Every school that I have ever attended, except for kindergarten, I went to a Catholic institution.

Once a bishop is appointed, in terms of governance, we are semi-autonomous. It's not like we are branch managers of a bank or something.

Getting to know people as they are is very, very important.

We're all different; we all have our ways of understanding ourselves and the way we live our lives and struggle with our humanity.

I don't think sometimes people in positions of leadership in the church really engage gay and lesbian people and talk to them and get to know about their lives.

There is a synergy between the way Croatians approach life and the way Jesuits do. Croatians are very real about situations. We don't gloss over things. If there are issues to deal with, you deal with them.

The Catholic Church is an enormous footprint in Chicago, doing a lot of good. That aspiration is felt by a lot of people - that the church succeed - because it will be good for society.

My folks were very practical. They were also kind of able to think outside of the box. They were not going to let circumstance paralyze them. They knew sometimes you just had to take some new initiative. I think they passed that on to all of us... If you don't find a way, you make one.

The church can challenge society, but society also challenges the church. That's good. We should be humble enough to be able to accept that.

I would say the synodal church is like the word itself. It is 'a going on the way together,' and it is a way - whenever people walk, there are people who have been that way before who know that others have been that way before, and so they try to give direction.

I grew up in a family of nine children, and I know there has to be a back and forth and a listening.

We have to learn. We have to listen to where people are. We have to listen to where the Spirit is working in the lives of people.

In the 40 years that I've been a priest and the 17 as a bishop, I have experienced people coming at things in a different way. That's the way adults are, that's the way the world is, and that's OK.

We should be with people who are in need.

We want to inspire people to work together, giving them hope that we can do something even if we cannot do everything.

Some of the greatest Christians I know are people who don't actually have a kind of faith system that they believe in. But, in their activity, the way they conduct themselves, there's a goodness there.

I always tell myself... that the faith I have is a gift, so I shouldn't take that for granted. And so when people are struggling and feel they have no faith at all, I shouldn't say, 'Well, it's their fault.'

White supremacy is a sin. Neo-Nazism is a sin.

Ultimately, it is only the witness who convinces people, not the teacher.

Bishops need to resist the defensiveness that institutions often fall back on in crisis moments.

We have never owned, as a country, the damage done not only to people who were enslaved but to future generations in which they were treated. I think that has damaged the future of many African-American people. Some have risen above it quite nobly, but it has impacted generations, and we have to be able to own that as part of the past.

People think sometimes there is a 'Catholic vote' because of one particular issue. This demeans who we are as a Catholic community. We should take the whole thing... We take everything.

Let's face it: grandparents are very important to family systems. You're babysitters, but you also instill values in children that sometimes skip a generation.

Just as Cardinal Bernardin proposed that an of ethic of life be consistently applied to unite all the life issues, we need in our day to mine the church's social teaching on solidarity.