Popular

Browse Popular Topics

Quotes by Joseph Ratzinger

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.
– Joseph Ratzinger
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.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.
– Joseph Ratzinger
An Adult faith does not follow the waves of fashion and the latest novelties.
– Joseph Ratzinger
As a mere exchange of material goods, Christmas is coming under the power of wanting-for-oneself; it is becoming the instrument of an insatiable egoism and has fallen under the sway of possessions and of power - whereas this event in fact brings us exactly the opposite message. Pruning back Christmas so that it is once again simple would be an enormous achievement.
– Joseph Ratzinger
But that means that the Eucharist is far more than just a meal; it has cost a death to provide it, and the majesty of death is present in it. Whenever we hold it, we should be filled with reverence in the face of this mystery, with awe in the face of this mysterious death the becomes a present reality in our midst.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord.
– Joseph Ratzinger
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.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Find the Lord, find the saints of the times, but also find the not canonized, simple persons who are really in the heart of the Church.
– Joseph Ratzinger
For one, it seemed to be the connection between my previous task as teacher and my new mission. Despite all the differences in modality, what is involved was and remains the same: to follow truth, to be at its service. And because in today's world the theme of truth has all but disappeared, because truth appears too great for man, and yet everything falls apart if there is no truth.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.
– Joseph Ratzinger
I don't want to overreach myself, but I would say that this expresses the essence of what I consider to be my standard at this time.
– Joseph Ratzinger
In Jesus' life from the Father, in the immediacy and closeness of his association with him in prayer and indeed face to face, he is God's witness, through whom the intangible has become tangible, the distant has drawn near.
– Joseph Ratzinger
In the Church, priests also are sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Initially, it was possible for people to think, with respect to Lourdes, that this little girl had fantasized something. And then it turned out after all the she herself was really there, the Mother -Mary. It is certainly not by chance that people are nowadays turning again to Mary, in whom Christianity becomes loveable again and close to us, and we really do find the door again through the Mother.
– Joseph Ratzinger
It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church's pastors wherever it occurs... The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in work, in action and in law.
– Joseph Ratzinger
It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity. Through Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stand at the heart of the Christian religion. And this is not in competition with Christ. To think of Christ and Mary as being in competition means ignoring the essential distinctions between these two figures.
– Joseph Ratzinger
It is true that the Muslim world is not totally mistaken when it reproaches the West of Christian tradition of moral decadence and the manipulation of human life. Islam has also had moments of great splendor and decadence in its history.
– Joseph Ratzinger
It is true that the pill has given rise to an anthropological revolution of great dimensions. It has not been, as thought in the beginning, the only solution for difficult situations. But it has changed the vision of sexuality, the human being and the body itself. Sexuality has been separated from fecundity and in this way it has profoundly changed the concept of the human life.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Love, in the true sense, is not always a matter of giving way, being soft, and just acting nice. In that sense, a sugar-coated Jesus or a God who agrees to everything and is never anything but nice and friendly is no more than a caricature of real love. Because God loves us, because he wants us to grow into truth, he must necessarily make demands on us and must also correct us.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Man was not just thrown up into the world by some quirk of evolution. The underlying truth is that each person is meant to exist. Each person is God's own idea. Within everything that just for the moment exist factually, a plan and an idea are at work, and this gives meaning to my search for my own ideal self and to my coexistence with the world and with the onward path of history.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Men and women were created to be jointly the guarantee of the future of the humanity - not only a physical guarantee, but also a moral one.
– Joseph Ratzinger
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.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Our Christian conviction is that Christ is also the messiah of Israel. Certainly it is in the hands of God how and when the unification of Jews and Christians into the people of God will take place.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Our hearts are full of sadness, yet at the same time (full) of joyful hope and profound gratitude.
– Joseph Ratzinger
That the Jews are connected with God in a special way and that God does not allow that bond to fail is entirely obvious. We wait for the instant in which Israel will say yes to Christ, but we know that it has a special mission in history now... which is significant for the world.
– Joseph Ratzinger
The abuse of faith has to be resisted precisely.
– Joseph Ratzinger
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.
– Joseph Ratzinger
The Christian feast, the Eucharist, plumbs the very depths of death. It is not just a matter of pious discourse and entertainment, of some kind of religious beautification, spreading a pious gloss on the world; it plumbs the very depths of existence, which it call death... what the tradition sums up in the sentence: The Eucharist is a sacrifice, the presentation of Jesus Christ's sacrifice on the Cross.
– Joseph Ratzinger
The Church does not invent sins but recognizes the will of God and has to declare it. Of course, the great thing... is that upon the Church, which has to declare the will of God in its full magnitude, in its unconditional rigor, so that man should know his true measure, is bestowed as a gift, at the same time, the task of forgiving.
– Joseph Ratzinger
The Cross is the approbation of our existence, not in words, but in an act so completely radical that it caused God to become flesh and pierced this flesh to the quick; that, to God, it was worth the death of his incarnate Son.
– Joseph Ratzinger
The Eucharist is not itself the sacrament of reconciliation, but in fact it presupposes that sacrament. It is the sacrament of the reconciled, to which the Lord invites all those who have become one with him; who certainly still remain weak sinners, but yet have give their hand to him and have become part of his family. That is why, form the beginning, the Eucharist has been preceded by a discernment.
– Joseph Ratzinger
The fact that the church is convinced of not having the right to confer priestly ordination on women is now considered by some as irreconcilable with the European Constitution.
– Joseph Ratzinger
The fact that the Lord can work and act even with insufficient means consoles me, and above all I entrust myself to your prayers.
– Joseph Ratzinger
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.
– Joseph Ratzinger
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.
– Joseph Ratzinger
There is one thing we must not forget: it has always been the Mother who reached people in missionary situations and made Christ accessible to them. That is especially true of Latin America. Here, to some extent, Christianity arrived by way of Spanish swords, with deadly heralds.
– Joseph Ratzinger
There was an instrumentalization by ideologies that were tyrannical, brutal, and cruel. That experience made it clear to me that the abuse of faith had to be resisted precisely if one wanted to uphold the will of the Council.
– Joseph Ratzinger
To be the first person baptized with the new water was seen as a significant act of Providence. I have always been filled with thanksgiving for having had my life immersed in this way in the Easter Mystery... the more I reflect on it, the more this seems fitting for the nature of our human life: we are still waiting for Easter; we are not yet standing in the full light but walking toward it full of trust.
– Joseph Ratzinger
To me, its seems necessary to rediscover - and the energy to do so exists - that even the political and economic spheres need moral responsibility, a responsibility that is born in man's heart and, in the end, has to do with the presence or absence of God.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Today we bury his remains in the earth as a seed of immortality. Our hearts are full of sadness, yet at the same time of joyful hope and profound gratitude.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Unspontaneity is of their essence. In these rites I discover that something is approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from divine revelation. This is why the Christian East calls the liturgy the Divine Liturgy, expressing thereby the liturgy's independence from human control.
– Joseph Ratzinger
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.
– Joseph Ratzinger
We can be sure our beloved pope is standing today at the window of the father's house, that he sees us and blesses us.
– Joseph Ratzinger
We can learn from him that suffering and the gift of himself is an essential gift we need in our time.
– Joseph Ratzinger
We do at least need a new liturgical consciousness, to be rid of this spirit of arbitrary fabrication. Things have gone so far that Sunday litugy groups are cobbling together the liturgy for themselves. The most important thing today is that we should regain respect for the liturgy and for the fact that it is not to be manipulated.
– Joseph Ratzinger
When you are studying theology, your intention is not to learn a trade but to understand the faith, and this presupposes, as we said a while ago, using the words of Augustine, that the faith is true, that, in other words, it opens the door to a correct understanding of your own life, of the world and of men.
– Joseph Ratzinger
You can never predict in advance how things will turn our. Anyone who is extrapolating the decline of the church in academic, statistical fashion from the situation in Europe is failing to recognize the unpredictable nature of human history in general - and in particular, God's power to take the initiative by intervening, as he is always able to do.
– Joseph Ratzinger
Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.
– Joseph Ratzinger