Imagine, to become a priest there are eight years of study and preparation, and then if after a while you can't do it, you can ask for a dispensation, you leave, and everything is OK.

The victims of problems of the family are the children. The children. Even of problems that neither husband nor wife have a say in.

How many of us, myself included, have lost our bearings; we are no longer attentive to the world in which we live; we don’t care; we don’t protect what God created for everyone, and we end up unable even to care for one another.

We are a church of sinners but we must not be afraid of holiness. Do not be afraid to aim for holiness and turn yourselves over to the love of God. Holiness does not mean performing extraordinary things but carrying out daily things in an extraordinary way that is with love, joy and faith.

This concern for the poor is in the Gospel, it is within the tradition of the Church, it is not an invention of communism and it must not be turned into an ideology, as has sometimes happened before in the course of history.

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

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.