Word: priestly
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...inconvenient, he may doubt that they will leave now in droves over issues of governance. Certainly he has shown no desire to increase lay influence. Addressing a delegation from the West Indies last month, he warned against lay people becoming "too clerical or too politicized," either by usurping the priest's liturgical role or supplanting him in "tasks of pastoral governing...
...awful. I'm a priest and a bishop, and I wanted to be a priest from the time I was in the sixth grade. And my own experience of priests from the time I was a youngster has only been of the finest priests that I know. Yes, it's shocking...
...cuts at the heart of the very fabric of the church. That is a fiduciary relationship. When I was ordained a priest in 1973, I was 25 years old. I was assigned to a very affluent and very significant parish in a northwest suburb of Chicago. They didn't know me. I was dealing with people of significant competence--lawyers, judges, doctors. But the one thing that I had was that I was a priest, and therefore I had credibility. They trusted me with some of the great secrets of their lives. They trusted me with their kids. They trusted...
Dallas is about us as bishops. The spotlight has shifted from the priest who abuses to the bishop who doesn't handle the situation fairly. We must convince our people that first of all we are terribly open and contrite. And we have a firm resolve to mend our ways...
...church has long been a source of stability, permanence, transcendence. I remember the feelings of my childhood, when my local Catholic church was the only place I felt connected to something truly profound. I recall the first time I went, as an altar boy, into the sacristy where the priest vested himself. I felt as if I were entering the most sacred place on Earth. The smell of incense, the touch of candle wax, the overly starched cotton of my surplice as I knelt before the sacred mystery of the Eucharist: in the words of the poet Philip Larkin...