Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Karol Wojtya

“[S]pouses [do] not only exchange their own human love, but also the most precious thing God has given them—which is the gift of the Spirit—in a process of gradual growth in charity and expansion of their capacity to receive and give divine love.”

“Since the body, too, is called to participate in the final resurrection to the vision of God, . . . it is a living organ that allows us to see God better.”

“In the saint’s life and work, human existence, with all its drama and questions, meets God’s eternal and ever-new Incarnate Word spoken to man in his historical time.”

“What makes self-determination possible is knowledge of the truth about the good as a good that is to be done .”

“The objective content of revelation alone evokes in man a response in the form of lived-experience—a lived-experience that possesses both a theoretical and practical character.”

“God draws human reason and elevates it to the participation in his own knowledge by revealing to it truths that are the proper object of divine reason.”

“Human subjects do not have a given relationship to the world that is ‘already, out, there, now, real’; they must establish one.”

“Natural law, rightly understood, . . . neither presupposes a reality that is ‘actually meaningless’ when considered objectively or ‘in itself,’ nor does it first become ‘rational’ only by virtue of the activity of human beings and apart from the original ordering activity of the intelligent Creator God.”

“Ratzinger’s harmonization of conscience as the aboriginal vicar of Christ based upon the anamnesis of creation , with the Petrine ministry of Christ’s vicar based upon the anamnesis of faith , helps us to see, as Newman said, that to toast one is to toast the other.”

“The spirituality of our Holy Father is a unique refutation of the weary resignation of many Christians today who think that the truths of revelation are too old to ‘be true anymore,’ too worn out to influence the world of today and therefore should be transformed from within.”

“Being fulfilled by God’s Holy Spirit through renunciation, through making space, through becoming poor, is the only mode in which we can come to know God as he is in truth: the Love that can be thought only as a reciprocal ‘self-giving’ in which nothing is held back.”