Tolerance is not a Christian value. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty--these are Christian values.
It is not kindness to tell patients that need strong medicine that nothing serious is wrong with them.
Real spiritual authority has to do with the truth of the actual words being spoken, and the spirit of the person behind the words. Really, authority is about truth: honest-living truth.
If an honest man is the noblest work of God, then Mr. Lincoln's title to high nobility is clear and unquestioned.
I do believe that Muslims and Christians and Jews pray to the same God. And yet they understand who God is in significantly different ways.
This also is a part of the teaching of the Church, that there are certain angels of God, and certain good influences, which are His servants in accomplishing the salvation of men.
A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.
Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.
The Son of God became incarnate in the souls of men to instill the feeling of brotherhood. All are brothers and all children of God.
The Church is or should go back to being a community of God's people, and priests, pastors and bishops, who have the care of souls, are at the service of the people of God.
Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?... It is necessary to accompany them with mercy.
Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.
Anyone who wants to be pope doesn't care much for themselves, God doesn't bless them. I didn't want to be pope.
My main job is to live with deep contentment, joy, and confidence in my everyday experience of life with God. Everything else is job number two.
To have my mind racing and my heart beating fast over glorious possibilities is very close to the summit of life experience for me.
My experience as a pastor is lots of people have really toxic, dangerous, psychologically devastating images of God in their head, images of a God who's not good.
Because we don't see the evil destroyed now and thus experience the suffering that evil inevitably inflicts, we are tempted to doubt God's existence and goodness.
God tolerates even our stammering, and pardons our ignorance whenever something inadvertently escapes us - as, indeed, without this mercy there would be no freedom to pray.
In a way, fraud in business is no different from infidelity in marriage or plagiarism in scholarly work. Even people committed to high moral standards succumb.
In Christian terms, evangelization and humanization are not alternatives. Nor are the 'vertical dimension' of faith and the 'horizontal dimension' of love for one's neighbor and political change.
After-school tutoring programs, care for the elderly, shelters for the homeless, disaster relief work, and a variety of other services would all benefit from government funding.
