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More on Pope Benedict

I'm not a Catholic, so my interest in this stuff is academic in both senses of the word, but I feel like I ought to blog on it anyway.

While I think he's mistaken about gays, I think this is a good message: "One of Cardinal Ratzinger's central, and most misunderstood, notions is his conception of liberty, and he is very jealous in thinking deeply about it, pointing often to Tocqueville. He is a strong foe of socialism, statism and authoritarianism, but he also worries that democracy, despite its great promise, is exceedingly vulnerable to the tyranny of the majority, to "the new soft despotism" of the all-mothering state, and to the common belief that liberty means doing whatever you please. Following Lord Acton and James Madison, Cardinal Ratzinger has written of the need of humans to practice self-government over their passions in private life. He also fears that Europe, especially, is abandoning the search for objective truth and sliding into pure subjectivism. That is how the Nazis arose, he believes, and the Leninists. When all opinions are considered subjective, no moral ground remains for protesting against lies and injustices." (That's from a NYT op-ed by Michael Novak, read the whole thing here.)

All of that is true.

Posted on Wednesday, April 20, 2005 at 9:21 AM | Comments (9) | Return

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