BL. POPE JOHN PAUL II, 18 May 1920 – 2 April 2005, Birth name: Karol Wojtyla; 264th Pope: 16 Oct 1978- 2 Apr 2005 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 voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society. Be not afraid. Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch. “The worst prison would be a closed heart.” “Do not be afraid to take a chance on peace, to teach peace, to live peace...Peace will be the last word of history.” “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 revolution now taking place.” “ This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel. It is the time to preach it from the rooftops. Do not be afraid to break out of comfortable and routine modes of living in order to take up the challenge of making Christ known in the modern metropolis. ” “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 He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, makng the world more human and more fraternal.” “Christ is the sacrament of the invisible God - a sacrament that indicates presence. God is with us.” And Christ, through His own salvific suffering, is very much present in every human suffering, and can act from within that suffering by the powers of His Spirit of truth, His consoling spirit. Do not be afraid to be saints. Follow Jesus Christ who is the source of freedom and light. Be open to the Lord so that He may lighten all your ways. The saints have always been the source and origin of renewal in the most difficult moments in the Church’s history. “Ask yourselves, young people, about the love of Christ. Acknowledge His voice resounding in the temple of your heart. Return His bright and penetrating glance which opens the paths of your life to the horizons of the Church’s mission. It is a taxing mission, today more than ever, to teach men the truth about themselves, about their end, their destiny, and to show faithful souls the unspeakable riches of the love of Christ. Do not be afraid of the radicalness of His demands, because Jesus, who loved us first, is prepared to give Himself to you, as well as asking of you. If He asks much of you, it is because He knows you can give much.” Do not forget that true love sets no conditions; it does not calculate or complain, but simply loves. “Life is entrusted to man as a treasure which must not be squandered, as a talent which must be used well.” “Have no fear of moving into the unknown. Simply step out fearlessly knowing that I am with you, therefore no harm can befall you; all is very, very well. Do this in complete faith and confidence.” “Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which is soars to the truth.” True holiness does not mean a flight from the world; rather, it lies in the effort to incarnate the Gospel in everyday life, in the family, at school and at work, and in social and political involvement. “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.” “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 of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.” “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” “The truth is not always the same as the majority decision.” “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 is Love and leaving man with only a sense of the master-slave relationship.” It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this [gay marriage] is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man. “An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.” “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.” As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live. “To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the family has to become, in a special way, the servant of the others.” The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn. “Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.” “The ethos of redemption is realized in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.” “Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remains standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.” “War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanitys agenda for the future.” Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of men. War is a defeat for humanity. “Peace is not just the absence of war. Like a cathedral, peace must be constructed patiently and with unshakable faith.” The sickness of a family member, friend or neighbor is a call to Christians to demonstrate true compassion, that gentle and persevering sharing in another’s pain. Love is the only driving force that impels us to share with our brothers and sisters all that we are and have. It is unbecoming for a cardinal to ski badly. I have a sweet tooth for song and music. This is my Polish sin. I am a young person aged 83 -- speaking to youths. The Pope cannot remain a prisoner of the Vatican. I want to go to everybody...from the nomads of the steppes to the monks and nuns in their convents...I want to cross the threshold of every home. On Mahatma Ghandi, during a visit to India in 1986:He was never a Christian and he never pretended to be a Christian, but I learned a lot from him. I remember, above all, the Wadowice elementary school, where at least a fourth of the pupils in my class were Jewish. I should mention my friendship at school with one of them, Jerzy Kluger — a friendship that has lasted from my school days to the present. I can vividly remember the Jews who gathered every Saturday at the synagogue behind our school. Both religious groups, Catholics and Jews, were united, I presume, by the awareness that they prayed to the same God. The Popes last audible words, on hearing tens of thousands of young people singing in St. Peters Square as he lay in his deathbed, Friday, April 1, 2005: I sought you out and now you come to me. Thank you.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:39:13 +0000
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