Jenna

“In Jesus’ Passion, all the filth of the world touches the infinitely pure one, the soul of Jesus Christ and, hence, the Son of God himself. While it is usually the case that anything unclean touching something clean renders it unclean, here it is the other way around: when the world, with all the injustice and cruelty that make it unclean, comes into contact with the infinitely pure one—then he, the pure one, is the stronger. Through this contact, the filth of the world is truly absorbed, wiped out, and transformed in the pain of infinite love. Because infinite good is now at hand in the man Jesus, the counterweight to all wickedness is present and active within world history, and the good is always infinitely greater than the vast mass of evil, however terrible it may be.”
― Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection

“It is not the task of the state to create mankind’s happiness, nor is it the task of the state to create new men. It is not the task of the state to change the world into a paradise—nor can it do so. If it tries, it abandons its own boundaries and posits itself as something absolute. It behaves as if it were God, and, as the Revelation of John shows, this makes it the beast from the abyss, the power of the Antichrist.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Values in a Time of Upheaval: Meeting the Challenges of the Future

“The father of this other view of political activity is Plato, who assumes that only one who himself knows and has experienced the good is capable of ruling well. All sovereignty must be service, i.e., a conscious act whereby one renounces the contemplative height that one has attained and the freedom that this height brings. The act of governing must be a voluntary return into the dark “cave” in which men live. It is only in this way that genuine governance comes about. Anything else is a mere scuffling with illusions in a realm of shadows—and that is in fact what most of political activity is. Plato detects the blindness of average politicians in their fight for power “as if that were a great good.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Values in a Time of Upheaval: Meeting the Challenges of the Future

“The humility to recognize the truth that makes demands on me and that I do not choose for myself”
― Benedict XVI, Salt of the Earth: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church at the End of the Millennium