Ratzinger Quotes

Everything belongs to God, but to Man is given the freedom to say 'yes' or 'no'. Love's free 'yes' is the only thing for which God must wait

If discouragement overwhelms you, think of the faith of Saint Joseph; if anxiety has its grip on you, think of the hope of Saint Joseph.

Like Joseph, do not be afraid to take Mary into your home. That is to say, do not be afraid to love the Church.

Dear brothers and sisters, in reading the account of the raising of Lazarus, each one of us is called to understand that in our prayers of petition to the Lord we must not expect an immediate fulfilment of what we ask, of our own will.

Love of one's enemy constitutes the nucleus of the Christian revolution.

Christianity is not a type of moralism, simply a system of ethics. It does not originate in our action. Christianity is a gift: God gives himself to us. He does not give something, but himself. He constantly remains the one who gives.

I'll also always love this story from his time as a Professor in Tübingen, when the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch had a go on a sheesha pipe and had a violent coughing fit, to everyone's amusement.

As my episcopal motto I chose the phrase from the 3rd letter of John, "Co-worker of the Truth"... In today's world the theme of truth has all but disappeared, because truth appears to be too great for man, and yet everything falls apart if there is no truth.

"As a sign" the angels told the shepherds they would find a child wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. This is not a "sign" in the sense that God's glory would be made visible. Far from it. In this sense, the sign is also a non-sign. God's poverty is his real sign.

In the child Jesus we see the defencelessness of God's love. If anything can conquer the arrogance, the violence, the greed of man, it is the utter vulnerability of a child...One who has not grasped the mystery of Christmas has failed to grasp the decisive element in Christianity

Mankind is waiting for God, waiting for him to draw near. But when the moment comes, there is no room for him. Man is so preoccupied with himself, he has such urgent need for all the space and all the time for his own things.

Obedience to God’s will, obedience to Jesus Christ, must be, really and practically, humble obedience to the Church.

The attitude of resignation with regard to truth, I am convinced, lies at the heart of the crisis of the West, the crisis of Europe. If truth does not exist for man, then neither can he ultimately distinguish between good and evil.

The cross is Revelation. It does not reveal any particular thing, but God and man. It reveals who God is and who man is.

Man’s unqualified 'Yes' to God can alone form true worship.

The world cannot tolerate this kind of resistance. It demands conformity. It considers this mourning to be an accusation directed against the numbing of consciences. And so it is. That is why those who mourn suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness.

The mourning of which the Lord speaks in the Beatitudes is non-conformity with evil. It is a way of resisting models of behaviour that the individual is pressured to accept because “everyone does it.”

Christians have always known that in abandoning themselves to the will of the Father, they lose nothing, but instead discover their deepest identity and interior freedom. Those who bind themselves in an obedience grounded in God and inspired by the search for God, become free.

To Evangelise means to teach the art of living. The deepest poverty today is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory.

Ratzinger on Job