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Benedict’s words of wisdom

On religion

“The essence of religion is the relation of man beyond himself to the unknown reality that faith calls God.”

Salt of the Earth, interview with Peter Seewald, 1996

On Christianity

“Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

“Deus Caritas Est” (“God Is Love”), encyclical, December 2005

On the church’s mission

“The church’s mission and orientation, in every age, is to the duty to bring God to men and men to God. The church’s goal is the gospel, around which everything else must revolve.”

“The Ecclesiology of the Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium,” a 2000 speech

On charity

“For the church, charity is not a welfare activity that could equally well be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being.”

“Deus Caritas Est” (“God Is Love”), encyclical, December 2005

On faith

“The core of faith rests upon accepting being loved by God. And therefore to believe is to say yes, not only to him, but to creation, to creatures, above all, to men, to try to see the image of God in each person and thereby become a lover.”

Salt of the Earth, interview with Peter Seewald, 1996

On peace

“Where God is excluded, there is a breakdown of peace in the world.”

“Eucharist, Communion and Solidarity,” a 2002 speech

On pollution

“This is also the defect of the ecological movements. They crusade with an understandable and also legitimate passion against the pollution of the environment, whereas man’s self-pollution of his soul continues to be treated as one of the rights of his freedom. There is a discrepancy here.”

Salt of the Earth, interview with Peter Seewald, 1996

On liturgy

“The fact that the liturgy is actually ‘made’ for God and not for ourselves seems to have escaped the minds of those who are busy pondering how to give the liturgy an ever more attractive and communicable shape, actively involving an ever greater number of people. However, the more we make it for ourselves, the less attractive it is, because everyone perceives clearly that the essential focus on God has increasingly been lost.”

“The Ecclesiology of the Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium,” a 2000 speech

On authority

“But the church of Christ is not a party, not an association, not a club. Her deep and permanent structure is not democratic but sacramental, consequently hierarchical. … Here authority is not based on the majority of votes; it is based on the authority of Christ himself, which he willed to pass on to men who were to be his representatives until his definitive return.”

“The Ratzinger Report,” interview with Vittorio Messori in 1985

On women’s ordination, contraception, priestly celibacy, divorce

“These are certainly genuine issues, but I also believe that we go astray when we raise them to the standard questions and make them the only concerns of Christianity.”

Salt of the Earth, interview with Peter Seewald, 1996

On truth

“Under the pretext of goodness people neglect conscience. They place acceptance, the avoidance of problems, the comfortable pursuit of their existence, the good opinion of others, and good-naturedness above truth in the scale of values.”

Salt of the Earth, interview with Peter Seewald, 1996

On paradox

“Life doesn’t exist in contradictions, but it does exist in paradoxes. A joyfulness based on willful blindness to the horrors of history would ultimately be a lie or a fiction, a kind of withdrawal. But the converse is also true. Those who have lost the capacity to see that even in an evil world the creator still shines through are at bottom no longer capable of existing.”

Salt of the Earth, interview with Peter Seewald, 1996

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More online

To read speeches, sermons and encyclicals by Pope Benedict XVI, go to: www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/index.htm

The Alabama-based Eternal Word Television Network has the English translations of many of the pope’s speeches and writings from before his papacy in its library at www.ewtn.com/vlibrary/search.asp