Quotes About The Mass Catholic

“To be the altar boy at the first Mass of the day was a sacred initiation rite. It was like being hazed at a fraternity, only more Catholic.”

— Ian Morgan Cron

“To be Catholic was to belong to an ethnic group, not a religion. You didn't really have to believe it, or act like you believed it, to be a Catholic. You just had to show up every week for Mass and go to Catholic school.”

— Carlene Bauer

“Neutrinos have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic!
Robert to Vittoria”

— Dan Brown

“If you've never been to a Catholic Mass, don't worry, it's still going on, you still have time to catch it.”

— Jim Gaffigan

“Photons have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic.”

— Woody Allen

“I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

“My mother was a good Catholic
she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary's in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

“Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure.”

— Pat Conroy

“The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.”

— Jean Giraudoux

“Our Catholic church here split into three pieces: (1) the American Catholic Church whose new Rome is Cicero, Illinois; (2) the Dutch schismatics who believe in relevance but not God; (3) the Roman Catholic remnant, a tiny scattered flock with no place to go. The American Catholic Church, which emphasizes property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods, retained the Latin mass and plays The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation.”

— Walker Percy

“We were a religious, practicing, Catholic family - Mass together on Sunday, Catholic schools, and parents who practiced everything they preached. A great gift was their total absence of any derogatory talk about people of any race or culture and we were on a street of many faiths, though no other races at that early time.”

— Trina Paulus

“A future priest, I faced her as before an altar: one of her cheeks was the Epistle and the other the Gospel. Her mouth might have been the chalice, her lips the paten. All I needed to do was to say a new mass, according to a Latin that no one learns at school, and is the catholic language of mankind. Don't think me sacrilegious, devout lady reader; the purity of the intention cleanses anything unorthodox in the style. We stood there with heaven within us. Our hands, their nerve ends touching, made two creatures one: a single, seraphic being. Our eyes went on saying infinite things, and the words did not even try to pass our lips: they went back to the heart as silently as they had come ...”

— Machado De Assis

“Church files lawsuit over communion wafers: Oklahoma's Catholic Archbishop filed a lawsuit on Wednesday to halt the use of what he said were stolen communion wafers destined for a satanic black mass ceremony to be held next month in Oklahoma City.”

— Anonymous.

“It's a beautiful religion and I wish I understood it more. No, I don't want to understand it all. It's beautiful because it's always a mystery. Sometimes I say I don't believe in God and Jesus and Mary. I'm a bad Catholic because I miss mass once in a while and I grumble when, at confession, I get a heavy penance for something I couldn't help doing. But good or bad, I am a Catholic and I'll never be anything else.
Of course, I didn't ask to be born Catholic, no more than I asked to be born American. But I'm glad it turned out that I'm both these things.”

— Betty Smith

“I am a Catholic because I choose to be a Catholic. And then I go to the Mass because I choose. It is out of my free will.”

— Paulo Coelho

“It's hard for the Catholic Church to accept change. When the mass was no longer said in Latin, loyalists went into mourning for years.”

— Janine Di Giovanni

“Through the confessional system, the Catholic church spied upon the lives of its congregants. While Latin mass excluded most people who could not speak Latin from an understanding of the very system of thought that bound them.”

— Julian Assange

“I was raised a Roman Catholic and had to go to the eight o'clock Mass every morning and have communion and wear a tie, kind of like a restricted life style. Then in the '60s, we got wild and let it go and started looking in other places to see where God really was, and I came back to the Christian thing.”

— Roger McGuinn

“Growing up, I was your classic Catholic Irish kid. I went to mass every Sunday. Then in secondary school I went to boarding school, and there was mass seven days a week before breakfast - it may have put me off!”

— Deirdre O'Kane

“Catholics speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture. Sure, the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother.”

— Joshua Ferris

“So she went to mass every Sunday as a child, received communion, went to confession, and was confirmed, but because her mother never participated in any of this, Alice began questioning the validity of these beliefs at a young age. And without a satisfying answer from either her father or the Catholic Church, she never developed a true faith.”

— Lisa Genova

“The intention of Paul VI with regard to what is commonly called the Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should almost coincide with the Protestant liturgy - but what is curious is that Paul VI did that to get as close as possible to the Protestant Lord's supper ... there was with Paul VI an ecumenical intention to remove, or at least to correct, or at least to relax, what was too Catholic, in the traditional sense, and, I repeat, to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist Mass.”

— Jean Guitton

“I went to Catholic high school, so my being in this [the craft] is not going to make my grandmother very happy. It's funny, because I was the only one who is Catholic in it. You have this thing in mass where you have to genuflect before you go into the pew, so I said you have to do this [for a scene] and they said why, and I said because you have to; I don't know why, it's a rule. Or like instinct. It's funny they set in a Catholic school. I went to St. Ignatius College Prep - "Where Modesty is our Policy."”

— Robin Tunney

“I want to see religious instruction and sermons held in German in the mosques. The ideal, in my view, would be for imams to be trained in Germany and to speak our language, just as the Roman Catholic Church now holds mass in German and gave up Latin long ago.”

— Wolfgang Schauble

“Those who are seeking the true religion will never find it outside the Catholic Church alone, because, in every other religion, if they trace it up to the author, they will find some impostor whose imagination furnished a mass of sophisms and errors”

— Alphonsus Liguori

“The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder.”

— Terence McKenna

“I was born and raised in the University of Chicago area and had an uneventful middle-class Catholic childhood. I had a heavy Catholic upbringing and Catholicism is terrible - it's the reason there were slaves. Mass every morning at seven o'clock during Lent. It's a totally negative, man-made religion.”

— Chaka Khan

“I was brought up Catholic. My mom brought us to mass every Sunday - short for 'massive head trauma' that you get from your mother punching you in your little nine-year-old head every minute because you can't sit still for anything that's boring.”

— Richard Jeni

“Cuban agents are assigned to a Catholic Church where their instructions are to beat, jail and intimidate the Ladies In White that attend Mass and who afterwards peacefully take to the streets calling for the release of their husbands, sons and fathers who are political prisoners.”

— Marco Rubio

“I am a Catholic. As far as possible I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative!”

— Hilaire Belloc