Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me - a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord.
Once the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, the rest that one owns belongs to the poor.
The abuse of faith has to be resisted precisely.
A rebirth out of spiritual adversity causes us to become new creatures.
When the danger is great, one must not run away.
Politics are not the task of a Christian.
Anybody can be Pope; the proof of this is that I have become one.
The Christian faith can never be separated from the soil of sacred events, from the choice made by God, who wanted to speak to us, to become man, to die and rise again, in a particular place and at a particular time.
The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
The composition of a common world would be the definition of politics.
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.
Either one lives 'for' politics or one lives 'off' politics.
An Adult faith does not follow the waves of fashion and the latest novelties.
I'm not an austere person.
Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.
The Cross is the approbation of our existence, not in words, but in an act so completely radical that it caused God to become flesh and pierced this flesh to the quick; that, to God, it was worth the death of his incarnate Son.
It is the mind that makes the body.
Billions of people don't practice a religion at all.
All are my friends. I have no enemies.
