Quotes from James Carroll

Francis is at the mercy of an incoherent Catholic morality about all kinds of sexual expression, and he seems incapable of bringing the needed moral clarity and essential new structure of accountability. That incoherence in ethics and morality is itself essential to the malignant culture of clericalism that imprisons many, including the Pope.

Asceticism was not necessary for holiness.

The Jews remain the chosen people of God. The Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Son of God is an affirmation of faith that Christians must respect.

All of these imitators imitated Jesus for one reason: because he was God made man.

A power structure that is accountable only to itself will always end by abusing the powerless. If exposed, it will ask, paternalistically, to be allowed to repair the damage on its own.

Indeed, an ecumenical spirit extending to the worldly, to the flawed, to the politically compromised, and to the sexually stigmatized was what separated Jesus from his rigorously puritanical mentor.

Jesus was the only point. Imitation was the point.

For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary, it is one of the places where He is most fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility.

The theological denigration of women was a major revision of the assumptions that had informed the Christian movement from the gospels forward. Jesus himself modeled an egalitarian respect toward women: In Christ, 'there is neither male nor female.

I had come here with my three questions. The first: How did the history of Christian antisemitism contribute to the Holocaust? The second: How did the Church abet, or oppose, the Holocaust as it unfolded? And the third: How does the Church today negotiate that layered past, both the deep past of antisemitism and the recent past of the Holocaust? With Edith Stein, that.

The shame I feel as a Catholic Christian, aware in detail of the ways that the Church sanctified the hatred of Jews, not only betraying Jesus but tilling the soil out of which would come the worst crime in history, is shame not only at what my people did, but at what I can now admit I might well have done myself.

Thou art my beloved Son." Thou: the intimate form of address from God. Nothing could be more powerful, or more permanent, than that. Or more Jewish.