Pope Benedict XVI Quotes
-
Our Earth is talking to us, and we must listen to it and decipher its message if we want to survive.
-
If it is true that the great missionaries of the 16th century were convinced that one who was not baptized was lost - and that explains their missionary commitment - in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council, that conviction was definitely abandoned.
-
I would not like to use big words to apply generic labels. It certainly contains elements that can favor peace, it also has other elements: we must always seek the best elements.
-
I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense, the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.
-
We must have great respect for these people who also suffer and who want to find their own way of correct living. On the other hand, to create a legal form of a kind of homosexual marriage, in reality, does not help these people.
-
Those who love desire to share with the beloved. They want to be one with the beloved, and Sacred Scripture shows us the great love story of God for his people which culminated in Jesus Christ.
-
Relations between States and within States are correct to the extent that they respect the truth. When, instead, truth is violated, peace is threatened, law is endangered, then, as a logical consequence, forms of injustice are unleashed.
-
I would say it simply: No one can give that which he doesn't personally possess, which means we cannot transmit the Holy Spirit in an effective way, render the Spirit perceptible, if we ourselves aren't close to the Spirit.
-
If a Pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically, and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign.
-
The Gospel purifies and renews: it bears fruit wherever the community of believers hears and welcomes the grace of God in truth and lives in charity. This is my faith; this is my joy.
-
I realized that everything I had to do I could not do on my own, and so I was almost obliged to put myself in God's hands, to trust in Jesus who - while I wrote my book on him - I felt bound to by an old and more profound friendship.
-
It is evident that the Church is always abandoning more the old traditional structures of European life and, therefore, is changing its appearance and living new forms in itself. It's clear most of all that the de-Christianization of Europe is progressing, that the Christian element is always vanishing more from the fabric of society.
-
Dear young people, we have seen that it is the Holy Spirit who brings about the wonderful communion of believers in Jesus Christ. True to his nature as giver and gift alike, he is even now working through you. Let unifying love be your measure; abiding love your challenge; self-giving love your mission!
-
Liberty isn't liberalism, arbitrariness, but it's connected; it's conditioned by the great values of love and solidarity and in general by the good.
-
We can learn from him that suffering and the gift of himself is an essential gift we need in our time.
-
The myth of my solitude makes me laugh.
-
You can't talk about what you haven't felt.
-
I think we must reflect more on what democracy in the exercise of authority would mean. Is truth determined by a majority vote, only for a new 'truth' to be 'discovered' by a new majority tomorrow?
-
We can see that the sacramental presence of the Lord in the Eucharist is an essential gift for us and give us also the possibility to love the others and to work for the others.
-
By reminding us of human finitude and weakness, religion also enjoins us not to place our ultimate hope in this passing world.
-
I would like everyone to feel loved by the God who gave his son for us and showed us his boundless love. I want everyone to feel the joy of being Christian.
-
One sees in Latin America, and also elsewhere, among many Catholics a certain schizophrenia between individual and public morality.
-
It is essential that God created men and women to be one, as it is said in the first chapters of the Bible. So I think even if our culture is against marriage as essential form of relations between human beings, between women and men. I think our nature is always present, and we can understand it if we will understand it.
-
A form of reason that in some way wished to strip itself of beauty would be diminished; it would be a blinded reason.