Theologians from Poland

"The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal. Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite."

"He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor, his life for love, knowing that contentment is the shadow not the light. The great yearning that sweeps eternity is a yearning to praise, a yearning to serve. And when the waves of that yearning swell in our souls all the barriers are pushed aside: the crust of callousness, the hysteria of vanity, the orgies of arrogance. For it is not the I that trembles alone, it is not a stir out of my soul but an eternal flutter that sweeps us all. No code, no law, even the law of God, can set a pattern for all of our living. It is not enough to have the right ideas. For the will, not reason, has the executive power in the realm of living. The will is stronger than reason and does not blindly submit to the dictates of rational principles. Reason may force the mind to accept intellectually its conclusions. Yet what is the power that will make me love to do what I ought to do?"

"The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The call for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. He has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a here-now."

"We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender."

"Some are guilty, but all are responsible."

"Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds."

"We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes. … The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity."

"The Biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being."

"There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty. The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the prophets, the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the Prophets sought to convey: that morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible."

"Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God."

"Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God."

"The focus of prayer is not the self. … It is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centered thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer. Feeling becomes prayer in the moment in which we forget ourselves and become aware of God. ... Thus, in beseeching Him for bread, there is one instant, at least, in which our mind is directed neither to our hunger nor to food, but to His mercy. This instant is prayer. We start with a personal concern and live to feel the utmost."

"We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers."

"There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern."

"In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact."

"The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments"

"Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time."

"Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn."

"The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world."

"One must forget many clichés in order to behold a single image. Insight is the beginning of perceptions to come rather than the extension of perceptions gone by. Conventional seeing, operating as it does with patterns and coherences, is a way of seeing the present in the past tense. Insight is an attempt to think in the present. … Insight is knowledge at first sight."

"The striking surprise is that prophets of Israel were tolerated at all by their people. To the patriots, they seemed pernicious; to the pious multitude, blasphemous; to the men in authority, seditious."

"To Hosea, marriage is the image of the relationship of God and Israel. ... Idolatry is adultery."

"Why were so few voices raised in the ancient world in protest against the ruthlessness of man? Why are human beings so obsequious, ready to kill and ready to die at the call of kings and chieftains? Perhaps it is because they worship might, venerate those who command might, and are convinced that it is by force that man prevails. The splendor and the pride of kings blind the people."

""The gods are on the side of the stronger," according to Tacitus. The prophets proclaimed that the heart of God is on the side of the weaker. God's special concern is not for the mighty and the successful, but for the lowly and the downtrodden, for the stranger and the poor, for the widow and the orphan."

"The prophets never taught that God and history are one, or that whatever happens below reflects the will of God above. Their vision is of man defying God, and God seeking man to reconcile with him."

"It is an act of evil to accept the state of evil as either inevitable or final."

"The opposite of freedom is not determinism, but hardness of heart. Freedom presupposes openness of heart, of mind, of eye and ear."

"Freedom is not a natural disposition, but God's precious gift to man. Those in whom viciousness becomes second-nature, those in whom brutality is linked with haughtiness, forfeit their ability and therefore their right to receive that gift. Hardening of the heart is the suspension of freedom."

"Wonder, or radical amazement, is a way of going beyond what is given in thing and thought, refusing to take anything for granted, to regard anything as final. It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given."

"It would be a contradiction in terms to assume that the attainment of transcendent meaning consists in comprehending a notion. Transcendence can never be an object of possession or of comprehension. Yet man can relate himself and be engaged to it. He must know how to court meaning in order to be engaged in it. Love of ultimate meaning is not self-centered but rather a concern to transcend the self."

"Ultimate meaning is not grasped once and for all in the form of timeless idea, acquired once and for all, securely preserved in conviction. It is not simply given. It comes upon us as an intimation that comes and goes. What is left behind is a memory, and a commitment to that memory. Our words do not describe it, our tools do not wield it. But sometimes it seems as if our very being were its description, its secret tool."

"The anchor of meaning resides in an abyss, deeper than the reach of despair. Yet the abyss is not not infinite; its bottom may suddenly be discovered within the confines of a human heart or under the debris of might doubts. This may be the vocation of man: to say "Amen" to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God."

"The sense of meaning is not born in ease and sloth. It comes after bitter trials, disappointments in the glitters, foundering, strandings. It is the marrow from the bone. There is no manna in our wilderness. Thought is not bred apart from experience or from inner surroundings. Thinking is living, and no thought is bred in an isolated cell in the brain. No thought is an island."

"Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world."

"Human being is both being in the world and living in the world. Living involves responsible understanding of one's role in relation to all other beings. For living is not being in itself, but living of the world, affecting, exploiting, consuming, comprehending, deriving, depriving."

"There are two primary ways in which mans relates himself to the world that surround him: manipulation and appreciation. In the first way he sees in what surrounds him things to be handled, forces to be managed, objects to be put to use. In the second way he sees in what surrounds him things to be acknowledged, understood, valued or admired."

"Fellowship depends on appreciation while manipulation is the cause of alienation: objects and I apart, things stand dead, and I am alone. What is more decisive: a life of manipulation distorts the image of the world. Reality is equated with availability: What I can manipulate is, what I cannot manipulate is not. A life of manipulation is the death of transcendence."

"Acceptance is appreciation, and the high value of appreciation is such that to appreciate appreciation seems to be the fundamental prerequisite for survival. Mankind will not die for lack of information; it may perish for lack of appreciation."

"As a result of letting the drive for power dominate existence, man is bound to lose his sense for nature's otherness. Nature becomes a utensil, an object to be used. The world ceases to be that which is and becomes that which is available. It is a submissive world that modern man is in the habit of sensing, and he seems content with the riches of thinghood. Space is the limit of his ambitions, and there is little he desires besides it. Correspondingly, man’s consciousness recedes more and more in the process of reducing his status to that of a consumer and manipulator. He has enclosed himself in the availability of things, with the shutters down and no sight of what is beyond availability."

"Exclusive manipulation results in the dissolution of awareness of all transcendence. Promise becomes a pretext, God becomes a symbol, truth a fiction, loyalty tentative, the holy a mere convention. Man’s very existence devours all transcendence. Instead of facing the grandeur of the cosmos, he explains it away; instead of beholding, he takes a picture; instead of hearing a voice, he tapes it. He does not see what he is able to face. There is a suspension of man’s sense of the holy. His mind is becoming a wall instead of being a door open to what is larger than the scope of his comprehension. He locks himself out of the world by reducing all reality to mere things and all relationship to mere manipulation. Transcendence is not an article of faith. It is what we come upon immediately when standing face to face with reality."

"The perceptibility of things is not the end of their being. Their surface is available to our tools, their depth is immune to our inquisitiveness. Things are both available and immune. We penetrate their physical givenness, we cannot intuit their secret. We measure what they exhibit, we know how they function, but we also know that we do not know what they are, what they stand for, what they imply."

"Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency."

"The supremacy of expediency is being refuted by time and truth. Time is an essential dimension of existence defiant of man's power, and truth reigns in supreme majesty, unrivaled, inimitable, and can never be defeated."

"Authentic existence involves exaltation, sensitivity to the holy, awareness of indebtedness. Existence without transcendence is a way of living where things become idols and idols become monsters. Denial of transcendence contradicts the essential truth of being human. Its roots can be traced either to stolidity of self-contentment or to superciliousness of contempt, to moods rather than to comprehensive awareness of the totality and mystery of being. Denial of transcendence which claims to unveil the truth of being is an inner contradiction, since the truth of being is not within being or within our consciousness of being but rather a truth that transcends our being."

"Essential to education for being human is to cultivate a sense for the inexpedient, to disclose the fallacy of absolute expediency. God's voice may sound feeble to our conscience. Yet there is a divine cunning in history which seems to prove that the wages of absolute expediency is disaster. Happiness is not a synonym for self-satisfaction, complacency, or smugness. Self-satisfaction breeds futility and despair. Self-satisfaction is the opiate of fools."

"New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. … Man's true fulfillment depends on communion with that which transcends him."

"In our reflection we must go back to where we stand in awe before sheer being, faced with the marvel of the moment. The world is not just here. It shocks us into amazement. Of being itself all we can positively say is: being is ineffable. The heart of being confronts me as enigmatic, incompatible with my categories, sheer mystery. My power of probing is easily exhausted, my words fade, but what I sense is not emptiness but inexhaustible abundance, ineffable abundance. What I face I cannot utter or phrase in language. But the richness of my facing the abundance of being endows me with marvelous reward: a sense of the ineffable."

"Being as we know it, the world as we come upon it, stands before us as otherness, remoteness. For all our efforts to exploit or comprehend it, it remains evasive, mysteriously immune. Being is unbelievable."

"Our concern with environment cannot be reduced to what can be used, to what can be grasped. Environment includes not only the inkstand and the blotting paper, but also the impenetrable stillness in the air, the stars, the clouds, the quiet passing of time, the wonder of my own being. I am an end as well as a means, and so is the world: an end as well as a means. My view of the world and my understanding of the self determine each other. The complete manipulation of the world results in the complete instrumentalization of the self."

"The world presents itself in two ways to me. The world as a thing I own, the world as a mystery I face. What I own is a trifle, what I face is sublime. I am careful not to waste what I own; I must learn not to miss what I face. We manipulate what is available on the surface of the world; we must also stand in awe before the mystery of the world. We objectify Being but we also are present at Being in wonder, in radical amazement. All we have is a sense of awe and radical amazement in the face of a mystery that staggers our ability to sense it."

"Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe. Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe."

"Faith is not belief, an assent to a proposition, faith is attachment to the meaning beyond the mystery. Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe precedes faith; it is the root of faith. We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith. Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the world becomes a market place for you. The loss of awe is the avoidance of insight. A return to reverence is the first prerequisite for a revival of wisdom, for the discovery of the world as an allusion to God."

"In his great vision Isaiah perceives the voice of the seraphim even before he hears the voice of the Lord. What is it that the seraphim reveal? "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory." Holy, holy, holy — indicate the transcendence and distance of God. The whole earth is full of His glory — the immanence or presence of God. The outwardness of the world communicates something of the indwelling greatness of God. The glory is neither an aesthetic nor physical quality. It is sensed in grandeur, but it is more than grandeur. It is a presence or the effulgence of a presence. The whole earth is full of His glory, but we do not perceive it; it is within our reach but beyond our grasp. And still it is not entirely unknown to us."

"In English the phrase that a person has "a presence" is hard to define. There are people whose being here and now is felt, even though they do not display themselves in action and speech. They have a "presence." … Of a person whose outwardness communicates something of his indwelling power or greatness, whose soul is radiant and conveys itself without words, we say he has presence. Standing face to face with the world, we often sense a presence which surpasses our ability to comprehend. The world is too much with us. It is crammed with marvel. There is a glory, an aura, that lies about all beings, a spiritual setting of reality. To the religious man it is as if things stood with their backs to him, their faces turned to God, as if the glory of things consisted in their being an object of divine care."

"Being is both presence and absence. God had to conceal His presence in order to bring the world into being. He had to make His absence possible in order to make room for the world's presence. Coming into being brought along denial and defiance, absence, oblivion and resistance."

"Being points beyond itself. Accustomed to think in terms of space, the expression "being points beyond itself" may be taken to denote a higher point in space. What is meant, however, is a higher category than being: the power of maintaining being."

"Being is either open to, or dependent on, what is more than being, namely, the care for being, or it is a cul-de-sac, to be explained in terms of self-sufficiency. The weakness of the first possibility is in its reference to a mystery; the weakness of the second possibility is in its pretension to offer a rational explanation. Nature, the sum of its laws, may be sufficient to explain in its own terms how facts behave within nature; it does not explain why they behave at all. Some tacit assumptions of the theory of insufficiency remain problematic."

"The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature. Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?"

"Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence. We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being."

"The Torah has not imposed upon Israel a tyranny of the spirit. It does not violate human nature. On the contrary, the road to the sacred leads through the secular. The spiritual rests upon the carnal, like "the Spirit that hovers over the face of the water. " Jewish living means living according to a system of checks and balances. We are not asked anything that cannot be responded to. We are not told: Love thy enemy, but Do not hate him, and positively: "If thou meet thine enemy's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again." (Exodus 23:4)."

"The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. One cannot pray unless he has faith in his own ability to accost the infinite, merciful, eternal God."

"Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law. And yet we must not regard this revolt as entirely negative. The energy that rejects many obsolete laws is an entirely positive impulse for renewal of life and law."

"Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be? The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster. To pray is to recollect passionately the perpetual urgency of this vital question."

"One of the results of the rapid depersonalization of our age is a crisis of speech, profanation of language. We have trifled with the name of God, we have taken the name and the word of the Holy in vain. Language has been reduced to labels, talk has become double-talk. We are in the process of losing faith in the reality of words. Yet prayer can happen only when words reverberate with power and inner life, when uttered as an earnest, as a promise. On the other hand, there is a high degree of obsolescence in the traditional language of the theology of prayer. Renewal of prayer calls for a renewal of language, of cleansing the words, of revival of meanings. The strength of faith is in silence, and in words that hibernate and wait. Uttered faith must come out as a surplus of silence, as the fruit of lived faith, of enduring intimacy. Theological education must deepen privacy, strive for daily renewal of innerness, cultivate ingredients of religious existence, reverence and responsibility."

"Religion is critique of all satisfaction. Its end is joy, but its beginning is discontent, detesting boasts, smashing idols. It began in Ur Kasdim, in the seat of a magnificent civilization. Yet Abraham said, "No," breaking the idols, breaking away. And so every one of us must begin by saying no to all visible, definable entities pretending to be triumphant, ultimate. The ultimate is a challenge, not an assertion. Dogmas are allusions, not descriptions."

"This is the predicament of man. All souls descend a ladder form heaven to the world. Then the ladders are taken away. Once they are in this world, they are called upon from heaven to rise, to come back. It is a call that goes out again and again. Each soul seeks the ladder in order to ascend above; but the ladder cannot be found. Most people make no effort to ascend, claiming, how can one rise to heaven without a ladder? However, there are souls which resolve to leap upwards without a ladder. So they jump and fall down. They jump and fall down, until they stop. Wise people think that since no ladder exists, there must be another way. We must face the challenge and act. Be what it may, one must leap until God, in His mercy, makes exultation come about."

"It seems as though we have arrived at a point in history, closest to the instincts and remotest from ideals, where the self stands like a wall between God and man. It is the period of a divine eclipse. We sail the seas, we count the stars, we split the atom, but never ask: Is there nothing but a dead universe and our reckless curiosity? Primitive man's humble ear was alert to the inwardness of the world, while the modern man is presumptuous enough to claim that he has the sole monopoly over soul and spirit, that he is the only thing alive in the universe. … But there is a dawn of wonder and surprise in our souls, when the things that surround us suddenly slip off the triteness with which we have endowed them, and their strangeness opens like a gap between them and our mind, a gap that no words can fill. … What is the incense of self-esteem to him who tastes in all things the flavor of the utterly unknown, the fragrance of what is beyond our senses? There are neither skies nor oceans, neither birds nor trees — there are only signs of what can never be perceived. And all power and beauty are mere straws in the fire of a pure man's vision."

"He who has ever been confronted with the ultimate and has realized that sun and stars and souls do not ramble in a vacuum will keep his heart in readiness for the hour when the world is entranced, awaits a soul to breathe in the mystery that all things exhale in their craving for salvation. For things are not mute. The stillness is full of demands. Out of the world comes a behest to instill into the air a rapturous song for God, to incarnate in the stones a message of humble beauty, and to instill a prayer for goodness in the hearts of all children."

"Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp. Such alertness grows from the sense for the meaningful, for the marvel of matter, for the core of thoughts. It is begotten in passionate love for the significance of all reality, in devotion to the ultimate meaning which is only God. By our very existence we are in dire need of meaning, and anything that calls for meaning is always an allusion to Him. We live by the certainty that we are not dust in the wind, that our life is related to the ultimate, the meaning of all meanings. And the system of meanings that permeates the universe is like an endless flight of stairs. Even when the upper stairs are beyond our sight, we constantly rise toward the distant goal."

"Instead of indulging in jealousy, greed, in relishing themselves, there are men who keep their hearts alert to the stillness in which time rolls on and leaves us behind. … those who are open to the wonder will not miss it. Faith is found in solicitude for faith, in an inner care for the wonder that is everywhere."

"Only straight discovering in the nearest stone or tree, sound or thought, the shelter of His often desecrated goodness, the treasury of His waiting form man's heart to affiliate with His will — this is the rapture of faith. It is an echo to a pleading voice, a reply to the inconceivable in all beauty."

"Faith is an awareness of divine mutuality and companionship, a form of communion between God and man. It is not a psychical quality, something that exists in the mind only, but a force from the beyond."

"Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but the endless, tameless pilgrimage of hearts."

"Those of faith who plant sacred thoughts in the uplands of time, the secret gardeners of the Lord in mankind's desolate hopes, may slacken and tarry but rarely betray their vocation."

"He whose soul is charged with awareness of God earns his inner livelihood by a passionate desire to pour his life into the eternal wells of love. … We do not live for our own sake. Life would be preposterous if not for the love it confers. Faith implies no denial of evil, no disregard of danger, no whitewashing of the abominable. He whose heart is given to faith is mindful of the obstructive and awry, of the sinister and pernicious. It is God's strange dominion over both good and evil on which he relies. … Faith is not a mechanical insurance but a dynamic, personal act, flowing between the heart of man and the love of God."

"Not the individual man nor a single generation by its own power can erect the bridge that leads to God. Faith is the achievement of many generations, and effort accumulated over many centuries. … There is a collective memory of God in the human spirit, and it is this memory which is the main source of our faith."

"Faith is not a thing that comes into being out of nothing. It originates in an event. In the spiritual vacancy of life something may suddenly occur that is like the lifting of a veil at the horizon of knowledge. A simple episode may open sight of the eternal. A shift of conceptions, boisterous like a tempest of soft as a breeze may swerve a mind for an instant or forever. For God is not wholly silent and man is not always deaf. God's willingness to call men to His service and man's responsiveness to the divine indications in things and events are for faith what sun and soil are for the plant."

"The riches of the soul are stored up in its memory. this is the test of character, not whether a man follows the daily fashion, but whether the past is alive in his present."

"Only those who are spiritually imitators, only people who are afraid to be grateful and too weak to be loyal, have nothing but the present moment. The mark of nobility is inherited possession. To a noble person it is a holy joy to remember, an overwhelming thrill to be grateful, while to a person whose character is neither rich nor strong, gratitude is a most painful sensation. The secret of wisdom is never to get lost in a momentary mood or passion, never to forget a friendship over a momentary grievance, never to lose sight of the lasting values over a transitory episode."

"Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!"

"There are many creeds but only one faith. Creeds may change, develop, and grow flat, while the substance of faith remains the same in all ages. The overgrowth of creed may bring about the disintegration of that substance. The proper relation is a minimum of creed and a maximum of faith."

"In the realm of faith, God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. To rationalists He is something after which they seek in the darkness with the light of their reason. To men of faith He is the light."

"Faith is something that comes out of the soul. It is not an information that is absorbed but an attitude, existing prior to the formulation of any creed."

"Reason is not the measure of all things, not the all-inclusive power in the inner life of man. The powers of will and emotion, the realm of the subconscious lie beyond the scope of knowledge. The rush of reason is an effort of limited strength. Faith is not the miniature of thinking but its model, not its shadow but its root. It is a spiritual force in man, not dealing with the given, concrete limited, but directed upon the transcendent. It is the spring of our creative actions."

"All action is vicarious faith."

"Reality is not exhausted by knowledge. Inaccessible to research are the ultimate facts. All scientific conclusions are based on axioms, all reasoning depends ultimately upon faith. Faith is virgin thinking, preceding all transcendent knowledge. To believe is to abide at the extremities of spirit."

"There is neither advance nor service without faith. Nobody can rationally explain why he should sacrifice his life and his happiness for the sake of the good. The conviction that I must obey the ethical imperatives is not derived from logical argument but originates from an intuitive certitude, in a certitude of faith. There is no conspiracy against reason, no random obstinacy, no sluggish inertia of mind or smug self-assurance entrenched behind the walls of believing. Faith does not detach a man from thinking, it does not suspend reason. It is opposed not to knowledge but to backwardness and dullness, to indifferent aloofness to the essence of living. … It is a distortion to regard reason and faith as alternatives. Reason is a necessary coefficient of faith. Faith without explication by reason is mute, reason without faith is deaf. There can be a true symbiosis of reason and faith."

"The account of our experiences, the record of debit and credit, is reflected in the amount of trust or distrust we display towards life and humanity. There are those who maintain that the good is within our reach everywhere; you have but to stretch out your arms and you will grasp it. But there are others who, intimidated by fraud and ugliness, sense scorn and ambushes everywhere and misgive all things to come. Those who trust develop a finer sense for the good, even at the hight cost of blighted hopes. Charmed by the spell of love, faith is, as it were, imposed upon their heart."

"Trust is the core of human relationships, of gregariousness among men. Friendship, a puzzle to the syllogistic and critical mentality, is not based on experiments or tests of another person's qualities but on trust. It is not critical knowledge but a risk of the heart which initiates affection and preserves loyalty in our fellow men."

"Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us."

"To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain the sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time?"

"Man is a messenger who forgot the message."

"The search of reason ends at the shore of the known."

"The stone is broken, but the words are alive."

"To be human is a problem, and the problem expresses itself in anguish."

"I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don't be old. Don't be stale."

"In my youth, growing up in a Jewish milieu, there was one thing we did not have to look for and that was exaltation. Every moment is great, we were taught, every moment is unique."

"If there is one thing that captures popular understanding of the Jewish community’s relationship to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., it’s an image from Selma, 1965. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel links arms with a line of activists that include Rev. King, a shoulder’s breadth away, on their historic march to Montgomery. Heschel’s comments afterward have taken on a similarly iconic status: “I felt my feet were praying.”"

"If the religious and Christian foundation of this continent in its role as the inspiration of ethics and in its social effectiveness is ever marginalized, not only will the heritage of the European past be denied, but also a future worthy of the individual European-and, indeed, all Europeans, believers and non‑believers alike-will be seriously compromised."

"Young people have a special place in the heart of the Holy Father, who often repeats that the whole Church looks to them with particular hope for a new beginning of evangelization."

"Resurrection of the body is to be preceded by a judgment passed upon the works of charity, fulfilled or neglected. As a result of this judgement, the just are destined to eternal life. There is a destination to eternal damnation as well, which consists in the ultimate rejection of God, the ultimate break of the communion with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Here, it is not so much God who rejects man, but man who rejects God."

"[T]he religiosity of Muslims deserves respect. It is impossible not to admire, for example, their fidelity to prayer. The image of believers in Allah who, without caring about time or place, fall to their knees and immerse themselves in prayer remains a model for all those who invoke the true God, in particular for those Christians who, having deserted their magnificent cathedrals, pray only a little or not at all."

"The Church is called upon to manifest anew to everyone, with clear and stronger conviction, her will to promote human life by every means and to defend it against all attacks, in whatever condition or state of development it is found. Thus the Church condemns as a grave offense against human dignity and justice all those activities of governments or other public authorities which attempt to limit in any way the freedom of couples in deciding about children. Consequently, any violence applied by such authorities in favor of contraception or, still worse, of sterilization and procured abortion, must be altogether condemned and forcefully rejected. Likewise to be denounced as gravely unjust are cases where, in international relations, economic help given for the advancement of peoples is made conditional on programs of contraception, sterilization and procured abortion."

"Christian marriage and the Christian family build up the Church: for in the family the human person is not only brought into being and progressively introduced by means of education into the human community, but by means of the rebirth of baptism and education in the faith the child is also introduced into God's family, which is the Church. The human family, disunited by sin, is reconstituted in its unity by the redemptive power of the death and Resurrection of Christ. Christian marriage, by participating in the salvific efficacy of this event, constitutes the natural setting in which the human person is introduced into the great family of the Church. The commandment to grow and multiply, given to man and woman in the beginning, in this way reaches its whole truth and full realization."

"In virginity or celibacy, the human being is awaiting, also in a bodily way, the eschatological marriage of Christ with the Church, giving himself or herself completely to the Church in the hope that Christ may give Himself to the Church in the full truth of eternal life. The celibate person thus anticipates in his or her flesh the new world of the future resurrection. By virtue of this witness, virginity or celibacy keeps alive in the Church a consciousness of the mystery of marriage and defends it from any reduction and impoverishment. Virginity or celibacy, by liberating the human heart in a unique way,[40] "so as to make it burn with greater love for God and all humanity,"[41] bears witness that the Kingdom of God and His justice is that pearl of great price which is preferred to every other value no matter how great, and hence must be sought as the only definitive value. It is for this reason that the Church, throughout her history, has always defended the superiority of this charism to that of marriage, by reason of the wholly singular link which it has with the Kingdom of God."

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves."

"Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself."

"to men and women there falls the task of exploring truth with their reason, and in this their nobility consists."

"Every truth—if it really is truth—presents itself as universal, even if it is not the whole truth. If something is true, then it must be true for all people and at all times."

"human being is by nature a philosopher"

"to argue according to rigorous rational criteria is to guarantee that the results attained are universally valid."

"philosophy must obey its own rules and be based upon its own principles; truth, however, can only be one."

"Quite apart from the fact that it conflicts with the demands and the content of the word of God, nihilism is a denial of the humanity and of the very identity of the human being. It should never be forgotten that the neglect of being inevitably leads to losing touch with objective truth and therefore with the very ground of human dignity."

"Once the truth is denied to human beings, it is pure illusion to try to set them free. Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery."

"To believe it possible to know a universally valid truth is in no way to encourage intolerance; on the contrary, it is the essential condition for sincere and authentic dialogue between persons. On this basis alone is it possible to overcome divisions and to journey together towards full truth"

"Truth can never be confined to time and culture; in history it is known, but it also reaches beyond history."

"faith and reason “mutually support each other”; each influences the other, as they offer to each other a purifying critique and a stimulus to pursue the search for deeper understanding"

"The program already exists: it is the plan found in the Gospel and in the living Tradition, it is the same as ever. Ultimately, it has its center in Christ himself, who is to be known, loved and imitated, so that in him we may live the life of the Trinity, and with him transform history until its fulfilment in the heavenly Jerusalem. This is a program which does not change with shifts of times and cultures, even though it takes account of time and culture for the sake of true dialogue and effective communication. This program for all times is our program for the Third Millennium."

"Today the Church must face other challenges and push forward to new frontiers, both in the initial mission ad gentes and in the new evangelization of those peoples who have already heard Christ proclaimed."

"The universal call to holiness is closely linked to the universal call to mission."

"Truth enlightens man's intelligence and shapes his freedom."

"The moral life presents itself as the response due to the many gratuitous initiatives taken by God out of love for man."

"Totus Tuus"

"It is unbecoming for a cardinal to ski badly."

"Carissimi fratelli e sorelle, siamo ancora tutti addolorati dopo la morte del nostro amatissimo Papa Giovanni Paolo I. Ed ecco che gli Eminentissimi Cardinali hanno chiamato un nuovo vescovo di Roma. Lo hanno chiamato da un paese lontano... lontano, ma sempre così vicino per la comunione nella fede e nella tradizione cristiana. (...) Non so se posso bene spiegarmi nella vostra... nostra lingua italiana. Se mi sbaglio mi correggerete."

"Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ!"

"I wołam, ja, syn polskiej ziemi, a zarazem ja: Jan Paweł II papież, wołam z całej głębi tego tysiąclecia, wołam w przeddzień święta Zesłania, wołam wraz z wami wszystkimi: Niech zstąpi Duch Twój! Niech zstąpi Duch Twój! I odnowi oblicze ziemi. Tej ziemi!"

"This inscription awakens the memory of people whose sons and daughters were destined for total extermination. This people draws its origin from Abraham, our Father in faith. The very people that received from God the commandment, thou shalt not kill, itself experienced in a special measure what is meant by killing. It is not permissible for anyone to pass by this inscription with indifference."

"Faced with problems and disappointments, many people will try to escape from their responsibility: escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. But today, I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape."

"When you wonder about the mystery of yourself, look to Christ who gives you the meaning of life. When you wonder what it means to be a mature person, look to Christ who is the fullness of humanity. And when you wonder about your role in the future of the world and of the United States, look to Christ. Only in Christ will you fulfill your potential as an American citizen and as a citizen of the world community."

"The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish."

"When we talk about proof of the existence of God, we must underline that it is not proof of a scientific-experimental nature. Scientific evidence, in the modern sense of the word, is valid only for things perceptible to the senses, since only on these can the instruments of investigation and verification, which science uses, be exercised. Wanting scientific proof of God would mean lowering God to the rank of beings in our world, and therefore already being methodologically wrong about what God is. Science must recognize its limits and its impotence to reach the existence of God: it can neither affirm nor deny this existence. However, the conclusion must not be drawn from this that scientists are incapable of finding, in their scientific studies, valid reasons to admit the existence of God. If science, as such, cannot reach God, the scientist, who possesses intelligence whose object is not limited to sensible things, can discover in the world the reasons for affirming a being that surpasses it. Many scientists have made and are making this discovery."

"Every human being, every people with its culture, has its own place in the benevolent eyes of the Catholic—universal—Church, and in the heart of the one who is that Church's Pastor. This is the Gospel of love received from Jesus Christ: it embraces all nations in a spirit of service, bringing them a word of salvation and fraternal help. In the case of Vietnam, everyone knows and appreciates the courage in working, the tenacity in difficulties, the family sense and the other natural virtues of which you give proof. In your country which has cruelly suffered the trials of war, yοu have had to work hard at the rebuilding of the country; yοu have had to make great efforts in order to face the various problems of education, health and so on. The Church takes a lively interest in these efforts marked by solidarity, and she encourages them. She hopes that they will succeed in giving to every individual not only food and education but also the opportunity to develop freely each one's best potentialities, including religious aspiration, and in a climate of peace with the other nations that are seeking, like Vietnam, to live in tranquillity and dignity."

"Right from the beginning of my ministry in St. Peter’s See in Rome, I consider this message [of divine mercy] my special task. Providence has assigned it to me in the present situation of man, the Church and the world. It could be said that precisely this situation assigned that message to me as my task before God."

"The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn."

"The Redeemer suffered in place of man and for man. Every man has his own share in the Redemption. Each one is also called to share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished. He is called to share in that suffering through which all human suffering has also been redeemed. In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ."

"Christians and Muslims, we have many things in common, as believers and as human beings. We live in the same world, marked by many signs of hope, but also by multiple signs of anguish. For us, Abraham is a very model of faith in God, of submission to his will and of confidence in his goodness. We believe in the same God, the one God, the living God, the God who created the world and brings his creatures to their perfection."

"The Jewish religion is not extrinsic, but in a certain way intrinsic to our own religion. Therefore, we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers, and, in a certain way, it can be said that you are our elder brothers."

"We do not pretend that life is all beauty. We are aware of darkness and sin, of poverty and pain. But we know Jesus has conquered sin and passed through his own pain to the glory of the Resurrection. And we live in the light of his Paschal Mystery - the mystery of his Death and Resurrection. “We are an Easter People and Alleluia is our song!”."

"As the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live."

"Drodzy bracia i siostry Kaszubi! Strzeżcie tych wartości i tego dziedzictwa, które stanowią o Waszej tożsamości."

"Science develops best when its concepts and conclusions are integrated into the broader human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value. Scientists cannot, therefore, hold themselves entirely aloof from the sorts of issues dealt with by philosophers and theologians. By devoting to these issues something of the energy and care they give to their research in science, they can help others realize more fully the human potentialities of their discoveries. They can also come to appreciate for themselves that these discoveries cannot be a genuine substitute for knowledge of the truly ultimate. Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish."

"every individual is made in the image of God, insofar as he or she is a rational and free creature capable of knowing God and loving him."

"In the "unity of the two", man and woman are called from the beginning not only to exist "side by side" or "together", but they are also called to exist mutually "one for the other"."

"What is most admirable about the events we witnessed is that all nations spoke out loud: women, youths, men, everybody overcame fear."

"All human activity takes place within a culture and interacts with culture. For an adequate formation of a culture, the involvement of the whole man is required, whereby he exercises his creativity, intelligence, and knowledge of the world and of people. Furthermore, he displays his capacity for self-control, personal sacrifice, solidarity and readiness to promote the common good."

"The liberating message of the Gospel of Life has been put into your hands. And the mission of proclaiming it to the ends of the earth is now passing to your generation. Like the great Apostle Paul, you too must feel the full urgency of the task: "Woe to me if I do not evangelize" (1Cor 9,16). [...] Do not be afraid to go out on the streets and into public places, like the first Apostles who preached Christ and the Good News of salvation in the squares of cities, towns and villages. This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel (Cfr. Rom 1,16). It is the time to preach it from the rooftops (Cfr. Matth 10,27)."

"many women, especially as a result of social and cultural conditioning, do not become fully aware of their dignity. Others are victims of a materialistic and hedonistic outlook which views them as mere objects of pleasure, and does not hesitate to organize the exploitation of women, even of young girls, into a despicable trade. Special concern needs to be shown for these women, particularly by other women who, thanks to their own upbringing and sensitivity, are able to help them discover their own inner worth and resources. Women need to help women, and to find support in the valuable and effective contributions which associations, movements and groups, many of them of a religious character, have proved capable of making in this regard."

"Women have the right to insist that their dignity be respected. At the same time, they have the duty to work for the promotion of the dignity of all persons, men as well as women."

"Man is called to a fullness of life which far exceeds the dimensions of his earthly existence, because it consists in sharing the very life of God. The loftiness of this supernatural vocation reveals the greatness and the inestimable value of human life even in its temporal phase."

"In view of laws which permit abortion and in view of efforts, which here and there have been successful, to legalize euthanasia, movements and initiatives to raise social awareness in defence of life have sprung up in many parts of the world. When, in accordance with their principles, such movements act resolutely, but without resorting to violence, they promote a wider and more profound consciousness of the value of life, and evoke and bring about a more determined commitment to its defence. [...] This situation, with its lights and shadows, ought to make us all fully aware that we are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the "culture of death" and the "culture of life". We find ourselves not only "faced with" but necessarily "in the midst of" this conflict: we are all involved and we all share in it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life."

"There is no evil to be faced that Christ does not face with us. There is no enemy that Christ has not already conquered. There is no cross to bear that Christ has not already borne for us, and does not now bear with us. And on the far side of every cross we find the newness of life in the Holy Spirit, that new life which will reach its fulfillment in the resurrection. This is our faith. This is our witness before the world."

"Surely it is important for America that the moral truths which make freedom possible should be passed on to each new generation. Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought."

"(...) De nouvelles connaissances conduisent à reconnaître dans la théorie de l'évolution plus qu'une hypothèse. Il est en effet remarquable que cette théorie se soit progressivement imposée à l'esprit des chercheurs, à la suite d'une série de découvertes faites dans diverses disciplines du savoir. La convergence, nullement recherchée ou provoquée, des résultats de travaux menés indépendamment les uns des autres, constitue par elle même un argument significatif en faveur de cette théorie."

"Never again war! Never again hatred and intolerance!"

"Remember that you are never alone, Christ is with you on your journey every day of your lives! He has called you and chosen you to live in the freedom of the children of God. Turn to him in prayer and in love. Ask him to grant you the courage and strength to live in this freedom always. Walk with him who is "the Way, the Truth and the Life"!"

"I plead with you--never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid."

"Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece."

"Damnation remains a real possibility, but it is not granted to us, without special divine revelation, to know which human beings are effectively involved in it."

"peace is possible. It needs to be implored from God as his gift, but it also needs to be built day by day with his help, through works of justice and love."

"wars are often the cause of further wars because they fuel deep hatreds, create situations of injustice and trample upon people's dignity and rights. Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore, in addition to causing horrendous damage, they prove ultimately futile. War is a defeat for humanity. Only in peace and through peace can respect for human dignity and its inalienable rights be guaranteed."

"God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: we are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant."

"It can be said, in fact, that research, by exploring the greatest and the smallest, contributes to the glory of God which is reflected in every part of the universe."

"A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members; and among the most vulnerable are surely the unborn and the dying."

"It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal."

"Any procedure which tends to commercialize human organs or to consider them as items of exchange or trade must be considered morally unacceptable, because to use the body as an "object" is to violate the dignity of the human person. Acknowledgement of the unique dignity of the human person has a further underlying consequence: vital organs which occur singly in the body can be removed only after death, that is from the body of someone who is certainly dead. This requirement is self-evident, since to act otherwise would mean intentionally to cause the death of the donor in disposing of his organ."

"It is helpful to recall that the death of the person is a single event, consisting in the total disintegration of that unitary and integrated whole that is the personal self. The death of the person, understood in this primary sense, is an event which no scientific technique or empirical method can identify directly. Human experience shows that once death occurs certain biological signs inevitably follow, which medicine has learnt to recognize with increasing precision. In this sense, the "criteria" for ascertaining death used by medicine today should not be understood as the technical-scientific determination of the exact moment of a person's death, but as a scientifically secure means of identifying the biological signs that a person has indeed died."

"At the beginning of the new millennium, and at the close of the Great Jubilee during which we celebrated the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus and a new stage of the Church's journey begins, our hearts ring out with the words of Jesus when one day, after speaking to the crowds from Simon's boat, he invited the Apostle to "put out into the deep" for a catch: "Duc in altum" (Lk 5:4). Peter and his first companions trusted Christ's words, and cast the nets. "When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish" (Lk 5:6). Duc in altum! These words ring out for us today, and they invite us to remember the past with gratitude, to live the present with enthusiasm and to look forward to the future with confidence: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Heb 13:8)."

"The twentieth century was the great century of Christian martyrs, and this is true both in the Catholic Church and in other Churches and ecclesial communities."

"Could I forget that the event [Mehmet Ali Ağca’s assassination attempt] in Saint Peter's Square took place on the day and at the hour when the first appearance of the Mother of Christ to the poor little peasants has been remembered for over sixty years at Fatima in Portugal? For, in everything that happened to me on that very day, I felt that extraordinary motherly protection and care, which turned out to be stronger than the deadly bullet."

"I have looked for you. Now you have come to me. And I thank you."

"God assigns as a duty to every man the dignity of every woman."

"When you wonder about the mystery of yourself, look to Christ who gives you the meaning of life. When you wonder what it means to be a mature person, look to Christ who is the fullness of humanity. And when you wonder about your role in the future of the world and of the United States, look to Christ."

"How could man have such utter contempt for man? Because he had reached the point of contempt for God."

"Young people of every continent, do not be afraid to be the saints of the new millennium! Be contemplative, love prayer; be coherent with your faith and generous in the service of your brothers and sisters, be active members of the Church and builders of peace."

"I give thanks to God for the presence and help of cardinal Ratzinger, who is a trusted friend."

"Rasizm jest grzechem, który stanowi poważną obrazę Boga."

"The disposition to listen to the Truth (that is, obedience) and the readiness to act in the Truth constitute the true dignity of the human person."

"Jesus came into the world to reveal the whole dignity and nobility of the search for God, which is the deepest need of the human soul, and to meet the search halfway."

"the Church took it upon herself to draw attention to the unjust distribution of goods, not only between different social groupings but between different regions of the world. In fact, the gap became increasingly evident between the rich North, which was growing richer, and the poor South, which continued to be exploited and penalized in many ways even after the end of the colonial era. Instead of diminishing, the poverty of the South was constantly increasing. Such are the consequences of unbridled capitalism, which makes the rich ever richer while forcing the poor into conditions of growing degradation."

"Don’t you think that the irresponsible behavior of men is caused by women?"

"John Paul had sought rapprochement with Islam, which he appeared to view as a strategic ally in the struggle for "family values" and post-Enlightenment thinking; during his pontificate, the Vatican had teamed up with Islamic governments at international human rights conferences to thwart European proposals for Third World birth control and other modernist evils."

"Poland proved a lightning rod for the unpopularity of Communist regimes, with the added ingredients of traditional hostility to Russia and a strong national Christian commitment. This was shown in 1979 when John Paul II, the Polish Pope elected in 1978, drew millions on his ‘pilgrimage’ to the country. John Paul was at once theologically highly conservative and determined to challenge Communism as an unwelcome excrescence, especially in Poland. While a Cardinal there, he had met opposition leaders in 1976, and his stance was important in a major shift from the earlier position of the Catholic hierarchy there. In the 1960s, this hierarchy had sought better relations with the regime, but now, under John Paul, there was to be no compromise with Marxism and, instead, an affirmation of the authority of the Church. The strength of Catholic devotion in Poland was shown in public religious services. In turn, via Bulgarian intermediaries, the KGB may have been involved in the attempted assassination of the Pope in Rome in 1981. Although far from on the same scale or as public, Christian commitment and activity was also seen elsewhere in the Communist Bloc. Indeed, in this period, the Council for Religious Affairs in the Soviet Union received frequent complaints on this head from local agents."

"Imagine a land in which ideal love is a reality and ideal sex; simultaneous climax between a loving couple, and in this land all couples are married. No barriers to perfect self-giving; no barriers to childbirth; no condoms, IUDs or pills. Abortion is illegal too. This land does not exist, but these ideals do in the work and thought of Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II. This is a film about what happens when those ideals clash with reality."

"But trying to stop all abortions is just one way the Vatican is trying to impose its sexual values across the world. It's a campaign that draws passion and motivation from the Pope from Poland, John Paul II, and a vision of womanhood rooted in his personal history. In Kalwaria, close to the Pope's home town. They're setting off on a burial, the burial of the Virgin Mary. 74 years ago, this ceremony helped shape the Pope's vision of womanhood. The effigy, carried miles to its final resting place. Out of devotion to the ultimate mother. For John Paul, the virgin was to be the image of the ideal woman, a mother to all, and to him when, aged 8, he lost his own mother."

"John Paul's thought and writing would be haunted by this image of perfect motherhood. As a young priest Karol Wojtyla studied in Krakow, a city at once modern and medieval; critics say – like his thinking. He took a special interest in the philosophy of love, the family, marriage and sex. He gave friends and students in his flock advice on relationships."

"In 1960, now a bishop, he wrote an astonishingly frank book about love and marriage. It suggested that for a married man and woman: "climax must be reached in harmony" though he did add: "as far as possible." But although this was the age of the pill, Wojtyla also condemned contraception, pills, IUDs and condoms: "All immoral he said. All harmful for the health." Incredibly as it now seems, the Vatican almost endorsed the pill in the 60s, after all, there was no explicit ban on contraction in the Bible. But the then Pope, Paul VIth, received a gift from Krakow's Karol Wojtyla, a report attacking contraception and promoting natural family planning. The dismay of liberal Catholics, Pope Paul VIth using arguments Wojtyla had advocated, reaffirmed the ban on contraception. Karol Wojtyla, who'd been made Cardinal by a grateful Paul VIth, had stood against the tide of Catholic opinion and won. And once elected Pope, 25 years ago this week, he would use his extraordinary popularity to stand against the tide of world opinion, condemning contraction and the trend to legalise abortion."

"As well as sympathetic doubters there have been harsh critics of John Paul's vision of love and responsibility. On their view, he is a man who had never been close to a woman and so fell victim not to ideals but to stereotypes. A vision of women always defined by their reproductive powers –mother, wife, temptress. Perhaps the Pope's most powerful opponent for many years was Nafis Sadik, former head of the United Nations Population Fund. She had a face to face meeting with the Pope in 1994 to discuss women's rights and church teaching."

"Early in the Pope's reign he had a close ally in US President Ronald Reagan, both determined to end communism and support family values. Now President George W. Bush, a born again Christian, is reviving the alliance. He's pleased the Pope by stopping US aid for foreign organisations the US considers as promoting abortion, and by cutting off 34 million dollars of funding for the United Nations Population Fund and its family planning programmes. In Rome the ailing John Paul is still leading the fight, clearly frail but creating new saints, enforcing church doctrine and appointing new cardinals who will continue his work. But since the early days of his reign the world has been facing a new and terrible crisis."

"I was on the terrace of the Secretariat of State, with colleagues and Archbishop Agostino Casaroli. His first line was: "Never would I have thought that the conclave would choose a cardinal from a diocese beyond the Iron Curtain!" We all asked him many questions, and Casaroli explained that he was a "man of vision". He concluded: he will bring novelty, but he will be a good Pope."

"When Pope John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw airport he began the process by which communism in Poland – and ultimately elsewhere in Europe – would come to an end."

"The present Pope is a man I hold in high regard. To begin with, our somewhat similar backgrounds give us an immediate common ground. The first time we met, he struck me as a very practical sort of person, very broad-minded and open. I have no doubt he is a great spiritual leader. Any man who can call out "Brother" to his would-be assassin, as Pope John Paul did, must be a highly evolved spiritual practicioner."

"When the Pope's mother died, and one day his father took him here to Kalwaria and he pointed to the shire of our lady, to the picture of our lady of Kalwaria and he said Karol, from now on, she will be your mother, and he took it so seriously. He came here and he talked to her like he was talk to his earthly mum."

"Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you! And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up."

"Cardinal Sandri: At one point, John Paul II was unable to speak because he had undergone a tracheotomy. A speech therapist was called in to help the Pontiff practise, as he had to learn how to use his voice and articulate words again. Journalist: The image of John Paul II trying to speak at the Angelus on 30 March 2005 and not being able to do so remains etched in the collective memory... Cardinal Sandri: He had done his exercises, rehearsed the text, and when he appeared at the window, perhaps due to emotion, his voice failed him, and this caused him great suffering. But all this was ultimately the result of Parkinson's, a degenerative disease that had made it increasingly difficult for him to speak and could only get worse."

"Pope John Paul II was received in Israel with enthusiasm that sometimes bordered on the excitement generally reserved for pop stars. He radiated warmth. Pope Benedict XVI, in contrast, comes across as restrained, almost cold."

"The American intelligence agencies strengthened contact with political dissenters in eastern Europe. Agents brought messages of support and helped to publicise cases of official abuse. They also brought money. Ronald Reagan, President from 1980 to 1988, wanted to do what he could to pull down the Iron Curtain shrouding eastern Europe. He had an ally in Pope John Paul II, who as Karol Wojtyła had been Archbishop of Kraków until 1978. In the past it had been difficult for rebels against communism to subsist without gainful employment because the authorities might bring charges of ‘parasitism’. The CIA and the Vatican got to work at offering discreet assistance. Informal bodies, some of them being tiny in membership and short of funds, were doing the same. This was exactly what the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was doing to help the world communist movement. Thus, as dollars arrived in Rome from Moscow, dollars departed Rome and Washington for Warsaw. The finance helped, but it was not the crucial factor in weakening communism in eastern Europe. If money had been the key to political change, Italy would long ago have acquired a communist government (and the Pope would have been ejected from the Vatican). Financial subventions could only accelerate an existing motion. The same had been true in 1917: ‘German gold’ had been an aid to the Bolsheviks in preparing to seize power but nothing like the main resource at their disposal."

"By the time John Paul II was elected to the papacy in 1978, he had followed several vocations and avocations-student, laborer in a stone quarry, actor, playwright, philologist, seminarian, mystic, pastor and philosopher. These gave him a particularly rich background for the work he was destined to do in the Church. Not only did he develop his formidable intellectual gifts through teaching in philosophy and moral theology, but he gained invaluable experience of ordinary life through work during the war as a laborer and in a different way as a parish priest and youth counselor. He acquired a deep respect for manual labor and the dignity of the ordinary man. So he wrote in a poem called ‘Participation: How splendid these men, no airs, no graces, I know you, look into your hearts, No pretense stands between us, Some hands are for toil, some for the cross."

"The acting career of Karol Wojtyla began in high school between 1934 and 1938 and continued during the war years. At the age of 19 years he wrote his first play, David, which was quickly followed in the spring and summer of 1940 with Job and Jeremiah. As a result of the war, the theater was forced to go underground. Wartime limitations gave rise to the Rhapsodic Theater (1941), which was characterized by a minimum of scenery and emphasis on the spoken word. Such a theater of the word suited well the inclinations of both his collaborator, Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, and Wojtyla, two of the five actors of the new Rhapsodic Theater. It was, above all, a theater of the inner self. Boleslaw Taborski, the translator of his plays, identifies some key characteristics of the dramatic works of the future Pope. ‘In his plays, as in his poems, he is concerned not so much with external events as with exploring man’s soul: it is there that the action unfolds.’ He finds a certain uniformity in themes and what he calls ‘moral import.’ Even as a nineteen-year-old, Wojtyla’s work was remarkably mature with an inner coherence. He presented a ‘vision of man’s place on earth and in the divine plan of creation.’ He also aimed at the ‘revaluation of words,’ which had become debased by various ideologies."

"Under John Paul II, disciplinary actions against dissident theologians and priests increased dramatically, and the theological arguments advanced to support celibacy and to reject women’s ordination, artificial contraception, abortion, and NRTS became more entangled. This interpenetration of theological arguments meant that the Church found itself embroiled in an escalating series of crises from the 1960s onward, as increasingly its views on sexual morality no longer coincided with secular views."

"As I stand here today before this incredible crowd, this faithful nation, we can still hear those voices that echo through history. Their message is as true today as ever. The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out "We want God." Together, with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God. And with that powerful declaration of who you are, you came to understand what to do and how to live. You stood in solidarity against oppression, against a lawless secret police, against a cruel and wicked system that impoverished your cities and your souls. And you won. Poland prevailed. Poland will always prevail."