Pope Benedict XVI, born Joseph Alois Ratzinger on April 16, 1927, served as the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City from 2005 until his resignation in 2013. He was the first pope to resign in nearly 600 years, citing health reasons. His papacy was marked by efforts to address issues within the Church, including the sexual abuse crisis, and he emphasized the importance of faith and reason. He passed away on December 31,2002.

A SELECTION OF HIS WISDOM AND MEMORABLE QUOTES

On his predecessor Pope John Paul II: ” We can be sure our beloved pope is standing today at the window of the father’s house, that he sees us and blesses us. Today, we bury his remains in the earth as a seed of immortality. Our hearts are full of sadness, yet, at the same time, of joyful hope and profound gratitude. (Homily during Pope John Paul II funeral, 8th April 2005

On his inauguration April 2005: “The world is barren, a desert of suffering and a sea of alienation. The external deserts in the world are growing because the internal deserts have become so vast. The Church has long worried that consumerism and personal lifestyle choices are pulling away people from Catholicism and blinding people to their need for faith. God’s gifts have been warped into instruments of pain by men who misused them in a selfish quest for power, leaving people empty and without hope. The earth’s treasures no longer serve to build God’s garden for all to live in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction. Only a living relationship with Jesus and abundant life in God would heal the pain of the deserts of poverty, hunger, thirst, abandonment, loneliness, destroyed love, a loss of God, of human dignity and of meaning of life. We are living in alienation , in the salt waters of suffering and death, in a sea of darkness without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendour of God’s light, into true life. Do not be afraid. Do not copy those who rejected Christ because they feared the sacrifices that adherence to Church teachings would entail. Christ would certainly have taken something away from them: the dominion of corruption, the manipulation of law and the freedom to do as they pleased; But he would not have taken away anything that pertains to human freedom or dignity, or to the building of a just society. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of the thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.

On Islam: ” It is true that the Muslim world is not totally mistaken when it reproaches the West of Christian tradition of moral decadence and the manipulation of human life. …Islam has also had moments of great splendour and decadence in the course of its history.” (Zenit.org, via Catholic News, March 2002)

On Judaism: “That the Jews are connected with God in a special way and that God does not allow that bond to fail is entirely obvious. We wait for the instant in which Israel will say yes to Christ but we know it has a special mission in history now…..which is significant for the world. (from Ratzinger’s book, God and the World.)

On Israel: Our Christian conviction is that Christ is also the messiah of Israel. Certainly it is in the hands of God how and when the unification of Jews and Christians into the people of God will take place (from Ratzinger’s book, God and the World)

On faith: ” Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the Church, is often labelled today as fundamentalism…….. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along be every wind of teaching, looks like the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognise anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires” (from an homily delivered by Ratzinger at the Mass hours before the beginning of the conclave that would elect him Pope, 18th April 2005)

On women’s ordination: “The fact that the Church is convinced of not having the right to confer priestly ordination on women is now considered by some as irreconcilable with the European Constitution” (from Zenit.org, April 2005)

On sex abuse scandals: ” In the Church, priests also are sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories and perhaps it is even lower…..In the USA , there is constant news on this topic but less that 1% of priests are guilty of acts of this type. The constant presence of these news items does not correspond to the objectivity of the information nor to the statistical objectivity of the facts.” (Zenit.org Dec 2002)

On celibacy: “We have such difficulty understanding this renunciation today because the relationship to marriage and children has clearly shifted. To have to die without children was once synonymous with a useless life: the echoes of my own life die away and I am completely dead. If I have children, then I continue to live in them; it’s a sort of immortality through posterity…. “The renunciation of marriage and family is thus to be understood in terms of this vision: I renounce what, humanly speaking, is not only the most normal but also the most important thing. I forego bringing forth further life on the tree of life and I live in the faith that my land is really God – and so I make it easier for others, also, to believe that there is a kingdom of heaven. I bear witness to Jesus Christ, to the Gospel, not only with words but also with this specific mode of existence and I place my life in this form at his disposal” Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord” (from Salt of the Earth- interview with Peter Seewald (1997)

On homosexuality: “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder” (Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual persons, 1986;) It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation ….the intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in work, in action and in law. Men and women were created to be jointly the guarantee to the future of humanity – not only a physical guarantee but also a moral one (Zenit.org Nov 2004) Above all, we must have great respect for these people who also suffer and who want to find their own way of correct living. On the other hand, to create a legal form of a kind of homosexual marriage, in reality, does not help these people.