Catholic Sympathy Quotes

The mark of man is initiative, but the mark of woman is cooperation. Man talks about freedom; woman about sympathy, love, sacrifice. Man cooperates with nature; woman cooperates with God. Man was called to till the earth, to "rule over the earth"; woman to be the bearer of a life that comes from God.

That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion. You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, 'This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children.' Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue. That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. 'What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.

It loves the other, not because of attractiveness, or talents, or sympathy, but because of God. To the Christian, a person is one for whom I must sacrifice myself, not one who must exist for my sake.

I want people to notice God's actions in their lives and in the lives of others and to have sympathy for other people. I want them to see that there is something going on here that matters

Catholic Church—with a few regrettable exceptions—has almost always been on the side of the poor, which has gained it enormous respect and sympathy. During the dictatorship, many priests and nuns took on the task of helping the victims of repression, and they paid dearly for it. As Pinochet said in 1979, “the only persons going around crying for democracy to be restored in Chile are the politicians and one or two priests.” That was the period when the generals posited that Chile was blessed with “a totalitarian democracy.

To get an initial hint of the distance between the mind-set of parable's original audience and our own twenty-first-century perspectives, we might begin by reflecting briefly on the term 'good Samaritan.' Today, we use the term as if it were not peculiar. Yet as far as I am aware, there are not 'Good Catholic' or 'Good Baptist' hospitals; there are not social service organizations called 'Good Episcopalian' or 'Good Mexican' or 'Good Arab.' To label the Samaritan, any Samaritan, a 'good Samaritan' should be, in today's climate, seen as offensive. It is tantamount to saying, 'He's a good Muslim' (as opposed to all those others who, in this configuration, would be terrorists) or 'She's a good immigrant' (as opposed to all those others who, in this same configuration, are here to take our jobs or scam our welfare system), or, as Heinrich Himmler put it to a gathering of SS officers, every German 'has his decent Jew' - that is, knows one good Jew - and as far as Himmler was concerned, even one was too many, because that might create sympathy. The problem with the labeling is not simply a lack of sensitivity toward the Samaritan people - yes, there are still Samaritans. It is also a lack of awareness of how odd the expression 'good Samaritan' would have seemed to Jesus's Jewish contemporaries.

The refurbished Cromwell must be speaking to something in contemporary culture and the job of the adapters is to figure out what that something might be. They must do so knowing that whatever it is, it is not primarily about religion. The religious background is important in both versions: More’s relentless pursuit of heretics, Cromwell’s sympathy for, and manipulation of, Protestant reformers, the willingness of those reformers to support Anne because she is on their side, Henry’s genuine conviction that God is punishing his sin. But it matters as historical setting, not as contemporary passion. There is no religious shortcut to engagement with these dramas, no assumption that Catholics will hiss Cromwell and cheer More and that Protestants will do the opposite. Some other connection must be forged. What makes Mantel’s Cromwell appealing to readers, audiences, and TV viewers is that he is rather like most of them. He is a middle-class man trying to get by in an oligarchic world. Thirty years ago, Mantel’s Cromwell would have been of limited interest. His virtues—hard work, self-discipline, domestic respectability, a talent for office politics, the steady accumulation of money, a valuing of stability above all else—would have been dismissed as mere bourgeois orthodoxies. If they were not so boring they would have been contemptible. They were, in a damning word, safe. But they’re not safe anymore. They don’t assure security. As the world becomes more oligarchic, middle-class virtues become more precarious. This is the drama of Mantel’s Cromwell—he is the perfect bourgeois in a world where being perfectly bourgeois doesn’t buy you freedom from the knowledge that everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment. The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s weakness but in his extraordinary strength. He is a perfect paragon of meritocracy for our age. He is a survivor of an abusive childhood,

William pondered what his next discovery might be. He knew that readers were vexed by the possibility that their Bard might have been Catholic. There is, after all, that suspicious reference to Purgatory by the ghost of Hamlet’s father. In an era when anti-Catholic legislation was favorably viewed by many, such papist skullduggery was improper in a national literary hero. And so, on Christmas Day of 1794, William presented his nation with a fine gift—Shakespeare’s Profession of Faith, in which he disowns any Catholic sympathies. His father was awed by the import of this, so much so that he could no longer keep the discoveries secret. All holiday frivolity was to be set aside now. —

The enemies of Christ from Nero to Napoleon eventually discovered that to attack or murder the pope only creates sympathy and martyrs. It is a failed strategy in every era. So instead, they sought quietly to place one of their own in the papal shoes. It would require decades, even a century, to create the seminaries, the priests, the bishops, the cardinal electors, and then even the pope or popes themselves — but it would be worth the wait. It has been a slow, patient plan to establish a Satanic revolution with the pope as puppet.

The dazzling white Sacré-Coeur, which went up in the Commune’s aftermath, was erected in expiation for the sins of France, but its conservative Catholic promoters had little sympathy with the Communards. Not coincidentally, the basilica completely hides the ground where the cannons were parked and the uprising first broke out.

His face frankly displays his suffering, expressing it with a truly royal simplicity. At such moments even the very best people are apt to give themselves away with the kind of look which says to you more or less directly: 'You see how I'm sticking it out; don't praise me, it's my nature; thanks all the same.' But the Curé de Torcy looks straight at you, guilelessly. His eyes beg your compassion and sympathy. But with what nobility they beg! A king might beg in just that way.

It was sympathy to them, not empathy. I had to remain silent out of fear of discovery and, as such, being fired or kicked out of priesthood—and disappointing everyone.

Graham Greene did not like Franco, but as a Catholic could hardly come out in favour of the Republicans. It is universally acknowledged that the Nationalists were guilty of more atrocities, but the Republicans had on their hands the murders of seven thousand secular priests, monks, and nuns – most of them in the first weeks of fighting.2 Greene’s sympathies were actually with the Basques, who supported the Republicans in exchange for regional autonomy, and in the late spring, at the time of the bombing of Guernica, he had an opportunity to fly into Bilbao as it prepared for a Nationalist assault.

In addition to this crude notion of karma, and my sympathy for imagined babies and their imagined families, there also lurks something else: an illusion of control. There is so much in my life that I cannot hope to control. I can't control all my nights of broken sleep. I can't control the terrors that my mind chooses to review just as I close my eyes - the repetitive carousel of meningitis, comas, cars swept into oceans, house fires, or paedophiles. I can't control out landlord's whims, whether - or when - his voracity might lead to us moving house again. I can't control my children's chances of securing a place in the local primary school, whose enrollment policy (like most Irish schools) is predicated upon membership of the Catholic Church. I can, however, control the ritual of milk production: the sterilisation of the bottles, the components of the pump slotted in their correct order, the painstaking necessity of record-keeping, every procedure that I choose to perform carefully and correctly.

I was feeling in my mind a sensation close to, but indescribably different from, actual pain. This leads me to touch again on the elusive nature of such distress. That the word 'indescribable' should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction [depression] would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torments, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience. For myself,the pain is most closely connected with drowning or suffocation-- but even these images are off the mark.

Until the outbreak of the war, Jedwabne was a quiet town, and Jewish lives there differed little from those of their fellows anywhere else in Poland. If anything, they may have been better. The Jewish community was not affected by significant rifts or protracted conflicts. There were a few Chasids in Jedwabne, but spiritual leadership of the community was recognized by all in the person of a pious and respected rabbi, Avigdor Bialostocki. A few years before the war the town saw the appointment of a new parish priest, Marian Szumowski, whose sympathies were with the nationalist party, but until then Rabbi Bialostocki and Jedwabne's Catholic priest had been on very good terms with each other. In addition, by a lucky coincidence, the local police commander was a decent and straightforward fellow who kept order in the town and went after troublemakers, irrespective of their political beliefs or ethnic background. And then the war came.

Even if externally the two realms were quite separate, yet so high of degree of bliss is not as such compatible with entire ignorance of others’ misery, the more so if the separation itself is the result purely of a general judgment, at which both sides were present, which means conscious of each other. Now if we attribute to the blessed a knowledge of the state of the damned, it cannot be a knowledge unmixed with sympathy. If the perfecting of our nature is not to move backwards, sympathy must be such as to embrace the whole human race, and when extended to the damned must of necessity be a disturbing element in bliss, all the more that, unlike similar feelings in this life, it is untouched by hope.” And again from Schleiermacher: “From whichever side we view it, then, there are great difficulties in thinking that the finite issue of redemption is such that some thereby obtain highest bliss, while others (on the ordinary view, indeed the majority of the human race) are lost in irrevocable misery. We ought not to retain such an idea without decisive testimony to the fact that it was this that Christ Himself looked forward; and such testimony is wholly lacking. Hence we ought at least to admit that through the power of redemption there will one day be a universal restoration of all souls.