“Our created nature is so bound up with this created time in which all living beings live that our being cannot be taken up into the divine unless the time which is connatural to us is also in some way taken up.”
"The life of the counsels is not a matter for specialists, but the spirit of the whole."
The outstanding poets have received from God such vast things to express that only the entire universe will suffice for their work.
"Because of her unique structure, the Catholic Church is perhaps humanity's last bulwark of genuine appreciation of the difference between the sexes."
The finally valid answer to pagan wisdom, the answer equal to it in rank, can lie only in the total Christian wisdom.
"Relativity toward the other constitutes the human person. The human person is the event or being of relativity."
“Only in virtue of his filial intimacy with the divine Father can Jesus suffer total abandonment by the Father and taste that suffering to the last drop.”
“While it is surely not its business to discuss the ‘immediately moral’ in terms of case-book decisions, the whole business of art, where it is truly such, is in a sense more truly moral than morality itself when conceived in this traditional sense.”
“The ‘biological’ and the human are inseparable in the figure of Mary, just as are the human and the ‘theological.’”
“In the years of the Council, as we meditated on the apostolate of the laity, and as the constitution ‘On the Church in the Modern World’ was in gestation, I often thought of Jerzy.”
“It is a tribute to the Father that the Son is perfect in his humanity, because the Son thereby justifies the Father’s creation. But his perfection is an act and an achievement of his love for the Father and for human beings. His love is so great that it is able to embody the Father’s holiness in human form.”
“We have bought a package deal of far more fundamental novelness than simply a set of instruments under our control. . . . Technology is the ontology of the age.”
"Becoming a Christian means becoming communio and thereby entering into the mode of being of the Holy Spirit."
The change in the spiritual attitude contained in the transition from the patristic to the modern age can be described as a change from a world-condemning "dying to the world" to a world-affirming "dying to the world."
“In the midst of the empty present of the lost son, the Father is the liberating ‘today’ of the ever-greater future of love.”
“Freedom is only free for the future by virtue of a fulfilled present that is grounded in the past.”
The hope of the world rests on the poor.
We are both at the same time . . . a serving and being fruitful, power and impotence, glory ‘through’ poverty!
God speaks and it is.
All the saints—and all the faithful, and all sinners—form a continuous chain across the ages and this chain, in contrast to irreversible time, recovers its strength even as it unwinds.
The Eucharist is the thanksgiving of Christ to the Father in heaven that he has given him the ability to abandon himself for all—up to martyrdom and the descent into hell.
"Speech will . . . become music and melt into the symphony of universal praise like an immense and endless 'Alleluia' voicing all worship, all adoration."
"In a word, the object of existential hope bursts the bounds of 'this' world."
"The unity of the Church is not a fitting together of parts, but a union of persons."
"In creating man as man and woman, God imprints on humanity the mystery of that communion which is the essence of his interior life."
"[T]he cosmos as a whole is itself harmony."
“[T]oo great a desire to adapt himself to the needs of his time would endanger the authenticity of the historian’s work and by that very fact would deprive it of the interest it could have for his contemporaries.”
“[L]ive at the heart of the sacrament of the Covenant, your marriage nourished by the Eucharist and the Eucharist illumined by your sacrament of marriage; the future of the world depends on it.”
"The strength in which the Vicar of Christ must come to resemble his Lord is the strength of love that is ready for martyrdom."
"[W]hat reason could I give . . . for having denied the faith which saves those who cherish it, on account of human glory which has no substance?"
“The Church is fully catholic inasmuch as Christ, who suffered for all, Jews and Gentiles, and rose as the paradigmatic new man for all, wills to pour out the fullness of salvation . . . into his Church.”
“[T]hose who come to the multiversity with some memory, some intuition, some dense loyalty for the eternal good are faced with the modern paradigm which excludes the possibility of such.”
“Through man the silent litany of things becomes an explicit act of worship.”
“Catholic culture, if true to its inheritance, would include the sound concepts and traditions of all times, the best developments of human progress of all ages, and that in all the fields of human interest and endeavor.”
“The council, according to Wojtyła, should elaborate a firmly-grounded truth about man that testifies to how the religious aptitude is the fullness of man’s rationality, his fulfillment, and by no means his alienation.”
"We can give a meaningful answer to the questions raised only if we . . . are able to express the logic of the Faith in its integrity, the good sense and reasonableness of its view of reality and life."
"The fact that all her world-changing power flowed from unceasing prayer in the midst of the hustle and bustle of life, from a heart that never turned its gaze from God, is what makes her so profoundly relevant today."
"To go into the world . . . is to enter into the place, where, in a certain sense, God is not; to walk toward the unknown design of the redemption; to walk, a man in the midst of men, but a man indwelt by God."