Pat Sanders

“Although the ideal of celibacy was always put forward as a matter of high spirituality, the controlling motive for this purging of marriage from the priesthood [with the First Lateran Council, 1123] was economic. Through networks of monasteries and feudal fiefdoms, the Church was the largest landowner in Christendom — the territory described today as Western Europe. Celibate clergy, with no households to support, would lack the essential drive to accumulate wealth for themselves; nor would they produce legitimate heirs to lodge competing claims to the vast estates and treasures the medieval church was hell-bent on protecting and expanding.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The nub at the center of the notorious Roman Catholic sexual predation is an idolatry of the priest and of the priestly status that goes by the name of "clericalism." It is a malignity marked by a cult of secrecy; a high-flown theological misogyny that demeans all women and fosters an unbridled male supremacy; suppression of normal erotic desire; a hierarchical domination of priest over laypeople; and a basing of that power on threats of the doom-laden afterlife, drawn from a misreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“Give the world half of what Nina Simone gave it, and you have lived an exceptional life.”
― Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

“Why according to tomorrow's paper the proletariat will not rise yesterday.”
― E.E. Cummings, Collected Poems