Pope Francis Quotes

“A good father, like a good mother, is one who intervenes in the life of the child just enough to demonstrate guidelines for growing up, to help him, but who later knows when to be a bystander to his own and others’ failures, and to endure them.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“When religious sociologists discovered that a parish had a zone of influence which typically radiated 700 metres around its church, Bergoglio told his priests – knowing that Buenos Aires churches were on average 2,000 metres apart – to set up something in between the churches:”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“Politics is dirty but the reason it has become dirty is that Christians didn’t get deeply enough involved in the evangelical spirit.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“He left it behind. But not in the way he expected. ‘He has gone to Rome, but at least,’ said one woman happily in the villa miseria, ‘he takes the mud of the slums with him on his shoes.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“It encapsulated his conviction that his duty was ‘to proclaim the Gospel by going out to find people, not by sitting [around] waiting for people to come to us’.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“When fire swept through the Cromañon nightclub in Buenos Aires in 2004 Bergoglio was one of the first on the scene, arriving before many of the fire engines. Some 175 people had died, with the tragedy being compounded by the fact that the club owners had locked the emergency exits to keep freeloaders out.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“In confession, Bergoglio admitted, he is more likely to ask parents whether they are too busy with work to play with their children; it is not the kind of sin they are expecting to be quizzed about.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“Celibacy is a law that has to be changed. It’s a law made by men, not by Jesus.” Bergoglio said to me: “It’s a cultural issue; change may well be accepted at some point.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“In 2001 he surprised the staff of Muñiz Hospital in Buenos Aires by asking for a jar of water and then proceeding to wash the feet of twelve patients hospitalised with AIDS-related complications. He then kissed their feet.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“But it is to those outside the traditional religious convention that Bergoglio showed himself most anxious to reach. Sometimes at 11 p.m. he was to be found in the Plaza de Flores talking to the prostitutes who worked there. Occasionally he would even hear a confession sitting on a park bench.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“Bergoglio was revolutionary when it came to administrative matters too. He put an end to the traditional system of young priests starting in poor parishes and then being promoted with the years to larger and wealthier ones. ‘Nor did he like the idea that the best priests would go off to jobs in Rome’, said Marcó. ‘He saw that as careerism.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“His personal belongings were so few that when someone gave him a gift of some CDs he asked a friend to record them to cassettes, as he did not have a CD player.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“many in Argentina agree with Lisandro Orlov, a leading Lutheran theologian in Argentina – who, in all other aspects, defends Bergoglio’s record during the Dirty War – who said this is the area in which Bergoglio has most questions to answer. ‘None of us who were around in those years can say we didn’t know what was going on. He can’t sustain the argument that he didn’t know about the missing children.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“He wasn’t even a bishop yet, and could act only in his capacity as head of the country’s Jesuits. His job was to protect the Jesuits, and all of the Jesuits made it through the period alive, which tells you he did his job.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“At the airport they were loaded into planes or helicopters from which, dazed but conscious, they were pushed out into the Atlantic or the estuary of the River Plate. This was done in such numbers that eventually the friendly military dictatorship in neighbouring Uruguay complained about the number of bodies being washed up on its shores.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“There are many who do not like ESMA being a museum with tours for members of the public and foreign tourists; they want to knock it down and create a park with a golf course ‘so that society can forget’.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“The wounds in Argentine society are not yet healed, which is why the controversy surrounding Jorge Mario Bergoglio is still alive and angry.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“Today tours can be taken around the white-stucco red-tiled colonnaded building, rather grand in its colonial style, with neatly trimmed gardens, painted curbstones, clipped conifers and beautiful deep pink rosa china hibiscus flowers by the door through which those about to die would enter. In May, which is autumn in the southern hemisphere, the trees turn rich shades of russet and chestnut.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“It was here that two Jesuit priests, Fr Francisco Jalics and Fr Orlando Yorio, were brought one Sunday morning in May, hooded and shackled, and very frightened, after being arrested in the poor neighbourhood where they had worked for the previous six years.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“One of the Jesuit callings is to radical sacrifice of personal ambitions;”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“It was while in Germany, in the church of St Peter am Perlach in Augsburg, that Bergoglio came across the eighteenth-century painting Mary Untier of Knots, which so moved him that he bought a postcard of the image and took it back to Argentina”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“Vatican II famously threw open the windows of the Church, seeking greater interaction with, and influence on, secular society. In Latin America a number of theologians began to work out how the teachings of Vatican II should be applied on the ground.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“With respect to the Christian life, death has to accompany you on the way. In my case, for example, I think every day that I am going to die. This does not distress me, because the Lord and life have given me the proper preparation. I saw my ancestors die and now it is my turn. When? I do not know.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“Alone and unobserved Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was at prayer in the way that Grandma Rosa would have been.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“To him the strength of Catholicism is in the way simple people live their faith.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“Faith has become flesh and blood. That is why, popular piety is a great patrimony of the Church.’ But he warned: ‘It cannot be denied, however, that certain deviated forms exist of popular religiosity that, far from fomenting an active participation in the Church, create instead confusion and can foster a merely exterior religious practice detached from a well-rooted and interior living faith.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“He has always had a favourable attitude to popular religiosity,”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“Visitors tried to cheer him up with the usual comforting banalities but he was not placated, until he was visited by the nun who had prepared him for his first Communion, Sister Dolores. ‘She said something that truly stuck with me,’ he later recalled, ‘and make me feel at peace: “you are imitating Christ” ’, he was told.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“It was four years before she was reconciled to his decision and he only knew she had fully accepted it when she knelt before him after he had been ordained a priest, eleven years later, and asked for his blessing.”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“When he became a bishop he adopted as his episcopal motto miserando atque eligendo. It comes from a comment by the Venerable Bede on the gospel passage in which Jesus met the despised tax collector Mark. Translated it means unworthy but chosen, though Bergoglio likes to translate it rather more cumbersomely as ‘by having compassion and by choosing’. He now sees in that motto the moment he uncovered his vocation. ‘That was how I felt that God saw me during that conversation. And that is the way he wants me always to look upon others: with much compassion and as if I were choosing them for him; not excluding anyone, because everyone is chosen by the love”
― Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots