Quotable & Notable

“President Bush … delivered a speech that Bill Clinton would have been proud to give.”

-- Peter Canellos writing about the state of the union address in The Boston Globe. He said “Bush’s vehicle for domestic unity is the same one identified by Clinton in the early ’90s,” namely, education and training.

“I had an epiphany that God was in pain as much as God was in joy. And that you could find love in your doubt as much as you could find love in faith.”

-- Rosanne Cash, daughter of the late Johnny Cash, speaking of her song “God Is in the Roses”

“He’s not saying ‘Make my day!’ to anyone.”

-- Alberto Melloni, a church historian at the University of Modena, Italy, who said Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical on love may have disappointed some cardinal electors who thought they were getting a gun-slinging Clint Eastwood when they elected a doctrinal prefect as pope. He says Benedict is pushing the church into a period of introspection.

“Can you imagine the first Christian communities having to pay in Roman coin for the complete letters of the apostles?”

-- Adista, an Italian Catholic news agency, questioning the Vatican’s decision to charge license fees for publication of the pope’s words. To protest the policy, instead of publishing Benedict’s encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Adista printed a blank page in its dispatch.

“Jimmy Carter doesn’t phone in to Habitat for Humanity.”

-- Family Research Council President Tony Perkins saying he wished President Bush would have made a live appearance at the annual March for Life rally rather than phone in a message.

National Catholic Reporter, February 10, 2006