Pope Benedict XVI
"It is necessary that each person freely accept the truth of the love of God.
He is Love and Truth, and love as well as truth never imposes themselves.
They knock on the door of the heart and mind, and where they enter, bring peace and joy.
This is the way God reigns; this is his plan for salvation..."
Pope Benedict XVI
"Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is.
We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.
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
Warm and wise words of "Father Benedict"
We wish a happy birthday to Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, or as he prefers to be called, “Father Benedict,” who today celebrates his 89th year.
Given his prolific writings, we realize we could very likely find 89 great quotes of his to share with our readers — or 90, if we add a year “for luck,” as we tend to do.
But finding 90 quotes, and expecting people to read them all, seemed crazy. So we have gathered for you here 10 brief-but-great quotes from Father Benedict, one for each decade including the year before him, and another ten years “for luck.”
1) “Evil draws its power from indecision and concern for what other people think.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, 1st Station, Meditations for Stations of the Cross, Good Friday, 2005
2) “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, Audience 31 January 2007
3) “Freedom of conscience is the core of all freedom”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Church, Ecumenism and Politics
4) “One who has hope lives differently.”
― Pope Benedict XVI Spe salvi, 2
5) “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, Deus Caritas Est, 18
6) “God’s love for his people is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 10
7) “The ways of the Lord are not easy, but we were not created for an easy life but for great things, for goodness.” To German Pilgrims, April 25, 2005
8) “It is true: God disturbs our comfortable day-to-day existence. Jesus’ kingship goes hand in hand with his passion.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives
9) “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, The Church Fathers: From Clement of Rome to Augustine
10) “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, Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem to the Resurrection
Happy Birthday, Papa! If we may quote you back to yourself, “It is good that you exist!”**
**“If an individual is to accept himself, someone must say to him: ‘It is good that you exist’ — must say it, not with words, but with that act of the entire being that we call love.” Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology
https://aleteia.org/2016/06/13/when-cardinal-joseph-ratzinger-predicted-the-future-of-the-church/amp/When Father Joseph Ratzinger Predicted the Future of the churchHe
He didn’t pretend he could tell the future. No. He was much too wise for that. As a matter of fact, he tempered his initial remarks with this disclaimer:
“Let us, therefore, be cautious in our prognostications. What St. Augustine said is still true: man is an abyss; what will rise out of these depths, no one can see in advance. And whoever believes that the Church is not only determined by the abyss that is man, but reaches down into the greater, infinite abyss that is God, will be the first to hesitate with his predictions, for this naïve desire to know for sure could only be the announcement of his own historical ineptitude.”
But his era, brimming with existential danger, political cynicism and moral waywardness, hungered for an answer. The Catholic Church, a moral beacon in the turbulent waters of its time, had recently experienced certain changes of its own with adherents and dissenters alike wondering, “What will become of the Church in the future?”
10 Pithy and Potent Quotes from Pope Benedict
And so, in a 1969 German radio broadcast, Father Joseph Ratzinger would offer his thoughtfully considered answer. Here are his concluding remarks,
“The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods; nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves. To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality. Unselfishness, which makes men free, is attained only through the patience of small daily acts of self-denial. By this daily passion, which alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved by his own ego, by this daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened. He sees only to the extent that he has lived and suffered. If today we are scarcely able any longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of some pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us. If it is true that a man can see only with his heart, then how blind we are!
“How does all this affect the problem we are examining? It means that the big talk of those who prophesy a Church without God and without faith is all empty chatter. We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist, who does not stand on the [sidelines], watching the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of man, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future.
“Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly it will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Along-side this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize the sacraments as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.
“The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century. But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
“And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.
The Catholic Church will survive in spite of men and women, not necessarily because of them. And yet, we still have our part to do. We must pray for and cultivate unselfishness, self-denial, faithfulness, Sacramental devotion and a life centered on Christ.
In 2009 Ignatius Press released Father Joseph Ratzinger’s speech “What Will the Church Look Like in 2000” in full, in a book entitled Faith and the Future.
Read more: You haven’t read Benedict because WHY? Oh, give him a chance!
What is your favorite quote, or book, from Pope Benedict XVI?