For just as some people want a purely spiritual Christ, without flesh and without the cross, they also want their interpersonal relationships provided by sophisticated equipment, by screens and systems which can be turned on and off on command. Meanwhile, the Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction.

Human dignity is the same for all human beings: when I trample on the dignity of another, I am trampling on my own.

Wars shatter so many lives. I think especially of children robbed of their childhood.

We need to avoid the spiritual sickness of a church that is wrapped up in its own world: when a church becomes like this, it grows sick.

The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people.

The key phrase used by the synod, which I'll take up again, is 'integrate' in the life of the Church the wounded families, remarried families, etc. But of this one mustn't forget the children in the middle. They are the first victims, both in the wounds, and in the conditions of poverty, of work.

As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.