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Summary: Striking Insights from a Modern Catholic Prophet
Review: Cardinal Ratzinger is cut from a different cloth than those mediocre prelates who are always eager to accommodate the mistakes of modern Western societies. This book is well worth reading because Ratzinger obviously places proclaiming the truth above his personal popularity. In my opinion, his most striking words have to do with the proper role of the bishop: to keep challenging Christians and others, to, as Augustine said, keep them from falling asleep. Ratzinger finds repulsive the mentality of "don't rock the boat" that seems to permeate too many dioceses. When church historians look back to the latter part of the 20th century, they will rightly note the pivotal role of Ratzinger in preserving the deposit of faith when so many high-ranking clerics and prominent theologians were so eager to compromise that same deposit of faith.
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Summary: Wisdom and wonderful insight!
Review: I am in the midst of reading Cardinal Ratzinger's book and just love it. It is stated by the author that the Cardinal did not wish his words to be rehearsed and so he answers everything freely and apparently on immediate thought. If this is true, it is truly wonderous to hear this religious Cardinal speak. He is profound in his wisdom and absolutely brillant. The book is helping me to understand many things and to help me gain strength and hope for my own faith. I know this book is available here but I think fellow Catholics might prefer to buy it at Ignatius Press [url] or [url] since it would help those spiritual ministries. I like to put my money into good causes if I can.
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Summary: Riveting. Well written. Partly biographical.
Review: I found Ratzinger's book refreshing and I think most Catholics will find it so. I have now given four copies of it away including one to our parish priest and another to someone who has been on the edge considering converting. If you are a Catholic it is certainly worth reading. If you adore the things of Christ my guess is that this book, in its reverence, will help to quiet the soul by saturating it in hope.
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Summary: Answers beyond standard answers
Review: The background of Peter Seewald sets the tone for the book. He does not shy from his questions and this brings out more of Cardinal Ratzinger. I was not dissappointed as C. Ratzinger provides more than standard answers. His answer on women as priests was excellent.One thing that strike me most was when he was asked a particular question, he asked to be excused. The author assumes that he leaves for a prayer and comes back to answer his question. C. Ratzinger answers his question based on the search of truth in the Catholic faith.
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Summary: my highlighter has gone dry
Review: There are so many fabulous insights in this book, and such honesty that it should be required reading for high school religion classes. Cardinal Ratzinger has really hit the nail on the head, giving all of us an inside view of the issues that are important to the Church. "In today's whirl of instant bliss, religion, too, is socially respectable only as a dream of happiness without tears, as a mystical enchantment of the soul. Perhaps the Church comes under heavier fire because she talks about sin and suffering and rectitude of life....Just one curious example - when it comes to the state, as soon as crimes begin to multiply and society feels its safety threatened, there is an immediate demand for tougher laws. In relation to the Church, whose laws are moral in nature, the exact opposite happens - there is a demand for further relaxation."
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Summary: A rare breed: the modest intellectual
Review: This book can be read in at least two ways: in the interest of understanding Cardinal Ratziner the man, or to understand Ratzinger the theologian. In other words, this is both a personal and intellectual book. Here Seewold succeeds in not only getting to Ratzinger's theological positions, but also the more personal thought processes that were instrumental in the formation of his very important views. This solid interview with one of the Church's most larger-than-life figures shows how little of himself Ratzinger can see in such a discription. That is, the overwhelming modesty of the man is what comes through most strikingly.
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Summary: An intelligent defense of the Church's everlasting verities.
Review: This is a book length interview of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He is the Roman Church's sentinel on the frontiers of theological adventurism, there to keep watch that the Church's Deposit of Faith is preserved against impious attack. He has held this position since 1981, when Pope John Paul II called him to Rome from Munich, where he was archbishop. He was born in Bavaria seventy-three years ago. As with Karol Wojtyla, he had a full life before going to Rome. As a young man and seminarian he was exposed to the rise of Nazism in Germany. He was a prominent theological advisor during the Second Vatican Council and taught theology at Germany's most prominent universities. He earned a reputation as one of the Church's brightest and most creative theologians. In an age when Truth has come under unceasing brutal assault, he has become a target of attack worldwide. He is routinely caricatured in the worldwide media as the new Grand Inquisitor, unthinking and dictatorial. This book will discomfit his enemies. It shows a deeply learned man moving carefully and deliberately across all the issues of the "Canon of Criticism," forthrightly defending the Church. It shows a man with a keen understanding of our present age and the ideologies that animate it. The Roman Church is contemptible to so many precisely because it stands in unabashed reproof of so much of what passes as wisdom today, including the central "truth" of our post-modern era: that only truth is that there is no Truth. This reminds us that the Church is now, as always, a scandal. But it is necessary, Cardinal Ratzinger reminds, us to distinguish between the "primary" scandal and the "secondary" scandal. "The secondary scandal consists in our actual mistakes, defects and over-institutionalizations . . .." (124) The Church is made up of men who are subject to all the frailties to which flesh is heir. But the Church aspires for more. That she occasionally fails should not surprise us. That she aspires for more should inspire new generations of saints. Yet the very idea that man is not naturally good and should aspire for more through self-abnegation is a deep offense to the modern mindset that man is good and is always, inexorably, getting better. This makes the Church an object of contempt and, in time, hatred. "[T]he primary scandal consists precisely in the fact that we stand in opposition to the decline into the banal and the bourgeois and into false promises. It consists in the fact that we don't simply leave man alone in his self-made ideologies." (124) Substitution of transitory political ethics for Christian ethics leads to despotism, the exaltation of a mere man as God: Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Min. "We can say with a certainty backed up by empirical evidence that if the ethical power represented by Christianity were suddenly torn out of humanity, mankind would lurch to and fro like a ship rammed against an iceberg, and then the survival of humanity would be in greatest jeopardy." (227) "For this reason . . . the Catholic Church is a scandal, insofar as she sets herself in opposition to what appears to be a nascent global ideology and defends primordial values of humanity that can't be fit into this ideology . . .." (124) "[I]f we give up the principle that every man as man is under God's protection, that as a man he is beyond the reach of arbitrary will, we really do forsake the foundation of human rights." (204) The sacred tradition of the Church is arrayed in defense of the dignity of mankind. Contrary to fashionable caricature, the Church is not an ossified tree, subject to being felled by the latest gale. It changes, but slowly, deliberately, organically. "[T]here are various degrees of importance in the tradition [of the Church] . . . not everything has the same weight . . . [but] there are . . . essentials, for example, the great conciliar decisions or what is stated in the Creed. These things are the Way and as such are vital to the Church's existence; they belong to her inner identity." (207-208) As to its essentials, its First Principles, or everlasting verities, the Church is powerless to change even in face of popular demand. Bringing to mind Edmund Burke and G.K. Chesterton, Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us that "the Church lives not only synchronically but diachronically as well. This means that it is always all - even the dead - who live and are the whole Church, that it is always all who must be considered in any majority in the Church. . . . The Church lives her life precisely from the identity of all the generations, from their identity that overarches time, and her real majority is made up of the saints." (189) Our present age cannot cavalierly discard the wisdom of this great communion of the living and the dead, of one hundred human generations of the Church, confident that it has somehow achieved superceding wisdom. Instead, it must, as must all generations, submit to the essentials of the Church, to revelation and the Church's sacred tradition. "Every generation tries to join the ranks of the saints, and each makes its contribution. But it can do that only by accepting this great continuity and entering into it in a living way." (189) The Church does not need additional "reformers" of institutions. "What we really need are people who are inwardly seized by Christianity, who experience it as joy and hope, who have thus become lovers. And these we call saints." (269) This is not easy for any generation. It places a break on volition. It posits that man's every impulse is not virtuous. Intrinsically, it asserts that man is not God, that man must prune his impulses, as he would an overgrown plant to prepare it to bear fruit. "[P]eople don't want to do without religion, but they want it only to give, not to make its own demands on man. People want to take the mysterious element in religion but spare themselves the effort of faith." (212) This is New Age faith, not the faith of the Church and her saints. "If the willingness to be bound is not there, and if, above all, submission to the truth is not there, then in the end all of this will simply remain a game." (235) It is often heard today that if only the Church would make priestly celibacy optional, ordain women and "reform" its doctrine to accommodate other contemporary demands, that she would flourish as never before. These cavils ignore the central truth of any true church - that its communicants come to it and submit to the truth it professes, a truth beyond editing by plebiscite. It also reveals a stunning lack of critical intelligence. "These issues are resolved in Lutheran Christianity," Cardinal Ratzinger notes. "On these points, it has taken the other path, and it is quite plain that it hasn't thereby solved the problem of being a Christian in today's world and that the problem of Christianity, the effort of being a Christian, remains just as dramatic as before." (181) Why should the Roman Church make itself a clone of Lutheranism? "[B]eing a Christian does not stand or fall on these questions [and] . . . the resolution of these matters doesn't make the gospel more attractive or being Christian any easier. It does not even achieve the agreement that will better hold the Church together. I believe we should finally be clear on this point, that the Church is not suffering on account of these questions." (182) Cardinal Ratzinger is forthright in his pessimistic assessment of the time ahead. "The danger of a dictatorship of opinion is growing, and anyone who doesn't share the prevailing opinion is excluded, so that even good people no longer dare to stand by such nonconformists [i.e. Christians]. Any future anti-Christian dictatorship would probably be much more subtle than anything we have known until now. It will appear to be friendly to religion, but on the condition that its own models of behavior and thinking not be called into question." (153) The Church must attorn to the zeitgeist in this scheme. These themes are explored in Michael D. O'Brien's "Children of the Last Day" novels. It is time for the faithful, Cardinal Ratzinger says, to form "vital circles." [T]here are great, vibrant new beginnings and joyful forms of Christian life that don't figure much statistically but are humanly great and have the power to shape the future." (143). "Particularly when one has to resist evil it's important to not to fall into gloomy moralism that doesn't allow itself any joy but really to see how much beauty there is, too, and to draw from it the strength needed to resist what destroys joy." (69) In his autobiography "The Sword of Imagination," the novelist and historian Russell Kirk writes, "Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by the threads of moral and intellectual belief. In the hands of the Fates are no thunderbolts: only threads and scissors." Throughout this book, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger demonstrates that he understands better than, perhaps, anyone e
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Summary: "An intelligent defense . . .", Part 2.
Review: [The following three paragraphs were striken from the end of my earlier review of this book due to length restrictions. The beginning of the review, of which these three paragraphs form the concluding portion, appears immediately below this review.] Cardinal Ratzinger is forthright in his pessimistic assessment of the time ahead. "The danger of a dictatorship of opinion is growing, and anyone who doesn't share the prevailing opinion is excluded, so that even good people no longer dare to stand by such nonconformists [i.e. Christians]. Any future anti-Christian dictatorship would probably be much more subtle than anything we have known until now. It will appear to be friendly to religion, but on the condition that its own models of behavior and thinking not be called into question." (153) The Church must attorn to the zeitgeist in this scheme. These themes are explored in Michael D. O'Brien's "Children of the Last Day" novels. It is time for the faithful, Cardinal Ratzinger says, to form "vital circles." [T]here are great, vibrant new beginnings and joyful forms of Christian life that don't figure much statistically but are humanly great and have the power to shape the future." (143). "Particularly when one has to resist evil it's important to not to fall into gloomy moralism that doesn't allow itself any joy but really to see how much beauty there is, too, and to draw from it the strength needed to resist what destroys joy." (69) In his autobiography, the novelist and historian Russell Kirk wrote, "Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by the threads of moral and intellectual belief. In the hands of the Fates are no thunderbolts: only threads and scissors." Throughout this book, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger shows that in most parts of the world that the Roman Catholic Church is the last defense against the decay of human civilization. By defending revelation and sacred tradition against the moral anarchy of the age, the Church withholds disorder of the soul and the commonwealth, the idolatry of man as god, and preserves man, as a creature of God, against transitory and often violent popular passion. The ambitions of those men who would bring about and celebrate her demise are dangerous. Implicit in Cardinal Ratzinger's words and lifetime service is the message that it is time for serious men of serious purpose to come to her defense.
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Summary: "An intelligent defense . . .", Part 2.
Review: [The following three paragraphs were striken from the end of my earlier review of this book due to length restrictions. The beginning of the review, of which these three paragraphs form the concluding portion, appears immediately below this review.] Cardinal Ratzinger is forthright in his pessimistic assessment of the time ahead. "The danger of a dictatorship of opinion is growing, and anyone who doesn't share the prevailing opinion is excluded, so that even good people no longer dare to stand by such nonconformists [i.e. Christians]. Any future anti-Christian dictatorship would probably be much more subtle than anything we have known until now. It will appear to be friendly to religion, but on the condition that its own models of behavior and thinking not be called into question." (153) The Church must attorn to the zeitgeist in this scheme. These themes are explored in Michael D. O'Brien's "Children of the Last Day" novels. It is time for the faithful, Cardinal Ratzinger says, to form "vital circles." [T]here are great, vibrant new beginnings and joyful forms of Christian life that don't figure much statistically but are humanly great and have the power to shape the future." (143). "Particularly when one has to resist evil it's important to not to fall into gloomy moralism that doesn't allow itself any joy but really to see how much beauty there is, too, and to draw from it the strength needed to resist what destroys joy." (69) In his autobiography, the novelist and historian Russell Kirk wrote, "Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by the threads of moral and intellectual belief. In the hands of the Fates are no thunderbolts: only threads and scissors." Throughout this book, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger shows that in most parts of the world that the Roman Catholic Church is the last defense against the decay of human civilization. By defending revelation and sacred tradition against the moral anarchy of the age, the Church withholds disorder of the soul and the commonwealth, the idolatry of man as god, and preserves man, as a creature of God, against transitory and often violent popular passion. The ambitions of those men who would bring about and celebrate her demise are dangerous. Implicit in Cardinal Ratzinger's words and lifetime service is the message that it is time for serious men of serious purpose to come to her defense.
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