Pope Emeritus Quotes

His[Jesus'] death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form.

I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.

This message is loud and clear when we read Pope Emeritus Benedict’s Lenten message of 2009 when he says, “this practice (fasting) needs to be rediscovered and encouraged again in our day.” He also says that “it seems abundantly clear that fasting represents an important ascetical practice, a spiritual arm to do battle against every possible disordered attachment to ourselves.

I am always able to speak with him (Christ) inwardly. But I am nevertheless just a lowly little man who does not always reach all the way up to him.

Every suffering, said Ratzinger, ‘every silent endurance of wrong, every inner overcoming, every impulse of love, every care and every committal to God’ would have an effect. For ‘nothing good is in vain’.

On board the plane to Edinburgh, Benedict made his standpoint clear. When a journalist asked him whether the church should urgently do something to become more attractive, he answered with a plain ‘No’. The church did not sell anything, least of all itself. It was not entrusted with goods but with a message, which it had to pass on in full.

Pope Benedict was “framed” in a media set-up that no longer permitted serious reporting.’ The result: ‘Pope Benedict’s papacy, which had begun so brilliantly in 2005, increasingly developed into a “serial breakdown papacy”.’ Every appearance by the pope promised the media new negative headlines.’ The reporting on the pope and the church also showed a trend towards ‘tabloidization’, a way of presenting news ‘with a striking style in both design and content that does not just seek to inform, but also specifically aims at forming’ opinion. There was the ‘expectation of failure’, a mechanism that survived by satisfying those expectations. Journalists themselves did not now ‘expect to consider what the pope had said of interest about the relation between faith and reason or on the global economy, but to look out for mistakes’. That lack of ethics had had ‘a decisive influence on the media images of Pope Benedict’. Now it was often just a matter of ‘exposing the pope’:

he then coined the term ‘desecularization’ (Entweltlichung). Indeed, a church becoming more like Christ necessarily had ‘to differ sharply from the world around it’, he quoted from Pope Paul VI. It had to ‘distance itself’, we could say ‘desecularize itself’. Jesus became human ‘not just to confirm the world in its worldliness and be its companion’ and then leave it as it was. No, a church that ‘settles in this world, is self-satisfied and conforms to the world’s standards’ contravened its founder’s mission, ‘to be an instrument of salvation, imbued with God’s word’ and thus ‘be not of the world’. The pope expressly made clear that necessary ‘desecularization’ also included the church’s charitable works and its ‘organization and institution’. For ‘a church freed from material and political burdens and privileges can devote itself to the whole world better and in a truly Christian way. […] It opens itself to the world, not in order to win people for an institution with its own claims to power, but to bring them to themselves.

shall be conducted to the summit of the mountain called Calvary…There, fastened and crucified upon the Cross… Year of the creation of the world 5233, the 25th day of March.” 28, 29 Mary at Garabandal, Spain gives many clues for the date of March 25, 2016, as the day of the Warning. The feast of St. Imelda, considered a Eucharistic martyr, is on May 12, and must fall on a Thursday for the day of the Miracle sign. The Miracle sign has to be within a year of the Warning. The only years left at this time for the Miracle sign on a Thursday the 12th, are 2016, or 2022. The events must take place during the time of Pope Benedict, now Emeritus. In 2016, the Pope Emeritus Benedict will be 89 years. The date of March 25 in 2016 is on a Good Friday. March 25 is the original date of Jesus crucifixion and death according to Tertullian and Hippolytus and Augustine.