Explore Quotes by Pope Benedict Xvi

For me, it's a great joy to be together with priests: in the end, the bishop of Rome is the bishop and brother of all priests. His mandate is to confirm the brothers in the faith.

We can learn from him that suffering and the gift of himself is an essential gift we need in our time.

Liberty isn't liberalism, arbitrariness, but it's connected; it's conditioned by the great values of love and solidarity and in general by the good.

Since politics fundamentally should be a moral enterprise, the church in this sense has something to say about politics.

God of peace, bring your peace to our violent world: peace in the hearts of all men and women and peace among the nations of the Earth.

In Latin America in general, it's very important that Christianity not be simply a thing of reason, but also of the heart.

Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made.

Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord.

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.

Art is elemental. Reason alone as it's expressed in the sciences can't be man's complete answer to reality, and it can't express everything that man can, wants to, and has to express. I think God built this into man. Art along with science is the highest gift God has given him.

Both need each other: The agnostic cannot be content to not know, but must be in search of the great truth of faith; the Catholic cannot be content to have faith, but must be in search of God all the time, and in the dialogue with others, a Catholic can learn more about God in a deeper fashion.

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.

Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

I leave from where the apostle arrived.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I too hope in this short reign to be a man of peace.

We were looking for a 'good shepherd,' and instead we got a German shepherd.