Feast of Blessed Pope John XXIII

"If God created shadows it was to better emphasize the light."

"It often happens that I wake up at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope."

"The feelings of my smallness and my nothingness always kept me good company."

"The council now beginning rises in the Church like the daybreak, a forerunner of most splendid light."

"Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do."

"The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone."

"The family is the first essential cell of human society."

"What matters most to the good Christian community, and what may be taken as the measure of true spiritual fervor, is the love of Jesus in His Sacrament, the faithful attendance at His tabernacle."

"Mankind is a great, an immense family... This is proved by what we feel in our hearts at Christmas."

"I have looked into your eyes with my eyes. I have put my heart near your heart."

"This era in which we live is in the grip of deadly errors; it is torn by deep disorders...But is also an era which offers to those who work with the Church immense possibilities in the field of the apostolate...and therein lies our hope."

Pope John Paul II on Blessed John XXIII:

"Everyone remembers the image of Pope John's smiling face and two outstretched arms embracing the whole world. How many people were won over by his simplicity of heart, combined with a broad experience of people and things! The breath of newness he brought certainly did not concern doctrine, but rather the way to explain it; his style of speaking and acting was new, as was his friendly approach to ordinary people and to the powerful of the world. It was in this spirit that he called the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, thereby turning a new page in the Church's history Christians heard themselves called to proclaim the Gospel with renewed courage and greater attentiveness to the "signs" of the times. The Council was a truly prophetic insight of this elderly Pontiff who, even amid many difficulties, opened a season of hope for Christians and for humanity. In the last moments of his earthly life, he entrusted his testament to the Church: "What counts the most in life is blessed Jesus Christ, his holy Church, his Gospel, truth and goodness".
~Pope John Paul II