WESTERN CULTURE TODAY AND TOMORROW:
ADDRESSING THE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES
By Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI
Ignatius, 2019


Really read Joseph Ratzinger’s book.
Powerful perspectives and correctives dot every page. Take, for example, the role of monasticism in preserving Western culture after the fall of the Roman Empire. We all have images of Irish monks meticulously copying manuscripts, but why was that culture preserved in monasteries? Was it just an accident, only because monasteries happened to be around, as perhaps many people think? Was it just that the Western Roman Empire lacked an Andreas Carniegus to endow libraries for the next millennium?
Lionel: The monks believed there was no salvation outside the Church. For Pope Benedict and Pope Francis there is known salvation outside the Church. So there are exceptions to Feeneyite extra ecclesiam nulla salus(EENS) for them.
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Or rather, as Benedict XVI, seems to suggest in passing, was it that the world of antiquity knew that there was the kingdom of Caesar and the Kingdom of God and that both were important?
Lionel: The separation of Church and State today comes from Cushingite philosophy and theology. With Feeneyite EENS, the Social Reign of Christ the King in politics and law and the non separation of Church and State was proclaimed by the monks and the popes and saints over the centuries.
Pope Benedict and the left reject this.
Pope Benedict wrote along with a member of the Italian Senate  a book supporting secularism and the separation of Church and State.This was the natural fruit of his Cushingite interpretation of Vatican Council II.
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 And was it not the monasteries and churches of the West that, liturgical differences notwithstanding, still provided a common cultural glue that maintained communion in the absence of state institutions between Europe east and west, despite those differences? In other words, pace many European elites, was religion the core of European identity?
Lionel: But it was not the religion of Rahner and Ratzinger.
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 Is not Ratzinger correct in saying Europe is not a “continent that can be comprehended neatly in geographical terms; rather, it is a cultural and historical concept”? And isn’t it a cultural-historical concept that originated in a religious context and also finds its children in the Americas? 
Lionel: Their faith was  not Cushingite, like that of the popes since Paul VI.
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Modernity is ready to relegate religion to the sacristy, yet the Western public square would not be what it is but for religion. That is what makes this book so vitally important not just for religious readers, but even more so for anybody engaged in public policy, governance, history and culture. To pretend that Western culture is intelligible apart from its Judeo-Christian roots is to talk about a chimera: It may be the “culture” some elites want it to be, but the illusion has nothing in common with real Western culture or its origins.
Lionel: Pope Benedict in his books will not affirm the strict interpretation of the dogma EENS and neither will he affirm Vatican Council II with Feeneyism, for political reasons. So this is another of his books which can be written off.
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Ratzinger does not deny modernity, but he demands that modernity challenge its own presuppositions. The most important question I think he asks in this book is: What are “the ethical foundations of the law?” For Ratzinger, the answer is not inconsistent with the American founding principle of “unalienable rights.”
He writes:
“This is the question of whether there is something that can never become law but always remains injustice; or, to reverse this formulation, whether there is something that is of its very nature inalienably law, something that is antecedent to every majority decision and must be respected by all such decisions.” It cannot be culturally relative “because the obviousness of these values is by no means acknowledged in every culture. Islam has defined its own catalogue of human rights, which differs from the Western catalogue.” And so have others.
Lionel: The Muslims still affirm exclusive salvation in their religion. Pope Benedict let us down.
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Yet, in a global society, the need for a moral foundation that preexists particular forms of positive law is increasingly apparent, lest the conflict between one man’s right to life and another’s vision of executing his deity’s or his ideology’s grand vision collapse into a mere power struggle. The moral question cannot be ignored.
Lionel: Pope Benedict changed the moral and faith teachings of the Church with an irrational premise.Even though there are so many reports on the Internet, he and the Ignatius Press editors, do not have it in them to correct the error.
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That’s why this book is so important. Politicians, diplomats, policy-makers and commentators all need this book as much as — if not more than — readers interested in religious topics or readers who are Joseph Ratzinger’s fans. Immensely timely, invaluably important.
Lionel: Another one for the dustbin like those books on Vatican Council II. They are all interpret the Council with a false premise to create a rupture with the ecclesiology of the monks over the centuries.-Lionel Andrades