Top 188 Clergy Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

The clergy are at present divided into three sections: an immense body who are ignorant; a small proportion who know and are silent; and a minute minority who know and speak according to their knowledge.

By the former of these (canon law), the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the mind of man was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandizement of their own order.

Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position.

the most grievous wrong of that day ... was to be found in the establishment of the celibacy of the clergy. ... This hideous doctrine of a celibate priesthood was maintained only by a constant struggle against the better and truer instincts of the heart.

The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.

The clergy believe that any power confided in me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes, and they believe rightly.

Moral training in Ireland is severe and lasts until marriage. Even in childhood, we are taught by the pious clergy to battle against bad thoughts so that we may preserve our holy purity.

Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to secure & perpetuate it needs them not.

I grew up going to Catholic school and I was altar boy even going back to the days where the altar boys had to learn the Latin clergy for mass.

The seminaries must face the fact that they are not turning out well-trained professional clergy. They must realize that preaching is creative work and that some element of creativity should be required as a condition for ordination.

They all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point.

I was a celebrity. This is not what I do for a living - politics. I play politicians, as well as working class or clergy or whatever, and you mustn't be confused by what you're seeing on television because that's not who I am. So I always ended it.

Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.

Throughout this protracted and disgraceful assault on American womanhood, the clergy baptized each new insult and act of injustice in the name of the Christian religion, and uniformly asked God's blessing on proceedings that would have put to shame an assembly of Hottentots.

One of the duties of fortitude is to keep the weak from receiving injury; another, to check the wrong motions of our own souls; a third, both to disregard humiliations, and to do what is right with an even mind. All these clearly ought to be fulfilled by all Christians, and especially by the clergy.

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny; flattery to treachery; standing armies to arbitrary government; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.

I was the biggest George Harrison fanatic in the world. He was raised Catholic; my parents are both ex-clergy, so I was raised Catholic, and I admired how he used his faith.

I'm not OK with clergy, students, and those of different opinions lying and expressing hateful speech in the name of love, but again, it is their constitutional right. I'm not OK with their conduct, but in America we tolerate it, as obnoxious and spiteful as it may be.

Pray we for the Clergy; that they may rightly divide, that they may rightly walk; that while they teach others, themselves may learn.

The king, you say, desires to do what is right. My clergy are banished, my possessions are taken from me, the sword hangs over my neck. Do you call this right?

The Orthodox hierarchy doesn't have the kind of power that high-ranking clergy do in other churches. There isn't even a worldwide governing board to hold all the various Orthodox bodies together.

I'm a man of some intelligence. I've had some education, passed the bar, practiced law. I've been a teacher and I deal with men of substance, statesman, business leaders, the clergy... So why do I spend my time arguing with Dizzy Dean?

So too, in forming a constitution, or in enacting rules of procedure, or making canons, the people do not merely passively assent, but actively cooperate. They have, in all these matters, the same authority as the clergy.

Whenever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result.

Clergy had a vested interest in retaining the old, ways, which made few demands of them as teachers, as spiritual guides, or as moral examples or agents.

Christian creeds and doctrines, the clergy's own fatal inventions, through all the ages has made of Christendom a slaughterhouse, and divided it into sects of inextinguishable hatred for one another.

While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble.

A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.

the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a 'feature' in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.

Iran is hard to understand. Although it is ruled in an authoritarian manner, it's not a state in which everything is controlled from one center. There are many forces that work in parallel: the military, the intelligence service, the Revolutionary Guard, the clergy and the government. They all share a fear of the nation's youth.

When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God.

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.

Without fear of contradiction, I can safely say that every step in progress that woman has made she has been assailed by ecclesiastics, that her most vigilant unwearied opponents have always been the clergy.

According to your belief [Christian clergy], my kind of man — secular, prideful, agnostic and all the rest of it — is among the damned. I'm on my own. You've got your God.

The religious superstition is encouraged by means of the institution of churches, processions, monuments, festivities....The so-called clergy stupefy the masses....They befog the people and keep them in an eternal condition of stupefaction.

What do our clergy lose by reading their sermons? They lose preaching, the preaching of the voice in many cases, the preaching of the eye almost always.

If all Church power vests in the clergy, then the people are practically bound to passive obedience in all matters of faith and practice; for all right of private judgment is then denied.

I ask the clergy why don't I see myself represented in leadership? And I'm told, and this happens quite a bit, "We don't think about race when we hire. We just hire the best person for the job."

You see in the streets of London, great and little boys running about in long blue coats, which, like robes, reach quite down to the feet, and little white bands, such as the clergy wear.

It is a very rare church indeed that encourages its members to think for themselves in religious matters, or even tolerates this, and in most of them the clergy are quite ready to lay down the law in other fields too.

There is a particular set of values commonly associated with being professional. Experience, expertise, trustworthiness, wisdom, and good judgement are all attributes aspired to by senior professional people, be they doctors, engineers, lawyers, civil servants, or the clergy.

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.

The people are as severe toward the clergy as toward women; they want to see absolute devotion to duty from both.

The more members of the clergy that are out there working to expand their congregations, the more people will go to church.

The clergy, no less than the capitalist class, lives on the backs of the people, profits from the degradation, the ignorance and the oppression of the people.

so long as you believe that man is essentially evil in nature, and a more vicious doctrine was never promulgated, it follows that he is often going to need to have his ears slapped back, and who should do this but the clergy?

World travel and getting to know clergy of all denominations has helped mold me into an ecumenical being. We're separated by theology and, in some instances, culture and race, but all that means nothing to me any more.

Issues like immigration, police brutality, and other onerous laws put in place by local and state governments are prime avenues for active clergy to work with their parishioners on the issues that affect their daily lives.

Those who are used to a clergy take very lightly those who do not have a formal divinity degree: like Paul and Peter and James and John.

The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.

Have we arrived at our own faith and our own path or simply internalized the beliefs of parents, clergy, spouse, or friends?

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.

The clergy, with a few honorable exceptions, have in all modern countries been the avowed enemies of the diffusion of knowledge, the danger of which to their own profession they, by a certain instinct, seem always to have perceived.

Doctors, dentists and nurses commonly take out malpractice insurance to pay for lawsuits. The trend has expanded to include hairdressers, accountants, vets, sports umpires and members of the clergy, all fearful of being sued for wrongful action or advice.

Individualism. Narcissism. Value-free choices. These are all key elements in the decline of the practice of mutual accountability in Western churches, among clergy and laity alike.

I am Presbyterian and Protestant. I've had great relationships and developed even greater relationships with ministers. We have tremendous support from the clergy.

It was in this year, 1828, that the standard of "the Christian Party in Politics" was openly unfurled... This was an evident attempt, through the influence of the clergy over the female mind - until this hour lamentably neglected in the United States - to effect a union of Church and State.

Far, far from the clergy be the love of novelty!

O, because I have had only that kind of benevolence which consists in lying on a sofa, and cursing the church and clergy for not being martyrs and confessors. One can see, you know, very easily, how others ought to be martyrs.