It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
When we leave Mass, we ought to go out the way Moses descended Mt Sinai: with his face shining, with his heart brave and strong to face the world's difficulties.
If God accepts the sacrifice of my life, may my death be for the freedom of my people. A bishop will die, but the Church of God, which is the people, will never perish. I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the people of El Salvador.
Each time we look upon the poor, on the farmworkers who harvest the coffee, the sugarcane, or the cotton. . . remember, there is the face of Christ.
The absolute desire of 'having more' encourages the selfishness that destroys communal bonds among the children of God. It does so because the idolatry of riches prevents the majority from sharing the goods that the Creator has made for all, and in the all-possessing minority it produces an exaggerated pleasure in these goods.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ, will live like the grains of wheat that dies. It only apparently dies. If it were not to die, it would remain a solitary grain. The harvest comes because of the grain that dies. We know that every effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses; that God wants; that God demands of us.
The powershift began already several years ago, under the Bush administration, when the dollar became very volatile and started declining. That is when China shifted from having almost 100 percent of its reserves in dollars to 75 percent. Some countries went completely out of the dollar. The dollar, for all intents and purposes, lost its special reserve status and people starting talking about a portfolio, or basket, approach as a store of wealth instead of the dollar.
In our house we say 'adolescence' is a western word. We don't believe in it.
If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance there would be no limit to the happiness, the prosperity, and the glory which its 300,000,000 or 400,000,000 people would enjoy.
There is a belief that love has its own justification, that it should be experienced as passionately as possible. The French have a wonderful expression, amour passion, which is the ultimate.