Eugene Kennedy Quotes

‘There would be no need for love if perfection were possible. Love arises from our imperfection, from our being different and always in need of the forgiveness, encouragement and that missing half of ourselves that we are searching for, as the Greek myth tells us, in order to complete ourselves.’ – Eugene Kennedy

‘The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple? – Eugene Kennedy’ – Eugene Kennedy

‘In April, God speaks to us in the seas whose rhythmic murmuring fills our ears from a long way off. It was in April that the Titanic went down into the deep to lie like a slasher’s victim, bleeding the ‘debris field’ – its passengers’ personal possessions, the everyday things of everyman and everywoman – across the ocean’s floor.’ – Eugene Kennedy

‘We encounter and enter our richest, most humanly defining experiences by way of a tear in the fabric of things, because we are running late, or because we recognize, across a crowded room, a face whose lack of perfection allows a unique light to shine through and to stir us with uncommon wonder.’ – Eugene Kennedy

‘Pope Francis has aimed a blow at what the whole hierarchical system is built on: a graded system with the higher clergy in the skyboxes, the devoted religious in festival seating, as they say of the crowds at rock concerts, and, on the bottom, the laity in standing room only.’ – Eugene Kennedy

‘We not only romanticize the future; we have also made it into a growth industry, a parlor game and a disaster movie all at the same time.’ – Eugene Kennedy

‘The seminary of the future must relate itself to flesh-and-blood men, or it provides a framework that only talks about the people of God but never really shares life with them.’ – Eugene Kennedy

‘The priesthood is not dying, but the clerical state is dead. It needs to be buried, preferably with a Viking funeral in Boston Harbor so nobody can miss the spectacle of its passing.’ – Eugene Kennedy

‘We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.’ – Eugene Kennedy

‘Hierarchical formulations died because their wedding cake levels posited a multiply fractured cosmos that does not match the Space Age revelation of a unified universe in which the earth is clearly in, rather than separated from, the heavens. Hierarchical representations do not reflect what either the world or we are like.’ – Eugene Kennedy