From you we have learned what we, at least, value, to separate Church and State; and from you we gather inspiration at all times in our devotion to learning, to religious liberty, and to individual and National freedom.
I still went to church regularly every Sunday; that is we all went there together. I reverenced the family pew where we had assembled for so many years; and apart from that reason I hold it dear because it is associated in my memory with my mother.
I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment... rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart, such as I have felt it since my childhood.
I've grown so much since 1996. I think that was the turning point of when I started to go to church every Sunday and not just because you're supposed to. But because you enjoy going and listening to the Word and being excited about it.
Christians who have influence in political life must feel as individuals responsibility in front of their own faith. And the duty of encouraging laws that are not in contradiction with the Commandments comes within the mission of the Church.
There's always the tendency to transform the Church into an ethical agency, and of measuring the Church by the yardstick of social and cultural utility.
The Synod of Bishops has existed for forty years. In that long span of time it has been for all of us a good school for introducing us to the universal dimension of the Church.
But when one identifies the Church with a cultural and political bloc, there is the danger of making difficult the Church's contact with all those outside the bloc.
Some hypocrites and seeming mortified men, that held down their heads, were like the little images that they place in the very bowing of the vaults of churches, that look as if they held up the church, but are but puppets.
I grew up a Catholic and I don't want to talk badly about the Catholic Church but there's a lot of routine stuff going on. You say the same prayers, you sit, you kneel, whatever.
There is a lot of absurdity sometimes, not just in Mormonism but often in other religions that want to pretend that no bad happens in their church, rather than taking care of what bad does happen.
It is an absolutely unique success of the church community to have introduced such an epoch-making change, in just a few years, without having a serious division.
