Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

Vatican II declares the Church... as necessary for salvation.

If I should say anything that is not in conformity with what is held by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, it will be through ignorance and not through malice. This may be taken as certain, and also that, through God's goodness, I am, and shall always be, as I always have been, subject to her.

Father Coughlin has succeeded in persuading his hearers, or at least a large proportion of them, not only that his money theories and remedies are supported by the papal encyclicals, but that his economic teachings in general are on a level with the infallible pronouncements of the Church.

I didn't really start writing about the church in earnest until the mid-2000s, so I wasn't present for or a participant in a lot of the John Paul II-era debates about papal authority.

Our Faith will never be true unless it is united to that of St. Peter and the Pontiff, his successors.

I found out that many of our Catholics simply don't know what the church teaches, and why, on a lot of issues, and therefore are saying things that they think are okay. They simply don't know.

I was raised Catholic at a time when Vatican II was just taking hold.

It is now for the Catholic Church to bend herself to her work with calmness and generosity. It is for you to observe her with renewed and friendly attention.

There was a time when papal encyclicals were treated as virtual pronouncements of papal infallibility. There are still a small minority of Catholics who cite Pope Paul VI's 1968 document Humanae Vitae - which outlawed artificial birth control - as the word of God.

On Earth, God has placed no more than two powers, and as there is in Heaven but one God, so is there here one Pope and one Emperor. Divine providence has specially appointed the Roman Empire to prevent the continuance of schism in the Church.

Becoming Catholic involves entering into a relationship with the Catholic Church.

I do believe in the infallibility of the Pope, because I think we have to believe in something.

'The Fifth Gospel' is set entirely inside the Vatican and told from the perspective of a Catholic priest. I'm not Catholic myself, yet authenticity and factual accuracy are very important to me, so the novel required an enormous amount of research.

The Catholic Church was the church of the colonial fascist regime.

There is this difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England: the one professes to be infallible, the other to be never in the wrong.

The Roman Church has never erred, nor can it err until the end of time.

We, each and all, bishops, priests, and deacons of the holy Roman church, congregated in the city of Pisa for the purpose of ending the schism and of restoring the unity of the church, on our word of honor promise God, the holy Roman church, and this holy council now collected here for the aforesaid purpose, that, if any one of us is elected pope, he shall continue the present council and not dissolve it, nor, so far as is in his power, permit it to be dissolved until, through it and with its advice, a proper, reasonable, and sufficient reformation of the universal church in its head and in its members shall have been accomplished.

If the pope were the head of the Christian Church, then the Church were a monster with two heads, seeing that St. Paul says that Christ is her head. The pope may well be, and is, the head of the false Church.

Contrary to the proscription of the Church hierarchy, American Catholics have overwhelmingly rejected the 1968 Encyclical Humanae Vitae forbidding the use of contraception. However, Presidents and Congressmen have been influenced by the Vatican on this issue.

I am an Irishman second: I am a Catholic first…. If the [Roman Catholic] hierarchy give me any direction with regard to Catholic social teaching or Catholic moral teaching, I accept without qualification in all respects the reaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong.

I know Marco Rubio very well. He's a friend of mine. He's a man of deep faith. He is a man who follows Catholic dogma and - you know, for whom religion is very important.

The rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, whether its sources are Protestant or secular, has always insisted that the church of Rome is the enemy of what you might call healthy sexuality.

I totally respect the pope, and I totally respect the Catholic bishops and cardinals on doctrine.

There's so many gifts from the faith to appreciate and it strikes people differently, but the one-ness of the Church wherever you are, Raleigh, San Diego, Alabama. Every place we were was home because the Catholic Church is the same everywhere.

Those who saw Pope John Paul II either in person or through the mass media glimpsed a man who millions of Catholics believe may be one of the greatest popes in the history of the church.