Richard Rohr Country Quotations

When you look at the dominance of Notre Dame, the love of Mary in almost every European country, psychologically, had to come from this recognition of the feminine mediating divine love. And for many people in history, it was clearly the preferred way because women raised most people, not men, so their first experience of unconditional love, of touch, of caring, of nurturing very often came from a woman - that got easily transferred to Mary.

Most Christian 'believers' tend to echo the cultural prejudices and worldviews of the dominant group in their country, with only a minority revealing any real transformation of attitudes or consciousness. It has been true of slavery and racism, classism and consumerism and issues of immigration and health care for the poor.

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.