Catholic Tradition Quotes

In the Catholic tradition, the idea of giving something up on a Friday - the act of self denial - has always been tied with being generous to those in need. ~ Vincent Nichols

The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

To understand our faith -- to theologize in the Catholic tradition -- we need philosophy. We must use the philosophical language of God, person, creation, relationship, identity, natural law, virtues, conscience, moral norms if we are to think about religion and defend it. Theology has some terms and methods of its own, but its fundamental tools are borrowed from philosophy.

The growth of religious fundamentalism and the collapse of religious education mean theology is more urgently needed in universities -- especially Catholic ones -- than ever before. ~ George Cardinal Pell

It is absurd and a detestable shame, that we should suffer those traditions to be changed which we have received from the fathers of old. ~ Thomas Aquinas

This is why I persist, and if you wish to know the real reason for my persistence, it is this. At the hour of my death, when Our Lord asks me: "What have you done with your episcopate, what have you done with your episcopal and priestly grace?" I do not want to hear from his lips the terrible words "You have helped to destroy the Church along with the rest of them." (p. 163) ~ Marcel Lefebvre

Is anything more needed to convince Catholics that the sola gratia, as generally understood among Protestants, in the sense we have seen that they give it, is perfectly in accord with Catholic tradition? And those Protestants who see, in the passage we first quoted, the very heart of their faith and life as Christians, can they seriously question that the Church does justice to all that is essential and positive in their "protestation," once they have read these other texts?

-The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, 1956 ~ Louis Bouyer

God does not punish, just as the Church no longer condemns, except those who stay faithful to Tradition. (p. 61) ~ Marcel Lefebvre

Every year, like a good Catholic, I wait for Christmas. Putting up the lights, decorating the tree, making sweets and then unwrapping gifts on Christmas morning ... it's a tradition my family has followed since I was very little. ~ Malaika Arora Khan

St. Thomas explains that for a law to be just, it must conform to the demands of reason and have an effect which is both good and for the benefit of those for whom it is intended. A law can cease to bind without revocation on the part of the legislator when it is clearly harmful, impossible, or irrational. It would certainly constitute an abuse of authenticity for a pope to forbid the celebration of so hallowed, venerable and Catholic a rite as the Tridentine Mass. Should it be done, there is a sound case to justify the faithful in resisting him, based upon accepted norms within Catholic theology. (p. 25). ~ Michael Treharne Davies

The best advice I can give you is this. Church tradition - especially when they do not run counter to the Faith - are to be observed in the form in which previous generations have handed them down. ~ Jerome

The Catholic Church had strict racial attitudes and intolerance for anybody who was not Catholic. When I look at a lot of Black ministers and what went on in the Black church, I was more caught up with those who were in Cadillacs and shiny suits than I was with those who were Kingian in their style. ~ Harry Belafonte

When I was in my single digits, I was subjected to the worst torture you can possibly inflict on a child: Catholic mass. ~ Tyler Oakley

My mom's Jewish and my dad's Irish Catholic alcoholic, so I whine on the inside. ~ Margaret Smith

Evangelicals have to face it (like Roman Catholics of 16th century had to): Increasingly, our version of Good News is neither news nor good. ~ Samir Selmanovic

They are trying to hold on to a world that no longer exists. They are blind and terrified because they feel it slipping away from them. They are gripping thin air but they keep trying desperately to hold on to it - hoping the air will turn into something familiar and solid. ~ Lillian E. Smith

The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full. ~ Alice Walker

Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going. ~ N. T. Wright

Catholics and evangelicals need to remain allied, and in solidarity, against the increasingly aggressive secularism of our age. ~ Gary Bauer

Although it is a bit of a caricature, I think that there is some truth in the generalizations I'm about to make. The tendency in Roman Catholic theology is to view the kingdom of Christ as a cosmic ladder or tower, leading from the lowest strata to the hierarchy led by the pope. Anabaptists have tended to see the kingdom more as a monastery, a community of true saints called out of the world and a worldly church. Lutheran and Reformed churches tend sometimes to see the kingdom as a school, while evangelicals (at least in the United States) lean more toward seeing it as a market. ~ Michael S. Horton

And we're also remembering the guiding light of our Judeo-Christian tradition. All of us here today are descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, sons and daughters of the same God. I believe we are bound by faith in our God, by our love for family and neighborhood, by our deep desire for a more peaceful world, and by our commitment to protect the freedom which is our legacy as Americans. These values have given a renewed sense of worth to our lives. They are infusing America with confidence and optimism that many thought we had lost ... ~ Ronald Reagan

What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I said, There's a long tradition behind life in India that comes from a religion and philosophy that is thousands of years old. And although these people are not in India, they still pass on those traditions about what's important in life - trying to build for the future and supporting their children in the effort - which have come down to them for centuries. ~ Richard Feynman

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake. ~ June Jordan

In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy. ~ Peter Kreeft

I think that food ties us to our community and our traditions, and it's the thing that makes us feel good and connected. ~ Kathy Freston

Throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread, like you; feel want,
Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am king? ~ William Shakespeare

Futurism: This was a movement of intellectuals who wanted to replace tradition with the modern world of machinery, speed, violence, and public relations. It proves that we should be careful what intellectuals wish for, because we might get it. ~ Brad Holland

My home base - pop music and the Catholic Church. ~ Madonna Ciccone

Mormonism is the house whose walls I know best. It is the story I am not abandoning because it is the story I choose-and in many ways gas chosen me-again and again to grapple with. Mormonism is my native spiritual language and many of the threads with which my life's tapestry is woven. ~ Ashley Mae Hoiland

I went to a Catholic School, and underneath my school uniform, I wore a metal shirt. ~ George Stroumboulopoulos

But the only thing that is important is, Am I loving God and growing holy every day? ~ Mother Angelica

The monarchy continued this tradition, and it migrated to America as soon as there was profit to be had. ~ Andrew P. Napolitano

A Catholic priest who's been sending threatening notes to Conan O'Brien was charged with stalking in the fourth degree. It just goes to show you that people can become obsessed with redheads. ~ Chelsea Handler

How happily we explored our shiny new world! We lived like characters from the great books I curled up with in the big Draylon armchair. Like Jack Kerouak, like Gatsby, we created ourselves as we went along, a raggle-taggle of gypsies in old army overcoats and bell-bottoms, straggling through the fields that surrounded our granite farmhouse in search of firewood, which we dragged home and stacked in the living room. Ignorant and innocent, we acted as if the world belonged to us, as though we would ever have taken the time to hang the regency wallpaper we damaged so casually with half-rotten firewood, or would have known how to hang it straight, or smooth the seams. We broke logs against the massive tiled hearth and piled them against the sooty fire back, like the logs were tradition and we were burning it, like chimney fires could never happen, like the house didn't really belong to the poor divorcee who paid the rates and mortgage even as we sat around the flames like hunter gatherers, smoking Lebanese gold, chanting and playing the drums, dancing to the tortured music of Luke's guitar. Impelled by the rhythm, fortified by poorly digested scraps of Lao Tzu, we got up to dance, regardless of the coffee we knocked over onto the shag carpet. We sopped it up carelessly, or let it sit there as it would; later was time enough. We were committed to the moment.




Everything was easy and beautiful if you looked at it right. If someone was angry, we walked d ~ Claire Robson

We approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the Church and the world ... It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has moulded us. ~ J.I. Packer

According to a study conducted by the Oxford African American Studies Center, hip hop is part of and speaks to a long line of black American and African traditions. Many observers also make a connection between rap and West African griot tradition, the art of wandering storytellers known for their knowledge of local settings and their superior vocal skills. ~ Carlos Wallace

Confucians, along with Hebrew, Islamic, and Catholic scholastics, as well as Protestant fundamentalists, are like tourists who study guidebooks and maps instead of wandering freely and looking at the view. Speech and writing are undoubtedly marvelous, but for this very reason they have a hypnotic and fascinating quality which can lead to the neglect of nature itself until they become too much of a good thing. ~ Alan W. Watts

Get your head out of the gutter, baby. You Catholic girls and your filthy minds. ~ Tessa Bailey

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on. ~ Edmund Burke

... those who seek the lost Lord will find traces of His being and beauty in all that men have made, from music and poetry and sculpture to the gingerbread men in the pâtisseries, from the final calculation of the pure mathematician to the first delighted chalk drawing of a small child. ~ Caryll Houselander

For God's sake build not your faith upon Tradition, 'tis as rotten as a rotten Post. ~ Nicholas Culpeper

If Vulcans had a church, they'd be Catholics. ~ John C. Wright

61 lynchings occurred in 1920 alone. In 1921, 62, some of the victims, soldiers returning from the Great War who after fighting and winning significant victories - just as they had fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars and the wars again the Indians - thought that America would repay them for the generosity of putting their lives on the line, for aiding in salvaging their hides from the Kaiser who had been tagged "enemy" this time. Instead, a Protestant country ignorant even of Western mysteries executes soldiers after a manner of punishments dealt to witches in the "Middle Ages." Europe and the Catholic Church are horrified but not surprised at this "tough guy" across the waters whose horrendous murders in Salem led Europe to reform its "witch laws. ~ Ishmael Reed

Turning to me, he said, Take away your hand; it has deceived you. The road of the Tradition is not for the chosen few. It is everyone's road. And the power that you think you have is worthless, because it is a power that is shared by all. You should have refused your sword. If you had done so, it would have been given to you, because you would have shown that your heart was pure. But just as I feared, at the supreme moment you stumbled and fell. Because of your avidity, you will now have to seek again for your sword. And because of your pride, you will have to seek it among simple people. Because of your fascination with miracles, you will have to struggle to recapture what was about to be given to you so generously. ~ Paulo Coelho

The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us. ~ Learned Hand

[A] healthy respect for tradition[;]...a kind of default survival behavior ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

God was pitched out of forced schooling on his ear after WWII. This wasn't because of any constitutional proscription-there was none that anyone had been able to find in over a century and a half-but because the political state and corporate economy considered the Western spiritual tradition too dangerous a competitor. And it is. ~ John Taylor Gatto

In the spiritual reality of the church, neither Marcel Lefebvre, nor his bishops and priests, nor the people who frequent the SSPX chapels suffered or suffer excommunication. I believe history will record that the intent to impose such an excommunication was invalid and illicit. ~ Malachi Martin

In the tradition of great female artists, Karla Bonoff, Bonnie Raitt, Christine McVie, Shawn
Colvin, Sarah McLachlan ... now enter Maia Sharp. ~ Art Garfunkel

Are we creating and cultivating things that have a chance of furnishing the New Jerusalem? Will the cultural goods we devote our lives to - the food we cook and consume; the music we purchase and practice; the movies we watch and make; the enterprises we earn our paychecks from and invest our wealth in - be identified as the glory and honor of our cultural tradition? Or will they be remembered as mediocrities at best, dead-ends at worst? This is not the same as asking whether we are making "christian" culture. ~ Andy Crouch

In terms of identity? I'm a commercial fantasy writer, looking to entertain my audience with fantastical tales that mix history with myth and magic. That's something humans have been doing for a very long time, and I like being part of a long tradition of storytelling, whether that's ancient tales shared around a campfire or modern podcasts.
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I'm currently editing a scene that involves winged lions and smoke-conjured armor, so I'm not certain I'm the best writer to ask about truth. But that being said, words and stories have great power and I think setting a scene that pulls from the real world but is set in a fictional one can cause readers to reassess and question things in a way they might not have otherwise. ~ S.A. Chakraborty