Praying for others is a great act of charity.

- Homily, 23 September 2007

Today, as yesterday, Christian life demands the courage to go against the tide, to love like Jesus, who even went so far as to sacrifice himself on the Cross.

- Homily, 23 September 2007

Love is the essence of Christianity, which makes the believer and the Christian community a leaven of hope and peace in every environment and especially attentive to the needs of the poor and needy. This is our common mission: to be a leaven of hope and peace because we believe in love. Love makes the Church live, and since it is eternal it makes her live for ever, to the end of time.

- Homily, 23 September 2007

Christ has not enriched us with his richness but with his poverty, with his love that brought him to give himself totally to us.

- Angelus Address, 23 September 2007

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God has made himself small for us. God comes not with external force, but he comes in the powerlessness of his love, which is where his true strength lies. He places himself in our hands. He asks for our love. He invites us to become small ourselves, to come down from our high thrones and to learn to be childlike before God. He speaks to us informally. He asks us to trust him and thus to learn how to live in truth and love. The child Jesus naturally reminds us also of all the children in the world, in whom he wishes to come to us.

-Homily, 8 September 2007

Making a pilgrimage means setting out in a particular direction, travelling towards a destination. This gives a beauty of its own even to the journey and to the effort involved.

-Homily, 8 September 2007

The genealogy with its light and dark figures, its successes and failures, shows us that God can write straight even on the crooked lines of our history. God allows us our freedom, and yet in our failures he can always find new paths for his love. God does not fail. Hence this genealogy is a guarantee of God’s faithfulness; a guarantee that God does not allow us to fall, and an invitation to direct our lives ever anew towards him, to walk ever anew towards Jesus Christ.

-Homily, 8 September 2007

Volunteering is not only "doing": It is first of all a way of being, which begins in the heart, from a grateful way of viewing of life, and it encourages us to "give back" and share the gifts we have received with our neighbor.

- Wednesday Audience, 12 September 2007

To look at Jesus with the eyes of Mary means to meet God who is Love, who was made man and died on a cross for us.

- Wednesday Audience, 12 September 2007