Quotes from James Carroll

Live more humanly, bravely, and compassionately in such circumstances, mainly through a call to discipleship.

The way evolution has always worked, a "secular" process in which life's most sacred secret is embedded.

Compassion: she suffered with. Companion: she broke bread with. Conspiracy: she breathed with. Conscience: she knew with. And finally, consistent with this ethic of imitation.

The shame I feel as a Catholic Christian, aware in detail of the ways that the Church sanctified the hatred of Jews, not only betraying Jesus but tilling the soil out of which would come the worst crime in history, is shame not only at what my people did, but at what I can now admit I might well have done myself.

Back home, this Catholic kid was accustomed to a Protestant culture's condescension, but here he could see for himself the world-historic glories of Catholicism... [A Catholic American soldier's reaction to seeing St. Peter's Basilica during WWII.]

I had come here with my three questions. The first: How did the history of Christian antisemitism contribute to the Holocaust? The second: How did the Church abet, or oppose, the Holocaust as it unfolded? And the third: How does the Church today negotiate that layered past, both the deep past of antisemitism and the recent past of the Holocaust? With Edith Stein, that.

The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

The New Testament, that is, was made by the Church; the Church was not made by the New Testament. That is why, speaking generally, Catholics differ from Protestants in the importance given to the authority of the Bible on the one hand, and to the authority of the Church on the other. Therefore, Catholics more than Protestants would tend to say that the community has authority over its normative literature.

For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary, it is one of the places where He is most fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility.

The absence of Jesus is the mode of his presence.

God suffers with you!

Indeed, an ecumenical spirit extending to the worldly, to the flawed, to the politically compromised, and to the sexually stigmatized was what separated Jesus from his rigorously puritanical mentor.