"So Jesus did not call Himself unequivocally the Messiah (Christ); the man who gave Him this name was Pilate, who for his part associated himself with the accusation of the Jews by yielding to this accusation and proclaiming Jesus on the cross, in an execution notice drawn up in all the international languages of the day, as the executed king (=Messiah, Christus) of the Jews.  This execution notice, the death sentence of history, became with paradoxical unity the 'confession of faith', the real starting-point and rooting-point of the Christian faith, which holds Jesus to be the Christ: as the crucified criminal this Jesus is the Christ, the king.  His crucifixion is His coronation; His coronation or kingship is His surrender of Himself to men, the identification of word, mission, and existence in the yielding up of this very existence.  His existence is thus His word.  He is word because He is love.  From the cross faith understands in increasing measure that this Jesus did not just do or say something; that in Him message and person are identical, that He always already is what He says.  John needed only to draw the final straightforward inference: if that is so -- and this is the christological basis of his gospel -- then this Jesus Christ is 'word'; but a person who not only has words but is his word and his word is the logos (the 'Word', meaning, mind) itself; that person has always existed and will always exist; He is the ground on which the world stands -- if we ever meet such a person, then he is the meaning which sustains us all and by which we are all sustained."  

-- Ratzinger's Intro., pp 151-2

I think this is the most difficult passage of the entire book, which is among the most profound books I have ever come across!  Jesus as Word=Jesus as Love=Jesus as Original Meaning of the entire created world=Jesus as the Eternal One!  It requires much mediation, reflections, prayers, and fasting to grasp the profundity of what the pope wrote here!

"For the time being, let us note that alongside the union of the God of faith and the God of the philosophers, which we recognize in the first article as the basic assumption and structural form of the Christian faith, a second, no less decisive alliance appears, namely that of the logos and sarx, of word and flesh, of faith and history.  The historical man Jesus is the Son of God, and the Son of God is the man Jesus.  God comes to pass for man through man, nay, even more concretely, through the man in whom the quintessence of humanity appears and who for that very reason is at the same time God Himself."


--  Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity, p. 142. 

"At each crisis in the growth of our human affections there should be a corresponding discovery of a new aspect of our friendship for Christ."


"At each temptation . . . realize that this is normal.  At this time ask God to help you decide and know that Jesus asks you simply to choose Him, once more, as the single object of your love."


-- by Father Voillaume in "Au Coeur des masses"

"Thus today we often see in the faces of young people a remarkable bitterness, a resignation that is far removed from the enthusiasm of youthful ventures into the unknown.  The deepest root of this sorrow is the lack of any great hope and the unattainability of any great love: everything one can hope for is known, and all love becomes the disappointment of finiteness in a world whose monstrous surrogates are only a pitiful disguise for profound despair.  And in this way the truth becomes ever more tangible that the sorrow of this world leads to death: it is only flirting with death, the ghastly business of playing with power and violence, that is still exciting enough to create an appearance of satisfaction.  "If you eat it you must die" -- for a long time this has no longer been just a saying from mythology (Gen. 3:3)."

-- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's "To Look On Christ", published by Crossroad, 1991, pp. 69-70.

Isn't it true that we keep bumping up against our limitations, our finiteness, our finitude, even as we yearn for eternity in the very enjoyment of earthly delights?  This feeling of constant frustration over our inability to ever achieve lasting joy and love and happiness in this life should drive us all to despair, if it had not been for our faith and our hope, which has been guaranteed by Christ's resurrection.