<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">You cannot have God for your Father unless you have the Church for your Mother.</em></p>
On the Unity of the Catholic Church
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It is from pagans, rather, that you’ve taken the teaching of a single divine principle as a source of all things. You’ve changed their sacrifices into your love-feasts, their idols into your martyrs (whom you pray to like they pray to idols!). Like the pagans, you appease the dead with wine and feasts. You keep gentile holidays—the first of each month, the January new year, the summer solstice. And your way of living has remained just like theirs. </em></p>
Against Faustus (20:3) as quoted in Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, p. 233
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">… we … teach and define as dogma divinely revealed: That the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra [out of his office] … through the divine assistance promised him in blessed Peter, is endowed with that infallibility, with which the Divine Redeemer has willed that His Church … should be equipped … If any one shall presume (which God forbid!) to contradict this our definition; let him be anathema [cursed and condemned to Hell].</em></p>
Collectio Lacensis, First Vatican Council, 1870, recently reaffirmed in the 1997 Catechism of the Catholic Church (3:1:2035) – Doctrine of Papal Infallibility
– Doctrine of Papal Infallibility
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We, with the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and with our own, do declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which holds that the Virgin Mary was, in the first instant of her conception, preserved untouched by any taint of original guilt [sin], by a singular grace and privilege of Almighty God, in consideration of the merits of Christ Jesus the Savior of mankind — that this doctrine was revealed by God and therefore is to be firmly and steadfastly believed by all the faithful. Wherefore if any shall presume (which God forbid) to think in their hearts anything contrary to this definition of ours, let them realize and know well that they are condemned by their own judgment …</em></p>
Ineffabilis Deus, December 8, 1854, from Documents of the Christian Church, p. 286 – Mary’s Immaculate Conception
– Mary’s Immaculate Conception
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to the living, teaching office of the Church </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"><strong>alone</strong></em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">.</em></p>
(1:1:85) – emphasis added
– emphasis added
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The words bind and loose mean: whomever you exclude from your communion, will be excluded from communion with God; whomever you receive anew into your communion, God will welcome back into his. Reconciliation with the Church is inseparable from reconciliation with God. </em></p>
(2:2:1445)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">An indulgence is obtained through the Church who, by virtue of the power of binding and loosing granted her by Christ Jesus [Matthew (16:19; 18:18)], intervenes in favor of individual Christians [alive or now in Purgatory] and opens for them the treasure of merits of Christ and the saints obtain from the Father of mercies the remission of the temporal punishments due to their sins.</em></p>
(2:2:1478)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The apostles were given the gospel for us by the Lord Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ was sent forth from God. Thus Christ came from God and the apostles from Christ. Both things happened, then, in an orderly way according to the will of God. When, therefore, the apostles received his commands and were fully convinced through the resurrection … they went forth proclaiming the good news … brimming with the confidence through the Holy Spirit. And as they preached throughout the countryside and in the cities, they appointed the first fruits of their ministries as bishops and deacons of those who were about to believe, testing them by the Spirit.</em></p>
1 Clement (42:1-4) – an early statement of the Doctrine of Apostolic Succession
– an early statement of the Doctrine of Apostolic Succession
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We are convinced that the only defense for us and for our Empire is in favor of the God of heaven; and in order to deserve this favor it is our first care to support the Christian faith and its venerable religion. Therefore, in as much as the pre-eminence of the Apostolic See is assured by the merit of S. Peter, the first of the bishops, by the leading position of the city of Rome and also by the authority of the holy Synod, let not presumption strive to attempt anything contrary to the authority of that See. For the peace of the churches will only then be everywhere preserved when the whole body acknowledge its ruler.</em></p>
“Edict of Valentinian III,” Documents of the Christian Church, pp. 24-25
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The Pope, Bishop of Rome and Peter’s successor, is the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful. For the Roman Pontiff, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, and as pastor of the entire Church has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered. </em></p>
(1:2:882)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Our culture had aged, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up; our rituals and our cassocks are pompous … The Church must admit its mistakes and begin a radical change, starting from the pope and the bishops … The pedophilia scandals oblige us to take a journey of transformation … The Church is 200 years out of date … Why don’t we rouse ourselves? Are we afraid? </em></p>
quoted in a Reuters article carried by the New York Times, September 2, 2012
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The church is now more like the Scribes and Pharisees than like Christ. What are called “essential doctrines” of the Christian religion, he [Christ] does not even mention. </em></p>
as quoted in Edward Cook, Life of Florence Nightingale (1913)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding — at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.</em></p>
The Anti-Christ (39), p. 65
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.</em></p>
letter to Augusta Gregory, November 22, 1902
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The long period of the dark ages under which Europe has lain is due, I believe, in a very considerable degree, to the celibacy enjoined by religious orders on their votaries. Whenever a man or woman was possessed of a gentle nature that fitted him or her to deeds of charity, to meditation, to literature, or to art, the social condition of the time was such that they had no refuge elsewhere than in the bosom of the Church. But the Church chose </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"><strong>to preach and exact celibacy</strong></em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"><strong>.</strong> The consequence was that these gentle natures had no continuance and thus, by a policy so singularly unwise and suicidal that I am hardly about to speak of it without impatience, the Church brutalized the breed of our forefathers. She acts precisely as if she had aimed at selecting the rudest portion of the community to be, alone, the parents of future generations.</em></p>
Hereditary Genius, pp. 343-344 – emphasis added
– emphasis added
<p><em>The policy of the religious world in Europe was exerted in another direction, with hardly less cruel effect on the nature of future generations, by means of persecutions which brought thousands of the foremost thinkers and men of political aptitudes to the scaffold, or imprisoned them during a large part of their manhood, or drove them as emigrants into other lands. In every one of these cases the check upon their leaving issue was very considerable. Hence the Church, having first captured all the gentle natures and condemned them to celibacy, made another sweep of huge nets, this time fishing in stirring waters, </em><em><strong>to catch those who were the most fearless, truth-seeking, and intelligent</strong></em><em><strong>,</strong> in their modes of thought, and therefore most suitable parents of a high civilization, and put a strong check, if not a direct stop, to their progeny.</em></p>
Hereditary Genius, p. 344 – emphasis added
– emphasis added
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which had been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth [Matthew (16:19; 18:18)], we deprive him [the excommunicate] and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the on the day of judgment.</em></p>
under supervision, and appearing in the entry “Anathema,” Catholic Encyclopedia 1907, papal powers of excommunication and anathema
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of western theology was edited by his lawyers. The code of Justinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.</em></p>
“God and the World,” as quoted in Frankenberry, The Faith of Scientists (8), p. 182
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals — grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to an unknown god.</em></p>
diary entry, as quoted in Haught, 2000 Years of Disbelief, p. 135
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">With the support of Scripture and the Fathers of the Church, we unanimously declare, in the name of the Holy Trinity, that all images of whatever material made by the cursed art of painters shall be rejected, cast out, and expelled with curses. Anyone in the future who dares to fabricate such a thing or venerate it or expose it in a church or private house, or possess it in secret, will be, if he is a bishop, priest, or deacon, deposed; if he is a monk or a lay person, he will be anathematized; and he will fall under the blow of the laws of the secular authorities as an adversary of God and enemy of the doctrines transmitted by the Fathers.</em></p>
as quoted in A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, p. 97
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get.</em></p>
as quoted in Hodgson, The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, p. 312
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Christ: I dislike him very much; still I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about them.</em></p>
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
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