“In 2001 he surprised the staff of Muñiz Hospital in Buenos Aires by asking for a jar of water and then proceeding to wash the feet of twelve patients hospitalised with AIDS-related complications. He then kissed their feet.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Pope who announced his intention to transform the cultured silk-brocaded propriety of the Rome of Pope Benedict XVI into ‘a poor Church, for the poor’.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“He has opposed same-sex marriage and gay adoption but he has kissed the feet of homosexuals with Aids.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Celibacy is a law that has to be changed. It’s a law made by men, not by Jesus.” Bergoglio said to me: “It’s a cultural issue; change may well be accepted at some point.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“His personal belongings were so few that when someone gave him a gift of some CDs he asked a friend to record them to cassettes, as he did not have a CD player.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Bergoglio was revolutionary when it came to administrative matters too. He put an end to the traditional system of young priests starting in poor parishes and then being promoted with the years to larger and wealthier ones. ‘Nor did he like the idea that the best priests would go off to jobs in Rome’, said Marcó. ‘He saw that as careerism.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“In confession, Bergoglio admitted, he is more likely to ask parents whether they are too busy with work to play with their children; it is not the kind of sin they are expecting to be quizzed about.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Padre Bergoglio would slip in among them, dressed in the anonymity of plain clerical black, to sit in the pews before the painting to unravel the knots of his higher office.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“When a pope dies, cardinals from all over the world collect in the Vatican and begin to meet in what they call General Congregations. In April 2005 the first few days of these meetings were spent in absorbing the implications of the death of the man the Vatican swiftly dubbed John Paul the Great. Santo Subito, the crowds in St Peter’s Square had cried: Make him a Saint Now!”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“When fire swept through the Cromañon nightclub in Buenos Aires in 2004 Bergoglio was one of the first on the scene, arriving before many of the fire engines. Some 175 people had died, with the tragedy being compounded by the fact that the club owners had locked the emergency exits to keep freeloaders out.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“It was while in Germany, in the church of St Peter am Perlach in Augsburg, that Bergoglio came across the eighteenth-century painting Mary Untier of Knots, which so moved him that he bought a postcard of the image and took it back to Argentina”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“And conservatives and moderates alike could respect his keen pastoral sense and his personal frugality – a Prince of the Church who had given up a grand archbishop’s palace for a simple apartment in his episcopal office-block, who cooked his own meals and eschewed a chauffeur-driven limousine in favour of taking the subway and the bus. He was also a man of deep prayer.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“It was four years before she was reconciled to his decision and he only knew she had fully accepted it when she knelt before him after he had been ordained a priest, eleven years later, and asked for his blessing.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“One of the Jesuit callings is to radical sacrifice of personal ambitions;”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Visitors tried to cheer him up with the usual comforting banalities but he was not placated, until he was visited by the nun who had prepared him for his first Communion, Sister Dolores. ‘She said something that truly stuck with me,’ he later recalled, ‘and make me feel at peace: “you are imitating Christ” ’, he was told.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“It was here that two Jesuit priests, Fr Francisco Jalics and Fr Orlando Yorio, were brought one Sunday morning in May, hooded and shackled, and very frightened, after being arrested in the poor neighbourhood where they had worked for the previous six years.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“At the airport they were loaded into planes or helicopters from which, dazed but conscious, they were pushed out into the Atlantic or the estuary of the River Plate. This was done in such numbers that eventually the friendly military dictatorship in neighbouring Uruguay complained about the number of bodies being washed up on its shores.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Through a spokesman he told Newsweek Argentina of his ‘unhappiness’ with Benedict’s words. ‘Pope Benedict’s statement doesn’t reflect my own opinions,’ the Archbishop of Buenos Aires declared. ‘These statements will serve to destroy in 20 seconds the careful construction of a relationship with Islam that Pope John Paul II built over the last twenty years.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Bergoglio was the one who ‘took the family’s traditions most to heart’, he later said. His grandparents spoke Piedmontese to one another and he learned it from them. ‘They loved all of my siblings, but I had the privilege of understanding the language of their memories.’ That is why today Pope Francis is completely fluent in Italian as well as Spanish, and can get by in German, French, Portuguese and English as well as Latin.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“He was similarly unimpressed with Benedict’s 2009 decision to lift the excommunication of four schismatic Lefebvrists bishops of the Society of Pius X – one of whom, Bishop Richard Williamson, turned out persistently to insist that millions of Jews were not gassed in Nazi concentration camps.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“He has always had a favourable attitude to popular religiosity,”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Today tours can be taken around the white-stucco red-tiled colonnaded building, rather grand in its colonial style, with neatly trimmed gardens, painted curbstones, clipped conifers and beautiful deep pink rosa china hibiscus flowers by the door through which those about to die would enter. In May, which is autumn in the southern hemisphere, the trees turn rich shades of russet and chestnut.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“It encapsulated his conviction that his duty was ‘to proclaim the Gospel by going out to find people, not by sitting [around] waiting for people to come to us’.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Faith has become flesh and blood. That is why, popular piety is a great patrimony of the Church.’ But he warned: ‘It cannot be denied, however, that certain deviated forms exist of popular religiosity that, far from fomenting an active participation in the Church, create instead confusion and can foster a merely exterior religious practice detached from a well-rooted and interior living faith.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“A good father, like a good mother, is one who intervenes in the life of the child just enough to demonstrate guidelines for growing up, to help him, but who later knows when to be a bystander to his own and others’ failures, and to endure them.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“He left it behind. But not in the way he expected. ‘He has gone to Rome, but at least,’ said one woman happily in the villa miseria, ‘he takes the mud of the slums with him on his shoes.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“The Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires was altogether more robust. He went out of his way to preface his position by insisting that there is no connection between celibacy and paedophilia. ‘There are psychological perversions that existed prior to choosing a life of celibacy,’ he said. ‘If a priest is a paedophile, he is so before he becomes a priest.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“The wounds in Argentine society are not yet healed, which is why the controversy surrounding Jorge Mario Bergoglio is still alive and angry.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Church attempts to cover up the problem were both wrong and counter-productive, he believes. ‘I do not believe in the positions that some hold about sustaining a certain corporate spirit so as to avoid damaging the image of the institution,’ he said.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Bergoglio himself has quoted lines the nineteenth-century German poet Friedrich Hölderlin dedicated to his own grandmother; they end ‘may the man not betray what he promised as a child’.”
― quote from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
“Casper, she said someone has to hold your leash.”
The dog barked.
Then he dipped his head, picked up the end of the leash in his mouth, and trotted after his master.”
― Brigid Kemmerer, quote from Storm
“I loved being dominated in such a beastly sexual way. How his hands, lips and tongue all grabbed on to me.”
― J.J. McAvoy, quote from Ruthless People
“And even a small amount of talent can go an appallingly long way, these days.”
― Iain Banks, quote from Espedair Street
“My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“Some things can be recovered. Some things can be restored. But some lost things, we seek forever.”
― Margaret George, quote from Helen of Troy
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