Benedict XVI Quotes

“commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, Solzhenitsyn shocked his audience by suggesting that “the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion” was not attractive to those living in Russia. “It is time, in the West,” Solzhenitsyn said, “to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.” The triumph of rights over obligations had resulted in a destructive and irresponsible freedom, leading to “the abyss of human decadence.” He criticized the “misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror,” which illustrated the surrender of the West to the corrosion of evil. “The problem at the root of the West’s malaise,” Solzhenitsyn explained, was rooted in the “rationalistic humanism” of the so-called Enlightenment:”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“Compare Chesterton’s view with Ratzinger’s: It is precisely woman who is paying the greatest price [for the sexual “revolution.”] … Woman, who is creative in the truest sense of the word by giving life, does not “produce,” however, in that technical sense which is the only one that is valued by a society more masculine than ever in its cult of efficiency. She is being convinced that the aim is to “liberate” her, “emancipate” her, by encouraging her to masculinize herself, thus bringing her into conformity with the culture of production and subjecting her to the control of the masculine society of technicians, of salesmen, of politicians who seek profit and power, organizing everything, marketing everything, instrumentalizing everything for their own ends.13”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“The war on Christianity was also made manifest in the efforts to introduce neopaganism into the lives of the people. Joseph Ratzinger recalled that a young teacher in the village erected a maypole as a symbol of the pagan concept of the “life force.” He organized festivals for the summer solstice in homage to the sacredness of nature and dismissed traditional notions of sin, virtue, and redemption as alien ideas imposed by the cultural imperialism of the Jewish and Roman religion of Christianity. The old religious ideas had to make way for the new order, and the new order demanded a new age. Sixty years later, in his memoirs, Cardinal Ratzinger compared the anti-Christian neopaganism of the Nazis with the anti-Christian neopaganism of our own day: “When nowadays I hear how in many parts of the world Christianity is criticized as a destruction of individual cultural identity and an imposition of European values, I am amazed at how similar the types of argumentation are and at how familiar many a turn of phrase sounds.”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“Another part of the Nazi Party’s war on Christianity was its efforts to bring the Catholic schools into conformity with the prevailing ideology of the state. Fidelity to the Faith of the Fathers was seen as an obstacle to the new faith of the Fatherland. The traditional bond between the schools and the Church was dissolved, and Christianity was replaced by a new common core curriculum imposed by the government. From that point on, only what was deemed politically “correct” would be tolerated in the classroom.”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“One imagines that similar scenes of joy erupted throughout the world wherever two or three faithful Catholics gathered together. In contrast, the election of Ratzinger was greeted with grief and horror by those heretical theologians and cafeteria Catholics whose heresies and backsliding equivocations had been condemned by the new Pope during his many years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As usual, these wolves in sheep’s clothing howled in unison with the wolves in the secular media, uniting themselves with the avowed enemies of the Church in their hatred of the hero of orthodoxy who had forced them into retreat during his years as John Paul II’s faithful and fearless servant. In the war of words that followed the Pope’s election, the enemies of orthodoxy decried the new German shepherd as “God’s Rottweiler.” Although the gentle and saintly Ratzinger did not deserve such an epithet, it is ironically apt that the wolves who would devour the flock should hate the Rottweiler who had courageously stopped them from doing so!”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“Even as we grieved for the passing of one pope, our minds and prayers were already turning to thoughts of the next. The Church was under siege from her secularist enemies from without and was being betrayed by the modernist fifth columnists from within. She was in need of a strong and faithful shepherd to protect the flock from the wolves outside her walls, baying for her blood, and the wolves in sheep’s clothing within her own ranks, betraying her with a kiss.”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“his war against modernism and its worship of the spirit of the age. He restored the splendor of truth in his defense of orthodoxy and the splendor of the liturgy in his restoration of tradition. He fought the wickedness of the world in his unremitting and uncompromising battle against the dictatorship of relativism and its culture of death.”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“Love is not a feeling, which is, at most, merely an accidental attribute associated with it. We love our God, our spouses, our parents, our children, our friends, and our enemies, but we clearly do not have the same feelings toward our spouses as we have toward our friends or our enemies. Feelings vary; the love remains. Philosophically speaking, feelings are accidental; love is substantial.”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“healthy liturgy, Ratzinger wrote, was necessary for a healthy society. Whereas law was “essential for freedom and community,” worship was “essential for law”: “It is only … when man’s relationship with God is right that all of his other relationships—his relationships with his fellow men, his dealings with the rest of creation—can be in good order.”17 This is as true of man’s relationship with himself, as it is of his relationship with others.”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“In such a world, in which virtue is vilified and vice vindicated, it was necessary for Catholics to distance themselves from the zeitgeist: “Today more than ever the Christian must be aware that he belongs to a minority and that he is in opposition to everything that appears good, obvious, logical to the ‘spirit of the world,’ as the New Testament calls”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“Chesterton believed in a matriarchy where the woman was at the center of the family and the family was at the center of society and, in rebelling against this matriarchy, women, he was convinced, would lose far more than they could possibly gain.”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith