Pope Francis
Poverty is part of the natural condition and that is bad enough. But my task is to prevent the aggravation of this condition.Collection: Aggravation
God chooses the Pope and God also made men and women different.Collection: Men
There is nothing the Church can do except try to educate people to become good consumers.Collection: People
I'm the type of human who is interested most in the truth. God gave me a healthy love for the truth.Collection: Healthy
Dearest brothers and sisters who are so persecuted, I know how much you suffer, I know that you are stripped of everything. I am with you in the faith of the one who has conquered evil!Collection: Brother
Holy Mother Church teaches us to end the year and also our days with an examination of conscience...to be grateful and to ask for forgiveness.Collection: Mother
I would like especially to mention you, the women, wives and mothers of Paraguay, who at great cost and sacrifice were able to lift up a country defeated, devastated and laid low by an abominable war. God bless your perseverance, God bless and encourage your faith, God bless the women of Paraguay, the most glorious women of America.Collection: Mother
To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place.Collection: Tyrants
Wherever there are men and women who have consecrated their lives to God, there you find joy.Collection: Men
Lent is a time of grace, a time to convert and live out our baptism fully.Collection: Grace
Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it.Collection: Evil
Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry.Collection: Tables
Dear young friends, learn to pray every day: this is the way to know Jesus and invite him into your lives.Collection: Jesus
If you withdraw into yourself, you run the risk of becoming egocentric. And stagnant water becomes putrid.Collection: Running
In the moment of hardship, we ask why some things happen. In those moments of suffering, questioning prayers that do not ask for explanations but beg the Lord to accompany us are the most usefulCollection: Prayer
Ask Jesus what he wants from you and be brave!Collection: Jesus
It is the attitude of some leaders of God's people; they continually scold others, hurl reproaches at them, tell them to be quiet. ... 'Madam, take your crying child out of the church as I am preaching.' As if the cries of a child were not a sublime homily.Collection: Children
Jesus is more than a friend. He is a teacher of truth and life who shows us the way that leads to happiness.Collection: Teacher
We must not be afraid of solidarity; rather let us make all we have and are available to God.Collection: Solidarity
Your sins are great? Just tell the Lord: Forgive me, help me to get up again, change my heart!Collection: Heart
To be wise use three languages: think well, feel well and do well. And to be wise allow yourselves to be surprised by the love of God. That will guarantee a good life.Collection: Wise
How many Christians live for appearances? Their life seems like a soap bubble. The soap bubble is beautiful, with all its colours! But it lasts only a second, and then what?Collection: Beautiful
True peace is not a balance of opposing forces, and it is not ‘a lovely façade’ simply covering conflicts and divisions. Rather, peace calls for daily commitment -- it's homemade -- starting from God's gift, from the grace which he has given us in Jesus Christ.Collection: Jesus
Let us seek to live in a way that is always worthy of our Christian vocationCollection: Christian
"God is love". His is not a sentimental, emotional kind of love but the love of the Father who is the origin of all life, the love of the Son who dies on the Cross and is raised, the love of the Spirit who renews human beings and the world. Thinking that God is love does us so much good, because it teaches us to love, to give ourselves to others as Jesus gave himself to us and walks with us. Jesus walks beside us on the road through life.Collection: Love
Jesus wanted to show us his heart as the heart that loved so deeply. For this reason we have this commemoration today, especially of God's love. God loved us, he loved us with such great love. I am thinking of what St Ignatius told us.... He pointed out two criteria on love. The first: love is expressed more clearly in actions than in words. The second: there is greater love in giving than in receiving.Collection: Love
You have a specific and important mission, that of keeping alive the relationship between the faith and the cultures of the peoples to whom you belong. . . . [W]e have to follow Christ along the concrete path of our daily lives so that he can transform us.Collection: Important
For every Christian, the proclamation and witnessing of the Gospel are never an isolated act. This is important. For every Christian the proclamation and witnessing of the Gospel are never an isolated or group act, and no evangelizers acts, as Paul VI reminded very well, "on the strength of a personal inspiration, but in union with the mission of the Church and in her name"Collection: Christian
At this time of crisis we cannot be concerned solely with ourselves, withdrawing into loneliness, discouragement and a sense of powerlessness in the face of problems. Please do not withdraw into yourselves! This is a danger: we shut ourselves up in the parish, with our friends, within the movement, with the like-minded... but do you know what happens? When the Church becomes closed, she becomes an ailing Church, she falls ill! That is a danger. . . .A Church closed in on herself is the same, a sick Church.Collection: Loneliness
So let us ask ourselves this evening, in adoring Christ who is really present in the Eucharist: do I let myself be transformed by him? Do I let the Lord who gives himself to me, guide me to going out ever more from my little enclosure, in order to give, to share, to love him and others? Brothers and sisters, following, communion, sharing. Let us pray that participation in the Eucharist may always be an incentive: to follow the Lord every day, to be instruments of communion and to share what we are with him and with our neighbour. Our life will then be truly fruitful.Collection: Brother
"Do you love me?"; "Are you my friend?". The One who scrutinizes hearts (cf. Rom 8:27), makes himself a beggar of love and questions us on the one truly essential issue, a premiss and condition for feeding his sheep, his lambs, his Church. May every ministry be based on this intimacy with the Lord; living from him is the measure of our ecclesial service which is expressed in the readiness to obey, to humble ourselves, as we heard in the Letter to the Philippians, and for the total gift of self.Collection: Heart
And there is this fact of the twelve baskets: why twelve? What does it mean? Twelve is the number of the tribes of Israel, symbolically it represents all the people. And this tells us that when food is shared equally, with solidarity, nobody is devoid of the necessary, each community can meet the needs of the poorest. Human ecology and environmental ecology go hand in hand.Collection: Mean
Solidarity...is a structural value of the social doctrine, as Blessed John Paul II reminded us.Collection: Blessed
Above all I ask leaders and legislators and the entire international community above all to confront the reality of those who have been displaced by force, with effective projects and new approaches in order to protect their dignity, to improve the quality of their life and to face the challenges that are emerging from modern forms of persecution, oppression and slavery.Collection: Reality
If in so many parts of the world there are children who have nothing to eat, that's not news, it seems normal. It cannot be this way!Collection: Children
Consumerism has led us to become used to an excess and daily waste of food, to which, at times, we are no longer able to give a just value, which goes well beyond mere economic parameters. We should all remember, however, that throwing food away is like stealing from the tables of the the poor, the hungry!Collection: Food
[T]he "home" represents the most precious human treasures, that of encounter, that of relations among people, different in age, culture and history, but who live together and together help one another to grow. For this reason, the "home" is a crucial place in life, where life grows and can be fulfilled, because it is a place in which every person learns to receive love and to give love.Collection: Family
The Church is likewise conscious of the responsibility which all of us have for our world, for the whole of creation, which we must love and protect. There is much that we can do to benefit the poor, the needy and those who suffer, and to favour justice, promote reconciliation and build peace. But before all else we need to keep alive in our world the thirst for the absolute, and to counter the dominance of a one-dimensional vision of the human person, a vision which reduces human beings to what they produce and to what they consume: this is one of the most insidious temptations of our time.Collection: Responsibility
Let no one consider themselves to be the 'armour' of God while planning and carrying out acts of violence and oppression!Collection: Violence
Let us ask the Holy Spirit for the grace to live daily according to the mind of Jesus and his Gospel.Collection: Jesus
Lithuanian bishops have been heroic!Collection: Bishops
Fathers should speak with their children.Collection: Children
We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves.Collection: Letting Go
I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them.Collection: Christian
When the Lord wants to give us a mission, wants to give us a task, He prepares us. He prepares us to do it well...What is important is the whole journey by which we arrive at the mission the Lord entrusts to us...when the Lord gives a mission, He always has us enter into a process, a process of purification, a process of discernment, a process of obedience, a process of prayer.Collection: Prayer
In these cases, where there is an unjust aggression, I can only say that it is licit to stop the unjust aggressor. I emphasize the word: "stop". I'm not saying drop bombs, make war, but stop the aggressor. The means used to stop him would have to be evaluated.Collection: War
Praise is the 'breath' which gives us life, because it is intimacy with God, an intimacy that grows through daily praise.Collection: Breathing
We who are Christians, members of God’s family, are called to go out to the needy and to serve them.Collection: Christian
When you meet the needy your heart grows biggerCollection: Heart