About This Book
A selection and arrangement of the teachings left by Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger (1927-2022), prepared before and during his papacy as Benedict XVI and with a view to the Third Millennium of Christianity, is the purpose of this brief edition. In the opinion of those of us who are its authors, what is gathered here is enough for us to affirm that we are in the presence of another Doctor of the Church. With his intellectual work - do not forget that he was one of the expert theologians during the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), a time of rebirth and reform, without rupture or discontinuity, who was able to harmonize antagonisms and saw them, rather than censure them, as both worthy of serious reflection – he then covers two papacies, that of John Paul II during which he served as Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith, and his own. It covers the final time of communism, of the tragic experience of real socialism under the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which is the milestone or arc of time that at the same time marks the advent of Humanity to the 21st century, where Christian spaces and time are threatened or questioned as categories, behind the emerging religion of relativism. “On the basis of the conviction of the existence of a creative God,” the Pontiff observes, “the concept of human rights has developed, the idea of the equality of all men before the law, the awareness of the inviolability of human dignity of each person and the recognition of the responsibility of men for their conduct.” These knowledges of reason form, according to the Pope, “our cultural memory.”
