Words matter. These are the best Eugene Kennedy Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
As in the Divine Right of Kings, hierarchies invest those who preside at the top of their pyramidal structure with absolute power to rule over the lesser ranks that spread down like a marble staircase to the broad foundation stones of those with no power at all.
Bishops may often feel but cannot express the sting and throb of submitting themselves to Roman commands because the latter are always presented as tests of their loyalty to the Pope and of their absolute acceptance of his teaching authority, or Magisterium.
The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?
There would be no need for love if perfection were possible. Love arises from our imperfection, from our being different and always in need of the forgiveness, encouragement and that missing half of ourselves that we are searching for, as the Greek myth tells us, in order to complete ourselves.
Pope Francis has aimed a blow at what the whole hierarchical system is built on: a graded system with the higher clergy in the skyboxes, the devoted religious in festival seating, as they say of the crowds at rock concerts, and, on the bottom, the laity in standing room only.
Our human experience, like the World War II Ultra code-breaking machine, catches the heavy traffic of messages about what we really do and what is done to us every day.
Wherever you find ‘men together’ – writing the rules, as at exclusive golf or other men’s clubs, businesses, and lodges where they wear elaborate robes and funny hats – women are kept completely outside if possible and, when grudgingly admitted, to highly restricted areas or token status.
As dutiful bishops soon discover, authoritarianism, or control from the top down, characterizes the hierarchical tradition.
Pope Francis reminds us of Pope John XXIII because both men share the same lack of self-consciousness, and neither needs to keep his guard up through the use of psychological defenses such as rationalization, projection or intellectualization.
Human experience resembles the battered moon that tracks us in cycles of light and darkness, of life and death, now seeking out and now stealing away from the sun that gives it light and symbolizes eternity.
Benedict’s spending down his energy was a function of his fighting against the Space/Information Age’s relentless pressure on the concept of hierarchy, the restoration of which he had, following John Paul II, made a central part of the program that has come to be known as the reform of the reform.
The world, more suffering than sinning, turns toward Pope Francis as in a conversation people turn to the person who is making sense of things.
Vatican II and the Space/Information Age began in the same eye blink of history, with John XXIII’s opening speech of Vatican II on Oct. 11, 1962, following John F. Kennedy’s call for a round trip to the moon a month earlier.
The perception of the horizon is an earthbound event; all horizons disappear in space, and we are left shorn of the sweet roots that have held us to the earth, challenged to imagine what is truly present just before us, a unified and seemingly limitless universe.
If you ask people what attracted them to the person they love, they never tell you of some perfect feature that focused them on sheer surfaces but rather an imperfection that allowed them to see into their uncharted depths.
We encounter and enter our richest, most humanly defining experiences by way of a tear in the fabric of things, because we are running late, or because we recognize, across a crowded room, a face whose lack of perfection allows a unique light to shine through and to stir us with uncommon wonder.
From his first hours as pope, Francis has re-enacted or spoken of the great pastoral transformation of Vatican II as his own agenda.
