Quotes from James Carroll

Forgiveness as the response to the inevitability of failure. Suffering understood as part of life. Trust as the other side of anguish. A permanent thankfulness.

In the age of the Me Too movement, at last the Roman Catholic priesthood — considered as a whole — must be understood, quite simply, as a male supremacist institution.

The great question posed by the Catholic sexual abuse scandal is not How could priests and bishops have done this? Rather, given the global scale of the clerical crimes against children and the all-but-universal habit of Church denial that enabled those crimes, the great question is What in Catholic culture gives rise to this grotesquely massive dysfunction?.

Communion over loneliness. Death not an end, but a beginning. At home in the absolute—and absolutely unknown—future.

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.

The massive sexual dysfunction of the contemporary Catholic Church began with Augustine.

The popes who succeeded John XXIII were in clericalism's grip, which is why the reforms of his council didn't have a chance.

But — and here is the crucial point — it was difficult to rebut that anti-gay slur [i.e., that the abuse crisis in the Catholic church is about pedophilia by gay priests] for the scapegoating it was, precisely because of that cloak of denial around the Church's broader sexual dishonesty. Gay priests, too, were forced to live a lie.

Jesus was the only point. Imitation was the point.

Is it only a coincidence that the same arc of time defining this reinvigorated clerical corruption about sexuality has seen the rise of the fervently political Catholic Church crusade against abortion? It is as if the 1973 war Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court threw a lifeline to the morally discredited Catholic hierarchy.

Sexual morality, according to the Catholic Church, is all about denial of male restlessness and control of female agency. There is simply no place in this schema for a woman's autonomy.

Once converted, the former Anglicans are welcomed into the Roman Church as priests, even if they are married. So in that way, the rule of mandatory celibacy has indeed been lifted, if only for these self-acknowledged misogynists. That leaves the inferiority of women as the absolutely overriding Catholic moral principle. It is the keystone of clericalism.

But inside the church, the fiercest opposition [to Pope Francis] has come from the defenders of clericalism — the spine of male power and the bulwark against any loosening of the sexual mores that protect it.

The Pope's critics among his fellow prelates have engaged in entry, rumormongering, leaks, and open defiance — a desperate rearguard effort aimed at weakening a Pope deemed insufficiently committed to the protection of clerical power.

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.

The sweep of the hierarchy's betrayals, in scope and depth, is staggeringly new. And to gauge the likelihood of that hierarchy's facing the truth of what it has done and what it has become, consider this: The two contemporary maestros of denial, Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, have, in the very years of the scandal they enabled, been named as saints of the Catholic Church.

At the most practical level, a reformed, enlightened, hopeful Catholic Church is essential to the thriving — even to the survival — of the human species.

But if instead this man [i.e., Pope Francis] turns out to be as gripped by institutional self-interest as any corporate leader, then reasonable expectations of creative solutions to problems as varied as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and mass migration are doubly dashed.

Not satisfied with endlessly pulling drowning men from the torrents rushing past, Day went upstream to see who was throwing the poor bastards into the water in the first place—and

This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control. This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing implications.8

scholars tell us that there was no word in ancient Latin or Greek for "self" as it is understood in contemporary usage.

Asceticism was not necessary for holiness.

humans are reeds of straw who think. Reeds of straw who know. Reeds of straw who choose. Reeds of straw who love. Reeds of straw who willingly surpass themselves.

Therefore, in the presence of my dear family, in the presence of my Church, and in the presence of the imagined communion of my readers, I have told this story in the hope of forgiveness, and as a promise.