Photo: REUTERS/Tony Gentile (VATICAN)

Worship Christ the Lord in your hearts: cultivate a personal relationship of love with him, your first and greatest love, one and totalizing, in which to live, purify, illumine and sanctify all your other relationships.

- Homily, 27 April 2008

The imposition of hands visually expresses the specific manner of this meeting: the Church, impersonated by the Bishop standing with extended hands, prays to the Holy Spirit to consecrate the candidate: the deacon, on his knees, receives the imposition of hands and entrusts himself to this mediation. Altogether these gestures are important but the invisible spiritual movement that they express is infinitely more important, a movement clearly evoked by the sacred silence that envelops everything, internal and external.

- Homily, 27 April 2008

It is a matter of only a few seconds, a very short time, but full of an extraordinary spiritual intensity.

- Homily, 27 April 2008

In order to be collaborators in the joy of others, in a world that is often sad and negative, the fire of the Gospel must burn within you and the joy of the Lord dwell in you. Only then will you be able to be messengers and multipliers of this joy, bringing it to all, especially to those who are sorrowful and disheartened.

- Homily, 27 April 2008

What can be greater, more exciting, than cooperating in spreading the Word of life in the world, than communicating the living water of the Holy Spirit? To proclaim and to witness joy: this is the central core of your mission, dear deacons who will soon become priests.

- Homily, 27 April 2008

In seeing the darkness that today threatens their lives, youth can find in the saints the light that dissipate it: the light of Christ, hope for all men.

- General Audience, 30 April 2008