top of page
Quotes by Archbishop

"Christian teaching about sex is not a set of isolated prohibitions; it is an integral part of what the Bible has to say about living in such a way that our lives communicate the character of God."

"To conclude: good journalism is one of the models of good conversation and communication in the wider social context."

"Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality."

"Our present time is indeed a criticizing and critical time, hovering between the wish, and the inability to believe. Our complaints are like arrows shot up into the air at no target: and with no purpose they only fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves."

"The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit."

"As the gospels present it to us, the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which the community of God's people - historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant - is being re-created in relation to Jesus himself."

"Well, today, the diocese is more than ever a microcosm."

"The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home."

"Christ shared our experience; he suffered as we suffer; he died as we shall die, and for forty days in the desert he underwent the struggle between good and evil."

"Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum."

"The Church is the new creation, it is life and joy, it is the sacramental fellowship in which we share the ultimate purpose of God, made real for us now in our hearing the Word and sharing the Sacrament."

"Death remains about the one certain fact in the lives of each one of us, and there will be suffering, sorrow, and sadness next week as there was last week."

"You may keep your beauty and your health, unless you destroy them yourself, or discourage them to stay with you, by using them ill."

"Keeping our eyes on journey's end is what we need - the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety."

"And when the world is created, it is created in such a way that those eternal objects of God's loving wisdom become actualities - interacting with one another, relating to God in the finite realm."

"The great gift of Easter is hope - Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake."

"With a group of bankers I always had the feeling that success was measured by the extent one gave nothing away."

"When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."

"Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing."

"One of the most powerful defences the media can offer for controversial actions is, of course, public interest."

"Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed."

"Man's wisdom is his best friend; folly his worst enemy."

"Movements born in hatred very quickly take on the characteristics of the thing they oppose."

"Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new."

"It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity."

"The male sex still constitute in many ways the most obstinate vested interest one can find."

"The problem of evil... Why does God permit it? Or, if God is omnipotent, in which case permission and creation are the same, why did God create it?"

"I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose."

"Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow."

"Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society."

"The best rules to form a young man, are, to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one's own opinions, and value others that deserve it."

"To be a Christian is to believe we are commanded and authorised to say certain things to the world; to say things that will make disciples of all nations."

"The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies."

"The Church exists to connect people at the level of their hunger for a new world."

"The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor."

"St Paul, in his second letter to Corinth, spells this out further in the important eighth and ninth chapters, where he urges some of the Christian communities to be generous to others so that they may also have the chance to be generous in return."

"The twentieth century may tell us that we have nothing to be complacent about in the recent history of humankind; but it also tells us that there is nothing inevitable about tyranny."

"There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others."

"In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied."

"Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor - but the Church is not a campaign."

"To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one's own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty."

"Authority is by nothing so much strengthened and confirmed as by custom; for no man easily distrusts the things which he and all men have been always bred up to."

"Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen, a covenant between radically different partners."

"In sharp contrast to the idea that this stage of life is enviable, we hear high levels of anxiety about getting old, anxieties about health, mobility, access to facilities, simple routine care and attention."

"A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good."

"In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation."

"The answer was that in Burundi, having a clean bill of health has taken on a very particular meaning: unless and until you have paid for your hospital treatment, you simply can't leave, you are in effect a captive."

"The world's creation has a beginning from the world's point of view, not from God's."
bottom of page