When a child has a bad dream and wakes up crying, Dad goes and says, 'Don't be afraid, don't be scared. I'm here.' The Lord speaks this way, too... Usually, Christmas seems like a very noisy feast, but we can use a bit of silence to hear these words of love, closeness and tenderness.

How many kinds of moral and material poverty we face today as a result of denying God and putting so many idols in his place!

Where there is calumny, there is Satan himself.

Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord’s wounds at arm’s length. Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people’s lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people.

All of us benefit from remembering our past. A people which remembers does not repeat past errors; instead, it looks with confidence to the challenges of the present and the future.

Take good care of creation. St. Francis wanted that. People occasionally forgive, but nature never does. If we don't take care of the environment, there's no way of getting around it.

Being a Christian means renouncing ourselves, taking up the cross and carrying it with Jesus. There is no other way.