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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The church is not a political power; it’s not a party, but it’s a moral power.
Pope Benedict XVI
The church is not a political power; it’s not a party, but it’s a moral power.
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
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
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
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
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
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
The cardinals have elected me, a simple, humble worker in the Lord’s vineyard.
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
True friends challenge us and help us to be faithful on our journey.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
Choose the path of dialogue rather than the path of unilateral decisions.
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
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
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
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
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
An Adult faith does not follow the waves of fashion and the latest novelties.
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
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
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
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
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
Mercy is what moves us toward God, while justice makes us tremble in his sight.
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
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
One sees in Latin America, and also elsewhere, among many Catholics a certain schizophrenia between individual and public morality.
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
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
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
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
The outpouring of Christ’s blood is the source of the church’s life.
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
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
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