Fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family. I can only reiterate the importance and, above all, the richness and the beauty of family life.

I tell priests to flee from clericalism because clericalism distances people. May they flee from clericalism and I add: it's a plague in the Church.

Religious fundamentalism, even before it eliminates human beings by perpetrating horrendous killings, eliminates God himself, turning him into a mere ideological pretext.

Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people's pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else's responsibility and not our own.

I would like a more missionary church,Not so much a tranquil church, but a beautiful church that goes forward.

They (the consecrated) are men and woman who can awaken the world. Consecrated life is prophecy. God asks us to fly the nest and to be sent to the frontiers of the world, avoiding the temptation to 'domesticate' them. This is the most concrete way of imitating the Lord.

You have a specific and important mission, that of keeping alive the relationship between the faith and the cultures of the peoples to whom you belong. . . . [W]e have to follow Christ along the concrete path of our daily lives so that he can transform us.