Vito Mancuso

"Always let you work on your inner temple, therein lies great beauty."

"In every human being there is a divine dimension. There is a heart within a heart, [which is] the thought that precedes the words."

"If a believer is absolutely sure that his or her own is the only way to salvation, then any other sacred book will be seen as a threat. If, on the other hand, we start from the idea that God is not the property of any one person and that everyone is searching for him, then we can understand that all religions have something to learn from each other. This is the wisest and most ancient point of view, because it unites us in the humble awareness of having to deal with mysteries that are too great, such as death, suffering or the soul. Those who assume this posture are happy with pluralism."

"The term theology is ill-suited to the thought and, I would even say, the life of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Rather, another term needs to be coined to adequately illustrate his having spoken of God, his having represented him, his having been (to quote the famous definition of the Pope given by St Catherine of Siena) 'the sweet Christ on earth'. This neologism, not beautiful but in my opinion effective, is the following: theopathy. Not theo-logy, but theo-pathy. Just as one speaks of sympathy and empathy to mark the resonance of emotion when faced with another human being or a life situation, so, for the thought of God expressed by Pope Francis his writings and especially in his life, one must speak of theo-pathy. He did not think God, he suffered him. It was not logic, it was rather passion that constituted the seal of his encounter with the Mystery of the world capable of producing Love to which we traditionally refer by saying God."

"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."