Joseph Ratzinger had a logical, historical, critical razor and he knew how to use it. His enormous power of porcelain and steel was able to challenge the single dominant thought, the ethical, historical and philosophical relativism of our time
Impudent and even foul-mouthed laymen, by Ratzinger we fell in love here early on. It was the theological arm of a great and terrible pope, John Paul II, the liberator of Europe. He was the formidable super-professor of a sacred science, a Kabbalistic combination of reason and tradition, reflection and faith. A very powerful tool, the faith of others, scented with incense and without the smell of sheep, in the service of the great questions about the Western way of life and its “universal values”, which are the fragile criteria of human existence. He believed in God and advanced the absolute hypothesis that God does not exist in order to help famous men of good will correct the world “as if God existed”.. His intellectual genius proceeded in leaps and bounds, in abstractions, he wanted to be understood and did everything from his thesis to the three volumes on Jesus of Nazareth to be understood. Through the Dominus Iesus, Christ dead and risen, and the Catholic God, nothing but a directive from the Holy Office, affirming the Nicene Creed, and therefore, as Giacomo Biffi, Archbishop of Bologna, sarcastically remarked, it caused more of a scandal in the hypermodernist and walking church than a pilgrim.
Augustinian, in his “Introduction to Christianity” Thomas Aquinas is never mentioned, not even by mistake, but the Redemption of the Middle Ages, a rational, Aristotelian and even esoteric connection between the Gospels, the patristics of late antiquity and the modern it led to iridescent ones To prove. The world is undeniable, we can know it, and believing is a major way of doing it without taking it as a fairy tale or interpretation. Ratzinger had a logical, historical, critical razor and he knew how to use it. According to Michele Ciliberto’s Renaissance formula, he knew how to “think in opposites”. On the other hand, he successfully campaigned for the rehabilitation of Galileo, for a final understanding with his Jewish brothers, and even for an apology from the ecclesiastical institution in the face of history’s harsh replies. The Catholic Church should always be reformed, and always unchanging, unchanging except in the development of doctrine and pastoral practice, which also applied to Vatican II, a passage in Christianity and not a break in its continuity. Marcenaro said it was a statuette from Nuremberg, 19th-century porcelain, and as always he was right. Porcelain and steel are dissimilar materials, compounds that unleash an enormous power capable of challenging the only dominant thought, the ethical and historical and philosophical relativism of our time.
When his holy pope died and he gave a rally in the form of a homily to signal that the church has meaning when it contradicts the world it lives in but doesn’t necessarily belong to, we have the whole page with us “Professor Ratzinger’s Stunning Lesson”, the next day we changed the masthead because we felt it and the Foglio became Il Soglio and the title was ‘The Stunning Choice of Professor Ratzinger’. We fought against Regensburg, against abortion, against the Church’s ability to contradict a world of intolerable ideological clericalism, we demonstrated against Sapienza’s dismissive attitude towards him, we published everything about him, the great speeches about Europe and Cultures, to the St. Bernards of Paris and Bundestag, we shared the white dress complete with gold cross and red slippers. In eight years the election vanished with renunciation, a rational act of faith, the church ran into trouble, but the lesson survives the smallest and largest Nuremberg statue of the twentieth century and perishes. I remember him with Cardinal Ruini in the small Salesian church of Testaccio in Santa Maria Liberatrice, and I will never forget that hand touched by reverential admiration among different faithful.
“Ferrara, Giuliano. Born in Rome on January 7, 1952 to parents who had joined the Communist Party since 1942 and fought partisans without Luciferian pride or combative rhetoric. A family with liberal traditions on the side of his father, his grandfather Mario was a well-known lawyer and publicist (columnist for Mario Pannunzio’s Mondo and Corriere della Sera) who defended the anti-fascists before the Special Court for State Security.
