The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul QUOTES

1 " The nub at the center of the notorious Roman Catholic sexual predation is an idolatry of the priest and of the priestly status that goes by the name of "clericalism." It is a malignity marked by a cult of secrecy; a high-flown theological misogyny that demeans all women and fosters an unbridled male supremacy; suppression of normal erotic desire; a hierarchical domination of priest over laypeople; and a basing of that power on threats of the doom-laden afterlife, drawn from a misreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

2 " Although the ideal of celibacy was always put forward as a matter of high spirituality, the controlling motive for this purging of marriage from the priesthood [with the First Lateran Council, 1123] was economic. Through networks of monasteries and feudal fiefdoms, the Church was the largest landowner in Christendom — the territory described today as Western Europe. Celibate clergy, with no households to support, would lack the essential drive to accumulate wealth for themselves; nor would they produce legitimate heirs to lodge competing claims to the vast estates and treasures the medieval church was hell-bent on protecting and expanding. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

3 " But such distancing will still involve deliberate performance of the works of mercy that define the Catholic faith: feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, visiting the sick, striving for justice—finding Jesus “in the least of these.”2 Such chosen forms of faith may involve, for many, unauthorized expressions of prayer and worship—egalitarian, authentic, ecumenical—having nothing to do with diocesan borders, parish boundaries, or the sacrament of Holy Orders. That may be especially true in so-called intentional communities that lift up the leadership of women. These already exist, everywhere. In this connection, I think of my old partner Sister Gloria and what I belatedly learned from her. No matter who presides at whatever form the altar takes, such adaptations of Eucharistic observance return to the theological essence of the sacrament. Christ is experienced not through the officiant, but through the faith of the whole community. “For where two or three are gathered in my name,” Jesus said, “there am I in the midst of them.”3 "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

4 " Generating a neurotic pathology in many priests, and prompting many others to protect themselves and the institution instead of victims, clericalism, I will argue in this book, is both the root cause and the corrupter, the ongoing enabler of the present Catholic catastrophe. The priesthood itself is warped. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

5 " Clericalism is the pyramid, a structure of domination that must be protected at all costs by everyone occupying a niche in it — which is why bishops and most priests so routinely shield the clerical abusers instead of their victims. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

6 " Having seen what the Catholic priesthood has become, I feel the shock, also, of what it has in some way been all along. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

7 " The sexual abuse of children is an ancient and pervasive crime, one that is committed wherever adults have power over the young. Schoolteachers, scoutmasters, other clergy, family members, even fathers and mothers are known to physically exploit their vulnerable charges. The home can be the cockpit of abuse. Defenders of the clerical status quo insist on this broader context, as if predation in the sacristy is no big deal. Alas, as I noted earlier, Pope Francis himself displayed this impulse to relativize the priestly crime.

But the exploitation of children by Catholic priests stands apart — in its worldwide range, in the enabling complicity of church authorities, and in its deeper meaning a sacrilege — because of how God is so often invoked to seduce and coerce victims. The crime of sexual exploitation, especially of children, has shown itself to be endemic to the priesthood. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

8 " It was when Francis repeatedly failed in his response to the unchecked current of accusation and revelation — not just regarding priests as predators, but especially with bishops as enablers, and with bishops and Cardinals as predators, too — that I was forced to undertake a deeper and more comprehensive reckoning. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

9 " Francis has a tragic blind spot — the corruption of clericalism…. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

10 " Pope Francis routinely expresses his "shame and sorrow," but he instinctively defends the accused; he denounces the clerical culture in which abuse has found its hospitable niche, but he does nothing to dismantle it. Indeed, in his instinctive protective responses to the corruption of clericalism, he embodies that culture, even while seeming to criticize it. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

11 " The debasement of Catholic morality when it comes to women, power, and sex is perfectly captured in the fact that the Church’s Canon law provides for the ex post facto excommunication of a woman who attempts to say mass. There is no such penalty for a pedophile priest. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

12 " Francis is at the mercy of an incoherent Catholic morality about all kinds of sexual expression, and he seems incapable of bringing the needed moral clarity and essential new structure of accountability. That incoherence in ethics and morality is itself essential to the malignant culture of clericalism that imprisons many, including the Pope. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

13 " It has become routine for Catholics today to denounce clericalism — the supernatural status claimed for priests. Clerics themselves denounce it. But what is suspect, finally, is the priesthood as such. It's an illusion to pretend that "clericalism" exists apart from the entire culture defined by the sacrament of holy orders, which is the formal name of the priestly ordination rite. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

14 " In the age of the Me Too movement, at last the Roman Catholic priesthood — considered as a whole — must be understood, quite simply, as a male supremacist institution. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

15 " The great question posed by the Catholic sexual abuse scandal is not How could priests and bishops have done this? Rather, given the global scale of the clerical crimes against children and the all-but-universal habit of Church denial that enabled those crimes, the great question is What in Catholic culture gives rise to this grotesquely massive dysfunction?. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

16 " Augustine’s dualism saw the male as spirit and the female as flesh, which made male supremacy the foundation stone of existence. Female flesh was properly held in contempt. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

17 " The theological denigration of women was a major revision of the assumptions that had informed the Christian movement from the gospels forward. Jesus himself modeled an egalitarian respect toward women: In Christ, ‘there is neither male nor female. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

18 " The massive sexual dysfunction of the contemporary Catholic Church began with Augustine. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

19 " When Pope John's successors — Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI — adamantly refused to alter anything having to do with the patriarchal and deeply misogynistic structure of Catholic power, and when they shored up a broad Catholic suspicion of every erotic impulse, the Church sacrificed the ongoing project of a humanely reformed Catholicism. Even under Francis, the us-against-them bipolarity that John XXIII stood against remains firmly in place, and it is still epitomized by men against women. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

20 " What thwarted Pope John's reform was clericalism, the vesting of power in an all-male and celibate clergy. A foreseen change in the place of women in the church — foreseen in the nascent initiative John had taken in the direction of, yes, women's liberation — was what most powerfully ignited the clerical resistance.

To return to this book's central assertion, clericalism is both the root cause and the ongoing enabler of the present Catholic catastrophe. Clericalism epitomizes a woman-insulting patriarchy that cuts deeper into culture than other forms of male dominance because clericalism claims nothing less than divine authority for itself. "

― James Carroll , The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul