16 Quotes by Francis George

Christ didn’t leave us a book of instructions; He left us a body, a family – a Church. If it were perfectly clear, there wouldn’t be any freedom.

The Church is our Mother, which means it is an internal voice. It is not a set of external rules. That’s what isn’t understood about Catholicism in this Protestant culture. It means that your conscience is formed by the Church, but in the end you’re responsible for your own activities.

Equality, therefore, becomes the criterion because we can handle all that in process, but we can’t handle that as principle without infringing on freedom.

There is the enormous corpus of Islamic law that is very rich. However, law is one rational exercise of reason. Philosophy is very different. Philosophy wants to try to understand everything. It is a better dialogue partner with faith than law.

If you, however, separate reason and faith so that it’s purely a rationalistic scheme, it will end in violence. If a pure faith scheme – sometimes called the fundamentalist scheme in modern parlance – you’ll end in violence too.

The primary moral judgment on candidates and their positions is to be made in the light of their concern for protecting human life from conception to natural death.

The question about who God is is a very public question. We don’t have the tools in this kind of political atmosphere to handle that, and maybe politics isn’t the best place to answer that. It is a public issue.