Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

Theology, not morality, is the first business on the church's agenda of reform, and the church, not society, is the first target of divine criticism.

The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.

The church is like Noah's ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you'll drown.

I'd stand in line for Confession with old people and little kids, and as the line moved up, I knew when I got into the box that I would lie! Again!

I add, that those who are bent on restoring the whole church ought to be well instructed in the word, and to abstain from doing anything under the pretext of simplicity.

I hear around me reformers who want to dismantle the Holy Sanctuary, destroy the universal flame of the Church, to discard all her adornments, and smite her with remorse for her historic past.

Some people are weak in their faith and testimonies but are not even aware of how precarious their situation is. Many of them likely would be offended at the suggestion.

A revival is the church falling in love with Jesus Christ all over again.

There are good, humanitarian people everywhere - occasionally even in the Church.

If anyone feels his sins, let him come at once, straight, direct, not merely to church, or to the sacrament, or to repentance, or to prayer, but to Christ Himself.

No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the seeds of its own regeneration.

Absolutely nothing will revitalize a discouraged church faster than rediscovering it's purpose.

The reason why congregations have been so dead is, because they had dead men preaching to them. O that the Lord may quicken and revive them! How can dead men beget living children?

The most heinous crime of the Church has been perpetrated not against churchmen but against churchgoers. With its poisonous concepts of sin and divine punishment, it's warped and brainwashed countless millions.

No child of God sins to that degree as to make himself incapable of forgiveness.

Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated.

I love God and I follow Jesus but I just don't have much affinity for the organized folderol of the churches in the Western World.

If you rest in the silence inside, all those you meet will have their spiritual hearts resuscitated.

Each of us will taste the bitter ashes of life, from sin and neglect to sorrow and disappointment. But the atonement of Christ can lift us up in beauty from our ashes on the wings of a sure promise of immortality and eternal life. He will thus lift us up, not only at the end of life, but in each day of our lives.

May a merciful God preserve me from a Christian Church in which everyone is a saint! I want to be and remain in the church and little flock of the fainthearted, the feeble and the ailing, who feel and recognize the wretchedness of their sins, who sigh and cry to God incessantly for comfort and help, who believe in the forgiveness of sins.

There is a movement bubbling up that goes beyond cynicism and celebrates a new way of living, a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of.

When I hear music, it seems to me that all the sins of my life pass slowly by me with veiled faces, lay their hands on my head, and say softly, "My child."

There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's.

Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.

Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church.