A Big Heart Open to God Quotes

“Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs, or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“See everything; turn a blind eye to much; correct a little.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories, because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“ecumenical relations it is important not only to know each other better, but also to recognize what the Spirit has sown in the other as a gift for us.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“I thought the pope’s striking analogy of the church as a field hospital—where one must treat the wounded and tend to the most serious injuries first, rather than asking people about their cholesterol levels—to be a brilliant way of capturing the danger of the church falling casualty to its dogma and very revealing of Pope Francis’s great ability to communicate. Reading”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“he had taken care to speak with the sort of honesty and charity that encourages the larger church to do the same. His description of the church as a “home of all” and his urging not to reduce it to “a nest protecting our mediocrity” serve as a call for each of us to look truthfully at how well we welcome others and how much we think of ourselves. Francis”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs, or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“To serve means to work alongside the neediest, first of all to establish a close human relationship with them, based on solidarity. Solidarity—this word elicits fear in the developed world. They try not to say it. It is almost a dirty word for them. But it’s our word!”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“In a simple, direct, personal way he is presenting us with the reality of a God who does not condemn the world, but loves it more than it can believe or imagine (John 3:16–17). A God who can enter into the depths of our suffering is not repulsed by our woundedness or disfigurements, but who meets us wherever and whoever we are, heals us by bringing us ever closer to himself.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“It is not just one transforming moment of realization and “conversion,” though often it begins that way. It is the habitual knowledge that informs each moment of our lives, not as a paralyzing sense of guilt or shame, but as joyous thankfulness; an ever deepening self-knowledge of one’s dependency and poverty combined with a liberating wonder; the experience of the depth of our sin, but the even greater immensity of God’s saving love.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“Francis shows himself as a witness more than a teacher. He is teaching because he is a witness, and being a witness, he reveals himself.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“Tell me, when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?” If we dare to really see people, in their dignity and humanity, then we shall discover the right words to say.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“When does a formulation of thought cease to be valid? When it loses sight of the human or even when it is afraid of the human or deluded about itself.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“May the man hold fast to what the child has promised.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. ”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time. The wisdom of discernment redeems the necessary ambiguity of life and helps us find the most appropriate means, which do not always coincide with what looks great and strong.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“The people itself constitutes a subject. And the church is the people of God on the journey through history, with joys and sorrows. Thinking with the church, therefore, is my way of being a part of this people. And all the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief, and the people display this infallibilitas in credendo, this infallibility in believing, through a supernatural sense of the faith of all the people walking together.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“Our life is not given to us like an opera libretto, in which all is written down; but it means going, walking, doing, searching, seeing. . . . We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space crystallizes them. God is in history, in the processes.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“we must not confuse the function with the”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of goodwill and is in search of God, I am no one to judge. By saying this, I said what the catechism says. Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

“This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity. And the church is Mother; the church is fruitful. It must be. You see, when I perceive negative behavior in ministers of the church or in consecrated men or women, the first thing that comes to mind is: ‘Here’s an unfruitful bachelor’ or ‘Here’s a spinster.’ They are neither fathers nor mothers, in the sense that they have not been able to give spiritual life. Instead, for example, when I read the life of the Salesian missionaries who went to Patagonia, I read a story of the fullness of life, of fruitfulness.”
― Pope Francis, A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis