Quotes from Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

“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

Popular quotes

“Romero hurled a few shotgun blasts into an opponent and yelled, “Eat that, fucker!” The sheepish guy on the other computer looked up in fear. Shawn knew that look—the look of gamer who had never heard true, unbridled smack-talk, just like he’d been the first time he had heard Romero insult him during a game. But now Shawn was a pro and joined right in. “Suck it down, monkey fuck!” he called, after firing a few blasts from his BFG. The gamers cowered. They would learn.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

“But she believed there was a thin line between accepting one's fears and giving in to them altogether.”
― John Corey Whaley, quote from Highly Illogical Behavior

“Disappointment in others is tough. But disappointment in yourself is far worse.”
― A.R. Torre, quote from The Girl in 6E

“Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade.

"She was dying," Rosa Sorak said. "It was breaking our hearts."

Fejzić, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eastern edge of Goražde, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers.

"On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door," said Rosa Sorak. "It was Fadil Fejzić in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk he came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia."

The Soraks eventually left and took over a house that once belonged to a Muslim family in the Serbian-held town of Kopaci. Two miles to the east. They could no longer communicate with Fejzić.

The couple said they grieved daily for their sons. They missed their home. They said they could never forgive those who took Zoran from them. But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Sebs talking about Muslims, or even recite their own sufferings, without telling of Fejzić and his cow. Here was the power of love. What this illiterate farmer did would color the life of another human being, who might never meet him, long after he was gone. In his act lay an ocean of hope.”
― Chris Hedges, quote from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

“However, every advance in our knowledge of the cosmos has revealed that we live on a cosmic speck of dust, orbiting a mediocre star in the far suburbs of a common sort of galaxy, among a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. The news of our cosmic unimportance triggers impressive defense mechanisms in the human psyche.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, quote from Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution

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