Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger - Faith and Politics

FAITH AND POLITICS

BENEDICT XVI
JOSEPH RATZINGER

Selected Writings

With a Foreword by Pope Francis

Translated by Michael J. Miller and others

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

2018 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-230-5 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-64229-047-9 (EB)
Library of Congress Catalogue number 2018939113
Printed in the United States of America

1. The Rejection of Romes Political Theology

a. The Untruthfulness of the Political Religion

b. The Power of the Demons

2. The Starting Point for the Augustinian Theology of the Political

a. The Antithesis of the Stoa

b. The Antithesis of Platonism

3. The Theological Use of the Old Testament and of Roman History

4. The Place of the Church in History

5. Conclusion

Foreword

1. Freedom, Law, and the Good: Moral Principles in Democratic Societies

a. The Public Claim of Conscience

b. Individual Freedom and Common Values

c. Respecting a Core of Humanity

2. If You Want Truth, Respect the Conscience of Every Person: Conscience and Truth

a. A Conversation on the Erroneous Conscience and First Inferences

b. Newman and Socrates: Guides to Conscience

c. Systematic Consequences: The Two Levels of Conscience

Anamnesis

Conscientia

d. Epilogue: Conscience and Grace

3. The Significance of Ethical and Religious Values in a Pluralistic Society

a. Relativism as a Precondition of Democracy

b. What Is the State for ?

c. The Contradictory Answers to the Questions of the Foundations of Democracy

The Relativistic Theory

The Metaphysical and Christian Thesis

Evidential Character of Morality? Mediating Positions

d. Summary and Conclusions

e. Closing Reflection: Heaven and Earth

1. Power and Law

2. New Forms of Power and New Questions about Mastering It

3. Prerequisites for Law: LawNatureReason

4. Interculturality and Its Consequences

5. Conclusions

by
His Holiness Pope Francis

The relation between faith and politics is one of the major themes that have always been at the center of attention of Joseph RatzingerBenedict XVI throughout his entire intellectual and human career: his firsthand experience of Nazi totalitarianism led him even as a young student to reflect on the limits of obedience to the state for the sake of the liberty of obeying God: The state, he writes along these lines in one of the texts presented in this volume, is not the whole of human existence and does not encompass all human hope. Man and what he hopes for extend beyond the framework of the state and beyond the sphere of political action. This is true not only for a state like Babylon, but for every state. The state is not the totality; this unburdens the politician and at the same time opens up for him the path of reasonable politics. The Roman state was wrong and anti-Christian precisely because it wanted to be the totality of human possibilities and hopes. A state that makes such claims cannot fulfill its promises; it thereby falsifies and diminishes man. Through the totalitarian lie, it becomes demonic and tyrannical.

Later on, again precisely on this basis, at the side of Saint John Paul II, he elaborates and proposes a Christian vision of human rights that is capable of calling into question at the theoretical and practical level the totalitarian claim of the Marxist state and of the atheistic ideology on which it was founded; because in Ratzingers opinion the real contrast between Marxism and Christianity certainly does not consist in the Christians preferential option for the poor: We must also learnagain, not just theoretically, but in the way we think and actthat in addition to the Real Presence of Jesus in the Church and in the Blessed Sacrament, there is that other, second real presence of Jesus in the least of our brethren, in the downtrodden of this world, in the humblest; he wants us to find him in all of them, Ratzinger writes as early as the 1970s with the theological depth and at the same time the immediate accessibility that are characteristic of a genuine pastor. Nor does that contrast consist, as he emphasizes in the mid-1980s, in a lack of a sense of equity and solidarity in the Churchs Magisterium; and, consequently, in denouncing the scandal of the shocking inequality between the rich and poorwhether between rich and poor countries, or between social classes in a single nation[which] is no longer tolerated.

The profound contrast, Ratzinger notes, consists insteadeven prior to the Marxist claim to place heaven on earth, mans redemption in the present worldof the fathomless difference that exists between them with regard to how redemption is supposed to come about: Does redemption occur through liberation from all dependence, or is its sole path the complete dependence of love, which then would also be true freedom?

And thus, thirty years in advance, he accompanies us in understanding our present day, which testifies to the unchanged freshness and vitality of his thought. Today, indeed, more than ever , the same temptation is being proposed again: to reject any dependence of love that is not mans love for his own ego, for the I and its desires; and, consequently, the danger of the colonization of the conscience by an ideology that denies the fundamental certainty that man exists as male and female, to whom is assigned the task of transmitting life; the ideology that goes so far as to plan rationally the production of human beings and thatperhaps for some end that is considered goodgoes so far as to think it logical and licit to eliminate what it no longer considers to be created, given as a gift, conceived, and generated, but considers, rather, to be made by ourselves.

These apparent human rights, which all tend toward mans self-destructionJoseph Ratzinger shows us this forcefully and effectivelyhave one common denominator, which consists in one great denial: the denial of the dependence on love, the denial that man is Gods creature, lovingly made by him in his image, for whom man thirsts like the deer for running streams (Ps 42). When this dependence of the creature on the Creator is denied, this relation of love, one basically relinquishes mans true greatness and the bulwark of his liberty and dignity.

Thus the defense of man and of what is human against the ideological reductions of power proceeds today once again by way of establishing mans obedience to God as the limit of obedience to the state. To take up this challenge, in the truly epochal change through which we are living today, means to defend the family. Elsewhere, Saint John Paul II had already understood correctly the decisive importance of the question: it was no accident that he, who was rightly called also the pope of the family, stressed that the future of humanity passes by way of the family.

Thus I am particularly happy to be able to introduce this second volume of selected writings of Joseph Ratzinger on the theme of faith and politics. Together with his weighty Complete Works , they can help all of us not only to understand our present day and to find a sound orientation for the future but also to be a true and genuine source of inspiration for political action that places the family, solidarity, and equity at the center of its attention and of its planning and thereby truly looks to the future with far-sighted wisdom.

Franciscus

The Multiplication of Rights and the
Destruction of the Concept of Law

Points for a discussion of Marcello Peras book
La Chiesa, i diritti humani e il distacco da Dio
(The Church, Human Rights and
Estrangement from God)