We're watching a four part series of preaching by Fr. John Corapi. Look him up on wikipedia. We heard him speak at the Marian conference in Spokane in 1998. Strangely enough, our good friend Tammy was there, too, and now we are godparents to her two adopted kids. How cool is that?

Anyway, here are some quotes from him which were listed on the wikipedia website. I couldn't post just one!

• "The devil donned a judicial robe." (In relation to the US Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade which decriminalized abortion.)

• "In the end, you and I will be in Heaven or Hell, forever. Period!"

• "You need to know your faith. You cannot give what you do not have." (On the need for Catholics to study and learn Sacred Scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church)

• "I'm not going to hell for anybody!"

• "Let me tell you how NOT to have vocations: 1) disobey the Church. 2) Do not accept the teaching of the Magisterium of the Church. 3) Bad mouth the Pope and send them to lousy seminaries. You will have NO vocations! Kiss 'em goodbye! It is absolutely fatal to play fast and loose with faith and morals. Things are getting better but we've gone through a very dry period in the Church. I can give you example after example of religious congregations and dioceses that are doing just great with vocations. Why? Because they're faithful. Period. Because they're faithful. They don't play games with the Doctrine of the Faith. They don't try to promote in seminarians a kind of attitude of liberal dissent. That is the kiss of death and I can prove it time and time and time again that wherever that is done, there are no vocations. And there won't be. There won't be. Where things are done properly, there are vocations. It's not hard. It's not rocket science."

• "Tolerating homosexuality brought down Greece, it brought down Rome and mark my words, it will bring down the United States." (In relation to the US Supreme Court decision in Lawrence vs. Texas which decriminalized homosexual sex.)

• "Sometimes people will say 'Well I've outgrown my faith.' I've met eight zillion people who have said 'Yeah I used to be Catholic...' Well what are you now? And they may be Buddhist, or who knows what other nonsense? And they sometimes say 'Well I outgrew my Catholic faith, I became more sophisticated, I became more educated.' There's something I have found. Now I have some education. I have earned five university degrees, most of them with highest honors. I'm not bragging, I'm just saying that to let you know that I respect education. I have a high regard for education. But in my many years around the education establishment, I was given a great revelation by God, and the revelation is: a lot of people done been educated into imbecility."

• "I’m not doing my job if I’m not telling you the truth. When I say something risks your immortal soul spending eternity in hell, you can believe it. So believe this…the act of masturbation can cause you to spend eternity in hell. Just masturbation and just once…it’s a mortal sin, a sin against chastity".

• "The Holy Spirit is a divine artist; we're like a lump of clay. We've heard that analogy that we're clay. We carry this treasure within us in earthen vessels. We know an artist, a sculptor can work in clay. Clay is soft. Clay is malleable. Clay can be easily formed. The Holy Spirit is a divine artist. Are you clay? Or are you marble? Artists can work with marble too. Marble's very cold and hard though. How does an artist work with marble? He chips away at it. You've been wondering why God's been chipping away at you? It's painful to lose pieces of yourself isn't it? Gotta do it. There are things in us that have to go. You can't be egocentric, you've got to be Christocentric. You can't be self-centered and hope to be sanctified. You've got to be centered on Christ. It's a work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit forms Jesus within us. No cross? No crown. No pain? No gain. No way around it--if there was a shortcut, I'd know it and I'd tell ya."

• "People say to me, 'If Christ doesn't appeal to me, why can't I just try to sincerely follow some other faith?’ To that I say, ‘Give Christ a second try, the devil will always be there, waiting for you to reject the truth’. Now...I know that’s kind of politically incorrect these days. But that’s what the Bible says, you read it for yourself, you don’t have to take my word for it. I’m sorry, I didn’t write it but I can read well enough to know what it says. Of course, the Bible wasn’t written just for today, it was written for yesterday, today and tomorrow, until the end of time. Perhaps would should concentrate on making today conform to the Bible, rather than complain that it doesn’t fit with our happy vision of how things should be.”

• "More than once I’ve had discussions with persons who say, things, based on a misunderstanding. […] ‘Oh you Catholics worship images.’ No we don’t, ‘yes you do,’ no we don’t, ‘yes you do,’ no we don’t! The final retort to that is… I have a doctorate, in Catholic theology that I have earned the hard way; by sitting in university classrooms for twelve years. I know what we believe! You get a doctorate in Catholic theology? What do you know about it? Nothing! You don’t know anything about it. You're saying things that are born of misunderstanding or ignorance."

• "Ah, California, the land of fruits and nuts. Well, let me tell you, when I lived there I met plenty of both!"

• "There are people who say, ‘oh every time Catholics make the sign of the cross they re-crucify Christ.’ Look, that’s what comes under the theological classification of happy horse manure! Got it, that’s what that is. That’s bologna, absolute bologna! They don’t know anything about our religion, and I don’t purport to know anything about theirs. I respect theirs, respect ours. When we make the sign of the cross we are simply making a statement of faith. I believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and I believe in the sign of the cross, because that is the sign of our salvation!"