Several aspects of the pontificate of silent martyrdom.
The late pope emeritus warned the church not to reduce the message of Jesus to the vague values of political moralism.
Joseph Ratzinger – Benedict XVI. was a great gift of God to the church and the world. Uniquely, he was able to reconcile deep intellectual knowledge with spiritual penetration of the problem, in other words, integrally combine Fides et ratio, faith, and reason, and thus penetrate to the essence of things, understand complex phenomena and foresee their further development.
The key word of his theological thinking and pontificate was the truth. This term was already in his archbishop’s motto and the title of two key encyclicals.
While today’s secularized world is dominated by the dictates of relativism, enforced by political power through the ubiquitous media offensive and coercive means, Ratzinger never stopped proclaiming that objective truth independent of human will exists and that man naturally seeks it.
It is not enough, therefore, to be “polite” concerning supposed Christian love, to “discuss” and “tolerate each other”, because even Christian love is nothing if it is not rooted in truth, and Christian tolerance tolerates the sinner, but not his error and sin.
As Catholics, we have a moral obligation to the truth, which is only one and is not “in the middle”, as political correctness cheaply offers us today, but it is where it is, and as Christians, we have a moral obligation to seek and proclaim it, opportune importune, that is even if it causes resistance.
He ruthlessly pointed out the crisis in the church
During the Way of the Cross in the Coliseum on Good Friday 2005, shortly before the death of Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spoke harsh words about the crisis in the Church: “ How little faith there is in so many theories, how many empty words there are!” How much dirt there is in the church, and even among those who in the priesthood should belong to him (that is, Jesus).”
Pope Benedict XVI. then he mercilessly pointed out the crisis in the church, the “pride, and self-centeredness”, especially among those who should completely belong to it [the church] as priests!”, and the lack of faith. He compared the church to a boat that is tossed between ideological currents, “into which water flows from all sides”, in which there is too much of the human and not enough of the divine.
Ratzinger’s principles and ideas provoked a huge backlash from the secular, anti-Church-biased world.
He warned the church and theology not to reduce the message of Jesus to vague values that merge with the general meaningless slogans of political moralism such as decency, tolerance, protection of creation, and peace…, in the middle of which, however, God is forgotten, without whom they become empty and exploitable.
Pope Benedict was convinced that the church and theology had already wasted a lot of time in minor fights over details and had lost sight of the essentials. The Church must not allow itself to be degraded to a cheap social moralizer or an institution of social assistance, it must become itself again, return to its most proper task of proclaiming God’s word and God’s kingdom, and each of its priests must be an alter Christus, “another Christ”, who is in the name of Christ’s truth, he is not even afraid of Calvary.
Integral human development is not possible without God
Although Benedict XVI. wrote only one explicitly social encyclical, which was published a few months after the outbreak of the great financial crisis of 2008, in it he gave a clear message to the world: integral human development cannot be achieved without God.
Marxism and liberalism – he considered both ideologies and systems to be very related because they are built on the same materialism without God – tried to achieve development through purely economic, material means, but these are not only insufficient, but without God, they become dehumanized and counterproductive.
When we remove the moral principle and reduce the economy to the principle of profit and its functioning to a market mechanism, it becomes a destructive tool hostile to man, unable to ensure the integral material-spiritual development of man and the common good of the nation and the state.
Economics also needs the idea of a selfless gift, solidarity, and work out of love and devotion, work is “decent” only when a person chooses it voluntarily, and income is “decent” when it allows one to support a family and provide education and upbringing for children, to enjoy respect in society, to let your voice be heard in the public space, to have a dignified perspective on the time of retirement.
A society of freedom and justice is not possible without the gospel, truly human development is only possible when it touches all people and the whole person, in his material and spiritual dimensions.
Empty Europe
Ratzinger was convinced that the European “civilization of technology and trade, which is triumphantly spreading throughout the world” is “a post-European culture, born from the demise of the old European cultures”.
Europe is emptied from the inside, paralyzed by the will to live, the rejection of the future, manifested by the rejection of children and “pathological” self-hatred. It opens itself up to foreign values, but does not love itself, it sees only everything reprehensible and destructive in its history, it laudably punishes the dishonor of the faith of Israel or Islam, but it offers its own Christianity as a prey to attack and supports multiculturalism, which in reality is only a denial of its own and sacred.
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