Top 100 Quotes About Pope Benedict Xvi
#1. Please receive in the name of the Spanish government and the people of Spain our warmest congratulations for your election as Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church and my best wishes for the Papacy which you begin today. [to Pope Benedict XVI]
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero
#2. He [Pope Benedict XVI] spoke of the distilled message of John Paul's reign: Be not afraid
Peggy Noonan
#3. Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system ... Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said.
Michael Lewis
#4. The one and only time I met Pope Benedict XVI was when he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.
David Novak
#5. Pope Benedict XVI assumes leadership at a critical time in which the world's collective wisdom and leadership including that of the religious community is most important to face up to challenges of deepening poverty and under-development afflicting many people of the world.
Thabo Mbeki
#6. So one aspect of becoming a Christian is having to leave behind what everyone else thinks and wants, the prevailing standards, in order to enter the light of the truth of our being, and aided by that light to find the right path. Mary
Pope Benedict XVI
#7. 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
#8. Prayer, as a means of drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently needed,
Pope Benedict XVI
#10. After the evil spirit of a narrow Scholastic orthodoxy has been driven out, in the end seven much more wicked spirits return in its place.
Pope Benedict XVI
#11. This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.
Pope Benedict XVI
#12. Freedom is not only a gift, but a summons to personal responsibility.
Pope Benedict XVI
#13. The proper request of love is that our entire life should be oriented to the imitation of the Beloved. Let us therefore spare no effort to leave a transparent trace of God's love in our life.
Pope Benedict XVI
#14. We must trust in the mighty power of God's mercy. We are all sinners, but His grace transforms us and makes us new.
Pope Benedict XVI
#15. Pray that, above all things, the gates of light may be opened to you; for these things cannot be perceived or understood by all, but only by the man to whom God and his Christ have imparted wisdom (Dial. 7, 3).
Pope Benedict XVI
#16. If you find your sustenance in Christ, my dear young people, and if you live profoundly in him as did the Apostle Paul, you will not be able to resist speaking about him and making him known and loved by many of your friends and contemporaries.
Pope Benedict XVI
#17. It is true: God disturbs our comfortable day-to-day existence. Jesus' kingship goes hand in hand with his Passion.
Pope Benedict XVI
#19. The ways of the Lord are not comfortable, but we were not created for comfort, but for greatness, for good.
Pope Benedict XVI
#20. The sign of the new Covenant is humility, hiddenness - the sign of the mustard-seed. The Son of God comes in lowliness. Both these elements belong together: the profound continuity in the history of God's action and the radical newness of the hidden mustard-seed.
Pope Benedict XVI
#21. 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
#23. Lent stimulates us to let the Word of God penetrate our life and in this way to know the fundamental truth: who we are, where we come from, where we must go, what path we must take in life ...
Pope Benedict XVI
#24. Sometimes we are looked upon as people who speak only of prohibitions. Nothing could be further from the truth! Authentic Christian discipleship is marked by a sense of wonder. We stand before the God we know and love as a friend, the vastness of his creation, and the beauty of our Christian faith.
Pope Benedict XVI
#25. The fundamental task of the evangelization of culture is the challenge to make God visible in the human face of Jesus.
Pope Benedict XVI
#26. Today the great gift of God's Creation is exposed to serious dangers and lifestyles which can degrade it. Environmental pollution is making particularly unsustainable the lives of the poor of the world ... we must pledge ourselves to take care of creation and to share its resources in solidarity.
Pope Benedict XVI
#27. The ecological crisis shows the urgency of a solidarity which embraces time and space ... A greater sense of intergenerational solidarity is urgently needed. Future generations cannot be saddled with the cost of our use of common environmental resources.
Pope Benedict XVI
#28. When politicians presume to do God's work, they do not become divine but diabolical.
Pope Benedict XVI
#30. It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love.
Pope Benedict XVI
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Everything in this world will pass away. In eternity only Love will remain.
Pope Benedict XVI
#34. Rock ... is the expression of elemental passions ... In the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe.
Pope Benedict XVI
#35. One doesn't begin to be a Christian because of an ethical decision or a great idea, but rather because of an encounter with an event, with a Person, who gives new horizons to life, and with that, a decisive orientation.
Pope Benedict XVI
#37. In this regard, I reiterate that the prohibition against torture cannot be contravened under any circumstances.
Pope Benedict XVI
#38. Christianity is the present: it is both gift and task, receiving the gift of God's inner closeness and - as a consequence - bearing witness to Jesus Christ.
Pope Benedict XVI
#39. Today, the need to avoid confusing marriage with other types of unions based on weak love is especially urgent. It is only the rock of total, irrevocable love between a man and a woman that can serve as the foundation on which to build a society that will become a home for all mankind.
Pope Benedict XVI
#40. Intelligence and love are not in separate compartments: love is rich in intelligence and intelligence is full of love.
Pope Benedict XVI
#41. Violence does not build up the kingdom of God, the kingdom of humanity. On the contrary, it is a favorite instrument of the Antichrist, however idealistic its religious motivation may be. It serves, not humanity, but inhumanity.
Pope Benedict XVI
#42. Over the pope as expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there stands one's own conscience which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority.
Pope Benedict XVI
#43. Terrorist activity is continually recurring in various parts of the world, sowing death and destruction and plunging many of our brothers and sisters into grief and despair
Pope Benedict XVI
#44. The Church is not an association that wishes to promote a certain cause. It is not about a cause. It is about the person of Jesus Christ.
Pope Benedict XVI
#45. 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
#46. God's heart calls to our hearts, inviting us to come out of ourselves, to forsake our human certainties, to trust in him and, by following his example, to make ourselves a gift of unbounded love.
Pope Benedict XVI
#47. You must know your faith with the same precision with which a specialist in information technology knows the operating system of a computer.
Pope Benedict XVI
#48. Help each other to live and to grow in the Christian faith so as to be valiant witnesses of the Lord. Be united, but not closed. Be humble, but not fearful. Be simple, but not naive. Be thoughtful, but not complicated. Enter into dialogue with others, but be yourselves.
Pope Benedict XVI
#50. What is capable of restoring enthusiasm and confidence, what can encourage the human spirit to rediscover its path, to raise its eyes to the horizon, to dream of a life worthy of its vocation - if not beauty?
Pope Benedict XVI
#51. If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful, and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed.
Pope Benedict XVI
#52. [I am not] one of those thoughtless people who always uncritically accept what is new as necessarily better.
Pope Benedict XVI
#53. To the extent that it remains true to itself, the historical method not only has to investigate the biblical word as a thing of the past, but also has to let it remain in the past.
Pope Benedict XVI
#54. Only if there is love, if hearts are opened, can one person truly know the other.
Pope Benedict XVI
#55. It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity. Through Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stands at the heart of the Christian religion.
Pope Benedict XVI
#56. Let us say plainly: the unredeemed state of the world consists precisely in the failure to understand the meaning of creation, in the failure to recognize truth; as a result, the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world.
Pope Benedict XVI
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. The Christian calendar is wrong, Jesus was born years earlier.
Pope Benedict XVI
#60. 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
#61. The primary contribution that the Church offers to the development of mankind and peoples does not consist merely in material means or technical solutions. Rather, it involves the proclamation of the truth of Christ.
Pope Benedict XVI
#62. But Palm Sunday tells us that ... it is the cross that is the true tree of life.
Pope Benedict XVI
#63. The need to proclaim Christ boldly and courageously is a continuing priority for the Church; indeed it is a solemn duty laid upon her by Christ who enjoined the Apostles to 'go out to the whole world, proclaim the Good News to all creation.'
Pope Benedict XVI
#64. 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
#65. How much filth there is in the church, even among those who, in the priesthood, should belong entirely to Him. How much pride, how much self-sufficiency.
Pope Benedict XVI
#66. Each of us has a mission ... each of us is called to change the world, to work for a culture of life, a culture forged by love and respect for the dignity of each human person.
Pope Benedict XVI
#67. 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
#68. These days we are all pained by the disaster caused by the hurricane in the United States of America.
Pope Benedict XVI
#69. Thanks to being profoundly rooted in Christ, he was able to bear a burden which transcends merely human abilities.
Pope Benedict XVI
#70. Can we remain indifferent before the problems associated with such realities as climate change?
Pope Benedict XVI
#71. God seeks us where we are, not so that we stay there, but so that we may come to be where He is, so that we may get beyond ourselves.
Pope Benedict XVI
#72. The goods of creation belong to humanity as a whole. Yet the current pace of environmental exploitation is seriously endangering the supply of certain natural resources not only for the present generation, but above all for generations to come.
Pope Benedict XVI
#73. If in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be 'devout' and to perform my 'religious duties', then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely 'proper', but loveless.
Pope Benedict XVI
#74. In the pierced heart of the Crucified, God's own heart is opened up - here we see who God is and what he is like. Heaven is no longer locked up. God has stepped out of his hiddenness
Pope Benedict XVI
#75. 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
#76. Holiness does not consist in never having erred or sinned. Holiness increases the capacity for conversion, for repentance, for willingness to start again and, especially, for reconciliation and forgiveness.
Pope Benedict XVI
#77. Christ had a specific evangelizing goal in mind when he prayed at the Last Supper that all his disciples 'be one ... 'The Church's evangelizing mission, therefore, moves along the path of ecumenism, the path of unity of faith, of evangelical witness and authentic fraternity.
Pope Benedict XVI
#80. In a world wounded by conflicts, where violence is justified in God's name, it's important to repeat that religion can never become a vehicle of hatred, it can never be used in God's name to justify violence.
Pope Benedict XVI
#81. Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received.
Pope Benedict XVI
#82. 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
#83. You have before you the task of seeking new ways to announce Christ in situations of rapid and often profound transformation, and of emphasizing the missionary character of all pastoral activity.
Pope Benedict XVI
#84. 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
#85. Being missionaries means loving God with all one's heart, even to the point, if necessary, of dying for him ... Being missionaries means stooping down to the needs of all, like the Good Samaritan, especially those of the poorest and most destitute people.
Pope Benedict XVI
#86. May all our contemporaries stand beside their brothers and sisters in humanity. Each one of you is called by Christ and must be a missionary of the Good News in word and in active charity.
Pope Benedict XVI
#87. The Catechism was not written to please you. It will not make life easy for you, because it demands of you a new life.
Pope Benedict XVI
#88. The life of this Kingdom is Christ's continuing life in those who are his own. In the heart that is no longer nourished by the vital power of Christ, the Kingdom ends; in the heart that is touched and transformed by it, the Kingdom begins ... .
Pope Benedict XVI
#89. 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
#91. We do not seek a Christ whom we have invented, for only in the real communion of the Church do we encounter the real Christ.
Pope Benedict XVI
#92. Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises.
Pope Benedict XVI
#93. Believing is nothing other than, in the darkness of the world, touching the hand of God, and in this way, in silence, hearing the Word, seeing love.
Pope Benedict XVI
#94. I send them my warmest encouragement to persevere in the patience and charity of Christ.
Pope Benedict XVI
#95. It is a symbol evoking a reality that touches the depths of the person ... the light of goodness that vanquishes evil, of love that overcomes hatred, of life that defeats death.
Pope Benedict XVI
#96. And if the object of one's desire is a relationship with God, his blessing and love, then the struggle cannot fail but ends in that self-giving to God, in recognition of one's own weakness, which is overcome only by giving oneself over into God's merciful hands.
Benedict, Pope XVI
#97. The Church's mission is to spread hope "contagiously" among all peoples ... It is only in this mission that the true journey of humanity is understood and attested.
Pope Benedict XVI
#98. 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
#99. The human being of all times prays because he cannot fail to wonder about the meaning of his life, which remains obscure and discomforting of it is not put in relations to the mystery of God and if his plan for the world.
Pope Benedict XVI
#100. God's love does not distinguish between the infant in the mother's womb or the child or the youth or the adult or the older person. In each one God sees His image and likeness. Human life is a manifestation of God and His glory.
Pope Benedict XVI
