Behold the Pierced One Quotes

“The Christian confession is not a neutral proposition; it is prayer, only yielding its meaning within prayer.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Behold The Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology

“Normal food is less strong than man, it serves him, is taken into man’s body to be assimilated and to build it up. But this special food, the Eucharist, is above man and stronger than man. Consequently the whole process involved is reversed: the man who eats this bread is assimilated by it, taken into it; he is fused into this bread and becomes bread, like Christ himself. “Though many, we are one body, for we are one bread.” The result of this insight is quite clear: Eucharist is never merely an event a deux, a dialogue between Christ and me. The goal of eucharistic communion is a total recasting of a person’s life, breaking up a man’s whole “I” and creating a new “We”.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Behold The Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology

“Death, which, by its very nature, is the end, the destruction of every communication, is changed by him into an act of self-communication; and this is man’s redemption, for it signifies the triumph of love over death. We can put the same thing another way: death, which puts an end to words and to meaning, itself becomes a word, becomes the place where meaning communicates itself.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Behold The Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology

“For in Jesus’ prayer we have discovered the clue linking together Christology and soteriology, the person of Jesus and his deeds and sufferings. Although the Evangelists’ accounts of the last words of Jesus differ in details, they agree on the fundamental fact that Jesus died praying. He fashioned his death into an act of prayer, an act of worship.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Behold The Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology

“Liberation is our continual and fresh acceptance of truth as the path of life set before us.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Behold The Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology