It's not the job of government to help the poor. The church is the mechanism that God put on earth to help the poor.

There's a difference, you know, between faith and playing make-believe. One will make you grow. The other one will make you sleep.

Deliver us from evil - from moral duplicity and weakness, from laziness and spiritual complacency, from those lies we tell ourselves from our fear of facing the truth.

I hope I would leave a legacy of joy -a legacy of real compassion.

I take comfort in knowing that it was the shepherds to whom the angels appeared when they announced Christ's birth. Invariably throughout the course of history, God has appeared to people on the fringes. It's nice to find theological justification for your quirks.

Having grown up Protestant, I was unfamiliar with St. Francis. Then I watched the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon... I just became fascinated with the character of St. Francis. What I saw in that movie was a man who had fallen in love with God, someone for whom God was everything.

God did not give Joseph any special information about how to get from being the son of a nomad in Palestine to being Pharaoh's right hand man in Egypt. What He did give Joseph were eleven jealous brothers, the attention of a very loose and vengeful woman, the ability to do the service of interpreting dreams and managing other people's affairs and the grace to do that faithfully wherever he was.