Top 100 Pope Benedict XVI Quotes
#1. We cannot keep to ourselves the words of eternal life given to us in our encounter with Jesus Christ: they are meant for everyone, for every man and woman ... It is our responsibility to pass on what, by God's grace, we ourselves have received.
Pope Benedict XVI
#2. Freedom is not only a gift, but a summons to personal responsibility.
Pope Benedict XVI
#3. The ways of the Lord are not comfortable, but we were not created for comfort, but for greatness, for good.
Pope Benedict XVI
#4. The sharing of goods and resources, from which authentic development proceeds, is not guaranteed by merely technical progress and relationships of utility, but by the potential of love that overcomes evil with good.
Pope Benedict XVI
#5. When politicians presume to do God's work, they do not become divine but diabolical.
Pope Benedict XVI
#7. In the world in which we live, it is almost a necessity to be able to regain one's strength of body and spirit, especially for those who live in the city, where the conditions of life, often feverish, leave little room for silence, reflection and relaxed contact with nature.
Pope Benedict XVI
#8. The happiness you have a right to enjoy has a name and a face: it is Jesus of Nazareth, hidden in the Eucharist.
Pope Benedict XVI
#9. By itself, the question of the liturgy's essence and the standards of the reform has brought us back to the question of music and its position in the liturgy. And as a matter of fact one cannot speak about worship at all without also speaking of the music of worship.
Pope Benedict XVI
#10. Only if there is love, if hearts are opened, can one person truly know the other.
Pope Benedict XVI
#11. Adoration outside Holy Mass prolongs and intensifies what has taken place in the liturgical celebration and makes a true and profound reception of Christ possible. I ... warmly recommend, to Pastors and to all the faithful, the practice of Eucharistic adoration
Pope Benedict XVI
#12. A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology.
Pope Benedict XVI
#13. It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives ...
Pope Benedict XVI
#14. We ask the Blessed Virgin for the gift of conversion for all Christians, so that they may announce and give a faithful and coherent witness to the perennial evangelical message, which indicates to humanity the path to an authentic peace.
Pope Benedict XVI
#15. We will never forget that blessing. It was the most pained and moving blessing, which left us with the extreme testimony of his will to complete his ministry until the end.
Pope Benedict XVI
#16. If the world and man do not come from a creative intelligence, which stores within itself their measures and plots the path of human existence, then all that is left are traffic rules for human behavior, which can be discarded or maintained according to their usefulness.
Pope Benedict XVI
#17. Make sure that every person, of whatever background, can find in you a welcoming heart.
Pope Benedict XVI
#18. The way we order our time is dependent on the way we order our Sunday.
Pope Benedict XVI
#20. It is true that the Muslim world is not totally mistaken when it reproaches the West of Christian tradition of moral decadence and the manipulation of human life ... Islam has also had moments of great splendor and decadence in the course of its history.
Pope Benedict XVI
#21. Is what we profess in the Creed true, then? - "I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God ... [who] by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary"? The answer is an unequivocal yes.
Pope Benedict XVI
#23. 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
#24. Advent, this powerful liturgical season that we are beginning, invites us to pause in silence to understand a presence. It is an invitation to understand that the individual events of the day are hints that God is giving us, signs of the attention he has for each one of us.
Pope Benedict XVI
#25. Poverty is a plague against which humanity must fight without cease.
Pope Benedict XVI
#26. There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility,
Pope Benedict XVI
#27. God is always faithful to His promises, but He often surprises us in the way He fulfills them.
Pope Benedict XVI
#28. We celebrate [Easter] because now, thanks to the risen Lord, it is definitively established that reason is stronger than unreason, truth stronger than lies, love stronger than death.
Pope Benedict XVI
#30. Music has no borders, no race or color, no limits of country, no ethnicity. Music makes the people come together. Dance it,Dance all.
Pope Benedict XVI
#31. We are no longer able to hear God - There are too many frequencies filling our ears.
Pope Benedict XVI
#32. The destruction of the environment, its improper or selfish use, and the violent hoarding of the Earth's resources cause grievances, conflicts and wars, precisely because they are the consequences of an inhumane concept of development.
Pope Benedict XVI
#33. To make the sign of the cross is to pronounce a visible and public yes to him who died for us and who is risen, to the God who in the humility and weakness of his love is omnipotent, stronger than all the power and intelligence of the world.
Pope Benedict XVI
#34. Thus, the apostles' adventure began as a gathering of persons who open to one another reciprocally. A direct knowledge of the Teacher began for the disciples.
Pope Benedict XVI
#35. In the Eucharist, the Son of God comes to meet us and desires to become one with us; eucharistic adoration is simply the natural consequence of the eucharistic celebration, which is itself the Church's supreme act of adoration.
Pope Benedict XVI
#36. I am consoled by the fact that the Lord knows how to work and how to act, even with insufficient tools.
Pope Benedict XVI
#37. Grant that we may be one flock and one shepherd. Do not allow your net to be torn, help us to be servants of unity.
Pope Benedict XVI
#38. Jesus takes upon himself the whole of humanity, the whole history of man, and he gives it a decisive re-orientation toward a new manner of human existence.
Pope Benedict XVI
#40. 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
#42. Dear young people, the Church depends on you! She needs your lively faith, your creative charity and the energy of your hope. Your presence renews, rejuvenates and gives new energy to the Church.
Pope Benedict XVI
#43. 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
#48. God is our Father and loves us, even when his silence remains incomprehensible.
Pope Benedict XVI
#49. The Creed, which is a sort of Gospel synthesis, helps us understand what it means and how we should read the Gospel itself.
Pope Benedict XVI
#50. The two chapters of Matthew's Gospel devoted to the infancy narratives are not a meditation presented under the guise of stories, but the converse: Matthew is recounting real history, theologically thought through and interpreted, and thus he helps us to understand the mystery of Jesus more deeply.
Pope Benedict XVI
#51. Jesus prays the Psalms of Israel with his disciples: this element is fundamental for understanding the figure of Jesus, but also for understanding the Psalms themselves, which in him could be said to acquire a new subject, a new mode of presence, and an extension beyond Israel into universality.
Pope Benedict XVI
#52. Believers are increasingly aware that, unless the Good News is made known also in the digital world, it may be absent in the experience of many people for whom this existential space is important.
Pope Benedict XVI
#53. I urge you to continue your fraternal cooperation with one another in the spirit of the community of Christ's disciples, united in your love for him and in the Gospel that you proclaim.
Pope Benedict XVI
#54. Music, great music, distends the spirit, arouses profound emotions and almost naturally invites us to raise our minds and hearts to God in all situations of human existence, the joyful and the sad. Music can become prayer.
Pope Benedict XVI
#55. The one and only Gospel waits to be proclaimed by everyone together, in love and reciprocal esteem.
Pope Benedict XVI
#56. sin is always an offense that touches others, that alters the world and damages it.
Pope Benedict XVI
#57. Liberation is our continual and fresh acceptance of truth as the path of life set before us.
Pope Benedict XVI
#58. We cannot live, we cannot look at the truth about ourselves without letting ourselves be looked at and generated by Christ in daily Eucharistic Adoration.
Pope Benedict XVI
#59. Morality is not man's prison but rather the divine element in him.
Pope Benedict XVI
#60. 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
#61. Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave.
Pope Benedict XVI
#62. The Church needs your faith, your idealism, and your generosity, so that she can always be young in Spirit.
Pope Benedict XVI
#63. Nourishment is a factor which touches on the fundamental right to life.
Pope Benedict XVI
#64. In both her sacramental life and in her proclamation of the Word, the Church constitutes a distinctive subject whose memory preserves the seemingly past word and action of Jesus as a present reality.
Pope Benedict XVI
#65. Indeed, truth draws strength from itself and not from the number of votes in its favour.
Pope Benedict XVI
#66. The world needs transparent lives, clear souls, pure minds that refuse to be perceived as mere objects of pleasure.
Pope Benedict XVI
#67. Every human being is loved by God the Father. No one need feel forgotten, for every name is written in the Lord's loving heart.
Pope Benedict XVI
#68. Deeply saddened by the news of the terrorist attacks in central London, the Holy Father offers his fervent prayers for the victims and for all those who mourn.
Pope Benedict XVI
#69. Monsters, among other brutes, are the ones without guilt feelings. Perhaps Hitler did not have any, or Himmler, or Stalin. Maybe Mafia bosses do not have any guilt feelings either, or maybe their remains are just well hidden in the cellar. Even aborted guilt feelings ... All men need guilt feelings.
Pope Benedict XVI
#71. In Jesus Christ, God took on a human face and became our friend and brother.
Pope Benedict XVI
#72. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed. Each of us is loved. Each of us is necessary.
Pope Benedict XVI
#74. God loves us despite our shortcomings and sins, and his love gives meaning to our lives and to the life of the world.
Pope Benedict XVI
#75. 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
#76. Faith is above all a personal, intimate encounter with Jesus, and to experience [His] closeness, [His] friendship, [His] Love; only in this way does one learn to know [Him] ever more, and to love and follow [Him] ever more. May this happen to each one of us.
Pope Benedict XVI
#77. It is a precisely datable historical event having the full weight that real historical happenings have; like them, too, it happens once only; it is contemporary with all times, but not in the way that a timeless myth would be.
Pope Benedict XVI
#78. 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
#79. In the Eucharist a communion takes place that corresponds to the union of man and woman in marriage. Just as they become "one flesh", so in Communion we all become "one spirit", one person, with Christ.
Pope Benedict XVI
#80. Since politics fundamentally should be a moral enterprise, the church in this sense has something to say about politics.
Pope Benedict XVI
#81. In an ever more open world,
building peace through dialogue
is no longer a choice but a necessity!
Pope Benedict XVI
#82. 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
#83. We are sinners. But we should not take the failure to live up to this high moral standard as an authoritative objection to the truth. We should try to do as much good as we can and to support and put up with each other.
Pope Benedict XVI
#84. In the eyes of the unrighteous it appeared that God did not intervene and that His Son died, but for believers it was at that precise moment that true glory was manifested and definitive salvation achieved.
Pope Benedict XVI
#85. A world filled with temptations needs priests who are totally dedicated to their mission. Accordingly, they are asked in a very special way to open themselves fully to serving others as Christ did by embracing the gift of celibacy.
Pope Benedict XVI
#86. God no longer simply stands before us as the One who is totally Other. He is within us, and we are in him. His dynamic enters into us and then seeks to spread outward to others until it fills the world, so that his love can truly become the dominant measure of the world.
Pope Benedict XVI
#87. If you follow the will of God, you know that in spite of all the terrible things that happen to you, you will never lose a final refuge. You know that the foundation of the world is love, so that even when no human being can or will help you, you may go on, trusting in the One that loves you.
Pope Benedict XVI
#88. Thank you from the heart to all those who in various ways are near me or follow me spiritually with affection and prayers from afar. To each one of you, I ask you to continue to support me by praying to God to let me be his gentle and firm pastor of his church.
Pope Benedict XVI
#89. Dialogue is the fundamental unfolding of a gift of oneself to another.
Pope Benedict XVI
#90. All the Saints of God are there to protect me, to sustain me and to carry me. And your prayers, my dear friends, your indulgence, your love, your faith and your hope accompany me.
Pope Benedict XVI
#91. 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
#92. The Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known - it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.
Pope Benedict XVI
#93. Both strength of mind and body are necessary, strengths which in the last few months have deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me,
Pope Benedict XVI
#94. When God is regarded as a secondary matter that can be set aside temporarily or permanently on account of more important things, it is precisely these supposedly more important things that come to nothing.
Pope Benedict XVI
#95. Indeed, beauty is one of mankind's greatest needs; it is the root from which the branches of our peace and the fruits of our hope come forth. Beauty also reveals God because, like him, a work of beauty is pure gratuity; it calls us to freedom and draws us away from selfishness.
Pope Benedict XVI
#96. I encourage all of you to discover ever more fully in the Eucharist, the sacrament of Christ's sacrificial love, the inspiration and strength needed to work ever more generously for the spread of God's Kingdom and the growth of the civilization of love
Pope Benedict XVI
#97. Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene is a classic example of science fiction.
Pope Benedict XVI
#98. God loves us; we need only to summon up the humility to allow ourselves to be loved.
Pope Benedict XVI
#99. In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live "by bread alone" (Mt 4:4; cf. Dt 8:3) - a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human.
Pope Benedict XVI
#100. With the Synod Assembly, therefore, I heartily recommend to the Church's pastors and to the People of God the practice of Eucharistic Adoration, both individually and in community
Pope Benedict XVI
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
