The Christian Catholic Church of Switzerland is the Swiss member church of the Union of Utrecht, also known as Old Catholic Church, originally founded by the jansenists, with a later influx of discontented Catholics following their disappointment with the First Vatican Council. It has 14,000 members and 40 parishes. The church is a national Swiss church and recognised (as are the Evangelical Reformed and the Roman Catholic churches) in 11 cantons by the government. Since 1874, the University of Berne has had its own Christian Catholic theological faculty, which is now one part (as the Christian Catholic section) of the Faculty of Theology. The strongest concentration of Christian Catholics lies in the cantons of Solothurn, Aargau, Zurich and Geneva.
Famous quotes containing the words christian, catholic, church and/or switzerland:
“O, I have passed a miserable night,
So full of fearful dreams, of ugly sights,
That, as I am a Christian faithful man,
I would not spend another such a night
Though ‘twere to buy a world of happy days,
So full of dismal terror was the time.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“That is the great end of empires before God, to be Catholic and draw nations into their Catholicism. But our empire is less and less Christian as it grows.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“This is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through the channel of no-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No.”
—Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–1890)
“In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)