Pope Benedict XVI
The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation.
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.
The life of the community, both domestically and internationally, clearly demonstrates that respect for rights, and the guarantees that follow from them, are measures of the common good that serve to evaluate the relationship between justice and injustice, development and poverty, security and conflict.
Human rights, of course, must include the right to religious freedom, understood as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual and communitarian - a vision that brings out the unity of the person while clearly distinguishing between the dimension of the citizen and that of the believer.
In our heart, in the heart of each of you, let there be always the joyous certainty that the Lord is near, that he does not abandon us, that he is near to us, and that he surrounds us with his love.
I no longer wield the power of the office for the government of the church, but in the service of prayer I remain, so to speak, within St. Peter's bounds. St. Benedict, whose name I bear as pope, shall be a great example in this for me. He showed us the way to a life which, active or passive, belongs wholly to the work of God.
Loving the church also means having the courage to make difficult, trying choices, having ever before oneself the good of the church and not one's own.
We pray that the Lord may help us to produce His light in ourselves, even in dark days, so that we might be light for others, illuminating the world and life in this world.
We have to pay attention to developing well, in the correct manner, the human aspects also in the professions, in respect of other persons, in being concerned for others, which is the best way of being concerned for ourselves.
A form of reason that in some way wished to strip itself of beauty would be diminished; it would be a blinded reason.
On the one hand, faith is a profoundly personal contact with God, which touches me in my innermost being and places me in front of the living God in absolute immediacy in such a way that I can speak with Him, love Him, and enter into communion with Him.
We all see that, today, man can destroy the foundation of his existence: his Earth.
This obedience to the voice of the Earth is more important for our future happiness... than the desires of the moment.
The principle of tolerance and respect for freedom promoted by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council are today being manipulated and erroneously taken too far.
The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a crime against God and against humanity.
Germany has an established and well-furnished Catholicism, often with employed Catholics who handle the church like a labor union. For them, the church is simply the employer.
You can't talk about what you haven't felt.
In the harshness of the world of technology - in which feelings do not count anymore - the hope for a saving love grows, a love which would be given freely and generously.
For me, it is one of the 'signs of the times' that the idea of God's mercy is becoming increasingly central and dominant.
If it is true that the great missionaries of the 16th century were convinced that one who was not baptized was lost - and that explains their missionary commitment - in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council, that conviction was definitely abandoned.
We let ourselves be molded and transformed by Christ and continually pass from the side of one who destroys to that of the one who saves.
A weak point of mine was maybe little resolve in governing and making decisions.
In reality, I am more a professor, one who reflects and mediates on spiritual questions. Practical governance is not my strong point, and this is certainly a weakness. But I do not see myself as a failure. For eight years, I carried out my work.
It is evident that the Church is always abandoning more the old traditional structures of European life and, therefore, is changing its appearance and living new forms in itself. It's clear most of all that the de-Christianization of Europe is progressing, that the Christian element is always vanishing more from the fabric of society.
I use both the 'I' and the 'we.' For on many, many matters, I am not simply expressing ideas that have happened to occur to Joseph Ratzinger, but I am speaking out of the common life of the Church's communion.
Today we have to learn all over again that love for the sinner and love for the person who has been harmed are correctly balanced if I punish the sinner in the form that is possible and appropriate.
At any rate, we can see that they are given into our care, that we cannot just do whatever we want with them. Animals, too, are God's creatures.
An important function of theology is to keep religion tied to reason and reason to religion. Both roles are of essential importance for humanity.
Where human lives are concerned, time is always short, yet the world has witnessed the vast resources that governments can draw upon to rescue financial institutions deemed 'too big to fail.'
There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere.
God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.
Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution, or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.
While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities, and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them.
God in fact does not change: he is faithful to himself.
One sees in Latin America, and also elsewhere, among many Catholics a certain schizophrenia between individual and public morality.
True friends challenge us and help us to be faithful on our journey.
Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken.
I would say it simply: No one can give that which he doesn't personally possess, which means we cannot transmit the Holy Spirit in an effective way, render the Spirit perceptible, if we ourselves aren't close to the Spirit.
Mercy is what moves us toward God, while justice makes us tremble in his sight.
The real 'action' in the liturgy in which we are all supposed to participate is the action of God himself. This is what is new and distinctive about the Christian liturgy: God himself acts and does what is essential.
We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.
I leave from where the apostle arrived.
All the great works of art, the cathedrals - the Gothic cathedrals and the splendid Baroque churches - are a luminous sign of God, and thus are truly a manifestation, an epiphany of God.
When the danger is great, one must not run away.
I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense, the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.
Choose the path of dialogue rather than the path of unilateral decisions.
We must respect the interior laws of creation, of this Earth, to learn these laws and obey them if we want to survive.
The church is not a political power; it's not a party, but it's a moral power.
Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord.