Benedict 16 Quotes

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

Prudence, policy and a true Christian spirit will lead us to look with compassion upon their errors without insulting them. While we are contending for our own liberty, we should be very cautious of violating the rights of conscience in others, ever considering that God alone is the judge of the hearts of men and to him only, in this case, they are answerable.16 When

Priesthood, Ratzinger stressed, meant getting out of a bourgeois lifestyle. It had to ‘guide people towards becoming reconciled, forgiving and forgetting, being tolerant and generous’. It was to help them ‘put up with other people in their otherness, and have patience with one another’. A priest must ‘above all, be able to support people in pain – in bodily suffering, as well as in all the disappointments, humiliations and fears, which no one is spared.’ For ‘the ability to accept and stand suffering’ is ‘a fundamental condition for successful human living. If that is not learned, then failure is inevitable.’16 The ‘right definition of what a priest should be and do’ was still Paul’s message in his letter to the Corinthians: ‘We are ambassadors for Christ.’ A priest is required ‘to know Jesus intimately; he has met him and learned to love him’. It was only by being a man of prayer that he was also a truly ‘spiritual’ person – a priest. When priests were overworked and felt tired and frustrated, it was often caused by a tense straining for performance. Then faith became a heavy burden, ‘when it should be wings to carry us’. Whoever works for Christ knows that ‘it is always someone else who sows and someone else who reaps. He does not have to continually question himself; he leaves the outcome to the Lord and does what he can without worrying, freely and happily, secure as part of the whole.’17

Cuando la Carta a los Hebreos dice que los cristianos son huéspedes y peregrinos en la tierra, añorando la patria futura (cf. Hb 11,13-16; Flp 3,20), no remite simplemente a una perspectiva futura, sino que se refiere a algo muy distinto: los cristianos reconocen que la sociedad actual no es su ideal; ellos pertenecen a una sociedad nueva, hacia la cual están en camino y que es anticipada en su peregrinación.

adroitly jumped to the back of the chair, where it perched with its tail bushed out in annoyance

she sat in Scrope’s chair, indicating that Master Benedict

However, the Word gives us a different perspective. Paul wrote, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable” (2 Timothy 3:16), and this includes the salutations and benedictions of the epistles. I am convinced they are not superficial formalities. They were inspired by the Holy Spirit to impart powerful spiritual blessing to all who read them.

St. Benedict's Rule, chapter 16: “‘Seven times in the day,’ says the Prophet [psalmist], ‘I have rendered praise to you.’ Now that sacred number of seven will be fulfilled by us if we perform the offices of our service at the time of the morning office, of prime, of terce, of sext, of none, of vespers and of compline, since it was of these day hours that he said, ‘Seven times in the day I have rendered praise to you.’ For as to the night office the same Prophet says, ‘In the middle of the night I arose to glorify you.

Many Jewish texts, as well as OT hope in general, expected that in the end Israel would be restored to a place of great blessing (Jer. 16:15; 23:8; 31:27–34 [where the new covenant is mentioned]; Ezek. 34–37; Isa. 2:2–4; 49:6; Amos 9:11–15; Sir. 48:10; Ps. Sol. 17–18; 1 En. 24–25; Tob. 13–14; Eighteen Benedictions 14).[1] The question is a natural one for Jews who have embraced the messianic hope. Luke 1–2 expressed this hope vividly (1:69–74; 2:25, 38).

His meaning becomes clear if we recall the story recounted by all three Synoptic evangelists, in which children were brought to Jesus “that he might touch them”. Despite the resistance of the disciples, who wanted to protect him from this imposition, Jesus calls the children to himself, lays his hands on them, and blesses them. He explains this gesture with the words: “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Mk 10:13-16). The children serve Jesus as an example of the littleness before God that is necessary in order to pass through the “eye of a needle”, the image that he used immediately afterward in the story of the rich young man (Mk 10:17-27). In the previous chapter we find the scene where Jesus responds to the disciples’ dispute over rank by placing a child in their midst, taking it into his arms and saying: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” (Mk 9:33-37). Jesus identifies himself with the child—he himself has become small. As Son he does nothing of himself, but he acts wholly from the Father and for the Father. The passage that follows a few verses later can also be understood on this basis. Here Jesus speaks no longer of children, but of “little ones”, and the term “little ones” designates believers, the company of the disciples of Jesus Christ (cf. Mk 9:42). In the faith they have found this true littleness that leads mankind into its truth. This brings us back to the children’s Hosanna: in the light of Psalm 8, the praise of these children appears as an anticipation of the great outpouring of praise that his “little ones” will sing to him far beyond the present hour. The early Church, then, was right to read this scene as an anticipation of what she does in her liturgy. Even in the earliest post-Easter liturgical text that we possess—the Didachē (ca. 100)—before the distribution of the holy gifts the Hosanna appears, together with the Maranatha: “Let his grace draw near, and let this present world pass away. Hosanna to the God of David. Whoever is holy, let him approach; whoever is not, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen” (10, 6). The Benedictus also entered the liturgy at a very early stage. For the infant Church, “Palm Sunday” was not a thing of the past. Just as the Lord entered the Holy City that day on a donkey, so too the Church saw him coming again and again in the humble form of bread and wine.

The antithesis of giving thanks is grumbling. The grumblers live in a state of self-induced stress. Like the crew of vineyard workers who had labored from dawn to dusk and felt cheated when latecomers received the same wage (Matt. 20:1–16), they bellyache about the unfairness of life, the paucity of their gifts, the insensitivity of their spouse and employer, the liberals who are destroying the church and the conservatives who have deserted their post, the hot weather and the cold pizza, the greedy rich and the shiftless poor, and their victimization at the hands of the IRS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the manufacturers of Viagra. (Small wonder that the stressed-out grumblers are two and a half times more susceptible to colds than grateful people, according to Ohio State virologist Ronald Glaser.) In his Rule for monasteries, St. Benedict considered grumbling a serious offense against community life. He wrote, “If a disciple grumbles, not only aloud but in his heart … his action will not be accepted with favor by God, who sees that he is grumbling in his heart.” Indicating his fierce opposition to this behavior, he added, “First and foremost, there must be

María Magdalena quiere tocar a Cristo, retenerlo, pero el Señor le dice: «Suéltame, que todavía no he subido al Padre» (Jn 20,17). Esto nos sorprende. Es como decir: Precisamente ahora que lo tiene delante, ella puede tocarlo, tenerlo consigo. Cuando habrá subido al Padre, eso ya no será posible. Pero el Señor dice lo contrario: Ahora no lo puede tocar, retenerlo. La relación anterior con el Jesús terrenal ya no es posible. Se trata aquí de la misma experiencia a la que se refiere Pablo en 2 Corintios 5,16s: «Si conocimos a Cristo según los criterios humanos, ya no lo conocemos así. Si uno está en Cristo, es una criatura nueva». El viejo modo humano de estar juntos y de encontrarse queda superado. Ahora ya sólo se puede tocar a Jesús «junto al Padre». Únicamente se le puede tocar subiendo. Él nos resulta accesible y cercano de manera nueva: a partir del Padre, en comunión con el Padre.