Parish Council Quotes

She navigated away from the Parish Council message board and dropped into her favorite medical website, where she painstakingly entered the words "brain" and "death" in the search box. The suggestions were endless. Shirley scrolled through the possibilities, her mild eyes rolling up and down, wondering to which of these deadly conditions, some of them unpronounceable, she owed her present happiness.

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.

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.

In another life, she might have been in theatre. In this life, in this small town in the west of Ireland, she is on the parish council.

Luke should be working. Unanswered emails were up on his laptop, and a pile of paperwork from the parish council was sitting on his desk which required his urgent attention. He had come into the vestry with the intention of playing catch up. Instead he was balls deep in his Greek goddess, her back against the wall, and her perfect fucking legs wrapped tightly around his waist.

But in the years before the council, in a typical American parish, that ancient liturgy was too often approached haphazardly, celebrated carelessly, treated as an obligation to be rushed through as quickly as possible. After the council, of course, the introduction of a new streamlined liturgy gave immeasurably more scope to the casual approach. In Why Catholics Can’t Sing, Thomas Day comments: We can be reasonably sure that the Last Supper did not begin with the words, “Good evening, apostles.” Intuition tells us that John the Baptist did not cry out in the wilderness, “Repent, sin no more, and havernice day.” Common sense tells us that there is something immensely wrong and contradictory about starting off a ritual with “Good Morning.” We might even say that the laity in the pews “short circuits” when greeted this way at Mass. The church building, the music, and the celebrant in flowing robes all seem to say, “This is a ritual,” an event out of the ordinary. Then, the “Good Morning” intrudes itself and indicates that this is really a business meeting and not a liturgy, after all. Today, after more than a full generation of liturgical experimentation, the integrity of the liturgy can be compromised by two opposite dangers: caring too little about the established rubrics or caring too much.

His teaching as to the absence of any freedom of will or choice in man, and of salvation as being solely by the grace of God, went so far as to lead to the neglect of right conduct as a part of the Gospel. Among the doctrines carried over from the Church of Rome was that of baptismal regeneration, and, with this, the general practice of baptising infants. While reviving the teaching of Scripture as to individual salvation by faith in Christ Jesus and His perfect work, Luther did not go on to accept the New Testament teaching as to the churches, separate from the world, yet maintained in it as witnesses to it of the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ; he adopted the Roman Catholic system of parishes, with their clerical administration of a world considered as Christianized. Having a number of rulers on his side, he maintained the principle of the union of Church and State, and accepted the sword of the State as the proper means of converting or punishing those who dissented from the new ecclesiastical authority. It was at the Diet, or Council, of Speyer (1529) that the Reform party presented the protest to the Roman Catholic representatives, from which the name Protestant came to be applied to the Reformers. The League of Smalcald in 1531, bound together nine Princes and eleven free cities as Protestant Powers.