The first requirement for prayer is silence. People of prayer are people of silence.

It is Christmas every time you let God love others through you...yes, it is Christmas every time you smile at your brother and offer him your hand.

The point is to do something, however small, and show you care through your actions by giving your time.

At the hour of death when we all come face to face with God we are going to be judged on love: how much we have loved, not how much we have done but how much love we have put in our action.

When I pick up a person from the street, hungry, I give him a plate of rice, a piece of bread. But a person who is shut out, who feels unwanted, unloved, terrified, the person who has been thrown out of society - that spiritual poverty is much harder to overcome. And abortion, which often follows from contraception, brings a people to be spiritually poor, and that is the worst poverty and the most difficult to overcome.

I think the world today is upside down, and is suffering so much, because there is so very little love in the homes and in family life.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noises and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature-trees, flowers, grass-grow in silence. Is not our mission to give God to those we walk with? Not a dead God, but a living, loving God. The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. Words that don't give the light of Christ increase the darkness.