Top 35 Paul Vallely Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It was while in Germany, in the church of St Peter am Perlach in Augsburg, that Bergoglio came across the eighteenth-century painting Mary Untier of Knots, which so moved him that he bought a postcard of the image and took it back to Argentina.”

— Paul Vallely

2. “It was here that two Jesuit priests, Fr Francisco Jalics and Fr Orlando Yorio, were brought one Sunday morning in May, hooded and shackled, and very frightened, after being arrested in the poor neighbourhood where they had worked for the previous six years.”

— Paul Vallely

3. “Visitors tried to cheer him up with the usual comforting banalities but he was not placated, until he was visited by the nun who had prepared him for his first Communion, Sister Dolores. ‘She said something that truly stuck with me,’ he later recalled, ‘and make me feel at peace: “you are imitating Christ” ’, he was told.”

— Paul Vallely

4. “Before him, also, was the memory of how John Paul II had chosen to die in public; there was an almost carnivalesque atmosphere to those final dying days of which the austere reserved Bavarian disapproved.”

— Paul Vallely

5. “He left it behind. But not in the way he expected. ‘He has gone to Rome, but at least,’ said one woman happily in the villa miseria, ’he takes the mud of the slums with him on his shoes.”

— Paul Vallely

6. “At the airport they were loaded into planes or helicopters from which, dazed but conscious, they were pushed out into the Atlantic or the estuary of the River Plate. This was done in such numbers that eventually the friendly military dictatorship in neighbouring Uruguay complained about the number of bodies being washed up on its shores.”

— Paul Vallely

7. “His personal belongings were so few that when someone gave him a gift of some CDs he asked a friend to record them to cassettes, as he did not have a CD player.”

— Paul Vallely

8. “The wounds in Argentine society are not yet healed, which is why the controversy surrounding Jorge Mario Bergoglio is still alive and angry.”

— Paul Vallely

9. “Church attempts to cover up the problem were both wrong and counter-productive, he believes. ‘I do not believe in the positions that some hold about sustaining a certain corporate spirit so as to avoid damaging the image of the institution,’ he said.”

— Paul Vallely

10. “Alone and unobserved Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was at prayer in the way that Grandma Rosa would have been.”

— Paul Vallely

11. “Celibacy is a law that has to be changed. It’s a law made by men, not by Jesus.” Bergoglio said to me: “It’s a cultural issue; change may well be accepted at some point.”

— Paul Vallely

12. “Politics is dirty but the reason it has become dirty is that Christians didn’t get deeply enough involved in the evangelical spirit.”

— Paul Vallely

13. “Being with our grandparents brings us, he said, face-to-face with our past.”

— Paul Vallely

14. “Through a spokesman he told Newsweek Argentina of his ‘unhappiness’ with Benedict’s words. ‘Pope Benedict’s statement doesn’t reflect my own opinions,’ the Archbishop of Buenos Aires declared. ‘These statements will serve to destroy in 20 seconds the careful construction of a relationship with Islam that Pope John Paul II built over the last twenty years.”

— Paul Vallely

15. “When a pope dies, cardinals from all over the world collect in the Vatican and begin to meet in what they call General Congregations. In April 2005 the first few days of these meetings were spent in absorbing the implications of the death of the man the Vatican swiftly dubbed John Paul the Great. Santo Subito, the crowds in St Peter’s Square had cried: Make him a Saint Now!”

— Paul Vallely

16. “With respect to the Christian life, death has to accompany you on the way. In my case, for example, I think every day that I am going to die. This does not distress me, because the Lord and life have given me the proper preparation. I saw my ancestors die and now it is my turn. When? I do not know.”

— Paul Vallely

17. “In confession, Bergoglio admitted, he is more likely to ask parents whether they are too busy with work to play with their children; it is not the kind of sin they are expecting to be quizzed about.”

— Paul Vallely

18. “The Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires was altogether more robust. He went out of his way to preface his position by insisting that there is no connection between celibacy and paedophilia. ‘There are psychological perversions that existed prior to choosing a life of celibacy,’ he said. ‘If a priest is a paedophile, he is so before he becomes a priest.”

— Paul Vallely

19. “Pope who announced his intention to transform the cultured silk-brocaded propriety of the Rome of Pope Benedict XVI into ‘a poor Church, for the poor’.”

— Paul Vallely

20. “It was four years before she was reconciled to his decision and he only knew she had fully accepted it when she knelt before him after he had been ordained a priest, eleven years later, and asked for his blessing.”

— Paul Vallely

21. “To him the strength of Catholicism is in the way simple people live their faith.”

— Paul Vallely

22. “Bergoglio was the one who ‘took the family’s traditions most to heart’, he later said. His grandparents spoke Piedmontese to one another and he learned it from them. ‘They loved all of my siblings, but I had the privilege of understanding the language of their memories.’ That is why today Pope Francis is completely fluent in Italian as well as Spanish, and can get by in German, French, Portuguese and English as well as Latin.”

— Paul Vallely

23. “It took God for granted. Faith was as much about what you did as what you thought.”

— Paul Vallely

24. “Faith has become flesh and blood. That is why, popular piety is a great patrimony of the Church.’ But he warned: ‘It cannot be denied, however, that certain deviated forms exist of popular religiosity that, far from fomenting an active participation in the Church, create instead confusion and can foster a merely exterior religious practice detached from a well-rooted and interior living faith.”

— Paul Vallely

25. “And conservatives and moderates alike could respect his keen pastoral sense and his personal frugality – a Prince of the Church who had given up a grand archbishop’s palace for a simple apartment in his episcopal office-block, who cooked his own meals and eschewed a chauffeur-driven limousine in favour of taking the subway and the bus. He was also a man of deep prayer.”

— Paul Vallely

26. “One of the Jesuit callings is to radical sacrifice of personal ambitions;.”

— Paul Vallely

27. “In March 2012 on a trip to Mexico and Cuba he lost his balance in his room and fell, hitting his head on a bathroom sink.”

— Paul Vallely

28. “Padre Bergoglio would slip in among them, dressed in the anonymity of plain clerical black, to sit in the pews before the painting to unravel the knots of his higher office.”

— Paul Vallely

29. “He was similarly unimpressed with Benedict’s 2009 decision to lift the excommunication of four schismatic Lefebvrists bishops of the Society of Pius X – one of whom, Bishop Richard Williamson, turned out persistently to insist that millions of Jews were not gassed in Nazi concentration camps.”

— Paul Vallely

30. “There are many who do not like ESMA being a museum with tours for members of the public and foreign tourists; they want to knock it down and create a park with a golf course ‘so that society can forget’.”

— Paul Vallely

31. “When religious sociologists discovered that a parish had a zone of influence which typically radiated 700 metres around its church, Bergoglio told his priests – knowing that Buenos Aires churches were on average 2,000 metres apart – to set up something in between the churches:.”

— Paul Vallely

32. “He was shocked, about the same time, when someone died from a heart attack at a family wedding, to hear a relative doubt the existence of God.”

— Paul Vallely

33. “He wasn’t even a bishop yet, and could act only in his capacity as head of the country’s Jesuits. His job was to protect the Jesuits, and all of the Jesuits made it through the period alive, which tells you he did his job.”

— Paul Vallely

34. “Today tours can be taken around the white-stucco red-tiled colonnaded building, rather grand in its colonial style, with neatly trimmed gardens, painted curbstones, clipped conifers and beautiful deep pink rosa china hibiscus flowers by the door through which those about to die would enter. In May, which is autumn in the southern hemisphere, the trees turn rich shades of russet and chestnut.”

— Paul Vallely

35. “A good father, like a good mother, is one who intervenes in the life of the child just enough to demonstrate guidelines for growing up, to help him, but who later knows when to be a bystander to his own and others’ failures, and to endure them.”

— Paul Vallely

36. “Vatican II famously threw open the windows of the Church, seeking greater interaction with, and influence on, secular society. In Latin America a number of theologians began to work out how the teachings of Vatican II should be applied on the ground.”

— Paul Vallely