A Quote by Penny Lernoux

In contrast, traditional Catholic churches serve vast numbers of people who have little or nothing in common, and they are often impersonal supermarkets for the sacraments.

Penny Lernoux

Quote Topics

Catholic Catholic Church Churches Common Contrast Impersonal Little Nothing Numbers Often People Sacraments Serve Supermarkets Traditional Vast

Quote Author

Penny Lernoux
American - Journalist
January 6, 1940 - October 9, 1989

When I talk to audiences about the size and age of the cosmos, people often say, "It makes me feel so insignificant." I answer, "The bigger and more impersonal the universe is, the more meaningful you are, because this vast, impersonal place needs something significant to fill it up." We've abandoned the old belief that humanity is at the physical center of the universe but more come back to believing we are at the center of meaning.

Alan Dressler

I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.

Barbara Brown Taylor

The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring - but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.

Herbert A. Simon

The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name: they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.

Leo Tolstoy

Henceforward the Christian Churches having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof, came into the hands of the Encratites: and the Heathens, who in the fourth century came over in great numbers to the Christians, embraced more readily this sort of Christianity, as having a greater affinity with their old superstitions, than that of the sincere Christians; who by the lamps of the seven Churches of Asia, and not by the lamps of the Monasteries, had illuminated the Church Catholic during the three first centuries.

Isaac Newton

'Catholic writer' seems like you have an agenda of evangelization, as if you were somehow influenced in your choice of perspective by dogma or canon law. That has nothing to do with me. I don't have a lot in common with other 'Catholic' writers.

Mary Gordon

I am Catholic but I want to say something to the Catholics. Thank you for some of the bishops who live in rural areas, and are still Catholic. These bishops of the Catholic churches still pray for the poor, and pray for their president who works for the poor, while the leaders of the Catholic Church only defend oligarchy.

Evo Morales

A Martian would think that the English worship at supermarkets, not in churches.

Jonathan Sacks

Our society offers little in the way of reeducation for those who have been torn away from their traditional culture and suddenly exposed to all the blandishments of mass culture-even the churches which follow the hillbillies to the city often make use of the same "hard sell" that the advertisers and politicians do.

David Riesman

Since lawyers are thinkers and not feelers, and their moral development is locked into the rigidity of maintaining law and order, they often come across as impersonal, insensitive, amoral, and not particularly human to the clients they serve.

Thane Rosenbaum

Most of what I have seen, the churches that are growing are the best are those that are nondenominational. But I don't think it's because they are nondenominational. I think that there's a certain method by which they go about reaching out to people that are not as traditional as your mainland churches generally do.

T. D. Jakes

Impersonal criticism?is like an impersonal fist fight or an impersonal marriage, and as successful.

George Jean Nathan

Rome has seven sacraments, but the Protestant churches, being less prosperous, feel that they can afford only two, and these of inferior sanctity.

Ambrose Bierce

I was raised Catholic, but my father's people were Methodist, so we went to both churches.

Aaron Neville

Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from the dictates of governments and the results of battles, but through vast numbers of people changing their minds, sometimes only a little bit.