Pope Francis - Church Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars. You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.

Pope Francis
I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.

Pope Francis
We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of women within the church. The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions.

Pope Francis
We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.

Pope Francis
Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.

Pope Francis
Instead of seeming to impose new obligations, they should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by proselytizing that the Church grows, but by attraction.

Pope Francis
Any Church community, if it thinks it can comfortably go its own way without creative concern and effective cooperation in helping the poor to live with dignity and reaching out to everyone, will also risk breaking down,

Pope Francis
Religious life ought to promote growth in the Church by way of attraction. The Church must be attractive. Wake up the world! Be witnesses of a different way of doing things, of acting, of living! It is possible to live differently in this world.

Pope Francis
It is the attitude of some leaders of God's people; they continually scold others, hurl reproaches at them, tell them to be quiet.... 'Madam, take your crying child out of the church as I am preaching.' As if the cries of a child were not a sublime homily.

Pope Francis
The Church in the Philippines is called to acknowledge and combat the causes of the deeply rooted inequality and injustice which mar the face of Filipino society, plainly contradicting the teaching of Christ.

Pope Francis
I want the Church to go out onto the streets, I want us to resist everything worldly, everything static, everything comfortable...eve rything that might make us closed in on ourselves.

Pope Francis
The time has come for the Church to take up the joyful call to mercy once more. It is time to return to the basics and to bear the weaknesses and struggles of our brothers and sisters. Mercy is the force that reawakens us to new life and instils in us the courage to look to the future with hope.

Pope Francis
The Church encourages those in power to be truly at the service of the common good of their peoples. She urges financial leaders to take account of ethics and solidarity. And why should they not turn to God to draw inspiration from his designs? In this way, a new political and economic mindset would arise that would help to transform the absolute dichotomy between the economic and social spheres into a healthy symbiosis.

Pope Francis
The thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful.

Pope Francis