17 July 2013

God knows us in our inmost depths, better than we ourselves, and loves us; and knowing this must suffice.

- General Audience Address, 7 March 2012
Yet God’s silence, as happened to Jesus, does not indicate his absence. Christians know well that the Lord is present and listens, even in the darkness of pain, rejection and loneliness. 

- General Audience Address, 7 March 2012
Silence can carve out an inner space in our very depths to enable God to dwell there, so that his word will remain within us and love for him take root in our minds and hearts and inspire our life.

- General Audience Address, 7 March 2012
Only in silence can the word of God find a home in us, as it did in Mary, woman of the word and, inseparably, woman of silence” (n. 66).

- General Audience Address, 7 March 2012
Inward and outward silence are necessary if we are to be able to hear this word.

- General Audience Address, 7 March 2012
The Cross of Christ does not only demonstrate Jesus’ silence as his last word to the Father but reveals that God also speaks through silence...

- General Audience Address, 7 March 2012
Jesus’ experience on the cross profoundly reveals the situation of the person praying and the culmination of his prayer: having heard and recognized the word of God, we must also come to terms with the silence of God, an important expression of the same divine Word.

- General Audience Address, 7 March 2012
True faith in God, then, is inseparable from personal holiness, just as it is from the search for justice.

- Homily, 25 January 2013
Unity, in fact, is given by God as inseparable from faith...

- Homily, 25 January 2013
Faith needs to be strengthened through teaching, so that it can enlighten the minds and hearts of believers.

- Fides per Doctrinam, 16 January 2013
It is only in opening oneself to God’s truth, in fact, that it is possible to understand and achieve in the concrete reality of both conjugal and family life the truth of men and women as his children, regenerated by Baptism.

- Address, 26 January 2013
It is our smallness, our frail human nature that becomes an appeal to the Lord’s mercy, that he may show his greatness and tenderness as a Father, helping, forgiving us and saving us.

- General Audience Address, 30 January 2013
And humility is precisely the door to every virtue.

- Address, 13 May 2012
The continuous meditation on the Cross, in this holy place, has been a means of sanctification for many Christians, who, throughout eight centuries, have knelt and prayed here in silence and in recollection.

- Address, 13 May 2012
It may be said that the impulse of scientific research itself stems from the longing for God that dwells in the human heart: basically, scientists, even unconsciously, strive to attain that truth which can give meaning to life.

- Address, 3 May 2012
Science and faith have a fruitful reciprocity, an almost complementary need for understanding the real.

- Address, 3 May 2012
...it is not merely a question of conferring an office as happens in a public organization, but is an ecclesial event in which the Holy Spirit appropriates seven men chosen by the Church, consecrating them in the Truth that is Jesus Christ: he is the silent protagonist, present during the imposition of hands so that the chosen ones may be transformed by his power and sanctified in order to face the practical challenges, the pastoral challenges.

- General Audience Address, 25 April 2012
Dear friends, today too the Risen One enters our homes and our hearts, even when, at times, the doors are closed. He enters giving joy and peace, life and hope, gifts we need for our human and spiritual rebirth. Only he can roll away those stones from the tombs in which all too often people seal themselves off from their own feelings, their own relationships, their own behaviour; stones that sanction death: division, enmity, resentment, envy, diffidence, indifference. Only he, the Living One, can give meaning to existence and enable those who are weary and sad, downhearted and drained of hope, to continue on their journey.

- General Audience Address, 11 April 2012
...Jesus shows the disciples the wounds in his hands and in his side (cf. Jn 20:20), signs of what has occurred and will never be cancelled: his glorious humanity remains “wounded”. The purpose of this act is to confirm the new reality of the Resurrection: Christ, now among his own, is a real person, the same Jesus who three days earlier was nailed to the cross. And it is in this way that in the dazzling light of Easter, in the encounter with the Risen One, the disciples perceive the salvific meaning of his passion and his death. Then sorrow and fear turn into full joy. The sorrow and the wounds themselves become a source of joy.

- General Audience Address, 11 April 2012
Christian worship is not only a commemoration of past events nor even a specific, inner mystical experience; rather, it is essentially an encounter with the Risen Lord who lives in the dimension of God beyond time and space, and yet becomes really present amidst the community, speaks to us in the Sacred Scriptures and breaks the bread of eternal life for us.

It is through these signs that we relive what the disciples experienced, that is, the event of seeing Jesus and at the same time of not recognizing him; of touching his body, a real body and yet free from earthly bonds.

- Regina Caeli Address, 15 April 2012

15 July 2013

God always asks for our free adherence to faith, that it is expressed in love for him and for our neighbour. No one is so poor that he cannot give something.

Angelus Address, 11 November 2012
Indeed, if faith is always born from listening to the word of God — a form of listening, naturally, not only of the senses but that also passes from the senses to the mind and heart — there is no doubt that music, and especially song, can give the recitation of the Psalms and Canticles of the Bible greater communicative force.

- Address, 10 November 2012
...work is not only an instrument for individual profit but a moment in which we express our abilities by spending ourselves, in a spirit of service, in professional activity, whether this be in manual labour, farming, science or some other area.

- Address, 19 May 2012
Violence is never useful to humanity but dehumanizes it.

- Angelus Address, 11 March 2012
The eyes of the heart must be turned to the Lord, who is in our midst: this is a fundamental disposition.

- General Audience Address, 26 September 2012
 The conviction must grow within us every day that the liturgy is not our or my “doing” but rather is an action of God in us and with us.

- General Audience Address, 3 October 2012
The Christian liturgy is the worship of the universal temple which is the Risen Christ, whose arms are outstretched on the Cross to draw everyone into the embrace of God’s eternal love. It is the worship of a wide open heaven. It is never solely the event of a single community with its place in time and space. It is important that every Christian feel and be truly integrated into this universal “we” which provides the “I”, the basis and refuge of the “I”, in the Body of Christ which is the Church.

- General Audience Address, 3 October 2012
Finding one’s identity in Christ means reaching communion with him, that does not wipe me out but raises me to the loftiest dignity, that of a child of God in Christ...

- General Audience Address, 3 October 2012
Christian prayer consists in looking constantly at Christ and in an ever new way, speaking to him, being with him in silence, listening to him, acting and suffering with him. The Christian rediscovers his true identity in Christ, “the first-born of all creation” in whom “all things hold together” (cf. Col 1,15ff.). In identifying with him, in being one with him, I rediscover my personal identity as a true son or daughter who looks to God as to a Father full of love.

But let us not forget: it is in the Church that we discover Christ, that we know him as a living Person.

- General Audience Address, 3 October 2012
Therefore the life of prayer consists in being habitually in God’s presence and being aware of it, in living in a relationship with God as we live our customary relationships in life, with our dearest relatives, with true friends; indeed the relationship with the Lord is the relationship that gives light to all our other relationships.

- General Audience Address, 3 October 2012
Many people today have a limited idea of the Christian faith, because they identify it with a mere system of beliefs and values rather than with the truth of a God who revealed himself in history, anxious to communicate with human beings in a tête-à-tête, in a relationship of love with them. In fact, at the root of every doctrine or value is the event of the encounter between man and God in Jesus Christ. Christianity, before being a moral or an ethic, is the event of love, it is the acceptance of the Person of Jesus.

- General Audience Address, 14 November 2012
Yet God never tires of seeking us, he is faithful to the human being whom he created and redeemed, he stays close to us in our life because he loves us. This is a certainty that must accompany us every day, even if a certain widespread mentality makes it harder for the Church and for Christians to communicate to every creature the joy of the Gospel and to lead everyone to the encounter with Jesus, the one Saviour of the world.

However, this is our mission. It is the mission of the Church and every believer must carry it out joyously, feeling it his own, through an existence truly enlivened by faith, marked by charity, by service to God and to others, and that can radiate hope. This mission shines out above all in the holiness to which we are all called. 

- General Audience Address, 14 November 2012
When life becomes frail, in the years of old age, it never loses its value and its dignity: each one of us, at any stage of life, is wanted and loved by God, each one is important and necessary

- Address, 12 November 2012
At every phase of life it is necessary to be able to discover the presence and blessing of the Lord and the riches they bring. We must never let ourselves be imprisoned by sorrow! We have received the gift of longevity. Living is beautiful even at our age, despite some “aches and pains” and a few limitations. In our faces may there always be the joy of feeling loved by God and not sadness.

- Address, 12 November 2012
Contact with offenders paying the price for what they have done and the commitment needed to restore dignity and hope to people who in many cases have already suffered marginalization and scorn call to mind the mission of Christ himself, who came to call not the just, but sinners (cf. Mt 9:13; Mk 2:17; Lk 5:32), the privileged recipients of divine mercy.

- Address, 22 November 2012
 ...it is necessary that in punishing them, everything possible be done to correct and improve them. When this does not happen, justice is not done in an integral sense.

- Address, 22 November 2012
The prisoner’s personal need to undergo in prison a process of rehabilitation and maturation is actually a need of society itself, both because it stands to regain someone who can make a useful contribution to the common good, and also because such a process makes the prisoner less likely to reoffend and thus endanger society.

- Address, 22 November 2012
Christians often do not even know the central core of their own Catholic faith, the Creed, so that they leave room for a certain syncretism and religious relativism, blurring the truths to believe in as well as the salvific uniqueness of Christianity. The risk of fabricating, as it were, a “do-it-yourself” religion is not so far off today. Instead we must return to God, to the God of Jesus Christ, we must rediscover the Gospel message and make it enter our consciences and our daily life more deeply.

- General Audience Address, 17 October 2012
Allow the fascination of his person to capture your imagination and warm your heart. He has chosen you to be his friends, not his servants, and he invites you to share in his priestly work of bringing about the salvation of the world. Place yourselves completely at his disposal and allow him to form you for whatever task it may be that he has in mind for you.

- Address, 3 December 2012
...one of the most serious problems of our time is ignorance of religious practice in which many men and women live, including some Catholic faithful (cf. Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles laici, Chapter V).

For this reason the new evangelization, to which the Church has been resolutely committed since the Second Vatican Council and of which the Motu Proprio Ubicumque et Semper outlined the central modalities, is particularly urgent as underlined by the Fathers of the Synod which ended recently. The new evangelization calls all Christians to account for the hope that is in them (cf. 1 Pet 3:15), aware that one of the worst obstacles for our pastoral mission is ignorance of the content of the faith. In fact it is a dual ignorance: a lack of knowledge of the person of Jesus Christ and ignorance of the sublimity of his teachings, of their universal and perpetual value in the search for the meaning of life and happiness. Moreover this lack of knowledge results in an inability in the new generations to understand history and to feel that they are heirs to this tradition which has shaped the life, society, art and culture of Europe.

- Address, 30 November 2012
Saying “I believe in God” means founding my life on him, letting his Word guide it every day, in practical decisions, without fear of losing some part of myself.

- General Audience Address, 23 January 2013
Only true friendship with God will break the bonds of loneliness from which our fragile humanity suffers and will establish a true and lasting communion with others, a spiritual bond that will readily prompt within us the wish to serve the needs of those we love in Christ.

- Address, 18 February 2011
Do not forget, however, that the family is the primary means for transmitting the faith, that small domestic Church called to make Jesus and his Gospel known and to educate according to the law of God, so that each one of you may achieve full human and Christian maturity (cf. John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio, n. 2).

- Address, 1 December 2012
Do not forget, however, that the family is the primary means for transmitting the faith, that small domestic Church called to make Jesus and his Gospel known and to educate according to the law of God, so that each one of you may achieve full human and Christian maturity (cf. John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio, n. 2).

- Address, 1 December 2012
Believing means entrusting one’s life to the One who alone can give it fullness in time and open it to a hope beyond time.

- Homily, 1 December 2012
Believing means entrusting one’s life to the One who alone can give it fullness in time and open it to a hope beyond time.

- Homily, 1 December 2012
It is the Easter joy that does not stay silent or conceal the realities of pain, of suffering, of effort, of difficulty, of incomprehension and of death itself, but that can offer criteria for interpreting all things in the perspective of Christian hope.

- General Audience Address, 28 November 2012
We must return to God, so that man may return to being man.

- Homily, 4 October 2012
There is a clear link between the crisis in faith and the crisis in marriage.

- Homily, 7 October 2012
Marriage, as a union of faithful and indissoluble love, is based upon the grace that comes from the triune God, who in Christ loved us with a faithful love, even to the Cross.

- Homily, 7 October 2012
The Church exists to evangelize.

- Homily, 7 October 2012
In every time and place, evangelization always has as its starting and finishing points Jesus Christ, the Son of God (cf. Mk 1:1); and the Crucifix is the supremely distinctive sign of him who announces the Gospel: a sign of love and peace, a call to conversion and reconciliation.

- Homily, 7 October 2012
Those who advocate research on embryonic stem cells in the hope of achieving such a result make the grave mistake of denying the inalienable right to life of all human beings from the moment of conception to natural death. The destruction of even one human life can never be justified in terms of the benefit that it might conceivably bring to another.

- Address, 12 November 2011
Every person, whether man or woman, is destined to exist for others. A relationship that fails to respect the fact that men and women have the same dignity constitutes a grave crime against humanity.

- Address, 7 November 2011
A society is truly human when without reservations it protects and respects the dignity of every person from conception until the moment of his or her natural death. However, should it decide to “get rid” of its members in the greatest need of protection, exclude people from being people, it would be behaving in a profoundly inhuman and also distorted manner with regard to the equality — obvious to every person of good will — of the dignity of all people, in all the stages of life. 

If the Holy See intervenes in the legislative context with regard to fundamental questions of human dignity that are being brought up today in numerous areas of the prenatal existence of the human being, it does not do so to impose faith indirectly on others but rather to defend values that are fundamentally comprehensible to all as truths of existence, even if interests of another kind seek in various ways to obscure this consideration.

- Address, 7 November 2011
...discover in volunteer work a way to grow in the self-giving love which gives life its deepest meaning. Young people readily react to the call of love. Let us help them to hear Christ who makes his call felt in their hearts and draws them closer to himself. We must not be afraid to set before them a radical and life-changing challenge, helping them to learn that our hearts are made to love and be loved. It is in self-giving that we come to live life in all its fullness.

- Address, 11 November 2011
...your role as Christians is to take an active part in the life of society, seeking to make it ever more humane, ever more marked by authentic freedom, justice and solidarity.

- Address, 11 November 2011
The little that we manage to do to relieve human needs can be seen as a good seed that will grow and bear much fruit; it is a sign of Christ’s presence and love which, like the tree in the Gospel, grows to give shelter, protection and strength to all who require it.

- Address, 11 November 2011
We also become visible instruments of his love in a world that still profoundly yearns for that love amid the poverty, loneliness, marginalization and ignorance that we see all around us.

- Address, 11 November 2011
Christ’s grace helps us to discover within ourselves a human desire for solidarity and a fundamental vocation to love. His grace perfects, strengthens and elevates that vocation and enables us to serve others without reward, satisfaction or any recompense.

- Address, 11 November 2011
It is only by practicing charity that we too will be able to share in the joy of Our Lord.

- Angelus Address, 13 November 2011
Charity is the fundamental good that no one can fail to bring to fruition and without which every other good is worthless (cf. 1 Cor 13:3).

- Angelus Address, 13 November 2011
Death, followed by the Last Judgement, is an obligatory stage to pass through in order to reach this definitive reality.

- Angelus Address, 13 November 2011
Man needs eternity for every other hope is too brief, too limited for him. Man can be explained only if there is a Love which overcomes every isolation, even that of death, in a totality which also transcends time and space. Man can be explained, he finds his deepest meaning, only if there is God.

- General Audience Address, 2 November 2011
The role of education cannot, in fact, be reduced to the mere transmission of knowledge and skills that aim to form a professional but must include all the aspects of the person, from his social side to his yearning for the transcendent. 

- Address, 31 October 2011
The Church hopes that the State, in its turn, will recognize that a healthy secularism must not view religion, simply as an individual sentiment that can be relegated to the private sphere but rather as a reality which, also organized in visible structures, needs her public presence in the community in order to be recognized.

This is why the State is responsible for guaranteeing the possibility of the free exercise of worship of every religious denomination, as well as its cultural, educational and charitable activities, as long as they are not in opposition to the moral and public order. Well, the Church’s contribution is not limited to supportive, concrete social, humanitarian and educational initiatives and so forth, but gives special consideration to the growth of social ethics, promoted by many signs of openness to the transcendent and by the formation of consciences sensitive to the fulfilment of the duties of solidarity.

- Address, 31 October 2011
It is important for everyone, in fact, to learn ever better how to “remain” with the Lord daily in personal encounters to allow his love to take hold of them and to be proclaimers of the Gospel. It is important to seek to live one’s life generously, not according to one’s own plan, but to the one God has for each of us, conforming our own will to the Lord’s; it is important to be prepared, also through serious and committed study, to serve the People of God in the tasks which will be entrusted to them.

- Homily, 4 November 2011
We must never forget — as priests — that the only legitimate ascent to the ministry of the pastor is not that of success, but of the Cross. In this logic, being a priest means being a servant also through an exemplary life.

- Homily, 4 November 2011
One should never forget that one comes into the priesthood through the Sacrament of Orders and this means exactly opening oneself to the God’s action by choosing daily to give oneself up for God and for one’s brethren, according to the Gospel saying: “You received without pay, give without pay” (Mt 10:8). The Lord’s call to the ministry is not the fruit of special merit but a gift to be received and responded to by dedicating oneself not to one’s own plan but to God’s, in a generous and disinterested way, for he sends us out according to his will, even if this might not correspond to our idea of self-fulfilment.

- Homily, 4 November 2011
Therefore the Gospel minister is the one who lets himself be seized by Christ, who knows how to “stay” with him, who enters into harmony, into an intimate friendship with him, so that all is done “not by constraint but willingly” (1 Pet 5:2), according to his will of love, with great interior freedom and profound joy in the heart. 

- Homily, 4 November 2011
First, in the call to the priestly ministry we meet Jesus and are drawn to him, struck by his words, his actions, and his person. It is to have the grace to distinguish his voice from so many other voices and to respond like Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (Jn 6:68-69).

- Homily, 4 November 2011
True wisdom is making the most of mortal life in order to do works of mercy, for after death this will no longer be possible. When we are reawoken for the Last Judgement, it will be made on the basis of the love we have shown in our earthly life (cf. Mt 25:31-46). And this love is a gift of Christ, poured out in us by the Holy Spirit.

- Angelus Address, 6 November 2011
If we remove God, we remove Christ and the world falls back into emptiness and darkness.

- Angelus Address, 6 November 2011
In our giving too it does not matter whether or not a gift is expensive; those who cannot manage to give a little of themselves always give too little. Indeed, at times we even seek to substitute money or material things for our hearts and the commitment to giving ourselves.

- General Audience Address, 9 January 2013
Justice is achieved only when people are just!

- Address, 7 January 2013
It is precisely man's forgetfulness of God, and his failure to give him glory, which gives rise to violence.

- Address, 7 January 2013
For faith is nothing less than being interiorly seized by God, something which guides us along the pathways of life.  Faith draws us into a state of being and it makes us pilgrims who are on an inner journey towards the true King of the world and his promise of justice, truth and love.

- Homily, 6 January 2013
Human beings have an innate restlessness for God, but this restlessness is a participation in God's own restlessness for us.

- Homily, 6 January 2013
It is the task of the Bishop in this pilgrimage not merely to walk beside the others, but to go before them, showing the way.

- Homily, 6 January 2013
The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full. But matters go deeper still. Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of thinking is structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist.

- Homily, 24 December 2012
The flight from responsibility, which degrades human persons, and even more so the killing of a defenceless and innocent being, will never be able to produce happiness or peace.

Life in its fullness is the height of peace. Anyone who loves peace cannot tolerate attacks and crimes against life.

The precondition for peace is the dismantling of the dictatorship of relativism and of the supposition of a completely autonomous morality which precludes acknowledgment of the ineluctable natural moral law inscribed by God upon the conscience of every man and woman. Peace is the building up of coexistence in rational and moral terms, based on a foundation whose measure is not created by man, but rather by God.

Today Christians are called to be witnesses of prayer precisely because our world is often closed to the divine horizon and to the hope that brings the encounter with God.

- General Audience Address, 30 November 2011
Prayer is of course is a gift which nevertheless asks to be accepted; it is a work of God but demands commitment and continuity on our part. Above all continuity and constancy are important.

- General Audience Address, 30 November 2011
In our prayer too we must learn, increasingly, to enter this history of salvation of which Jesus is the summit, to renew before God our personal decision to open ourselves to his will, to ask him for the strength to conform our will to his will, throughout our life, in obedience to his design of love for us.

- General Audience Address, 30 November 2011
Humanity does not only need benefactors but also humble, practical people who, like Jesus, are able to stand beside their brethren, sharing a little of their struggle.

- Address, 24 November 2011
It is important that suffering people be able to feel God's warmth and that they feel it through our hands and our open-hardheartedness.

- Address, 24 November 2011
This is the badge of Christians: faith which becomes active in charity.  Each one of you is called to make your own contributions so that the love with which we have always been and always will be loved by God may become an active approach to life, an effort of service and an awareness of responsibility.

- Address, 24 November 2011
Responding to needs not only means giving bread to the hungry; it also means letting oneself be challenged by the reasons causing their hunger, with the gaze of Jesus who could see the deep reality of the people who came to him.  It is in this perspective that the present day calls into question your method of being animators and agents of charity.

- Address, 24 November 2011
The Church expects much of you, of your enthusiasm, of your capacity for looking ahead and of your desire for radicalism in life's decisions.

- Homily, 2010
All must be able to find in the parish an adequate means of formation and must be able to experience that community dimension which is a fundamental characteristic of Christian life.

- Homily, 12 December 2010
 Patience and constancy are truly a synthesis between human commitment and confidence in God.

- Angelus Address, 12 December 2010
Advent calls us to develop inner tenacity, resistance of the spirit, which enables us not to despair while waiting for a good that is slow in coming, but on the contrary to prepare for its coming with active trust.

- Angelus Address, 12 December 2010
Even when difficulties arise in conjugal life and in the relationship with their children, married couples must never cease to stay faithful to that fundamental “yes” which they said before God and to each other on their wedding day, remembering that faithfulness to one’s vocation demands courage, generosity and sacrifice.

- Homily, 12 December 2010
No community can live as a cell isolated from the diocesan context; instead the community must be a living expression of the beauty of the Church which, under the guidance of the Bishop — and in the parish, under the guidance of the Parish Priest who acts in his place — journeys on in communion towards the Kingdom of God.

- Homily, 12 December 2010
Advent is a strong invitation to everyone to let God come increasingly into our lives, our houses, our neighborhoods and our communities in order to have light in the midst of the many shadows, in the numerous daily efforts.

- Homily, 12 December 2010
Lord, help me to come to know you more and more.  Help me to be ever more at one with your will.  Help me to live my life not for myself, but in union with you to live it for others.  Help me to become ever more your friend.

- Homily, 29 June 2011
Faith starts with God, who opens his heart to us and invites us to share in his own divine life.  Faith does not simply provide information about who Christ is; rather, it entails a personal relationship with Christ, a surrender of our whole person, with all our understanding, will and feelings, to God's self-revelation.

- Homily, 21 August 2011