Top 300 Pope Benedict XVI Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The Church is not an association that wishes to promote a certain cause. It is not about a cause. It is about the person of Jesus Christ.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

202. “Men and women cannot rest content with a superficial and unquestioning exchange of skeptical opinions and experiences of life – all of us are in search of truth and we share this profound yearning today more than ever...”

— Pope Benedict XVI

203. “What a treasure is hidden in two small words: ‘thank you!’”

— Pope Benedict XVI

204. “In the month of October, the universal Church highlights her missionary vocation. Guided by the Holy Spirit she knows she is called to pursue the work of Jesus himself, proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom of God which is “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit””

— Pope Benedict XVI

205. “I am consoled by the fact that the Lord knows how to work and how to act, even with insufficient tools.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

206. “The fundamental human right, the presupposition of every other right, is the right to life itself. This is true of life from the moment of conception until its natural end. Abortion, consequently, cannot be a human right – it is the very opposite. It is a deep wound in society.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

207. “The human being of all times prays because he cannot fail to wonder about the meaning of his life, which remains obscure and discomforting of it is not put in relations to the mystery of God and if his plan for the world.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

208. “In a world wounded by conflicts, where violence is justified in God’s name, it’s important to repeat that religion can never become a vehicle of hatred, it can never be used in God’s name to justify violence.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

209. “Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

210. “If the Letter to the Hebrews treats the entire Passion as a prayer in which Jesus wrestles with God the Father and at the same time with human nature, it also sheds new light on the theological depth of the Mount of Olives prayer. For these cries and pleas are seen as Jesus’ way of exercising his high priesthood. It is through his cries, his tears, and his prayers that Jesus does what the high priest is meant to do: he holds up to God the anguish of human existence.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

211. “In other words, the New Covenant must be founded on an obedience that is irrevocable and inviolable. This obedience, now located at the very root of human nature, is the obedience of the Son, who made himself a servant and took all human disobedience upon himself in his obedience even unto death, suffered it right to the end, and conquered it.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

212. “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.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

213. “That the different Christian confessions, aware of the need for a new evangelisation in this period of profound transformations, may be committed to announcing the Good News and moving towards the full unity of all Christians in order to offer a more credible testimony of the Gospel.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

214. “The new pope knows that his task is to make the light of Christ shine before men and women of world – not his own light, but that of Christ.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

215. “Holiness does not consist in never having erred or sinned. Holiness increases the capacity for conversion, for repentance, for willingness to start again and, especially, for reconciliation and forgiveness.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

216. “The Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known – it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

217. “For me, it’s a great joy to be together with priests: in the end, the bishop of Rome is the bishop and brother of all priests. His mandate is to confirm the brothers in the faith.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

218. “How can it be that the most wonderous and sacred human space – the womb – has become a place of unutterable violence?”

— Pope Benedict XVI

219. “An Adult faith does not follow the waves of fashion and the latest novelties.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

220. “No law made by man can overturn that of the Creator without dramatically affecting society in its very foundation.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

221. “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.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

222. “At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more reasonable than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

223. “The wrath of God is a way of saying that I have been living in a way that is contrary to the love that is God. Anyone who begins to live and grow away from God, who lives away from what is good, is turning his life toward wrath.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

224. “Society as a whole must defend the conceived child’s right to life and the true good of the woman who can never, in any circumstances, find fulfilment in the decision to abort.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

225. “If Jesus has become your hope, communicate this to others with your joy and your spiritual, apostolic and social engagement. Let Christ dwell within you, and having placed all your faith and trust in Him, spread this hope around you. Make choices that demonstrate your faith.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

226. “There is no other possibility for possessing certitude with regard to one’s life apart from self-abandonmen t, in a continuous crescendo, into the hands of a love that seems to grow constantly because it has its origin in God.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

227. “Beauty, then, is not mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation. These considerations should make us realize the care which is needed, if the liturgical action is to reflect its innate splendour.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

228. “I’m not a man who constantly thinks up jokes.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

229. “Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our Earth-erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

230. “A just laicism allows religious freedom. The state does not impose religion but rather gives space to religions with a responsibility toward civil society, and therefore it allows these religions to be factors in building up society.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

231. “The sign of the new Covenant is humility, hiddenness – the sign of the mustard-seed. The Son of God comes in lowliness. Both these elements belong together: the profound continuity in the history of God’s action and the radical newness of the hidden mustard-seed.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

232. “It is important always to know that the first word, the true initiative, the true activity comes from God and only by inserting ourselves into the divine initiative, only begging for this divine initiative, shall we too be able to become – with him and in him – evangelizers.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

233. “A thirst for the infinite is indelibly present in human beings. Man was created to have a relationship with God; we need him.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

234. “The risen Lord is the new Temple, the real meeting place between God and man.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

235. “Liberty isn’t liberalism, arbitrariness, but it’s connected; it’s conditioned by the great values of love and solidarity and in general by the good.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

236. “Enough with the slaughters. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!”

— Pope Benedict XVI

237. “Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

238. “Jesus resolved the false opposition between obedience and freedom and opened the path to freedom.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

239. “Let us say plainly: the unredeemed state of the world consists precisely in the failure to understand the meaning of creation, in the failure to recognize truth; as a result, the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

240. “Today, I, too, wish to reaffirm that I intend to continue on the path toward improved relations and friendship with the Jewish people, following the decisive lead given by John Paul II.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

241. “The Jesus of the Gospels is surely not convenient for us.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

242. “The Faith does not mean an alienation from any culture for any people because all cultures await Christ and are not destroyed by the Lord. In fact, they reach their maturity.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

243. “As a spiritual being, the human creature is defined through interpersonal relations. The more authentically he or she lives these relations, the more his or her own personal identity matures. It is not by isolation that man establishes his worth, but by placing himself in relation with others and with God.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

244. “The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

245. “I, retired in prayer, will always be with you, and together we will move ahead with the Lord in certainty. The Lord is victorious.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

246. “The sharing of goods and resources, from which authentic development proceeds, is not guaranteed by merely technical progress and relationships of utility, but by the potential of love that overcomes evil with good.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

247. “The blessing hands of Christ are like a roof that protects us. But at the same time, they are a gesture of opening up, tearing the world open so that heaven my enter in, may become “present” within it.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

248. “Tell others about the truth that sets you free.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

249. “The Jesus who makes everything okay for everyone is a phantom, a dream, not a real figure...”

— Pope Benedict XVI

250. “Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.”

— Pope Benedict XVI