Parish Church Quotes

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In "Brave New World" non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.

... so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

mission is defined as what you do to join in God’s world-renewing project.

see a little village a mile ahead of us with a venerable church on a mound in the middle of it gravely presiding over the surrounding wide parish of corn.

Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.

Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoloeague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.

Normally people tended to be very quiet in the parish church. Perhaps they were afraid of waking God up in case He asked pointed questions or gave them a test.

Let each one ask him- or herself today, “Do I increase harmony in my family, in my parish, in my community, or am I a gossip? Am I a cause of division or embarrassment?” And you know the harm that gossiping does to the Church, to the parishes, the communities. Gossip does harm! Gossip wounds. Before Christians open their mouths to gossip, they should bite their tongue! To bite one’s tongue: this does us good because the tongue swells and can no longer speak, cannot gossip.

He is as good as anybody in this parish! He is very particular, too, about going to church-yes, he is!' 'I am afeard nobody ever saw him there. I never did, certainly.' 'The reason of that is,' she said eagerly, 'that he goes in privately by the old tower door, just when the service commences, and sits at the back of the gallery. He told me so.' This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock. It was not only received with utter incredulity as regarded itself, but threw doubt on all the assurances that had preceded it.

and he stopped going to church entirely, because there seemed no point now in even contemplating prayer for his soul. Besides, the parish church near Kilmartin dated to 1432, and the crumbling stones certainly couldn‟t takea direct strike of lightning. And if God ever wanted to smite a sinner, he couldn‟t do better than Michael Stirling. Michael Stirling, Sinner. He could see it on a calling card. He‟d have had it printed up, even—his was just that sort of black sense of humor—if he weren‟t convinced it would kill his mother on the spot. Rake he might be, but there was no need to torture the woman who‟d borne him.

The impression given by Bill and May as a couple was of a marriage that was never seriously under strain but was based on habit as much as on affection, with each of them, increasingly, pursuing his or her own interests: Bill in his business, sport, walking, and playing cards; May in the running of the household, the welfare of her sons, Tullow Parish Church, local events such as dog shows, the garden, her dogs, and a donkey called Kish.67

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, — the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

Everyone. The church, the parish, politicians, people who believed in God, people who didn’t believe in God… she made it her job to defend the weakest: the homeless, migrants, even criminals. Because somewhere in the Bible Jesus says something like: ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was homeless and you looked after me, I was sick and you cared for me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ And then He says something like, what we do for the weakest among us, we also do for Him. And she took everything so damn literally, my wife. That’s why she kept causing trouble.

Loving without agenda: Often our neighborhoods are filled with special interest groups. The church is not a special interest group; rather we have a reconciling mission that seeks unity, that all might flourish. Consider how your faith community can champion what others are already doing.

A suburban pastor maintained services appropriate for his respected, professional parish. His father, an excitable traveling evangelist, visited and challenged the congregation to confront pride and sing out loudly with the windows open. The next day, the pastor’s banker mentioned overhearing, and he was sheepish. The buttoned-up banker said, though, that the neighborhood had been WAITING TO HEAR the church live out the joy they claimed.

The only time I met R.B. clandestinely was in the parish church, where we were married before two witnesses — it was the first and only time. I looked, he says, more dead than alive, and can well believe it, for I all but fainted on the way, and had to stop for sal volatile at a chemist’s shop.

There are those who say further that these are meer Dreames and no true Relations, but I say back to them: look upon my Churches in the Spittle-fields, in Limehouse, and now in the Parish of Wapping Stepney, and do you not wonder why they lead you into a darker World which on Reflection you know to be your own? Every Patch of Ground by them has its Hypochondriack Distemper and Disorder; every Stone of them bears the marks of Scorching by which you may follow the true Path of God.

one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the parish and the drunken section,—that is, he went to church, but yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed, and thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening to the sermon.

To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.

I regret the immaturity with which I approached the problems and tasks of the ministry but I do not regret the years devoted to the parish.

Be informed, also, that this good and savoury Parish is the home of Hectors, Trapanners, Biters who all go under the general appelation of Rooks. Here are all the Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, Linnen-lifters, who are like so many Jakes, Privies, Houses of Office, Ordures, Excrements, Easments and piles of Sir-reverence: the whores of Ratcliffe High-way smell of Tarpaulin and stinking Cod from their continuall Traffick with seamen's Breeches. There are other such wretched Objects about these ruined Lanes, all of them lamentable Instances of Vengeance. And it is not strange (as some think) how they will haunt the same Districts and will not leave off their Crimes until they are apprehended, for these Streets are their Theatre. Theft, Whoredom and Homicide peep out of the very Windows of their Souls; Lying, Perjury, Fraud, Impudence and Misery are stamped upon their very Countenances as now they walk within the Shaddowe of my Church.

Papa said that the parish priest in Abba was not spiritual enough. That was the problem with our people, Papa told us, our priorities were wrong; we cared too much about huge church buildings and mighty statues. You would never see white people doing that.

evangelical churches often make extroversion a prerequisite for leadership, sometimes explicitly. “The priest must be … an extrovert who enthusiastically engages members and newcomers, a team player,” reads an ad for a position as associate rector of a 1,400-member parish.

Somehow we American pastors, without really noticing what was happening, got our vocations redefined in the terms of American careerism. We quit thinking of the parish as a location for pastoral spirituality and started thinking of it as an opportunity for advancement. Tarshish, not Nineveh, was the destination. The moment we did that, we started thinking wrongly, for the vocation of pastor has to do with living out the implications of the word of God in community, not sailing off into the exotic seas of religion in search of fame and fortune.

When religious sociologists discovered that a parish had a zone of influence which typically radiated 700 metres around its church, Bergoglio told his priests – knowing that Buenos Aires churches were on average 2,000 metres apart – to set up something in between the churches:

This informal “pre-exclusion” is probably the more powerful and widely exerted form in many churches. It is in my denomination. As the divorced and remarried don’t seek communion at a Roman Catholic parish, gays and lesbians don’t seek to participate in most evangelical churches.

And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

The Pope’s name is taken out of the service book, but parishes have simply glued strips of paper over it, thinking the world will turn and Rome rise again. But once the lands are given out, no subject will want to give them back to the church. Prayers may be rewritten, but not leases. Hearts may revert to Rome, but the money never will.

The keeper, who is at once gravedigger and church beadle (thus making a double profit out of the parish corpses), has taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his small field grows smaller, and when there is an epidemic, he does not know whether to rejoice at the deaths or regret the burials.

Nature cannot satisfy the desires she arouses nor answer theological questions nor sanctify us. Our real journey to God involves constantly turning our backs on her; passing from the dawn-lit fields into some poky little church, or (it might be) going to work in an East End parish. But the love of her has been a valuable and, for some people, an indispensable initiation.

How often do we hear from the local diocesan people—the bishop, the communications director, the victim assistance coordinator, and others—that this abuse is not restricted to clergy, but, rather, it is a societal problem? It does occur outside in the public realm. When was the last time you heard of a sex offender not being held accountable for his actions once caught? The Church treated the abuse as a sin only and nothing more. Out in society, sex offenders are not moved to another community quietly. “But protest that priests are 'no worse' than other groups or than men in general is a dire indictment of the profession. It is surprising that this attitude is championed by the Church authorities. Although the extent of the problem will continue to be debated, sexual abuse by Catholic priests is a fact. The reason why priests, publicly dedicated to celibate service, abuse is a question that cries out for explanation. Sexual activity of any adult with a minor is a criminal offense. By virtue of the requirement of celibacy, sexual activity with anyone is proscribed for priests. These factors have been constant and well-known by all Church authorities” (Sipe 227−228).

After Pope John Paul II permitted limited use of the Latin-only Tridentine Mass, which was banned by the Second Vatican Council, the elder Bannons became Tridentine Catholics. “When [the Roman Catholic Church] first started allowing it in the mid-eighties,” Steve Bannon recalled, “we left our parish that we’d been in for years and went and joined St. Joseph’s in Richmond, which offers a Tridentine Mass.

It had so happened that, in the course of his labours on behalf of the little stone figure and the girl with the ivy-leaves in her hair, Mr Honeyfoot had discovered something. He believed that he had identified the murderer as an Avebury man. So he had come to Wiltshire to look at some old documents in Avebury parish church. “For,” as he had explained to Mr Segundus, “if I discover who he was, then perhaps it may lead me to discover who was the girl and what dark impulse drove him to destroy her.” Mr Segundus had gone with his friend and had looked at all the documents and helped him unpick the old Latin. But, though Mr Segundus loved old documents (no one loved them more) and though he put great faith in what they could achieve, he secretly doubted that seven Latin words five centuries old could explain a man’s life.

But we need not surrender the love of nature--chastened and limited as I have suggested--to the debunkers. Nature cannot satisfy the desires she arouses nor answer theological questions nor sanctify us. Our real journey to God involves constantly turning our backs on her; passing from the dawn-lit fields into some poky little church, or (it might be) going to work in an East End parish. But the love of her has been a valuable and, for some people, an indispensable initiation.

On Religion: "I'm reluctant to believe that some statue of the Holy Mother wept real tears in a church in Cincinnati or Peoria or Teaneck last week after the Wednesday-night bingo games, witnesses only by two teenagers and the parish cleaning lady. And I'm not ready to believe that a shadow resembling Jesus, cast on someone's garage wall by a yellow bug light, is a sign of impending apocalypse. God works in mysterious ways, but not with bug lights and garage walls." Dean Koontz Cold Fire

born and raised in Honolulu but had spent four years of his childhood flying kites and catching crickets in Indonesia. After high school, he’d passed two relatively laid-back years as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia, where by his own account he’d behaved nothing like a college boy set loose in 1980s Manhattan and instead lived like a sixteenth-century mountain hermit, reading lofty works of literature and philosophy in a grimy apartment on 109th Street, writing bad poetry, and fasting on Sundays. We laughed about all of it, swapping stories about our backgrounds and what led us to the law. Barack was serious without being self-serious. He was breezy in his manner but powerful in his mind. It was a strange, stirring combination. Surprising to me, too, was how well he knew Chicago. Barack was the first person I’d met at Sidley who had spent time in the barbershops, barbecue joints, and Bible-thumping black parishes of the Far South Side. Before going to law school, he’d worked in Chicago for three years as a community organizer, earning $12,000 a year from a nonprofit that bound together a coalition of churches. His task was to help rebuild neighborhoods and bring back jobs. As he described it, it had been two parts frustration to one part reward: He’d spend weeks planning a community meeting, only to have a dozen people show up. His efforts were scoffed at by union leaders and picked apart by black folks and white folks alike. Yet over time, he’d won a few incremental victories, and this seemed to encourage him. He was in law school, he explained, because grassroots organizing had shown him that meaningful societal change required not just the work of the people on the ground but stronger policies and governmental action as well. Despite my resistance to the hype that had preceded him, I found myself admiring Barack for both his self-assuredness and his earnest demeanor. He was refreshing, unconventional, and weirdly elegant.

The Church's obsession with sexual restrictions is and always has been wrong wrong wrong. Wrong to be contemptuous of naïve young women like Philomena and me. Wrong to ignore the men involved in creating "illegitimate" children. Wrong to demonize gays while knowing full well how many men and women of the Church are gay. Wrong to excuse and hide criminal priests, transferring them to new, unsuspecting parishes. Wrong to think that forbidding consensual human sexuality is more important than Christ's message of compassion and forgiveness.

Parishioners will welcome the assurance, if news of changes and experiments has come their way, that no such changes are contemplated in this parish church; they will not be used as guinea pigs for liturgical experiments. The form used at weddings and at the baptism of their children will be exactly the same as it has been for centuries. There have been changes in the world around – especially perhaps in the Victorian era, which we are pleased to think of as solid – but human needs are very constant and those who study it will find that the Book of Common Prayer, compiled from ancient sources in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries meets those needs in a manner more realistic than more contemporary efforts in this direction. It is difficult for instance to discover any need in 1966 which is not fittingly brought to God in the 400 year old words of the Litany. So the motto for our public transactions with Almighty God in the churches of our parish will be ‘Business as usual’. If any declare that we stick in the mud, we retort that by loyalty to the Prayer Book we stand on a rock.

IN THE fifteenth century, a swampy parcel of land in the sestieri of Cannaregio was set aside for the construction of a new brass foundry, known in the Venetian dialect as a geto. The foundry was never built, and a century later, when the rulers of Venice were looking for a suitable spot to confine the city’s swelling population of unwanted Jews, the remote parcel known as Ghetto Nuovo was deemed the ideal place. The campo was large and had no parish church. The surrounding canals formed a natural moat, which cut off the island from the neighboring communities, and the single bridge could be guarded by Christian watchmen. In 1516, the Christians of Ghetto Nuovo were evicted and the Jews of Venice were forced to take their place. They could leave the ghetto only after sunrise, when the bell tolled in the campanile, and only if they wore a yellow tunic and hat. At nightfall they were required to return to the island, and the gates were chained. Only Jewish doctors could leave the ghetto at night. At its height, the population of the ghetto was more than five thousand. Now, it was home to only twenty Jews.

Here we may observe and I hope it will not be amiss to take notice of it that a near view of death would soon reconcile men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy situation in life and our putting these things far from us that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued, prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union, so much kept and so far carried on among us as it is. Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before. As the people who had been used to join with the Church were reconciled at this time with the admitting the Dissenters to preach to them, so the Dissenters, who with an uncommon prejudice had broken off from the communion of the Church of England, were now content to come to their parish churches and to conform to the worship which they did not approve of before; but as the terror of the infection abated, those things all returned again to their less desirable channel and to the course they were in before.

Besides the 254 peasants and cotters who owned and lived on assessed land, there were 39 persons listed as artisans and apprentices, 92 squatters, 11 enlisted soldiers, 6 innkeepers, 5 horse traders, 3 house-to-house peddlers. There were also 274 farm servants, 23 bedesmen and bedeswomen, 104 “ordinary poor,” 18 sick and crippled, 11 deaf and dumb, 8 blind, 6 nearly blind, 13 almost lame, 4 lame, 5 near idiots, 3 idiots, 1 half idiot, 3 whores and 2 thieves. On the last page of the church book, under the heading “End of the Parish,” were listed 27 persons who had moved away and never been further heard from.

The Westcotts lived in the parish of the strange wild clergyman whose church looked over the sea; strange and wild in the eyes of Treliss because he was a giant in size and had a long flowing beard, because he kept a perfect menagerie of animals in his little house by the church, and because he talked in such an odd wild way about God being in the sea and the earth rather than in the hearts of the Treliss citizens—all these things odd enough and sometimes, early in the morning, he might be seen, mother-naked, going down the path to the sea to bathe, which was hardly decent considering his great size and the immediate neighbourhood of the high road.

The secret protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Pact partitioned Poland between the two signatories and gave the Soviets a free hand over Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina. Most of these new countries were Catholic, which in Stalin’s mind meant subordinated to a foreign power—the Vatican. That was unacceptable for the man who had become the Soviet Union’s only god—at whose order 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy had been arrested during the purges of 1936–1938 alone, 100,000 of whom had been shot.4 The Russian Orthodox Church, which had had more than fifty-five thousand parishes in 1914, was now reduced to five hundred.5

Last night they stole the watchman’s rattle, and knocked the watchman down. Now they go rattling through the streets, proclaiming the ballad of Worse-was-it-Never. There was a former age, it seems, when wives were chaste and pedlars honest, when roses bloomed at Christmas and every pot bubbled with fat self-renewing capons. If these times are not those times, who is to blame? Londoners, probably. Members of Parliament. Reforming bishops. People who use English to talk to God. Word spreads. On the farms around, labourers see the chance of a holiday. Faces blackened, some wearing women’s attire, they set off to town, picking up any edged tool that could act as a weapon. From the marketplace you can see them coming, kicking up a cloud of dust. Old men anywhere in England will tell you about the drunken exploits of harvests past. Rebel ballads sung by our grandfathers need small adaptation now. We are taxed till we cry, we must live till we die, we be looted and swindled and cheated and dwindled … O, Worse was it Never! Farmers bolt their grain stores. The magistrates are alert. Burgers withdraw indoors, securing their warehouses. In the square some rascal sways on top of a husting, viewing the rural troops as they roll in. ‘Pledge yourselves to me—Captain Poverty is my name.’ The bell-ringers, elbowed and threatened, tumble into the parish church and ring the bells backward. At this signal, the world turns upside down.

Today, the Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination in the United States, with more than 60 million members, more than nineteen thousand parishes, and enormous influence in the nation's political, cultural, educational, and religious life. Americans often view it as a northern institution that has welcomed, educated, and nurtured waves of newcomers from Europe and Latin America. But there is a darker history both for the church and for our country: for more than a century, the American Catholic Church relied on the buying, selling, and enslavement of Black people to lay its foundations, support its clergy, and drive its expansion. Without the enslaved, the Catholic Church in the United States, as we know it today, would not exist.

Dost thou renounce Satan, and all his Angels, and all his works, and all his services, and all his pride?" ... The first act of the Christian life is a renunciation, a challenge. No one can be Christ's until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it. How far is this spirit from the way in which we often proclaim, or to use a more modern term, "sell" Christianity today! ... How could we then speak of "fight" when the very set-up of our churches must, by definition, convey the idea of softness, comfort, peace? ... One does not see very well where and how "fight" would fit into the weekly bulletin of a suburban parish, among all kings of counseling sessions, bake sales, and "young adult" get-togethers. ... "Dost thou unite thyself unto Christ?

To my surprise, she knelt down by the side of the grave. "Do you remember me, Father Monroe?" she asked quietly. "Catherine Goggin." "You threw me out of the parish in 1945 because I was going to have a child. You tried to destroy me but you didn't. You were a terrible monster of a man and wherever you are you should feel shame for the way you lived your life." She looked as if she wanted to rip the stone out of the ground with her bare hands and break it over her knee but finally, breathing heavily, she stood up and moved on. I couldn't help but to wonder what might have happened to her if the priest had shown her compassion instead of cruelty, had he intervened with my grandfather and helped him realize that we all make mistakes. If the parish had rallied behind my mother instead of casting her out.

How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man, create Peugeot, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history, and in which thousands of French curés were still creating Christ’s body every Sunday in the parish churches. It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them. In the case of the French curés, the crucial story was that of Christ’s life and death as told by the Catholic Church. According to this story, if a Catholic priest dressed in his sacred garments solemnly said the right words at the right moment, mundane bread and wine turned into God’s flesh and blood. The priest exclaimed, ‘Hoc est corpus meum! ’ (Latin for ‘This is my body!’) and hocus pocus – the bread turned into Christ’s flesh. Seeing that the priest had properly and assiduously observed all the procedures, millions of devout French Catholics behaved as if God really existed in the consecrated bread and wine. In the case of Peugeot SA the crucial story was the French legal code, as written by the French parliament. According to the French legislators, if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was incorporated. When in 1896 Armand Peugeot wanted to create his company, he paid a lawyer to go through all these sacred procedures. Once the lawyer had performed all the right rituals and pronounced all the necessary spells and oaths, millions of upright French citizens behaved as if the Peugeot company really existed.

When Gene Crutchfield brought his troubled friend to Hopkins in 1938, Hopkins was twenty-four years old and in charge of LeKies Memorial, the Methodist church in the Atlantic City neighborhood. He had taken over the parish the year before and wore a mustache to try to make himself look older. It complemented his horn-rimmed glasses and added a bit of distinction to an otherwise unimpressive medium height and build. Hopkins’s father and grandfather had been Methodist ministers, but tradition was not the reason he had dropped out of law school and entered the ministry. He had been attracted by the ideas then being promoted within the Methodist Church in Virginia. They were ideas of the kind that are now taken for granted in American life—nutrition and welfare support for dependent children; free medical care for the impoverished and the aged; the right of workers to organize a union, to receive a minimum wage, to strike; interracial cooperation.

What are all these?” Charlie plucked a book of psalms from the unruly pile on the desk. “Have you two robbed a church since I left this morning?” “No,” said Jackaby. “Not personally. We had to delegate that task. Pilfering parish property has fallen to Miss Cavanaugh this week.” Charlie rubbed his neck as he dropped the book back on the stack. “Because if there’s one thing New Fiddleham needs right now, it’s a bit more paranormal petty crime.” “If it makes you feel any better,” I submitted, “the pastor more or less asked us to. He was rather insistent that we should find something in one of his Bibles.” “You’re certain he won’t go storming into the station house tomorrow to tell the duty officer how he’s been robbed by a ghost?” I swallowed. “Not unless he is one himself,” said Jackaby. “He’s dead.” “What?” “Quite dead. He’s up in the attic if you would like to check for yourself.” “Why do you have a dead preacher in your attic?” “Because we found it easier to carry him up to the coffin than to maneuver it down to him.” Charlie looked suddenly very tired. “Enough about our morning,” I said. “You had a difficult patch yourself?

A visiting pastor at our church in Plains once told a story about a priest from New Orleans. Father Flanagan’s parish lay in the central part of the city, close to many taverns. One night he was walking down the street and saw a drunk thrown out of a pub. The man landed in the gutter, and Father Flanagan quickly recognized him as one of his parishioners, a fellow named Mike. Father Flanagan shook the dazed man and said, “Mike!” Mike opened his eyes and Father Flanagan said, “You’re in trouble. If there is anything I can do for you, please tell me what it is.ℍ “Well, Father,” Mike replied, “I hope you’ll pray for me.” “Yes,” the priest answered, “I’ll pray for you right now.” He knelt down in the gutter and prayed, “Father, please have mercy on this drunken man.ℍ At this, a startled Mike woke up fully and said, “Father, please don’t tell God I’m drunk.ℍ Sometimes we don’t feel much of a personal relationship between God and ourselves, as though we have a secret life full of failures and sins that God knows nothing about. We want to involve God only when we plan to give thanks or when we’re in trouble and need help. But the rest of our lives, we’d rather keep to ourselves.

Strangely, “Horror in the Nursery” never mentioned that the location of Wertham’s research site was Harlem. The first sentence of the piece set the scene: “In the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church parish house in uptown New York … ,” evoking associations with WASPy Anglicanism without a hint of how far uptown the Lafargue Clinic was. The text never mentioned Negro culture or, for that matter, race or ethnicity in any context; and all the children in the photographs, which were staged, were white. Wertham, interviewed for the article prior to the Supreme Court ruling on Winters v. New York, anticipated objections to his criticism of comics on First Amendment grounds. Still, he called for legislative action. “The publishers will raise a howl about freedom of speech and of the press,” he told Crist: Nonsense. We are dealing with the mental health of a generation—the care of which we have left too long in the hands of unscrupulous persons whose only interest is greed and financial gain … If those responsible refuse to clean up the comic-book market—and to all appearances most of them do, the time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy stores.

we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.

if I found the sermon neither healing nor inspiring, I found the prayers full of hope and consolation. They at least are safe beyond human caprice, conceit, or incapacity. Upon them, too, the man who is distressed at the thought of how little of the needful food he had been able to provide for his people, may fall back for comfort, in the thought that there at least was what ought to have done them good, what it was well worth their while to go to church for. But I did think they were too long for any individual Christian soul, to sympathise with from beginning to end, that is, to respond to, like organ-tube to the fingered key, in every touch of the utterance of the general Christian soul. For my reader must remember that it is one thing to read prayers and another to respond; and that I had had very few opportunities of being in the position of the latter duty. I had had suspicions before, and now they were confirmed—that the present crowding of services was most inexpedient. And as I pondered on the matter, instead of trying to go on praying after I had already uttered my soul, which is but a heathenish attempt after much speaking, I thought how our Lord had given us such a short prayer to pray, and I began to wonder when or how the services came to be so heaped the one on the back of the other as they now were. No doubt many people defended them; no doubt many people could sit them out; but how many people could pray from beginning to end of them

As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition to despair of life and abandon themselves, so this very thing had a strange effect among us for three or four weeks; that is, it made them bold and venturous, they were no more shy of one another, or restrained within doors, but went anywhere and everywhere, and began to converse. One would say to another, “I do not ask how you are, or say how I am; it is certain we shall all go; so ’tis no matter who is sick or who is sound;” and so they ran desperately into any place or any company. As it brought the people into publick company, so it was surprizing how it brought them to crowd into the churches. They enquired no more into who, they sat near to or far from, what offensive smells they met with, or what condition the people seemed to be in, but looking upon themselves all as so many dead corpses, they came to the churches without the least caution, and crowded together, as if their lives were of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there. Indeed, the zeal which they shewed in coming, and the earnestness and affection they shewed in their attention to what they heard, made it manifest what a value people would all put upon the worship of God if they thought every day they attended at the church that it would be their last. Nor was it without other strange effects, for it took away all manner of prejudice or of scruple about the person who they found in the pulpit when they came to the churches. It cannot be doubted but that many of the ministers of the parish churches were cut off, among others, in so common and dreadful a calamity; and others had courage enough to stand it, but removed into the country as they found means for escape. As then some parish churches were quite vacant and forsaken, the people made no scruple of desiring such Dissenters as had been a few years before deprived of their livings by virtue of the Act of Parliament called the Act of Uniformity to preach in the churches; nor did the church ministers in that case make any difficulty of accepting their assistance; so that many of those who they called silenced ministers had their mouths opened on the occasion and preached publickly to the people. Here we may observe, and I hope it will not be amiss to take notice of it, that a near view of death would soon reconcile men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy situation in life and our putting these things far from us that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued, prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union so much kept and far carried on among us as it is. Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before. As the people who had been used to join with the Church were reconciled at this time with the admitting the Dissenters to preach to them, so the Dissenters, who with an uncommon prejudice had broken off from the communion of the Church of England, were now content to come to their parish churches, and to conform to the worship which they did not approve of before; but as the terror of the infection abated, those things all returned again to their less desirable channel, and to the course they were in before.

The Roman Catholic Church in particular is having to answer this question in the most painful of ways, by calculating the monetary value of child abuse in terms of compensation. Billions of dollars have already been awarded, but there is no price to be put on the generations of boys and girls who were introduced to sex in the most alarming and disgusting ways by those whom they and their parents trusted. “Child abuse” is really a silly and pathetic euphemism for what has been going on: we are talking about the systematic rape and torture of children, positively aided and abetted by a hierarchy which knowingly moved the grossest offenders to parishes where they would be safer. Given what has come to light in modern cities in recent times, one can only shudder to think what was happening in the centuries where the church was above all criticism. But what did people expect would happen when the vulnerable were controlled by those who, misfits and inverts themselves, were required to affirm hypocritical celibacy? And who were taught to state grimly, as an article of belief, that children were “imps of” or “limbs of” Satan? Sometimes the resulting frustration expressed itself in horrible excesses of corporal punishment, which is bad enough in itself. But when the artificial inhibitions really collapse, as we have seen them do, they result in behavior which no average masturbating, fornicating sinner could even begin to contemplate without horror. This is not the result of a few delinquents among the shepherds, but an outcome of an ideology which sought to establish clerical control by means of control of the sexual instinct and even of the sexual organs. It belongs, like the rest of religion, to the fearful childhood of our species.

I heard a compelling lecture by an African American pastor from the north side of Chicago. He opened his talk with numbers, counting up all of the hours that a God-fearing person in his parish has spent in church over the course of her life. It was a lot. Then he described what is talked about during those hours in church. It’s all about hope, he told us. For change, for a better future, for justice, for relief of suffering. And then he asked the predominantly white audience why we expected our African American patients to give up hope—for a cure, for another chance at life—at this most vulnerable point in their lives. This is a time, he said, when they need hope the most. If the doctor’s only concept of hope and miracles is the cure of disease, then there truly is nothing more to talk about with a family wanting everything done in the name of God. But guided by Betty Clark, the pastor on our palliative care team, I have found other ways of transmitting hope to families looking for a miracle. The miracle of time at home, of pain management, of improved quality of life. These are all concepts I have seen families embrace in place of survival—the only concept of hope previously imagined. I have also found it helpful to open up the question of God’s will. Once, a religious family explained to me that they didn’t want to play God by withdrawing the breathing tube from their dying loved one. I asked them whether another interpretation might be that they were playing God by keeping her alive when her body was actively dying. Mightn’t this be God demonstrating that it was her time to die? And were we, in our hubris, thwarting God’s will? Many families agreed with my suggestion that almighty God doesn’t need help from mere mortals. If He wants to heal a body, He can do it on his own.

As we trod up the front walk, Jackaby let out a thoughtful “Huh.” I followed his gaze to the transom ahead of us. It read, in clean, frosty letters: r. f. jackaby: exquisite frustration “Are you feeling exquisitely frustrated of late, Miss Rook?” he asked. “I wouldn’t put it as such, sir,” I said. “I don’t think that one’s for me.” Jenny materialized between Jackaby and the bright red door. “Ah,” said Jackaby. “Good afternoon, Miss Cavanaugh.” “I couldn’t find it,” Jenny said without preamble as we mounted the steps. “What? Right—the Bible. It’s fine. I’ll see to it myself. That church is a long way off. It was quite ambitious for you to even consider the trip. I shouldn’t reasonably have expected as much of you.” “I made it to the church just fine, thank you very much for your vote of confidence. Do you have any idea how many Bibles and psalm books and hymnals there are in a parish that size? You said to look for a shield, but none of them had anything obvious like that. If the shield is somehow inside one of them, it could be any of them.” “That’s all right, you did your—” Jackaby began. “. . . So I just brought all of them.” The door swung open to reveal a small hillside of books heaped on the front desk. “Hrm.” Jackaby grunted. He stepped inside and began to dig through the stack, picking up battered old books and dropping them back onto the heap. “Thank you, Miss Cavanaugh,” Jenny intoned behind him. “It was nothing, really,” she replied to herself. “I underestimated you, Miss Cavanaugh. Oh, I was just happy to help. You are special and precious to me, Miss Cavanaugh. Please now, Mr. Jackaby, you’re simply too much.” Jackaby paid her dialogue no mind, and appeared to have forgotten that anyone else was in the room at all. “I’ll just go fetch that bail money for Miss Lee, shall I?” I suggested, and excused myself.

Hunsford, near Westerham, Kent, 15th October. “Dear Sir,— “The disagreement subsisting between yourself and my late honoured father always gave me much uneasiness, and since I have had the misfortune to lose him, I have frequently wished to heal the breach; but for some time I was kept back by my own doubts, fearing lest it might seem disrespectful to his memory for me to be on good terms with anyone with whom it had always pleased him to be at variance.—’There, Mrs. Bennet.’—My mind, however, is now made up on the subject, for having received ordination at Easter, I have been so fortunate as to be distinguished by the patronage of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh, whose bounty and beneficence has preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish, where it shall be my earnest endeavour to demean myself with grateful respect towards her ladyship, and be ever ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which are instituted by the Church of England. As a clergyman, moreover, I feel it my duty to promote and establish the blessing of peace in all families within the reach of my influence; and on these grounds I flatter myself that my present overtures are highly commendable, and that the circumstance of my being next in the entail of Longbourn estate will be kindly overlooked on your side, and not lead you to reject the offered olive-branch. I cannot be otherwise than concerned at being the means of injuring your amiable daughters, and beg leave to apologise for it, as well as to assure you of my readiness to make them every possible amends—but of this hereafter. If you should have no objection to receive me into your house, I propose myself the satisfaction of waiting on you and your family, Monday, November 18th, by four o’clock, and shall probably trespass on your hospitality till the Saturday se’nnight following, which I can do without any inconvenience, as Lady Catherine is far from objecting to my occasional absence on a Sunday, provided that some other clergyman is engaged to do the duty of the day.—I remain, dear sir, with respectful compliments to your lady and daughters, your well-wisher and friend, “William Collins

With his Don Juan Mozart enters the little immortal circle of those whose names, whose works, time will not forget, because eternity remembers them. And though it is a matter of indifference, when one has found entrance there, whether one stands highest or lowest, because in a certain sense all stand equally high, since all stand infinitely high, and though it is childish to dispute over the first and the last place here, as it is when children quarrel about the order assigned to them in the church at confirmation, I am still too much of a child, or rather I am like a young girl in love with Mozart, and I must have him in first place, cost what it may. And I will appeal to the parish clerk and to the priest and to the dean and to the bishop and to the whole consistory, and I will implore and adjure them to hear my prayer, and I will invoke the whole congregation on this matter, and if they refuse to hear me, if they refuse to grant my childish wish, I excommunicate myself, and renounce all fellowship with their modes of thought; and I will form a sect which not only gives Mozart first place, but which absolutely refuses to recognize any artist other than Mozart; and I shall beg Mozart to forgive me, because his music did not inspire me to great deeds, but turned me into a fool, who lost through him the little reason I had, and spent most of my time in quiet sadness humming what I do not understand, haunting like a specter day and night what I am not permitted to enter. Immortal Mozart! Thou, to whom I owe everything; to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that caused my soul to tremble, the fear that gripped my inmost being; thou, to whom I owe it that I did not pass through life without having been stirred by something. Thou, to whom I offer thanks that I did not die without having loved, even though my love became unhappy. Is it strange then that I should be more concerned for Mozart's glorification than for the happiest moment of my life, more jealous for his immortality than for my own existence? Aye, if he were taken away, if his name were erased from the memory of men, then would the last pillar be overthrown, which for me has kept everything from being hurled together into boundless chaos, into fearful nothingness.

With his Don Juan Mozart enters the little immortal circle of those whose names, whose works, time will not forget, because eternity remembers them. And though it is a matter of indifference, when one has found entrance there, whether one stands highest or lowest, because in a certain sense all stand equally high, since all stand infinitely high, and though it is childish to dispute over the first and the last place here, as it is when children quarrel about the order assigned to them in the church at confirmation, I am still too much of a child, or rather I am like a young girl in love with Mozart, and I must have him in first place, cost what it may. And I will appeal to the parish clerk and to the priest and to the dean and to the bishop and to the whole consistory, and I will implore and adjure them to hear my prayer, and I will invoke the whole congregation on this matter, and if they refuse to hear me, if they refuse to grant my childish wish, I excommunicate myself, and renounce all fellowship with their modes of thought; and I will form a sect which not only gives Mozart first place, but which absolutely refuses to recognize any artist other than Mozart; and I shall beg Mozart to forgive me, because his music did not inspire me to great deeds, but turned me into a fool, who lost through him the little reason I had, and spent most of my time in quiet sadness humming what I do not understand, haunting like a specter day and night what I am not permitted to enter. Immortal Mozart! Thou, to whom I owe everything; to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that caused my soul to tremble, the fear that gripped my inmost being; thou, to whom I owe it that I did not pass through life without having been stirred by something. Thou, to whom I offer thanks that I did not die without having loved, even though my love became unhappy. Is it strange then that I should be more concerned for Mozart's glorification than for the happiest moment of my life, more jealous for his immortality than for my own existence? Aye, if he were taken away, if his name were erased from the memory of men, then would the last pillar be overthrown, which for me has kept everything from being hurled together into boundless chaos, into fearful nothningness.

The clergy of the TV religion are those entertainers, newscasters in particular, who nightly spread the Word from their cathode-ray pulpit. The network newscasters are the High Priests and High Priestesses of Satanism, bending the minds of viewers to the requirements of consumer marketing. The local newscasters are the parish priests, yawking, ribbing and emoting over the latest local tragedies. Celebrities, whether local or national, are all part of the hierarchy of the church, men of the cloth. There should be no complaint regarding network High Priests arriving to report on scenes of devastation in white stretch limos. After all, they are royalty within the Church and should be accorded the same privileges as a visiting Pope, Cardinal or Archbishop.

Cohabitation is a big issue, and how it is dealt with at the parish level is a big concern, so the pope is sending a signal,” said John Thavis, a veteran Vatican reporter. He said that the couples chosen for the ceremony “seem to be normal people and not necessarily handpicked. It’s one more indication that the pope looks at things the way they really are; he’s a realist. “It’s a pope willing to say that if you want to be married in the church, we’ll find a way to do it. It’s the ‘who am I to judge?’ pope, who doesn’t want to turn people away and instead wants to find a way to bring people in,” Mr. Thavis said. In defending the sacrament of marriage, the pope acknowledged that it could become a challenge, that spouses could stray, or become discouraged and “daily life becomes burdensome, even nauseating.

Are we still a Church capable of warming hearts? A Church capable of leading people back to Jerusalem? Of bringing them home? Jerusalem is where our roots are: Scripture, catechesis, sacraments, community, friendship with the Lord, Mary and the apostles…. Are we still able to speak of these roots in a way that will revive a sense of wonder at their beauty?”7 Pope Francis, meeting with the bishops of Brazil, July 28, 2013

a closer walk with God than any man he had known. Davenport went from place to place without invitation, and depending upon impulses and impressions, denounced as unconverted such ministers as disagreed with him and exhorted their flocks to desert them and follow him. Confusion and bitterness resulted in almost every parish which he visited. Congregations were divided, alienation and strife were created, the evil effects of which continued for many years.  In order to suppress these evils the Connecticut legislature in 1742 passed an act forbidding any minister or licentiate to preach in any church not his own, without the consent of its pastor and the major portion of its membership, under penalty of forfeiting the right to collect his legal salary, if a resident of the colony, and liability to expulsion from the colony if not. Davenport was accordingly arrested and brought before the assembly, by whom he was adjudged insane and sent to his parish on Long Island. Not long afterwards he appeared in Boston, where in accordance with his custom he denounced the ministers as "unconverted" and "leading their people blindfold to hell." He was arrested for uttering slanderous statements

I have a complicated spiritual history. Here's the short version: I was born into a Mass-going Roman Catholic family, but my parents left the church when I was in the fifth grade and joined a Southern Baptist church—yes, in Connecticut. I am an alumnus of Wheaton College—Billy Graham's alma mater in Illinois, not the Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts—and the summer between my junior and senior year of (Christian) high school, I spent a couple of months on a missions trip performing in whiteface as a mime-for-the-Lord on the streets of London's West End. Once I left home for Wheaton, I ended up worshiping variously (and when I could haul my lazy tuckus out of bed) at the nondenominational Bible church next to the college, a Christian hippie commune in inner-city Chicago left over from the Jesus Freak movement of the 1960s, and an artsy-fartsy suburban Episcopal parish that ended up splitting over same-sex issues. My husband of more than a decade likes to describe himself as a “collapsed Catholic,” and for more than twenty-five years, I have been a born-again Christian. Groan, I know. But there's really no better term in the current popular lexicon to describe my seminal spiritual experience. It happened in the summer of 1980 when I was about to turn ten years old. My parents had both had born-again experiences themselves about six months earlier, shortly before our family left the Catholic church—much to the shock and dismay of the rest of our extended Irish and/or Italian Catholic family—and started worshiping in a rented public grade school gymnasium with the Southern Baptists. My mother had told me all about what she'd experienced with God and how I needed to give my heart to Jesus so I could spend eternity with him in heaven and not frying in hell. I was an intellectually stubborn and precocious child, so I didn't just kneel down with her and pray the first time she told me about what was going on with her and Daddy and Jesus. If something similar was going to happen to me, it was going to happen in my own sweet time. A few months into our family's new spiritual adventure, after hearing many lectures from Mom and sitting through any number of sermons at the Baptist church—each ending with an altar call and an invitation to make Jesus the Lord of my life—I got up from bed late one Sunday night and went downstairs to the den where my mother was watching television. I couldn't sleep, which was unusual for me as a child. I was a champion snoozer. In hindsight I realize something must have been troubling my spirit. Mom went into the kitchen for a cup of tea and left me alone with the television, which she had tuned to a church service. I don't remember exactly what the preacher said in his impassioned, sweaty sermon, but I do recall three things crystal clearly: The preacher was Jimmy Swaggart; he gave an altar call, inviting the folks in the congregation in front of him and at home in TV land to pray a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into their hearts; and that I prayed that prayer then and there, alone in the den in front of the idiot box. Seriously. That is precisely how I got “saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But that's a whole other book…

I confess that my first reaction was a self-righteous astonishment that any group could so disfigure the past after its own image, but I did not know then what I have learned since: First Parish Church is but one example of a longstanding American tradition of remembering both the Pilgrims and the First Thanksgiving in self-serving ways.

Alice knows those stories. The routiers and condottieri of the Free Companies, who fight the wars of whichever prince will pay their fees, and amuse themselves in between times, are said to commit every kind of crime: from eating meat in Lent to slitting open pregnant women to kill their unborn and unbaptised children. The countryside of the southern lands is supposed to be full of their victims: a sea of vagabonds - priests without parishes; destitute peasants; artisans looking for work. ‘So you’, Alice says, ‘were one of the famous sons of iniquity…’ The Pope calls them that when they rob churches. But the Pope also uses them regularly. Alice knows she sounds a little breathless. She can’t altogether keep the admiration out of her voice. If she’d been a man, she thinks, she might have done exactly the same thing as Wat, to better herself fast.

In a misguided abdication of our prophetic calling, many churches have allowed themselves to become internally segregated by age. Most began with the valuable goal that their teaching be age appropriate but went on to create a systematized method of discipleship akin to the instructional model of public schools, which requires each age-group be its own learning cohort. Thus many churches and parishes segregate by age-group and, in doing so, unintentionally contribute to the rising tide of alienation that defines our times. As a by-product of this approach, the next generation’s enthusiasm and vitality have been separated from the wisdom and experience of their elders.

In 2003 an Armenian group protested that the LDS had baptized by proxy notable members of its community as well. In 2008 the Vatican sent a letter to parishes all over the world asking them to not share their records with Mormon genealogists. In 2012 it was widely reported that Anne Frank had been posthumously baptized into the Mormon Church. Similar stories emerged. Stanley Ann Dunham, the late mother of Barack Obama; Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was abducted and murdered in Pakistan in 2002; Adolf Hitler; Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter; and Steve Irwin, the Australian TV naturalist, had all been baptized.

Today marks the last day of the calendar year. Many of us will celebrate this event with friends, food and partying. Some parishes offer an alternative way to commemorate the coming of the New Year: prayer in church before the Blessed Sacrament. Others of us will opt for sleep. However we celebrate, when the clock strikes midnight (unless we’re already in bed), we will bid farewell to 2014 and welcome in 2015. But before this year ends, let us take a few minutes today to thank God for the obvious blessings of 2014: our loved ones, our spiritual growth, the challenges we faced and worked through, the love we received and bestowed this past year. And let us entrust the painful and ambiguous events of 2014 to God’s love and mercy. Then let us ask God for the grace to live the coming year well, ready and eager to receive grace upon grace from our good God. God of all time, thank you for the graces of this past year and for the graces yet to come.

Partnering across neighborhoods in the city or county exposes areas of insularity and opens the door for reconciliation, collaboration and innovation.

Every hundred years or so a new Grim Anoukie is made; the Parish Priest at the time picks a victim, usually someone who has pissed off the church or simply wouldn’t be missed. He then buries them alive in the Virgin Grave; the rest is... history.” Nicky Peacock “The Virgin Grave

What if we stopped attending community groups and became groups of communities?

We all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. . . . The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part. . . . You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this. (1 Corinthians 12 The Message)

we thought the reason the parish was losing market share was simply because our customers weren’t being well served and our product line wasn’t that good.

Sometimes the best catalyst for local responsibility is actually taking pilgrimages to other local places.

Dresden was built in the 11th century following Roman architectural patterns, but the main Baroque church was built in the early seventeen hundreds by George Bahr, who died before it could be completed. Earlier built as a Lutheran parish church, the structure had undergone years of remodeling before finally being baptized as a Protestant one. Many of the church’s features attested to that; for example the altar, pulpit and the baptismal font were built in the front so they could be in the view of the congregation.

given

Twelve secret presses printed the text in Germany. A clandestine network of couriers carried copies to every parish. Catholic youth used backpack caravans and hiked through the Bavarian Alps, the Black Forest, and along the Rhine. Altar boys pedaled bicycles at night. High school athletes ran across barley farms. Nuns rode motorcycles to remote villages. In church confessional booths, the couriers delivered their cargo to priests. The priests locked the text in their tabernacles, and on Palm Sunday, they read it from every pulpit in the Reich.29

In the Vistula Valley, between the delta and Thorn, there was great variation in education policies. In a few instances, as in Montau, Mennonites were permitted to have their own schools or to conduct classes in their church buildings. Lutherans also established schools, but they increasingly found that Catholic bishops were determined to control education. Thus, in 1745 the parish of Sibsau near Schwetz recorded 308 Catholic, 203 Lutheran, and 236 Mennonite school children. Pressure from the local bishop eventually brought almost all schools in surrounding villages under his control.78 Similar episcopal policies were implemented in the Lubin parish, where 85 Lutheran, 94 Mennonite, and 9 Catholic farm owners all had to contribute to the maintenance of five schools under Catholic direction.79 Likewise, in Schonsee, where Mennonites had been given extensive privileges as early as the late sixteenth century, an unsympathetic official in 1725 declared that although "the parish is filled with many Anabaptists or Mennonites,"80 payment of (Catholic) church and school dues should be rigorously enforced.

Isn’t it an odd thing that doubting doctrines and dogmas not fully articulated until the Middle Ages can make you a heretic? Admitting to your pastor or priest that you doubt God, the Church, or the Bible can get you excommunicated. Yet treating your fellow human beings as though they were worthless scum will get you elected to the parish council (or to the U.S. Congress). Being open and honest about your faith—or lack thereof—will gain you ridicule and contempt. But take heart, fellow Christians. If you pretend everything is good, and that you are a faithful believer in all things, you most certainly will gain the respect of everyone in your community. Well, except the most important person of all—the guy who railed against hypocrisy: Jesus of Nazareth.

His [brother in law Jim Hampson] appointment to the Episcopal parish in Wenham, near Gordon College brought them in close touch with leading evangelical faculty members in their pews and church leadership, including Elizabeth Elliot and Addison Leitch. They were instrumental in drawing Jim and and Sarah into the cutting edge of evangelical intellectual leadership, with friendships with Tom Howard and J.I. Packer. My ongoing relationship with Jim Packer, FitzSimons Allison and many other brilliant Anglican evangelicals would not have happened without Jim Hampson. His early influence on me in my transition from modern to classic Christian teaching was immense. While I was trying to demythologize Scripture, he was taking its plain meaning seriously. His strong preaching led him to become one of the founding sponsors and supporters of Trinity School of Ministry in Abridge, Pennsylvania...

Thursday started badly. Two of the ladies of my parish elected to quarrel about the church decorations. I was called in to adjudicate between two middle-aged ladies, each of whom was literally trembling with rage. If it had not been so painful, it would have been quite an interesting physical phenomenon.

Who here thinks,' I asked the small group of Marines who'd gathered for Sunday Mass, 'that when you get back to the States no civilians will be able to understand what you've gone through?' A few hands went up. 'I had a parishioner whose six-month-old son developed a brain tumor. He watched his child go through intense suffering, chemotherapy, and finally a brutal, ungraceful death. Who would rather go through that than be in Ramadi?' ...'Now, I wouldn't be surprised if this man supported the insurgency...But clearly this man has suffered. And if this man, this father, does support the insurgency, it's because he thinks his suffering justifies making you suffer. If his story about his beating is true, it means the Marines who beat him think their suffering justifies making him suffer...All of us suffer. We can either feel isolated, and alone, and lash out at others, or we can realize we're part of a community. A church. That father in my parish felt as if no one could understand him and it wasn't worth the effort to make them try. Maybe you don't think it's worth trying to understand the suffering of that Iraqi father.' ...'We are part of a long tradition of suffering. We can let it isolate us if we want, but we must realize that isolation is a lie. Consider Owen. Consider that Iraqi father and that American father. Consider their children. Do not suffer alone.

As we all know, the Church was born without episcopal conferences, as she was born without parishes and without dioceses, although all these structures have been helpful pastorally throughout the centuries. The Church was born only with shepherds, with apostolic pastors, whose relationship to their people keeps them one with Christ, from whom comes authority to govern the Church.

With his deep understanding of the needs of the Church, Pius X often saw things with a most remarkable clarity. An interesting conversation of the Holy Pontiff with a group of Cardinals was reported in the French clerical publication, “L’Ami du Clerge.” The Pope asked them: “What is the thing we most need, today, to save society?” “Build Catholic schools,” said one. “No.” “More churches,” said another. “Still no.” “Speed up the recruiting of priests,” said a third. “No, no,” said the Pope, “the MOST necessary thing of all, at this time, is for every parish to possess a group of laymen who will be at the same time virtuous, enlightened, resolute, and truly apostolic.

You have single men, moving from parish to parish, with no family of their own. It was a formula for disaster.” Like

The early meeting-houses in country parishes were seldom painted, such outward show being thought vain and extravagant. In the middle of the eighteenth century paint became cheaper and more plentiful, and a gay rivalry in church-decoration sprang up. One meeting-house had to be as fine as its neighbor.

We’ve sometimes reduced the Church to a set of ideas rather than an encounter with Jesus Christ and with his brothers and sisters in our parishes, our diocese and the world. Church becomes a debating society, people takes sides and rack up points..." "...What protected us from the differences of opinions, even theological and doctrinal divisions in the past, was that we could fall back on a required set of customs on a common way of life, a way of doing things as Catholics, even when we fought, even when we disagreed.

Two or three people had gone to Limerick and bought 'The Country Girls.' The parish priest asked them to hand in the books, which they did, and he burnt them on the grounds of the church.

The whole Lincolnshire Rising was sparked off when rumours spread that Commissioners were coming to take away all of the Church plate, paid for by the offerings of the parish over decades, and give it to the King.

Leucate. Same parish priest, same church. The great local innovation is Communion under the two species. If the faithful are reluctant to drink from the same chalice, God will not hold it against them. They can always dip their host in the priest's wine. All this new ritual passes over the heads of the general run of worshippers. Homily on the Covenant struck with Moses, then sealed in the blood of Christ, and then in the Eucharist. Only Christ washes away spiritual stains. Silence falls. There then enters a person who could well be the village whore - a blonde creature in a pale green miniskirt and with a boldly plunging neckline. She slips quietly into the Lady Chapel, lights a candle for the Virgin Mary, then prostrates herself in prayer in a dark side-chapel before leaving again unseen. The Holy Covenant remains the one between the people of the village.

Sadly, when we look deep beneath the surface of our lives, most of us are not doing anything fundamentally differently from what our families did. God’s intention, however, is that our local churches and parishes are to be places where, slowly but surely, we are re-parented on doing life Christ’s way. God intends that his new community of people be the place where we are set free.

People make a priest, even though he must be ordained by a bishop.

From the majestic pontifical High Mass in St. Peter's to the quiet simplicity of a Quaker meeting; from the intellectual sophistication of Saint Thomas Aquinas to the moving simplicity of spirituals such as "Lord, I want to be a Christian"; from St. Paul's in London, the parish Church of Great Britain, to Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta-- all this is Christianity.

The once anticlerical Mussolini, who had written a youthful novel called The Cardinal’s Mistress and, at twenty-one, in a debate with a Swiss pastor, had given God—if He existed—five minutes to strike him dead, had submitted in 1925 to a belated church marriage to his longtime common-law companion Rachele Guidi and to the baptism of their children. In elections on March 24, 1929, the Church’s explicit support helped produce a vote of 98 percent in favor of the Fascist list of candidates (there were no others) for parliament.90 Fascism paid a high price in the long term for the Church’s aid to consensus: as the hare of Fascist dynamism wore itself out, the tortoise of Catholic parish life and culture plodded along to become the basis of Christian democratic rule in Italy after 1945.

Men with strong religious beliefs tend to form into two broad categories, and constitute churches accordingly. One category, among whom the archtetypal church is the Roman Catholic, desire the certitude and tranquility of hierarchical order. They are prepared to entrust religious truth to a professional clergy, organized in a broad-based triangle of parish priests, with an episcopal superstructure and a pontifical apex. The price paid for this kind of orthodox order is clericalism—and the anticlericalism it provokes. There was never any chance of this kind of religious system establishing itself in America. If there was one characteristic which distinguished it from the start—which made it quite unlike any part of Europe and constituted its uniqueness in fact—it was the absence of any kind of clericalism. Clergymen there were, and often very good ones, who enjoyed the esteem and respect of their congregations by virtue of their piety and preachfulness. But whatever nuance of Protestantism they served, and including Catholic priests when they in due course arrived, none of them enjoyed a special status, in law or anything else, by virtue of their clerical rank. Clergy spoke with authority from their altars and pulpits, but their power ended at the churchyard gate; and even within it congregations exercised close supervision of what their minister did, or did not, do. They appointed; they removed. In a sense, the clergy were the first elected officials of the new American society, a society which to that extent had a democratic element from the start—albeit that such electoral colleges were limited to the outwardly godly.

Etymologically, paroikia (a compound word from para and oikos) literally means “next to” or “alongside of the house” and, in a technical sense, meant a group of resident aliens. This sense of “parish” carried a theological context into the life of the Early Church and meant a “Christian society of strangers or aliens whose true state or citizenship is in heaven.” So whether one’s flock consists of fifty people in a church which can financially sustain a priest or if it is merely a few people in a living room whose priest must find secular employment, it is a parish. This original meaning of parish also implies the kind of evangelism that accompanies the call of a true parish priest. A parish is a geographical distinction rather than a member-oriented distinction. A priest’s duties do not pertain only to the people who fill the pews of his church on a Sunday morning. He is a priest to everyone who fills the houses in the “cure” where God as placed him. This ministry might not look like choir rehearsals, rector’s meetings, midweek “extreme” youth nights, or Saturday weddings. Instead, it looks like helping a battered wife find shelter from her abusive husband, discretely paying a poor neighbor’s heating oil bill when their tank runs empty in the middle of a bitter snow storm, providing an extra set of hands to a farmer who needs to get all of his freshly-baled hay in the barn before it rains that night, taking food from his own pantry or freezer to help feed a neighbor’s family, or offering his home for emergency foster care. This kind of “parochial” ministry was best modeled by the old Russian staretzi (holy men) who found every opportunity to incarnate the hands and feet of Christ to the communities where they lived. Perhaps Geoffrey Chaucer caught a glimpse of the true nature of parish life through his introduction of the “Parson” in the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales. Note how the issues of sacrifice, humility, and community mentioned above characterize this Parson’s cure even when opportunities were available for “greater” things: "There was a good man of religion, a poor Parson, but rich in holy thought and deed. He was also a learned man, a clerk, and would faithfully preach Christ’s gospel and devoutly instruct his parishioners. He was benign, wonderfully diligent, and patient in adversity, as he was often tested. He was loath to excommunicate for unpaid tithes, but rather would give to his poor parishioners out of the church alms and also of his own substance; in little he found sufficiency. His parish was wide and the houses far apart, but not even for thunder or rain did he neglect to visit the farthest, great or small, in sickness or misfortune, going on foot, a staff in his hand… He would not farm out his benefice, nor leave his sheep stuck fast in the mire, while he ran to London to St. Paul’s, to get an easy appointment as a chantry-priest, or to be retained by some guild, but dwelled at home and guarded his fold well, so that the wolf would not make it miscarry… There was nowhere a better priest than he. He looked for no pomp and reverence, nor yet was his conscience too particular; but the teaching of Christ and his apostles he taught, and first he followed it himself." As we can see, the distinction between the work of worship and the work of ministry becomes clear. We worship God via the Eucharist. We serve God via our ministry to others. Large congregations make it possible for clergy and congregation to worship anonymously (even with strangers) while often omitting ministry altogether. No wonder Satan wants to discredit house churches and make them “odd things”! Thus, while the actual house church may only boast a membership in the single digits, the house church parish is much larger—perhaps into the hundreds as is the case with my own—and the overall ministry is more like that of Christ’s own—feeding, healing, forgiving, engaging in all the cycles of community life, whether the people attend

To collect the funding required to erect the papal capital in France, the French popes cut every corner they could, docking pay from parish priests and taxing bishops heavily. Under the loosening authority, the papacy encouraged the use of simony and indulgences, as well as the sale of relics, pearly gate passes, and ecclesiastical seats.