The honorific His Holiness is the official style used to refer to male leaders and highly respected spiritual figures of some religious groups; Her Holiness is the female equivalent. The term is sometimes abbreviated or "HH" or "H.H." when confusion with "His/Her Highness" is unlikely. The associated form of address is "Your Holiness". It is used for figures of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. The style may be used alone or followed by title and name; when speaking about a current Pope either "His Holiness visited the shrine..." or "His Holiness Pope Benedict visited the shrine...".
The title and form of address are used routinely by protocol in diplomacy and in formal contexts.
Famous quotes containing the word holiness:
“A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)