The Truth at the Heart of the Lie Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“The second story tells of how the malignity of that clericalism has been laid bare in recent years by the scandal of priests sexually abusing children, while bishops have protected the predators instead of their victims—a deviance so deeply driven into the Catholic culture that not even the brave and charismatic Pope Francis has been able or willing to uproot it. And the third story is my own—how Jimmy, how I, became a priest; then a writer, and an op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe, even as that paper’s Spotlight team broke the Church’s sexual abuse scandal; and, finally, a shattered believer forced to confront the corruption at the heart of my faith.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“But if instead this man [i.e., Pope Francis] turns out to be as gripped by institutional self-interest as any corporate leader, then reasonable expectations of creative solutions to problems as varied as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and mass migration are doubly dashed.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“At the most practical level, a reformed, enlightened, hopeful Catholic Church is essential to the thriving — even to the survival — of the human species.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The sweep of the hierarchy’s betrayals, in scope and depth, is staggeringly new. And to gauge the likelihood of that hierarchy’s facing the truth of what it has done and what it has become, consider this: The two contemporary maestros of denial, Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, have, in the very years of the scandal they enabled, been named as saints of the Catholic Church.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“A power structure that is accountable only to itself will always end by abusing the powerless. If exposed, it will ask, paternalistically, to be allowed to repair the damage on its own.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“As became clear to me and many others during his tone-deaf visit to Ireland in 2018 and during the 2019 aftershocks of scandal that culminated in the failed ‘Protection of Minors’ meeting in Rome, the pope from Argentina remains blind to what much of the world sees quite clearly. If, owing to his own limits as a Catholic priest, he is unable, finally, to begin a radical transformation of the anti-female, anti sex clerical culture that is brought ruin to thousands, the precious and prophetic world invitation of Pope Francis will be firmly met by history’s No! His tiny opening will be slammed shut.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The Pope's critics among his fellow prelates have engaged in entry, rumormongering, leaks, and open defiance — a desperate rearguard effort aimed at weakening a Pope deemed insufficiently committed to the protection of clerical power.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“But inside the church, the fiercest opposition [to Pope Francis] has come from the defenders of clericalism — the spine of male power and the bulwark against any loosening of the sexual mores that protect it.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“As the human species flirts with its own self-extinction, whether through weapons of mass destruction or environmental degradation, the world urgently needs this global institution to be rational, historically minded, pluralistically respectful, committed to peace, a tribune of justice, and a champion of the equality of women. That Vatican II occurred at all is enough to validate, if not in belief in the Holy Spirit, the hope that this great institution can survive the temporary moral collapse of its leadership.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“Once converted, the former Anglicans are welcomed into the Roman Church as priests, even if they are married. So in that way, the rule of mandatory celibacy has indeed been lifted, if only for these self-acknowledged misogynists. That leaves the inferiority of women as the absolutely overriding Catholic moral principle. It is the keystone of clericalism.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“Sexual morality, according to the Catholic Church, is all about denial of male restlessness and control of female agency. There is simply no place in this schema for a woman's autonomy.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“To be genuinely "pro-life" is to be firmly pro-contraception. By its stubborn theological clinging to "Humanae Vitae" and its collusion with right-wing-sponsored legislative initiatives aimed at restricting birth control, whether through insurance mandates or strings attached to foreign aid, the Catholic hierarchy has, in effect, turned Roman Catholicism into an abortionist church. To repeat: Catholic condemnation of birth control promotes abortion — period. That tells us that something else is going on here besides a genuine concern for life.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“Is it only a coincidence that the same arc of time defining this reinvigorated clerical corruption about sexuality has seen the rise of the fervently political Catholic Church crusade against abortion? It is as if the 1973 war Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court threw a lifeline to the morally discredited Catholic hierarchy.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“But — and here is the crucial point — it was difficult to rebut that anti-gay slur [i.e., that the abuse crisis in the Catholic church is about pedophilia by gay priests] for the scapegoating it was, precisely because of that cloak of denial around the Church’s broader sexual dishonesty. Gay priests, too, were forced to live a lie.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The popes who succeeded John XXIII were in clericalism's grip, which is why the reforms of his council didn't have a chance.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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