Today is the birthday of the late Pope John Paul II and because my anxiety has been inexplicably severe the past few days, I have not been able to compile a full tribute the way I have for others. So I’m just going to leave you all with some good quotes from him.
Oh, and random facts — he loved to write plays and poetry (many times using a pen name so they would be judged on their own merits), enjoyed hiking, kayaking, biking, being outside, and being overall awesomely stylish. And wearing Bono’s sunglasses.
In 1981 he was shot by a would-be assassin, lost almost three-quarters of his blood, and went in to surgery for five hours. In 1983, he went to meet privately with the man, Mehmet Ali Ağca, and they talked alone, after which the pope said to reporters, “What we talked about will have to remain a secret between him and me. I spoke to him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust.″
So without any more fanfare… here’s the best I could do.
“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.”
“Dear young people of every language and culture, a high and exhilarating task awaits you: that of becoming men and women capable of solidarity, peace and love of life, with respect for everyone. Become craftsmen of a new humanity, where brothers and sisters — members all of the same family — are able at last to live in peace.”
“The opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is use.”
“Faced with 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. But today, I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.”
“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 provokes 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 hearts 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 grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
“Ours is a time of continual movement which often leads to restlessness, with the risk of ‘doing for the sake of doing.’ We must resist this temptation by trying ‘to be’ before trying ‘to do’”
“Be not afraid, you were made for better things.”
“When you wonder about the mystery of yourself, look to Christ, who gives you meaning of life. When you wonder what it means to be a mature person, look to Christ, who is the fullness of humanity. And when you wonder about our role in the future of the world, look to Christ.”
“A person’s rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.”
“Utilitarianism is a civilization of production and of use, a civilization of things and not of persons, a civilization in which persons are used in the same way as things are used.”
“There is no evil to be faced that Christ does not face with us. There is no enemy that Christ has not already conquered. There is no cross to bear that Christ has not already borne for us, and does not now bear with us.”
“It does not matter what you have, what matters is who you are.”
“What really maters in life is that we are loved by Christ and that we love Him in return. In comparison to the love of Jesus, everything else is secondary. And, without the love of Jesus, everything is useless.”
“To live without risk is to risk not living.”
“To humanity, which at times seems too lost and dominated by the power of evil, egoism, and fear, the risen Lord offers as a gift his love that forgives, reconciles, and reopens the spirit to hope. It is love that converts hearts and gives peace.”
“Love for a person must consist in affirmation that the person has a value higher than that of an object for consumption or use… 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.”
“True holiness does not mean a flight from the world; rather, it lies in the effort to incarnate the Gospel in everyday life, in the family, at school and at work, and in social and political involvement.”
“God created man in his image and likeness by calling him into existence for Love’s sake; at the same time He called him to Love.”
“For by his incarnation the Son of God united himself in a certain way with every man. He labored with human hands… and loved with a human heart… he truly became one of us.”
“I plead with you – never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.”
“It is not wrong to want to live better; what is wrong is a style of life presumed to be better when directed towards ‘having’ rather than ‘being.’”
“Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”
“Beloved, you do not know how deeply you are mine, how much you belong to my love and my suffering — because to love means to give life through death; to love means to let gush a spring of the water of life into the depths of the soul, which burns or smolders, and cannot burn out.” (From his play The Jeweller’s Shop)
“A person must not be merely the means to an end for another person.”
“The truth is not always the same as the majority decision.”
“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.”
“Christ is the sacrament of the invisible God – a sacrament that indicates presence. God is with us.”
“The goal and target of our life is the Christ who awaits us — each one singly and altogether — to lead us across the boundaries of time to the eternal embrace of the God who loves us.”
“In Christ and through Christ man has acquired full awareness of his dignity, of the heights to which he is raised, of the surpassing worth of his own humanity, and of the meaning of his existence.”
“The distinctive mark of the Christian, today more than ever, must be love for the poor, the weak, the suffering.”
“Forgiveness is above all a personal choice, a decision of the heart to go against the natural instinct to pay back evil with evil.”
“The way Jesus shows you is not easy. Rather, it is like a path winding up a mountain. Do not lose heart! The steeper the road, the faster it rises towards ever wider horizons.”
