Diplomats Of The Holy See

"In Japan, there is in reality a great need for religious values, there are some faithful who practice two different religions. But the Church is not able to satisfy this thirst for religion because its strategy is mistaken: the Church must not limit itself to teaching Catholic doctrine, faith, and traditions, but must find a way to connect these with the culture and everyday problems of the Japanese, avoiding the fracture between the teaching of doctrine and everyday life in Japan. Obviously, this is an extremely difficult task."

"Christ has infinite patience with us. When we have doubts and fears, He never stops reaching out to us with his love. He wants us to love Him back, he wants us to trust him completely. We sometimes lack faith because the realities of the world press in on us: a financial situation, a job situation, a difficulty in the family, and other factors. When these concerns cloud our hearts, we begin to lose the clear vision of faith that frees us. Trust Christ! Have faith! Do not be afraid to trust Christ completely, offering Him your worries and fears, your joys and hopes. Jesus, I trust in you! This is the great exclamation of the Church. It is only through trust that you will begin to experience the depths of Christ's love for you. And when you begin to experience this love, deeply and profoundly in your lives, you cannot help but see the world around you differently."

"It would make no sense whatsoever to say, "Well, we shouldn’t honor Catholics who present the antithesis of our Catholic doctrine, but there’s really no problem whatsoever provided the person’s not a Catholic," that evades common sense."

"You have to differentiate between the papacy as an institution and the person of the incumbent. It certainly was a revolutionary step… And it’s only now that we see the importance and huge opportunities that have been opened up by this step. As I have said before, it was not easy for me personally, but the question is not whether it’s easy but rather that I have to accept and come to terms with this decision. And in this respect also I’m at peace with myself."

"Many cardinals today would sympathize with Angelo Scola as Pope."

"Seeing in 2013 the warm greeting of Gustavo Raffi, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, I became certain that, more than a welcome to Bergoglio, it was a goodbye for Pope Ratzinger!"

"[About the motu proprio Traditionis custodes] It brokes Pope Benedict’s heart."

"Let's consider the history of the Jesuits. That is something I am studying now with great care. In fact, if you would like to know the synthesis of my thought, it is this: What we are now seeing is the triumph of a 60-year-old plan, the successful execution of a well-thought out plan to bring a new sort of thinking into the heart of the Church, a thinking rooted in elements of Liberation Theology containing strands of Marxism, little interested in traditional Catholic liturgy or morality or theology, but rather focused on ‘praxis’ in the field of social justice. And now this plan has achieved one of its supreme goals, with a Jesuit on the See of Peter."

"In continuing to celebrate the Mass of Pope Saint Pius V no priest performs any act of disobedience, but on the contrary he exercises his right sanctioned by God, which not even the Pope can revoke. Whoever has the power to offer the Holy Sacrifice has the right to celebrate it in the ancient rite, as it was solemnly proclaimed by Saint Pius V in the Apostolic Constitution Quo Primum, promulgating the Tridentine Liturgy."

"The American people are mature and have now understood how much the mainstream media does not want to spread the truth but seeks to silence and distort it, spreading the lie that is useful for the purposes of their masters. However, it is important that the good – who are the majority – wake up from their sluggishness and do not accept being deceived by a minority of dishonest people with unavowable purposes. It is necessary that the good, the children of light, come together and make their voices heard. What more effective way is there to do this, Mr. President, than by prayer, asking the Lord to protect you, the United States, and all of humanity from this enormous attack of the Enemy? Before the power of prayer, the deceptions of the children of darkness will collapse, their plots will be revealed, their betrayal will be shown, their frightening power will end in nothing, brought to light and exposed for what it is: an infernal deception."

"...the most telling aspect of the First Crusade was that this mighty wave of military enthusiasm owed nothing whatever to any king or emperor. The Pope had summoned the chivalry of Europe round the banner of the cross and St Peter, to overwhelming effect. No secular ruler could have done as much, and there could be no more eloquent demonstration of the centrality of the reformed papacy in the religious imagination of medieval Europe."

"Urban spoke with fervour and with all the art of a great orator. The response was immediate and tremendous. Cries of 'Deus le volt!'—'God wills it!'—interrupted the speech. Scarcely had the Pope ended his words before the Bishop of Le Puy rose from his seat and, kneeling before the throne, begged permission to join in the holy expedition. Hundreds crowded up to follow his example. Then the Cardinal Gregory fell on his knees and loudly repeated the Confiteor; and all the vast audience echoed it after him. When the prayer was over Urban rose once more and pronounced the absolution and bade his hearers go home."

"It was at Clermont where, before a Council of several hundred prelates and thousands of clergy and laymen, he delivered a plea for united Christendom, a holy unity which would liberate the precious Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre, a Christendom which would defeat and throw off the shameful yoke of oppression. He spoke well, his theme was magnificent, and the moment was propitious. ... His audience wept and groaned in sympathy and with the vast sorrow and deep anger a mighty enthusiasm was born. ... "Who will avenge these wrongs?" cried the Pope with all the power of a flaming conscience. "On you rests this duty...on you!" "God wills it!" shouted his audience in wild excitement. "God wills it." The First Crusade was born."

"Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. He was a pacifist and had more in common with Gandhi, perhaps, than with Pope Urban."

"The church shall be catholic, chaste and free: catholic in faith and the communion of saints, chaste from all contagion of evil, and free from all secular power."

"Altars are profaned and broken, Christians tortured, women violated. ... Who will avenge these wrongs? On you, rests this duty, on you. ... That which above all other thoughts should stir you most is the Holy Sepulchre of the Savior and the Holy Places, ravaged and profaned by an impure race. Valiant soldiers, descendants of those who never know defeat, make your way to the Holy Sepulchre and tear the Holy Land from the grasp of this abominable nation."

"For what, in all the world, is more common than love? What state, what little town, what family lacks examples? Who, that has reached his thirtieth year, has not endured some villainy for love’s sake? I conjecture from myself whom love has sent into a thousand perils, and I thank the Gods above that I have a thousand times escaped the ambushes prepared for me; more fortunate in my star than Mars whom Vulcan took with Venus, and caught them in an iron net, and displayed them, as a laughing-stock, to the other Gods."

"You ask a thing ill-suited to my years, to yours both offensive and disgusting. For how can it become me, who am near forty, to write of love, or you, that are in your fifties, to read of it. That is a subject which delights young minds, and demands a tender heart. Old men are as fitted to tales of love as young men are to tales of prudence. Nor is there anything uglier than old age pursuing love, but lacking strength. Certainly you will sometimes find old men in love,—loved again, never; matrons and girls alike despise old age. No man’s love will hold a woman, but his whom she has seen in the flower of his youth. And if you hear aught to the contrary, there’s a lie behind it. Indeed I know, to write of love does not beseem me, who have already passed the noonday of life and am carried on towards evening; but it dishonours you who ask no less than me who write."

"Desirous that our venerable city be preserved in its dignity and splendor, we must attend to its care with the greatest vigilance. Not only the basilicas, churches, and religious sites, in which many relics of the saints reside, but also the ancient buildings and their ruins should be handed down to posterity, as these confer upon the city its most beautiful adornment and its greatest charm; they attest to ancient virtues and encourage us to emulate their glorious example."

"Religion, and it can merge into nationalism as orthodoxy does with the Serbs and the Russians, offers both a cause worth dying for and the promise of eternal life. The crusaders did not leave their homes all over Europe and make the long and dangerous journey to the Holy Land just to acquire loot and land. There was more and better to be had much closer to home. They were driven by what they thought was a divine mission, to retrieve the land where Christ had once lived for Christendom. Many crusaders – kings such as Richard I of England, the Lionheart, and Philip II of France and great landed magnates – left behind properties, position and families and many never returned. Egged on by religious leaders such as Pope Gregory VII, who reminded the faithful of the passage from the Book of Jeremiah ‘Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood’, they killed indiscriminately those they thought of as infidels. In the massacres in Jerusalem in 1099 the streets were said to have run with blood, in some places up to the knees of the crusaders’ horses. ‘None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared,’ said a contemporary account."

"As a mere constellation of talent in different fields Anselm, Gregory VII and William the Conqueror were the greatest men in Europe during this period... William and Gregory were men of action of a kind rare at any time, but almost unknown in the Middle Ages: they were creators who dealt intuitively with confused situations, having little in precedent or business routine or learned construction to guide them. Gregory had an energy of purpose and clarity of vision in practical affairs for which no parallel can be found in these centuries."

"The reconciliation was short-lived. After being excommunicated a second time Henry crossed the Alps with his army and replaced Gregory with an “antipope” of his own. But the events themselves matter less than the myth that grew up around them. During the German Reformation Henry was lionized as the defender of national rights and the scourge of the Catholic pope, often being dubbed “the first Protestant.” And during Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s struggle to rein in the Catholic church, he famously declared in the Reichstag on May 14, 1872: “We will not go to Canossa, neither in body nor in spirit.” He was voicing the new German Reich’s resolve to accept no outside interference in its affairs—political or religious. As a result Henry IV shivering outside the gates of Canossa became a familiar figure in late-nineteenth-century German art; the phrase “to go to Canossa” (nach Canossa gehen) entered the language as a synonym for craven surrender— almost the equivalent of “Munich” to the British and Americans."

"The importance of status is vividly illustrated by perhaps the most celebrated summit in German history: the meeting at Canossa in 1077 between Pope Gregory VII and Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. In German this is known as der Canossagang, the journey to Canossa; more aptly in Italian as l’umiliazione di Canossa, for it was truly a humiliation. In the Investiture Controversy—the power struggle between pope and emperor over the right to appoint bishops—Henry had renounced Gregory as pope, only to find himself excommunicated. This papal edict not only imperilled Henry’s immortal soul, it also laid him open to revolt by the German nobility. He sought a meeting with Gregory who, fearing violence, retreated to the castle of Canossa, in safe territory south of Parma. This forced the emperor to come to him. What exactly happened is shrouded in legend, but supposedly Henry arrived in the depths of winter, barefoot and in a pilgrim’s hair shirt, only to be kept waiting by Gregory for three days. When he was finally admitted to the castle on January 28, 1077, the emperor knelt before the pope and begged forgiveness. He was absolved and the two most powerful figures in Christendom then shared the Mass."

"Dilexi iustitiam et odi iniquitatem; propterea morior in exilio."

"That it has pleased God to make Holy Scripture obscure in certain places lest, if it were perfectly clear to all, it might be vulgarized and subjected to disrespect or be so misunderstood by people of limited intelligence as to lead them into error."

"Porro subesse Romano Pontifici omni humanae creaturae declaramus dicimus, definimus et pronunciamus omnino esse de necessitate salutis."

"In hac ejusque potestate duos esse gladios, spiritualem videlicet et temporalem, evangelicis dictis instruimur. […] Uterque ergo est in potestate ecclesiae, spiritualis scilicet gladius et materialis. Sed is quidem pro ecclesia, ille vero ab ecclesia exercendus, ille sacerdotis, is manu regum et militum, sed ad nutum et patientiam sacerdotis."

"Sive ergo Graeci sive alii se dicant Petro ejusque successoribus non esse commissos: fateantur necesse est, se de ovibus Christi non esse, dicente Domino in Joanne, unum ovile et unicum esse pastorem."

"Unam sanctam ecclesiam catholicam et ipsam apostolicam urgente fide credere cogimur et tenere, nosque hanc frmiter credimus et simpliciter confitemur, extra quam nec salus est, nec remissio peccatorum,"

"Priestly celibacy has been guarded by the Church for centuries as a brilliant jewel, and retains its value undiminished even in our time when the outlook of men and the state of the world have undergone such profound changes."

"It is as if from some mysterious crack, no, it is not mysterious, from some crack the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God."

"I for one find it much easier to sympathise with the Arnoldian gloom of Paul looking quietly at the ruin of the Church than with the glad-handing U2 world-tour optimism of St. John Paul II,"

"Was Paul VI's papacy a heroic one? In a way, I think the answer is yes. But his heroism was essentially tragic."

"With regard to man's innate drives and emotions, responsible parenthood means that man's reason and will must exert control over them."

"Married love is also faithful and exclusive of all other, and this until death."

"The marriage of those who have been baptized is, in addition, invested with the dignity of a sacramental sign of grace, for it represents the union of Christ and His Church."

"The question of human procreation, like every other question which touches human life, involves more than the limited aspects specific to such disciplines as biology, psychology, demography or sociology."

"No member of the faithful could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her magisterium to interpret the natural moral law"

"The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator. It has always been a source of great joy to them, even though it sometimes entails many difficulties and hardships."

"The post is unique. It brings great solitude. I was solitary before, but now my solitariness becomes complete and awesome. Hence the dizziness, the vertigo. Like a statue on a plinth — that is how I live now. Jesus was also alone on the cross. We hear that he expressed his desolation by crying out, Eloi, Eloi. My solitude will grow. I need have no fears: I should not seek outside help to absolve me from my duty; my duty is to plan, decide, assume every responsibility for guiding others, even when it seems illogical and perhaps absurd. And to suffer alone. The consolation of confiding in others will be rare and discreet: the depths of the spirit remain within me. Me and God. The colloquy with God must be full and endless"

"it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. These reasons include: the example recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing his Apostles only from among men; the constant practice of the Church, which has imitated Christ in choosing only men; and her living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God's plan for his Church."

"If evils increase, the devotion of the People of God should also increase."

"We find sin the perversion of human freedom, and the deep cause of death, because it is separation from God, the source of life...and then, in its turn, the occasion and effect of an intervention in us and in our world of an obscure agent, the Devil. Evil is not merely a lack of something, but an effective agent, a living spiritual being, perverted and perverting. A terrible reality. Mysterious and frightening. It is contrary to the teaching of the Bible and the Church to refuse to recognize the existence of such a reality, or to regard it as a principle in itself which does not draw its origin from God like every other creature; or to explain it as a pseudoreality, a conceptual and fanciful personification of the unknown causes of our misfortunes."