“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. There may be legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not… with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The Church must introduce the individual Christian into an encounter with Jesus Christ and bring Christians into His presence in the sacrament.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“God does not change; he is Love, ever and always. In himself, he is communion, unity in Trinity, and all his words and works are directed to communion.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The life of the community, both domestically and internationally, clearly demonstrates that respect for rights, and the guarantees that follow from them, are measures of the common good that serve to evaluate the relationship between justice and injustice, development and poverty, security and conflict.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“True friends challenge us and help us to be faithful on our journey.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“An important function of theology is to keep religion tied to reason and reason to religion. Both roles are of essential importance for humanity.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom, understood as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual and communitarian – a vision that brings out the unity of the person while clearly distinguishing between the dimension of the citizen and that of the believer.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“We pray that the Lord may help us to produce His light in ourselves, even in dark days, so that we might be light for others, illuminating the world and life in this world.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“I no longer wield the power of the office for the government of the church, but in the service of prayer I remain, so to speak, within St. Peter’s bounds. St. Benedict, whose name I bear as pope, shall be a great example in this for me. He showed us the way to a life which, active or passive, belongs wholly to the work of God.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“God of peace, bring your peace to our violent world: peace in the hearts of all men and women and peace among the nations of the Earth.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Mercy is what moves us toward God, while justice makes us tremble in his sight.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“To me, it really seems visible today that ethics is not something exterior to the economy, which, as technical matter, could function on its own; rather, ethics is an interior principle of the economy itself, which cannot function if it does not take account of the human values of solidarity and reciprocal responsibility.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The Church is not self-made, it was created by God and is continuously formed by Him. This finds expression in the Sacraments, above all in that of Baptism: I enter into the Church not by a bureaucratic act, but with the help of this Sacrament.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“All the great works of art, the cathedrals – the Gothic cathedrals and the splendid Baroque churches – are a luminous sign of God, and thus are truly a manifestation, an epiphany of God.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Both need each other: The agnostic cannot be content to not know, but must be in search of the great truth of faith; the Catholic cannot be content to have faith, but must be in search of God all the time, and in the dialogue with others, a Catholic can learn more about God in a deeper fashion.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, look like the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“If we may not remain silent about evil in the Church, then neither should we keep silent about the great shining path of goodness and purity which the Christian faith has traced out over the course of the centuries.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“We have to pay attention to developing well, in the correct manner, the human aspects also in the professions, in respect of other persons, in being concerned for others, which is the best way of being concerned for ourselves.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The church is not a political power; it’s not a party, but it’s a moral power.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The truth touches us. We try to be guided by this contact.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“How much we need, in the church and in society, witnesses of the beauty of holiness, witnesses of the splendour of truth, witnesses of the joy and freedom born of a living relationship with Christ!”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“An Adult faith does not follow the waves of fashion and the latest novelties.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“I too hope in this short reign to be a man of peace.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“If the protection of the environment involves costs, they should be justly distributed, taking due account of the different levels of development of various countries and the need for solidarity with future generations.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“It is of great concern that the fabric of African life, its very source of hope and stability, is threatened by divorce, abortion, prostitution, human trafficking, and a contraception mentality.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Artificial intelligence, in fact, is obviously an intelligence transmitted by conscious subjects, an intelligence placed in equipment. It has a clear origin, in fact, in the intelligence of the human creators of such equipment.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“God is not distant: he is ‘Emmanuel,’ God-with-us. He is no stranger: he has a face, the face of Jesus.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Our Christian conviction is that Christ is also the messiah of Israel. Certainly it is in the hands of God how and when the unification of Jews and Christians into the people of God will take place.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and states; hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“One sees in Latin America, and also elsewhere, among many Catholics a certain schizophrenia between individual and public morality.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“God guides his church, maintains her always, and especially in difficult times. Let us never lose this vision of faith, which is the only true vision of the way of the church and the world.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“God in fact does not change: he is faithful to himself.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Choose the path of dialogue rather than the path of unilateral decisions.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“When the danger is great, one must not run away.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“You can’t talk about what you haven’t felt.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The real ‘action’ in the liturgy in which we are all supposed to participate is the action of God himself. This is what is new and distinctive about the Christian liturgy: God himself acts and does what is essential.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“A just laicism allows religious freedom. The state does not impose religion but rather gives space to religions with a responsibility toward civil society, and therefore it allows these religions to be factors in building up society.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Today we bury his remains in the earth as a seed of immortality. Our hearts are full of sadness, yet at the same time of joyful hope and profound gratitude.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me – a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“To me, its seems necessary to rediscover – and the energy to do so exists – that even the political and economic spheres need moral responsibility, a responsibility that is born in man’s heart and, in the end, has to do with the presence or absence of God.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The Cross is the approbation of our existence, not in words, but in an act so completely radical that it caused God to become flesh and pierced this flesh to the quick; that, to God, it was worth the death of his incarnate Son.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“In Latin America in general, it’s very important that Christianity not be simply a thing of reason, but also of the heart.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Our Earth is talking to us, and we must listen to it and decipher its message if we want to survive.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“We must respect the interior laws of creation, of this Earth, to learn these laws and obey them if we want to survive.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“This obedience to the voice of the Earth is more important for our future happiness… than the desires of the moment.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“In the harshness of the world of technology – in which feelings do not count anymore – the hope for a saving love grows, a love which would be given freely and generously.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“I wrote the text of the resignation. I cannot say with precision when, but at the most two weeks before. I wrote it in Latin because something so important you do in Latin. Furthermore, Latin is a language in which I know well how to write in a more appropriate way.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Certainly a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Where human lives are concerned, time is always short, yet the world has witnessed the vast resources that governments can draw upon to rescue financial institutions deemed ‘too big to fail.’”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The cardinals have elected me, a simple, humble worker in the Lord’s vineyard.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the term is not possible without putting one’s own faith into parentheses.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“It is important to learn to understand in a historical text, a text from the past, the living Word of God, that is, to enter into prayer and thus read Sacred Scripture as a conversation with God.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“It is very important for a priest, in the parish itself, to see how people trust in him and to experience, in addition to their trust, also their generosity in pardoning his weaknesses.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“On the one hand, faith is a profoundly personal contact with God, which touches me in my innermost being and places me in front of the living God in absolute immediacy in such a way that I can speak with Him, love Him, and enter into communion with Him.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“It’s a great responsibility before God, the judge who guides us, who draws us to truth and good, and in this sense the church must unmask evil, rendering present the goodness of God, rendering present his truth, the truly infinite for which we are thirsty.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The fact that the Lord can work and act even with insufficient means consoles me, and above all I entrust myself to your prayers.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The fact that the church is convinced of not having the right to confer priestly ordination on women is now considered by some as irreconcilable with the European Constitution.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“We can learn from him that suffering and the gift of himself is an essential gift we need in our time.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Above all, 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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The wrath of God is a way of saying that I have been living in a way that is contrary to the love that is God. Anyone who begins to live and grow away from God, who lives away from what is good, is turning his life toward wrath.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place and at a particular time.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The abuse of faith has to be resisted precisely.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“I leave from where the apostle arrived.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The new pope knows that his task is to make the light of Christ shine before men and women of world – not his own light, but that of Christ.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Today, I, too, wish to reaffirm that I intend to continue on the path toward improved relations and friendship with the Jewish people, following the decisive lead given by John Paul II.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Art is elemental. Reason alone as it’s expressed in the sciences can’t be man’s complete answer to reality, and it can’t express everything that man can, wants to, and has to express. I think God built this into man. Art along with science is the highest gift God has given him.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The Lord has placed next to me many people, who, with generosity and love for God and the church, have helped me and been close to me.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“For me, it’s a great joy to be together with priests: in the end, the bishop of Rome is the bishop and brother of all priests. His mandate is to confirm the brothers in the faith.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“If we look to the saints, this great luminous wake with which God has passed through history, we truly see that here is a force for good that survives through millennia; here is truly light from light.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The outpouring of Christ’s blood is the source of the church’s life.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The reality of the Eucharistic sacrifice has always been at the heart of Catholic faith; called into question in the 16th century, it was solemnly reaffirmed at the Council of Trent against the backdrop of our justification in Christ.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The Eucharistic sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ embraces in turn the mystery of our Lord’s continuing passion in the members of his mystical body, the church in every age.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Since politics fundamentally should be a moral enterprise, the church in this sense has something to say about politics.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Each generation, as it seeks to advance the common good, must ask anew: ‘What are the requirements that governments may reasonably impose upon citizens, and how far do they extend? By appeal to what authority can moral dilemmas be resolved?’”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“In the name of freedom, there has to be a correlation between rights and duties, by which every person is called to assume responsibility for his or her choices, made as a consequence of entering into relations with others.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“In our heart, in the heart of each of you, let there be always the joyous certainty that the Lord is near, that he does not abandon us, that he is near to us, and that he surrounds us with his love.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Loving the church also means having the courage to make difficult, trying choices, having ever before oneself the good of the church and not one’s own.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“A form of reason that in some way wished to strip itself of beauty would be diminished; it would be a blinded reason.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The counterweight to the dominion of evil can consist in the first place only in the divine-human love of Jesus Christ that is always greater than any possible power of evil.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Faith is not a product of reflection, nor is it even an attempt to penetrate the depths of my own being.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“We all see that, today, man can destroy the foundation of his existence: his Earth.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“In the 20th century, in the darkest period of German and European history, an insane racist ideology, born of neopaganism, gave rise to the attempt, planned and systematically carried out by the regime, to exterminate European Jews. The result has passed into history as the Shoah.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The principle of tolerance and respect for freedom promoted by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council are today being manipulated and erroneously taken too far.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a crime against God and against humanity.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Germany has an established and well-furnished Catholicism, often with employed Catholics who handle the church like a labor union. For them, the church is simply the employer.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“We need Grace and forgiveness.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“For me, it is one of the ‘signs of the times’ that the idea of God’s mercy is becoming increasingly central and dominant.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“We let ourselves be molded and transformed by Christ and continually pass from the side of one who destroys to that of the one who saves.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“A weak point of mine was maybe little resolve in governing and making decisions.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“In reality, I am more a professor, one who reflects and mediates on spiritual questions. Practical governance is not my strong point, and this is certainly a weakness. But I do not see myself as a failure. For eight years, I carried out my work.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Liturgy, in truth, is an event by means of which we let ourselves be introduced into the expansive faith and prayer of the Church. This is the reason why the early Christians prayed facing east, in the direction of the rising sun, the symbol of the returning Christ.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“I use both the ‘I’ and the ‘we.’ For on many, many matters, I am not simply expressing ideas that have happened to occur to Joseph Ratzinger, but I am speaking out of the common life of the Church’s communion.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Today we have to learn all over again that love for the sinner and love for the person who has been harmed are correctly balanced if I punish the sinner in the form that is possible and appropriate.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The prevailing mentality was that the Church must not be a Church of laws but, rather, a Church of love; she must not punish. Thus, the awareness that punishment can be an act of love ceased to exist. This led to an odd darkening of the mind, even in very good people.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“At any rate, we can see that they are given into our care, that we cannot just do whatever we want with them. Animals, too, are God’s creatures.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“I would designate as science fiction in the best sense: they are visions and anticipations by which we seek to attain a true knowledge, but, in fact, they are only imaginations whereby we seek to draw near to the reality.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution, or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities, and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“We have to see that the human person needs the infinite. If God’s not there, if the infinite isn’t available, the human person creates its own paradises, giving the appearance of ‘infinitude’ that can only be a lie.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“I don’t know if the term ‘liberation theology,’ which can be interpreted in a very positive sense, will help us much. What’s important is the common rationality to which the church offers a fundamental contribution, and which must always help in the education of conscience, both for public and for private life.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“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.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“It is absolutely important to make accessible the Gospel for all people and also understandable for Jewish people.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The traditional teaching of the church has proven to be the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The myth of my solitude makes me laugh.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“Down through the centuries, the Czech Republic, the territory of the Czech Republic has been a place of cultural exchange.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“The Church must actualize, be present in the public debate, in our struggle for a true concept of liberty and peace.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“My plans never progressed as far as a clear desire for a family.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
“It is important to be in the ‘we’ of the Church, in the ‘we’ of the life of the Liturgy.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
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