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.
The need to proclaim Christ boldly and courageously is a continuing priority for the Church; indeed it is a solemn duty laid upon her by Christ who enjoined the Apostles to ‘go out to the whole world, proclaim the Good News to all creation.’
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.
The proclamation and witness of the Gospel are the first service that Christians can offer every person and the whole human race, as they are called to communicate to all the love of God, who manifested himself fully in the only Redeemer of the world, Jesus Christ.
A thirst for the infinite is indelibly present in human beings. Man was created to have a relationship with God; we need him.
We ask the Blessed Virgin for the gift of conversion for all Christians, so that they may announce and give a faithful and coherent witness to the perennial evangelical message, which indicates to humanity the path to an authentic peace.