Enzo Bianchi

"For us Christians, rituals are not enough; we need adherence of the heart and intellect. It is not enough to repeat formulas whose meaning is unknown: those who pray must understand what they are saying, and in this sense the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council was fundamental for a more thoughtful faith, one that is not merely devotion."

"Hans Urs von Balthasar was a multifaceted and unique personality, probably a man greater than the times in which he lived: musician, Germanist, man of letters, philosopher, theologian, publisher, translator, spiritual master, lecturer, he was the author of a vast theological output in which he engaged in dialogue with the cultural heritage of the West."

"The experience of faith is an experience of beauty, of an encounter that is as real as it is indescribable, of a presence that is more intimate to us than our own innermost being. And it is an experience that also involves the body and the senses. In the East, the saint is the man with the luminous face, whose body exudes perfume, whose physicality is now an event of beauty and communion. Of course, it would be wrong to confuse the psychological and emotional with the spiritual, but the spiritual traverses the psychic and involves the senses of the body."

"My childhood prayer is one I would never say today: God knows how many candles I lit before an exam or a test at school. It was a spontaneous, sincere way of praying, but today I practise other forms of prayer."

"When political forces generously offer legal protection or financial support to churches, they are actually working for their own benefit. (I, 1)"

"Our society is increasingly pluralistic in terms of religion, morals and customs: Christianity must live and find its place in it without hostility or creating enemies. (I, 2)"

"The Gospel, in fact, inspires the historical action of Christians, but it is in history itself that it becomes understandable. The ethos is not given once and for all, it is not handed down from above or contained in books, but is constantly elaborated in history, in the journey made alongside and together with other people. (I, 5)"

"Not technical solutions, not political recipes, but the voice of pastors will be all the more authoritative the more it is capable of being the voice of the Gospel and not of technical responses to the implementation of Gospel demands. (II, 4)"

"One never encounters Islam or a religion, but rather men and women who belong to particular religious traditions and for whom this belonging is one aspect of a multifaceted and not monolithic identity. (II, 5)"

"In order that universalism does not degenerate into totalitarianism, it must be conceived as a universal need for the other and expressed as a vocation to exile, to diaspora, to dispersion among peoples and cultures: the Christian faith cannot coincide with a culture or an ethnicity or a system of thought. It is transcultural and must therefore be accompanied by a work of deculturation so as not to risk passing off as gospel what is cultural form. (III, 2)"

"Jesus, our bliss, teaches us a path to happiness, opening up before us every day the ways to happiness that every human being longs for."

"The saint is the new man, the one who lives according to the model left by Jesus Christ; he is the man of the beatitudes; he is the man who has stripped himself of his selfishness and lives for God and others; he is the transfigured man. He is the truly and fully human man."

"The beatitudes firmly root those who hear them in the present, while at the same time opening them to a future of hope. They are addressed to people who are in difficult human conditions, experiencing trials and contradictions: it is in this state that they discover that they are the recipients of God's action, which is already today an occasion for happiness."