What do the Popes say about the Spiritual Exercises?

 

 

Pope Francis: “He who lives the Exercises in a genuine way experiences attraction, is fascinated by God, and returns renewed, transfigured to ordinary life, to the ministry, to daily relations, bearing within him the fragrance of Christ.”

 

 

Pope Benedict XVI: “The Spiritual Exercises are a particularly precious means and method with which to seek God, within us, around us and in all things, to know his will and to put it into practice.”

 

 

 

Pope John Paul II: “The Exercises are, in fact, a set of meditations and prayers in an atmosphere of contemplation and silence, and, above all, a special interior impulse—deriving from the Holy Spirit—to open ample spaces of the soul to the action of grace.”

 

 

 

Pope Paul VI: “We must spread this source of salvation and spiritual energy, adapting it to all categories of people.”

 

 

Pope Pius XI in Mens Nostra: “The gravest disease by which our age is oppressed … is that levity and thoughtlessness which carry men hither and thither through devious ways. Hence comes the constant and passionate absorption in external things; hence, the insatiable thirst for riches and pleasures … and so entangles them in outward and fleeting things that it forbids them to think of eternal truths, and of the Divine laws, and of God Himself, the one beginning and end of all created things … Now, if we would cure this sickness from which human society suffers so sorely, what healing remedy could we devise more appropriate for our purpose than that of calling these enervated souls, so neglectful of eternal things, to the recollection of the Spiritual Exercises?”

 

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