"(...) Michael Novak has rightly recognized that the very emergence of relativism means that "Power trumps."
"The new way [to relativism] – writes Novak – is not toward objectivity, but toward subjectivism; not toward truth as its criterion, but toward power. This, Ratzinger fears, is a move back toward the justification of murder in the name of "tolerance" and subjective choice."
Yet Novak does not go as far as to recognize, given such a context, the dangers entailed in the "divinization" of democratic rule so typical of the contemporary word.
Democracy goes far beyond being a merely procedural rule, and is raised to the status of the main ideological ethos of our time.
Legitimacy comes to be tested not in the light of independent criteria of good and evil – but rather via the mere ratification of a particular act by a parliamentary majority.
In a way, the very idea of the possibility of voting on whatever issue – ranging from killing infants (abortions) and adults (war) to the denial of private property (taxation) and wealth redistribution (subsidies and regulation) – is in essence a form, if not the form, of relativism.
On the other hand, it should be remembered that Truth isn’t enemy to freedom. As Alejandro Chafuen points out, "Cardinal Ratzinger focused on teaching the importance of convictions, rather than force.
On November 6, 1992, at the ceremony where Ratzinger was inducted into the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institute of France, he explained that a free society can only subsist where people share basic moral convictions and high moral standards. He further argued that these convictions need not be ‘imposed or even arbitrarily defined by external coercion’." (...)
In the 1985 interview-book, Rapporto sulla fede, that Vittorio Messori (later to interview John Paul II in Crossing the Threshold of Hope) authored with the Cardinal, he sharply defined Marxism "not the hope, but the shame of our time."
Indeed very significant is the name that Cardinal Ratzinger chose for himself.
The last Benedict was Benedict XV, who was a strong critic of World War I, which he defined as a "useless massacre" that was leading to the "suicide of Europe." Benedict XV was a Pontiff for peace. He made very clear that the path that Europe was climbing would end in the death of the West. Benedict XVI has the same vision, although today the threat to Europe is much more ideological than before: the smoking gun is not a real gun, as it was the case in 1914–18, but relativism.
Asked by an interviewer to comment on John Paul II’s opposition to the Iraqi war, the then Cardinal Ratzinger explained that he found the Holy Father’s judgment "reasonable also from a rational point of view: there were no sufficient reason to wage war against Iraq."
A Pope for Peace and Reason by Carlo Stagnaro and Alberto Mingardi
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