Selected quotes of Pope Benedict XVI offered daily for prayer and reflection….

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Eternal Life
 


We have a foretaste of the gift and the beauty of sanctity every time that we participate in the Eucharistic Liturgy, the communion with the “great multitude” of holy souls, which in Heaven eternally acclaim the salvation of God and of the Lamb (cf. Rev 7:9-10).

 
Angelus Address
St Peter's Square
1st November 2010

 
 
 
Eternal Life
 


Eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality.

 
Spe Salvi
Encyclical Letter

 
 
 
Eternal Life
 


Man needs eternity, for every other hope is too brief, too limited for him. Man can be explained only if there is a Love which overcomes every isolation, even that of death, in a totality which also transcends time and space. Man can be explained; he finds his deepest meaning, only if there is God.

 
General Audience

Paul VI Audience Hall

2 November 2011

 
 
 
Eternal Life
 


Only in the great perspective of eternal life does Christianity reveal its full meaning. We must have the courage, the joy, the great hope that eternal life exists; it is the true life, and from this true life comes the light that also illuminates this world.

 
Homily
Pauline Chapel
Apostolic Palace
15 April 2010

 
 
 
Eternal Life
 


It is precisely faith in eternal life which gives Christians the courage to love this earth of ours even more intensely, and to work to build an earthly future of true and secure hope.

 
General Audience
Paul VI Hall
2 November 2011

 
 
 
Eternal Life
 


True life, eternal life already begins in this world, although within the precariousness of human history; eternal life begins in the measure to which we open ourselves to the mystery of God and welcome it in our midst. It is God, the Lord of life, in whom "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17: 28).

 
Homily
Vatican Basilica
3 November 2008

 
 
 
Eternal Life
 


What we call “life” in our everyday language is not real “life” at all. Saint Augustine…wrote this: ultimately we want only one thing—”the blessed life”, the life which is simply life, simply “happiness”. In the final analysis, there is nothing else that we ask for in prayer. Our journey has no other goal—it is about this alone. But then Augustine also says: looking more closely, we have no idea what we ultimately desire, what we would really like. We do not know this reality at all; even in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it eludes us. “We do not know what we should pray for as we ought,” he says, quoting Saint Paul (Rom 8:26). All we know is that it is not this. Yet in not knowing, we know that this reality must exist. “There is therefore in us a certain learned ignorance (docta ignorantia), so to speak”, he writes. We do not know what we would really like; we do not know this “true life”; and yet we know that there must be something we do not know towards which we feel driven.

 
Encyclical Letter
On Christian Hope
'Spe Salvi'

 
 
 
Eternal Life
 


To enter eternal life requires listening to Jesus, following him on the way of the Cross, carrying in our heart like him the hope of the Resurrection.

 
Angelus Address
Second Sunday of Lent
St Peter's Square
17 February 2008

 

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