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Emaciate and blinking and with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight.

Father Urban felt that Clement VII had been the wrong pope to deal with Henry VIII, and he wondered what the feeling was in Heaven on this point.

Charity toward all, even when a few sharks get in among the swimmers, is always better than holier-than-thou singularity. That, roughly speaking, was the mind of the Church.

He had his rosary with him, and began the Glorious Mysteries, but somewhere along the line he forgot what he was doing, and just lay there, watching it get dark in his room.

I didn't say Our Lord hadn't eaten shish kebab. I only said I didn't know.

A nightclub, by day, is somehow innately unreal. Witchy.

All that obsolete silicon had to be going somewhere. Where it was going, he learned, was into any number of very poor places struggling along with nascent industrial bases. Nations so benighted that the concept of nation was still taken seriously.

'The figures were caricatures in light, lifesize cartoons.... Molly's breasts were too large, visible through tight black mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket.... She held an absurdly elaborate weapon of some kind, a pistol shape nearly lost beneath a flanged overlay of scope sights, silencers, flash hiders. Her legs were spread, pelvis canted forward....'

Yeah, Gibson anticipating and lampooning '90s manga.

...Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from the vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community.... Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.

So now you get to find out just how tight those jeans really are, huh?

Laudate Eum.

If it is not blasphemous to say so, I have the feeling that Judas was no more than the unfortunate puppet for the glory of that drama which was the life and death of Christ.

'I'd like a stick of Brighton rock,' she said.

Again he grinned: only the devil, he thought, could have made her answer that. She was good, but he'd got her like you got God in the eucharist -- in the guts. God couldn't escape the evil mouth which chose to eat its own damnation.

She came away from the wall and lifted her face to him. He knew what was expected of him; he regarded her unmade-up mouth with faint nausea. Saturday night, eleven o'clock, the primeval exercise.

She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape - anywhere - for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

The Church, which I had always seen as wrapped in barbed wire and brambles, was as yielding, accommodating and nonjudgmental as a mother.

I knelt not because he asked me to, and not because I was his servant (though I am) but because it was and is the right thing to do in the face of his miraculous presence. It isn't abasement as such, but awe -- a natural response to something so mighty we know our own smallness; we sink to the earth in acknowledgment of his height.

Persistent disparities and barriers to adequate coverage foster the deadly exclusion Francis decries and yet fail to register with frequency or urgency in local debates about conscience in health care. -- K.E. Heyer

It is not in the interest of either Catholic health care or the Catholic Church for a Catholic health care institution to somehow be more restrictive than the teaching of the Church itself. -- T.A. Nairn, OFM

In what appears like an ambiguous lack of consistency, Catholic rhetoric promptly calls for respect of institutional conscience while undermining the space of freedom that protects conscientious decision-making by individuals.... I am tempted to call this state of affairs an 'inconsistent ethic of life.' -- Roberto Dell'Oro

Evelyn Waugh does not recognize the anarchist-pacifist Catholic Worker as anything other than a movement that has to do with feeding people. And perhaps he is right.

It took me years to appreciate the Little Flower. I much preferred then to read about spectacular saints who were impossible to imitate. The message of Therese was too obviously meant for each one of us, confronting us with daily duties, simple and small, but constant.

Charity is only as warm as those who administer it.

He [Peter Maurin] was full of patience, ready to look at me now: not as a Catherine of Siena, already enlightened by the Holy Spirit, but as an ex-Socialist, ex-IWW, ex-Communist, in whom he might find some concordance, some basis on which to build. But unions and strikes and the fight for better wages would remain my immediate concern. As St. Augustine said, "The bottle will still smell of the liquor it once held."

[On the explicitly anti-Catholic attitude of the translators and editors of the 4th century "Six Books Dormition Apocryphon:"] It is indeed a bit odd to find scholars expressing such disdain for material that they have presumably labored long and hard to bring to light.