John Paul Ii Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to John Paul Ii. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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The future starts today, not tomorrow.
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Pope John Paul II
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Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.
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Pope John Paul II
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Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.
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Pope John Paul II
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The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.
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Pope John Paul II
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Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.
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Pope John Paul II
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I plead with you--never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.
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Pope John Paul II (Pope John Paul II: In My Own Words)
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It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.
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Pope John Paul II
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Know what you are talking about.
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Pope John Paul II
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A person's rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which is soars to the truth.
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Pope John Paul II (Fides et Ratio: On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason)
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The worst prison would be a closed heart.
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Pope John Paul II
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As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
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Pope John Paul II
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Do not be afraid to take a chance on peace, to teach peace, to live peace...Peace will be the last word of history.
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Pope John Paul II
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There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.
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Pope John Paul II
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Have no fear of moving into the unknown. Simply step out fearlessly knowing that I am with you, therefore no harm can befall you; all is very, very well. Do this in complete faith and confidence.
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Pope John Paul II
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It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.
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Pope John Paul II
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Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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Love consists of a commitment which limits one's freedom - it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one's freedom on behalf of another.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures, we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of His Son Jesus.
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Pope John Paul II
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Friendship, as has been said, consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person's good.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as β€œMother” Teresa on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of β€œDevil’s Advocate,” in order to fast‐track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono.
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Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
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True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.
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Pope John Paul II
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Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.
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Pope John Paul II
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Limitation of one's freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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He was alone in his wonderment, amoung creatures incapable of wonder --for them it was enough to exist and go their way.
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Pope John Paul II
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Merry Christmas!
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Pope John Paul II
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The Gospel lives in conversation with culture, and if the Church holds back from the culture, the Gospel itself falls silent. Therefore, we must be fearless in crossing the threshold of the communication and information revolution now taking place.
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Pope John Paul II
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Learning to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity better.
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Pope John Paul II
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The ethos of redemption is realied in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.
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Pope John Paul II (Blessed Are the Pure of Heart)
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This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel. It is the time to preach it from the rooftops. Do not be afraid to break out of comfortable and routine modes of living in order to take up the challenge of making Christ known in the modern metropolis.
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Pope John Paul II
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Life is entrusted to man as a treasure which must not be squandered, as a talent which must be used well.
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Pope John Paul II
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Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal.
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Pope John Paul II
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Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remains standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.
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Pope John Paul II
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The battle against the devil, which is the principal task of Saint Michael the Archangel, is still being fought today, because the devil is still alive and active in the world.
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Pope John Paul II
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The cross means there is no shipwreck without hope; there is no dark without dawn; nor storm without haven.
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Pope John Paul II
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Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth- in a word, to know himself- so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
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Pope John Paul II (Fides et Ratio: On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason)
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Treating a person as a means to an end, and an end moreover which in this case is pleasure, the maximization of pleasure, will always stand in the way of love.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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...if desire is predominant it can deform love between man and woman and rob them both of it.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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...all that is carried along by the stream's silvery cascade, rhythmically falling from the mountain, carried by its own current-- carried where?
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Pope John Paul II
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Love demands a personal commitment to the will of God.
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Pope John Paul II
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Ask yourselves, young people, about the love of Christ. Acknowledge His voice resounding in the temple of your heart. Return His bright and penetrating glance which opens the paths of your life to the horizons of the Church’s mission. It is a taxing mission, today more than ever, to teach men the truth about themselves, about their end, their destiny, and to show faithful souls the unspeakable riches of the love of Christ. Do not be afraid of the radicalness of His demands, because Jesus, who loved us first, is prepared to give Himself to you, as well as asking of you. If He asks much of you, it is because He knows you can give much.
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Pope John Paul II (The Meaning of Vocation)
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The lust of the flesh directs these desires [of personal union], however, to satisfaction of the body, often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons.
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Pope John Paul II (Blessed are the pure of heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount and writings of St. Paul)
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Marriage is an act of will that signifies and involves a mutual gift, which unites the spouses and binds them to their eventual souls, with whom they make up a sole family - a domestic church.
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Pope John Paul II
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Men are like wine-some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.
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Pope John Paul II
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A person is an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.
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Pope John Paul II
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None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.
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Pope John Paul II (Letter to Artists)
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The true Christian can nurture a trustful optimism, because he is certain of not walking alone. In sending us Jesus, the eternal Son made man, God has drawn near to each of us. In Christ he has become our travelling companion.
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Pope John Paul II
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Have no fear of moving into the unknown. Simply step out fearlessly knowing that I am with you
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Pope John Paul II
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Faced with the sacredness of life and of the human person, and before the marvels of the universe, wonder is the only appropriate attitude.
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Pope John Paul II
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Truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself.
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Pope John Paul II
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Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create.
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Pope John Paul II
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A democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.
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Pope John Paul II
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Do not be afraid, then, when love makes demands. Do not be afraid when love requires sacrifice.
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Pope John Paul II
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God allows man to learn His supernatural ends, but the decision to strive towards an end, the choice of course, is left to man's free will. God does not redeem man against his will.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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Original sin is not only the violation of a positive command … but … attempts … to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love and leaving man with only a sense of the master-slave relationship.
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Pope John Paul II (Crossing the Threshold of Hope)
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Man cannot remain with no way out.
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Pope John Paul II
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In Poland, Chopin is as revered as Pope John Paul II and God. Poland’s Holy Trinity.
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Lisa Genova (Every Note Played)
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In suffocating the voice of conscience, passion carries with itself a restlessness of the body and the senses: it is the restlessness of the "external man." When the internal man has been reduced to silence, then passion, once it has been given freedom of action, so to speak, exhibits itself as an insistent tendency to satisfy the senses and the body.
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Pope John Paul II (Blessed are the pure of heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount and writings of St. Paul)
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There is no need to be dismayed if love sometimes follows torturous ways. Grace has the power to make straight the paths of human love.
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Pope John Paul II
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Become who you are.
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Pope John Paul II
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In the words of Pope John Paul II at the canonization of St. Edith Steinβ€”a Catholic Carmelite nun who died in Auschwitz because of her Catholic faith and her Jewish descentβ€”β€œDo not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.
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Chris Stefanick (Absolute Relativism - The New Dictatorship and What to do About It)
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It is not enough to long for a person as a good for oneself, one must also, and above all, long for that person's good.
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Pope John Paul II
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Let me go to the house of the Father.
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Pope John Paul II
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John O’Sullivan has forcefully argued that the simultaneous presence in the highest offices of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II was the cause of the Soviet collapse.
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Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
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Love is never something ready made, something merely 'given' to man and woman, it is always at the same time a 'task' which they are set. Love should be seen as something which in a sense never 'is' but is always only 'becoming', and what it becomes depends up on the contribution of both persons and the depth of their commitment.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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Faced with today's problems and disappointments, many people will try to escape from their responsibility. Escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.
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Pope John Paul II
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The human being is single, unique, and unrepeatable, someone thought of and chosen from eternity, someone called and identified by name
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Pope John Paul II
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On one hand the eternal attraction of man towards femininity (cf. Gn. 2:23) frees in him-or perhaps it should free-a gamut of spiritual-corporal desires of an especially personal and "sharing" nature (cf. analysis of the "beginning"), to which a proportionate pyramid of values corresponds. On the other hand, "lust" limits this gamut, obscuring the pyramid of values that marks the perennial attraction of male and female.
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Pope John Paul II (Purity of Heart: Reflections on Love and Lust / Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body in Simple Language, Vol. 2)
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So far as I am aware no leader of a party of the European left in the past twenty-five years has declared capitalism as such to be unacceptable as a system. The only public figure to do so unhesitatingly was Pope John Paul II.
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Eric J. Hobsbawm
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It is unbecoming for a cardinal to ski badly.
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Pope John Paul II
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In the Vatican square, they were selling lollipops. You could buy lollipops about that big with the face of Pope John Paul II on them. You could buy a Pope John Paul II's face lollipop. I bought about ten. And I just thought... In the light of his death a few months later, I wondered whether sales of those lollipops went up or whether they went down. Did good Catholics think, 'Ah, the Pope's just died. It would now seem inappropriate... to lick a sugar effigy of his face.' Or did they go, 'Ah, the Pope's just died. But what better way... ...to commemorate his life than by licking a sugar effigy of his face?
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Stewart Lee
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What is the difference between β€œcreator” and β€œcraftsman”? The one who creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothingβ€”ex nihilo sui et subiecti, as the Latin puts itβ€”and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The craftsman, by contrast, uses something that already exists, to which he gives form and meaning.
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Pope John Paul II (Letter to Artists)
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No one else can want for me. No one can substitute his act of will for mine. It does sometimes happen that someone very much wants me to want what he wants. This is the moment when the impassable frontier between him and me, which is drawn by free will, becomes most obvious. I may not want that which he wants me to want - and in this precisely I am incommunicabilis. I am, and I must be, independent in my actions. All human relationships are posited on this fact.
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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Knowledge must then lead to education in self-control.
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Pope John Paul II (On the Family)
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Self-control is not needed because the body is evilβ€”the truth is just the opposite.Β  The body should be controlled with honor because it is worthy of honor.
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Pope John Paul II (Theology of the Body in Simple Language)
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Prayer finds its source in God's holiness and it is at the same time our response to this holiness.
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Pope John Paul II (Gift and Mystery: On the Fiftieth Anniversary of My Priestly Ordination)
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Michaelangelo must teach them - do not forget: all things are naked and open before His eyes.
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Pope John Paul II
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His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama feels quite at home in the world of Meister Eckhart, and His Holiness Pope John Paul II quotes the same Meister Eckhart on occasion in a sermon. Now, there’s a bridge builder between traditions! Should this come as a surprise? No, it shouldn’t surprise us, for Meister Eckhart is a mystic. The mystics of all traditions speak one and the same language, the language of religious experience. When
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Meister Eckhart (Meister Eckhart, from Whom God Hid Nothing: Sermons, Writings & Sayings)
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The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.
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Pope John Paul II
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Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christ's Cross at the center of that history? . . . But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and--to repeat once again--Love, desires to justify Himself to mankind. He is not the Absolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering. he is Emmanuel, God-with-us, a God who shares man's lot and participates in his destiny.
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Pope John Paul II (Crossing the Threshold of Hope)
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Christ is the sacramentβ€Ž of the invisible God - a sacrament that indicates presence. God is with us.
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Pope John Paul II
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The interior life is the spiritual life. It focuses on truth and the good. It
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Pope John Paul II (Love and Responsibility)
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Von Faulhaber had authored β€œWith Burning Concern” in 1937, and in 1941, von Galen had spoken out so vehemently against The Party and the Gestapo that the British had copied his sermons and dropped them from planes across Europe.* German soldiers, civilians, and occupied peoples read them, including the future Pope John Paul II, who found a flyer in Krakow, Poland.
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Adam Makos (A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II)
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When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.
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Pope John Paul II
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The ecological crisis in the world had become so obviously serious that Pope John Paul II felt the need to rebuke the wealthy classes of the industrialized nations for creating that crisis: β€œToday, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness, both individual and collective, are contrary to the order of creation.
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
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In truth, a State whose society is not sovereign is no sovereign State at all. Such is the case when a society has no chance to decide the common good, and when it has been denied the basic right to share in power and responsibility
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Pope John Paul II (On the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Outbreak of the Second World War (Publication))
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Do not be afriad! I can see that Americans are not afraid. They are not afraid of the sun, they are not afraid of the wind, they are not afraid of 'today'. They are, generally speaking, brave, good people. And so I say to you today, always be brave. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. God is with you. Do not be afraid to search for God-then you will truly be the land of the free, the home of the brave. God Bless America.
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Peggy Noonan (John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father)
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Chastity by no means signifies rejection of human sexuality or lack of esteem for it: rather it signifies spiritual energy capable of defending love from the perils of selfishness and aggressiveness, and able to advance it towards its full realization.
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Pope John Paul II (On the Family)
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Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of things that are. People think that they can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to their wills, as though the earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which human beings can indeed develop but must not betray.
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Pope John Paul II
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Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truthβ€”in a word, to know himselfβ€”so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
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Pope John Paul II
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Pope John Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, β€œbased on individual egoism” rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, β€œSuch a β€˜caricature’ has no future and cannot give future to any society”. Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order’s coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.
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Lee Edelman (No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive)
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Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence. But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence. And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence. Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters β€” methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence β€” such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods β€” astronomy, geology and history, for instance β€” they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe? Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts β€” whose assertions frequently contradict one another β€” are in fact sacred?
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Alan Sokal
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Each of us struggles through primary and essential questions that we cannot avoid once we reach or approach maturity. Why was I born? What is the meaning of life, and its purpose? Where and how can I find happiness? Why is life so full of pain and difficulty? How should we live, by what model or principles or arrangements? A great mystery embraces our lives, John Paul said. Then he added something that has been to me deeply inspiring: These questions we ask do not come only from your restless mind, and are not just products of your very human anxiety. They come from God. They are the beginning of the process by which you find them. God prompts them. He made you ask. The questions are, in fact, a kind of preparation for God, a necessary preamble to the story he wants to write on your heart. And the moment you ask them, your freedom has been set in motion. You become more sharply aware that there are choices. This, in a way, is the beginning of morality, because there is no morality without freedom. Only in freedom can you turn toward what is good. (p. 127)
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Peggy Noonan
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It must not be forgotten that reason too needs to be sustained in all its searching by trusting dialogue and sincere friendship. A climate of suspicion and distrust, which can beset speculative research, ignores the teaching of the ancient philosophers who proposed friendship as one of the most appropriate contexts for sound philosophical enquiry.
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Pope John Paul II (Fides et Ratio: On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason)
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Yesterday was a dark day in the history of humanity, a terrible affront to human dignity. After receiving the news, I followed with intense concern the developing situation, with heartfelt prayers to the Lord. How is it possible to commit acts of such savage cruelty? The human heart has depths from which schemes of unheard-of ferocity sometimes emerge, capable of destroying in a moment the normal daily life of a people. But faith comes to our aid at these times when words seem to fail. Christ’s word is the only one that can give a response to the questions which trouble our spirit. Even if the forces of darkness appear to prevail, those who believe in God know that evil and death do not have the final say. Christian hope is based on this truth; at this time our prayerful trust draws strength from it. ~General Audience, September 12, 2001.
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Pope John Paul II
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The social order will be all the more stable, the more it takes this fact into account and does not place in opposition personal interest and the interests of society as a whole, but rather seeks ways to bring them into fruitful harmony. In fact, where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity. When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a "secular religion" which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world.
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Pope John Paul II (Centesimus Annus: On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum)
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Later, when Eve is created, Adam understandsβ€”as soon as he lays eyes on herβ€”that men and women are fundamentally alike, yet different in complementary ways. Before she even speaks a word, Eve’s body reveals all this and more.Β  The body reveals the person. This phrase tells us all there is to know about the body. Science can examine our flesh in minute detail, down to our cells and even our DNA. But no amount of scientific exploration can replace the truth that our bodies reveal us, giving form to our innermost being and unique personality. Our bodies are sacramentalβ€”they make the invisible visible.
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Pope John Paul II (Theology of the Body in Simple Language)
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The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can call β€œhis own,” and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community.
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Pope John Paul II