The missionary experience is part of Christian formation and it is important for adolescents and young people to be able to live it personally.
In the world in which we live, it is almost a necessity to be able to regain one’s strength of body and spirit, especially for those who live in the city, where the conditions of life, often feverish, leave little room for silence, reflection and relaxed contact with nature.
At the judgment, in response to our questions, the Lord will show us his wounds, and we will understand. In the meantime, however, he simply expects us to stand by him and to believe what these wounds tell us, even though we cannot work right through the logic of this world.
Love alone makes us happy, because we live in relation, and we live to love and to be loved.
Music, great music, distends the spirit, arouses profound emotions and almost naturally invites us to raise our minds and hearts to God in all situations of human existence, the joyful and the sad. Music can become prayer.
If you find your sustenance in Christ, my dear young people, and if you live profoundly in him as did the Apostle Paul, you will not be able to resist speaking about him and making him known and loved by many of your friends and contemporaries.
Grant that we may be one flock and one shepherd!
I encourage all of you to discover ever more fully in the Eucharist, the sacrament of Christ’s sacrificial love, the inspiration and strength needed to work ever more generously for the spread of God’s Kingdom and the growth of the civilization of love.
Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our Earth-erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption.
In a world wounded by conflicts, where violence is justified in God’s name, it’s important to repeat that religion can never become a vehicle of hatred, it can never be used in God’s name to justify violence.
The one and only Gospel waits to be proclaimed by everyone together, in love and reciprocal esteem.
If we allow the love of Christ to change our heart, then we can change the world. This is the secret of authentic happiness.
With the Synod Assembly, therefore, I heartily recommend to the Church’s pastors and to the People of God the practice of Eucharistic Adoration, both individually and in community.
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.
Enough with the slaughters. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!
Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received.
Too often, attention is diverted from the needs of populations, insufficient emphasis is placed on work in the fields, and the goods of the earth are not given adequate protection. As a result, economic imbalance is produced, and the inalienable rights and dignity of every human person are ignored.
The church is not a political power; it’s not a party, but it’s a moral power.
Eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality.
We become new if we let ourselves be grasped and shaped by the new Man, Jesus Christ. He is the new Man par excellence. In him the new human existence became reality and we can truly become new if we deliver ourselves into his hands and let ourselves be moulded by him.