A Quote by Donald Wuerl

When I was a young priest in the 1960s and 1970s, there was much experimentation and confusion in the Church. Teachers and clergy were encouraged to communicate an experience of God's love, but to do it without reference to the Creed, the sacraments, or the tradition.
I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself - the working-class tradition of self-education.
The evil of the Church is the doing of Church work in a spirit of business, something to be got through. The only way to avoid this is for the priest to be instant in prayer. If he is not, he will lose that touch of the supernatural, without which he has no right to be a priest at all.
The apostles and their successors are God's vicars in governing the Church which is built on faith and the sacraments of faith. Wherefore, just as they may not institute another Church, so neither may they deliver another faith, nor institute other sacraments.
There's no possibility for vitality in the church without fidelity to the gospels. If you look at the Churches throughout the world, throughout the Western world, where radical reform has been attempted, the Church has collapsed and almost disappeared. The vitality in the Church, the young people who are here in their tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands possibly, young people who belong, who adhere strongly to the central tradition of Christ and the Church.
The system of fathers of the world church, the clergy system of the state church, and the pastoral system of the independent churches are all the same in nature. They are all Nicolaitans. In the Bible there are only brothers. There is the gift of a pastor, but no system of pastors. The pastoral system is man's tradition. If the children of God are not willing to return to the position of that in the beginning, no matter what they do, it will not be right.
The clergy profession is fundamentally self-defeating. Its stated purpose is to nurture spiritual maturity in the church - a valuable goal. In actuality, however; it accomplishes the opposite by nurturing a permanent dependence of the laity on the clergy. Clergy become to their congregations like parents whose children never grow up, like therapists whose clients never become healed, like teachers whose students never graduate.
The Church received from the apostles the tradition of giving baptism even to infants. The apostles, to whom were committed the secrets of the divine sacraments, knew there are in everyone innate strains of [original] sin, which must be washed away through water and the Spirit
The Church is not self-made, it was created by God and is continuously formed by Him. This finds expression in the Sacraments, above all in that of Baptism: I enter into the Church not by a bureaucratic act, but with the help of this Sacrament.
The priest is not and must not be a civil servant of the Church. Above all the priest is a man who lives for the spirit for God. This being the case the Seminary is the place where he learns 'to be with Him.'
The Church was resolved to have a New Testament, and as, after the lapse of more than three hundred years, no handwriting could be proved or disproved, the Church, which like former impostors had then gotten possession of the State, had everything its own way. It invented creeds, such as that called the Apostle's Creed, the Nicean Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and out of the loads of rubbish that were presented it voted four to be Gospels, and others to be Epistles, as we now find them arranged.
Wherever we find the Word of God surely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there, it is not to be doubted, is a church of God.
The game business arose from computer programs that were written by and for young men in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They worked so well that they formed a very lucrative industry fairly quickly. But what worked for that demographic absolutely did not work for most girls and women.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
My father was a teacher, my mama was a community worker, I taught in so many schools. So when you get that experience of how to communicate with younger people, put that hand on them and give them that old-school feeling, the maturity and adult, a lot of our kids just need the feeling of that love, and that's the frame of reference that I teach from and that's the frame of reference that all of our musicians in the Jazz at Lincoln Center.
I feel certain God loves me just the way I am, and I have a huge sense of calling to communicate that to young people. The Church's teaching was the reason that I lived in so much shame and isolation and pain for all those years. But rather than abandon it and say it's broken, I want to be part of the change.
There is a tradition that the church represents, without which we wouldn't have the church, that's all about diving deep beneath the surface of the culture and finding those timeless, eternal truths that the whole Christian enterprise is rooted in. And one of those is that you don't come to God at 180 miles an hour.
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