Quotes and news

Today’s Quotes and News are dedicated to extracts from the Pope’s speeches during his state and pastoral visit to the UK. The speeches can be easily accessed from the Vatican website www.vatican.va.

Church of service

“The Church does not work for her own ends, she does not work to increase numbers and thus power. The Church is at the service of another: she serves, not for herself, not to be a strong body; rather she serves to make the proclamation of Jesus Christ accessible, the great truths and great forces of love, reconciling love that appeared in this figure and that always comes from the presence of Jesus Christ.”

Talking to journalists on the papal flight.

Religion’s role

“Where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation.

“According to this understanding, the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers – still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion – but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles.

“This ‘corrective’ role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves”.

Speech at a meeting with representatives of British society.

The role of reason

“And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion. It is a two-way process. Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person.

“Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilisation.”

Speech at a meeting with representatives of British society.

Intellectual and moral relativism

“Newman, by his own account, traced the course of his whole life back to a powerful experience of conversion which he had as a young man... At the end of his life, Newman would describe his life’s work as a struggle against the growing tendency to view religion as a purely private and subjective matter, a question of personal opinion.

“Here is the first lesson we can learn from his life: in our day, when an intellectual and moral relativism threatens to sap the very foundations of our society, Newman reminds us that, as men and women made in the image and likeness of God, we were created to know the truth, to find in that truth our ultimate freedom and the fulfilment of our deepest human aspirations.

“In a word, we are meant to know Christ who is Himself ‘the way, and the truth, and the life’.”

Prayer vigil on the eve of the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman.