Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it.

The term ‘person’ has been coined to signify that a man cannot be wholly contained within the concept ‘individual member of the species’, but that there is something more to him, a particular richness and...

It is Jesus 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...

Original sin is not only the violation of a positive command … but … attempts … to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who...

Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christ’s Cross at the center of that history? . . . But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and–to repeat...

The true Christian can nurture a trustful optimism, because he is certain of not walking alone. In sending us Jesus, the eternal Son made man, God has drawn near to each of us. In Christ...

A person is an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love

The Gospel lives in conversation with culture, and if the Church holds back from the culture, the Gospel itself falls silent. Therefore, we must be fearless in crossing the threshold of the communication and information...

Love consists of a commitment which limits one’s freedom – it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one’s freedom on behalf of another.

Those who devote themselves to the study of Sacred Scripture should always remember that the various hermeneutical approaches have their own philosophical underpinnings, which need to be carefully evaluated before they are applied to the...

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

There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too...

He was alone in his wonderment,amoung creatures incapable of wonder–for them it was enough to exist and go their way.

The ethos of redemption is realized in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.

A person is an objective entity, which as a definite subject has the closest contacts with the whole (external) world and is most intimately involved with it precisely because of its inwardness, its interior life.

Know what you are talking about.

The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.

…all that is carried alongby the stream’s silvery cascade,rhythmically falling from the mountain,carried by its own current–carried where?

…if desire is predominant it can deform love between man and woman and rob them both of it.

Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create.

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.

Merry Christmas!

Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God’s prior and original gift of things that are....

It must not be forgotten that reason too needs to be sustained in all its searching by trusting dialogue and sincere friendship. A climate of suspicion and distrust, which can beset speculative research, ignores the...

The human being is single, unique, and unrepeatable, someone thought of and chosen from eternity, someone called and identified by name

Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.

Truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself.

Treating a person as a means to an end, and an end moreover which in this case is pleasure, the maximization of pleasure, will always stand in the way of love.

No one else can want for me. No one can substitute his act of will for mine. It does sometimes happen that someone very much wants me to want what he wants. This is the...

Learning to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity better.

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...

Life is entrusted to man as a treasure which must not be squandered, as a talent which must be used well.

Do not be afraid to take a chance on peace, to teach peace, to live peace…Peace will be the last word of history.

A person’s rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.

The lust of the flesh directs these desires [of personal union], however, to satisfaction of the body, often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons.

craftsman”? The one who creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothing—ex nihilo sui et subiecti, as the Latin puts it—and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs...

Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.

When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the...

Friendship, as has been said, consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person’s good.

A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.

None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.

Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which is soars to the truth.

Men are like wine-some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.

Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.

God allows man to learn His supernatural ends, but the decision to strive towards an end, the choice of course, is left to man’s free will. God does not redeem man against his will.

True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature...

In suffocating the voice of conscience, passion carries with itself a restlessness of the body and the senses: it is the restlessness of the “external man.” When the internal man has been reduced to silence,...

Prayer finds its source in God’s holiness and it is at the same time our response to this holiness.

Limitation of one’s freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love.

Faced with today’s 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. I...