Benedict's spending down his energy was a function of his fighting against the Space/Information Age's relentless pressure on the concept of hierarchy, the restoration of which he had, following John Paul II, made a central part of the program that has come to be known as the reform of the reform.

Eugene Kennedy

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

Human experience resembles the battered moon that tracks us in cycles of light and darkness, of life and death, now seeking out and now stealing away from the sun that gives it light and symbolizes eternity.

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

The mystery of being human and, certainly, of being a Catholic lies in our embracing together the imperfect state known as the human condition. First and foremost, if we could ever be perfect or do things perfectly, we would eliminate mystery, an essential ingredient in the good life and the spiritual life.

Eugene Kennedy

Good priests never look for awards and, perversely enough in the clerical culture universe, do not receive many. Like the aged nuns who taught selflessly and nearly anonymously all their lives, these servants of the People of God only get into the papers when their obituaries are printed.

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

Friendship is something whose depth fits human aspirations and fulfills human possibilities. It has heft to it, as a gold-piece does and a gambling chip does not.

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

Our human experience, like the World War II Ultra code-breaking machine, catches the heavy traffic of messages about what we really do and what is done to us every day.

Eugene Kennedy

The truth of faith is a slender, glowing element that runs through even the seemingly ordinary and undramatic moments of existence. Even at low intensity, it is a steady source of illumination. Such religious truth is powerful even when it seems faint, even when it seems obscured by the larger events of history.

Eugene Kennedy

The whole world feels that it knows Francis, not so much because he follows Francis of Assisi but because he is always himself. We have seen him pay his own hotel bill and heard that Francis called Buenos Aires for a pair of ordinary black shoes, like John XXIII, who preferred stout peasant shoes to the traditional papal footwear.

Eugene Kennedy

As dutiful bishops soon discover, authoritarianism, or control from the top down, characterizes the hierarchical tradition.

Eugene Kennedy

As in the Divine Right of Kings, hierarchies invest those who preside at the top of their pyramidal structure with absolute power to rule over the lesser ranks that spread down like a marble staircase to the broad foundation stones of those with no power at all.

Eugene Kennedy

Pope Francis reminds us of Pope John XXIII because both men share the same lack of self-consciousness, and neither needs to keep his guard up through the use of psychological defenses such as rationalization, projection or intellectualization.

Eugene Kennedy

The perception of the horizon is an earthbound event; all horizons disappear in space, and we are left shorn of the sweet roots that have held us to the earth, challenged to imagine what is truly present just before us, a unified and seemingly limitless universe.

Eugene Kennedy

The object of religion is the imagination, that deep and inexhaustible font of our understanding and symbolizing our deepest possibilities.

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