Pope Francis Quotes
Pope Francis (born Jorge Mario Bergoglio;[c] 17 December 1936 – 21 April 2025) was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 13 March 2013 until his death on Easter Monday, 21 April 2025. He was the first pope from the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit Order), the first from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, and the first born or raised outside Europe since the 8th-century Syrian pope Gregory III.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Bergoglio was inspired to join the Jesuits in 1958 after recovering from severe illness. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1969; from 1973 to 1979, he was the Jesuit provincial superior in Argentina. He became the archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and was created a cardinal in 2001 by Pope John Paul II.
Following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI on 28 February 2013, a papal conclave elected Bergoglio as his successor on 13 March. He chose Francis as his papal name in honour of Saint Francis of Assisi. Throughout his public life, Francis was noted for his humility, emphasis on God’s mercy, international visibility as pope, concern for the poor, and commitment to interreligious dialogue. He was known for having a less formal approach to the papacy than his predecessors by, for instance, choosing to reside in the Domus Sanctae Marthae (House of St. Martha) guest house rather than in the papal apartments of the Apostolic Palace used by previous popes.
We have prepared a compilation of Pope Francis’s quotes…
Pope Francis Quotes
Money has to serve, not to rule.
We all have the duty to do good.
We just cannot worry about ourselves.
Where there is no work, there is no dignity.
I love tango, and I used to dance when I was young.
He who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.
Life is a journey. When we stop, things don’t go right.
Wretched are those who are vindictive and spiteful.
To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.
Right now, we don’t have a very good relation with creation.
A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.
“We will never be disillusioned or lose our way if we are guided by God.”
Pope Francis Quotes
“The Lord never tires of forgiving. It is we who tire of asking for forgiveness.”
You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person.
The root of this possibility of doing good – that we all have – is in creation.
Find new ways to spread the word of God to every corner of the world.
“Kindness is firm and persevering intention to always will the good of others, even the unfriendly.”
Human self-understanding changes with time, and so also human consciousness deepens.
Young people are just as attracted to the truth as they are convenience and expediency.
Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.
“Dear young people, do not be afraid of making decisive choices in life. Have faith; the Lord will not abandon you!”
Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.
Truth, according to the Christian faith, is God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. Therefore, truth is a relationship.
We must always walk in the presence of the Lord, in the light of the Lord, always trying to live in an irreprehensible way.
There is a danger that threatens everyone in the church, all of us. The danger of worldliness. It leads us to vanity, arrogance and pride.
Abortion isn’t a lesser evil, it’s a crime. Taking one life to save another, that’s what the Mafia does. It’s a crime. It’s an absolute evil.
A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel.
We need to avoid the spiritual sickness of a church that is wrapped up in its own world: when a church becomes like this, it grows sick.
This is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff.
Pope Francis Quotes
“Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.”
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.
“We received this world as an inheritance from past generations, but also as a loan from future generations, to whom we will have to return it!”
Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.
“A Christian who doesn’t safeguard creation, who doesn’t make it flourish, is a Christian who isn’t concerned with God’s work, that work born of God’s love for us.”
God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If he gives us the gift of Christmas, it is because we all have the ability to understand and receive it.
Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities.
Politics is a noble activity. We should revalue it, practise it with vocation and a dedication that requires testimony, martyrdom, that is to die for the common good.
“God always forgives, we men forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives. If you give her a slap, she will will give you one. I believe that we have exploited nature too much.”
“This old man now speaking to you [university students] also dreams that yours will become a generation of teachers! Teachers of humanity. Teachers of compassion….Teachers of hope.”
We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.
Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.
The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but the Pope has the duty, in Christ’s name, to remind the rich to help the poor, to respect them, to promote them.
“May the relationship between man and nature not be driven by greed, to manipulate and exploit, but may the divine harmony between beings and creation be conserved in the logic of respect and care.”
The Church is or should go back to being a community of God’s people, and priests, pastors and bishops, who have the care of souls, are at the service of the people of God.
The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.
Jesus teaches us another way: Go out. Go out and share your testimony, go out and interact with your brothers, go out and share, go out and ask. Become the Word in body as well as spirit.
These days there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that’s a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. We all have to think about how we can become a little poorer.
In Europe first and now in America, elected men have taken it upon themselves to indebt their people to create an atmosphere of dependency. And why? For their own selfish need to increase their own personal power.
“Cardinal Re spoke about the war. Yesterday they did not let the patriarch enter into Gaza as they had promised. And yesterday children were bombed. This is cruelty. This is not war. I wanted to say this because it touches the heart.”
Pope Francis Quotes
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.
Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.
This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.
You might say, ‘Can’t we have a more human Christianity, without the cross, without Jesus, without stripping ourselves?’ In this way we’d become pastry-shop Christians, like a pretty cake and nice sweet things. Pretty, but not true Christians.
Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists – they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.
When we walk without the cross, when we build without the cross and when we proclaim Christ without the cross, we are not disciples of the Lord. We are worldly. We may be bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, all of this, but we are not disciples of the Lord.
“We must not be indifferent or resigned to the loss of biodiversity and the destruction of ecosystems, often caused by our irresponsible and selfish behavior… Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence … We have no such right.”
“Education is not about knowing things or taking lessons but about being able to use three lingos: those of the head, the heart, and the hands… learning so that you can think about what you feel and do, can feel what you think and do, and can do what you feel and think. Unity within a person.”
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.
Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good… Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.
We have observed that, in society and the world in which we live, selfishness has increased more than love for others, and that men of good will must work, each with his own strengths and expertise, to ensure that love for others increases until it is equal and possibly exceeds love for oneself.
Every man, every woman who has to take up the service of government, must ask themselves two questions: ‘Do I love my people in order to serve them better? Am I humble and do I listen to everybody, to diverse opinions in order to choose the best path?’ If you don’t ask those questions, your governance will not be good.
I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can – you must – try to seek God in every human life.
An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.
“Even hope, like all good things in this world, has enemies… Hope is the push in the heart of those who leave their home, and sometimes their family and relatives – I am thinking of migrants – to find a better life, with more dignity for themselves and their loved ones… It’s also the push in the heart of those who welcome: the desire to encounter, meet, dialogue… hope is the push to share the journey,”
Pope Francis Quotes
