Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.
God grants to evil and to evildoers a large measure of freedom--too large, we might think. Even so, history does not slip through his fingers.
In a word, the true morality of Christianity is love. And love does admittedly run counter to self-seeking—it is an exodus out of oneself, and yet this is precisely the way in which man comes to himself.
Normally, thought precedes word; it seeks and formulates the word. But praying the Psalms and liturgical prayer in general is exactly the other way round: The word, the voice, goes ahead of us, and our mind must adapt to it.
The ancient world did in fact experience the birth of Christianity as a liberation from the fear of demons that, in spite of skepticism and enlightenment, was all-pervasive at the time.
The Church does not derive from human will, from reflection, from man’s ability and organizational capacity...if that were so it would have become extinct a long time ago, like all human things.
The freedom to kill is not true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces the human being to slavery.
The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe. Contemplating it, we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God.
Those who understand freedom as the radically arbitrary license to do just what they want and to have their own way are living in a lie, for by his very nature man is part of a shared existence and his freedom is shared freedom.