Carlo Maria Martini

"Greater familiarity of European men and women with the Sacred Scriptures leads towards that experience of burning fire in the heart which was experienced by the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. The Bible read and prayed, in particular by young people, is the book of the future for the European continent."

"Corriere della Sera reader: "I am an atheist, but I see beauty all around me." Cardinal Martini: "I am Catholic and you are an atheist, but ultimately we are united by the same wonder at creation.""

"Christ's resurrection is not a miracle. The God who through the Son assumed human nature, after his death on the cross reassumes his divine and immortal nature."

"The Bible speaks of God's infinite greatness, even of His immeasurability, of the fact that God is immensely greater than our hearts, our beings, our spirits. And so it would come as no surprise if data were to emerge about other planets being inhabited by other people; this would not affect the message of the Bible in any way."

"Gianna Beretta Molla was a precious witness of conjugal and family spirituality, an authentic path of holiness."

"Television has made it clear that my neighbour has no boundaries. Even in the Gospel, the neighbour in the parable of the Good Samaritan transcends boundaries, but television has made this clear to us..."

"Halloween is a type of celebration that is foreign to our tradition but has immense value and should be continued. The cult of the dead is part of our history: it is a time when hope for eternity is born. It is a time when the Lord makes us understand that life is more than just this earthly existence."

"I personally believe that God created us man and woman and that therefore traditional moral doctrine has good reasons on this point. Of course, I am prepared to admit that in some cases good faith, lived experience, contracted habits, the unconscious and probably even a certain native inclination may lead one to choose for oneself a type of life with a same-sex partner. In today's world, such behaviour can therefore be neither demonised nor ostracised."

"I am also prepared to admit the value of an enduring friendship and faithfulness between two persons of the same sex. Friendship has always been held in great honour in the ancient world, perhaps more so than today, even though it was mostly understood in the context of that transcending of the purely physical sphere I mentioned above, to be a union of minds and hearts."

"I believe that each of us has a non-believer and a believer in us, who talk to each other inside, questioning each other, constantly sending pointed and disturbing questions back to each other. The non-believer in me disquiets the believer in me and vice versa."

"Often the language used to talk about God is stunted and feeble, sometimes awkward, sometimes generic; one easily divides into verticalists and horizontalists, traditionalists and progressives, one makes judgements that, in the light of the Gospel, are at least inadequate."

"Speaking of Jesus accompanies his actions and interprets them: the lordship of God is demonstrated through works and illustrated through words. [...] to authentically proclaim the Gospel it is necessary to some extent to veil it."

"Jesus' parable retains all its enigmatic charge, it leaves the listener with the task of understanding it, it challenges him and forces him to question himself, it involves him in the first person and engages him in the search for meaning. [...] the parables are an act of courtesy, of respect for human freedom, of condescension, almost of tenderness."

"The rhythms of the knowledge that comes from faith are slow. That is why revelation must also be hidden, veiled. Man's freedom is unable to bear the full weight of God's revelation. Thus the parables spring from the heart of Jesus urgency of the gospel; they are spontaneous, not artificial, they spring from life itself. The parables are, in this perspective, one of the most beautiful fruits of the mystery of the Incarnation, the frontier to which language is pushed by the Son of God, so that it may be adapted to communicate the mystery of the Kingdom in respect to the concrete situation of man."

"A drop of the divine is in every man. We are the dissimilar leaves of a single tree. It is not for me to distinguish the better leaves. Christ said: do not judge."

"(About Saint Ignatius of Loyola) He said it himself, he sinned long and hard, to quote Luther; his conversion was total, his expiation very long, accompanied by a love of life and works, including the foundation of a Company that after 400 years is still one of the pillars of our Church."

"A voice like Pope Francis's, and before that the voice that was Cardinal Martini's in Milan, manages to touch chords that exist but that the everyday fails to prompt. Bergoglio's attention to the world of non-believers, for example, was the global dimension of something we had already seen with Martini and his chair of non-believers, that experiment in the Church that aroused much controversy from a part of the clergy and the faithful. It was an occasion, the one proposed by the cardinal of Milan, that was received with more attention precisely by the secular world than by the Church. With Pope Francis the same thing happened."