Benedict XVI and St. Josemaria Escriva

The Invisible God: Hidden in the Market Place

Ratzinger’s Bear

Benedict XVI and the Bear: Roch Kereszty writes: “From an early age he felt the vocation to be a theologian; even after ordination, he found teaching and writing, rather than pastoral ministry, to be most congenial to his talents and personality. Then came the unexpected appointment to the archbishopric of Munich-Freising in 1977 by Pope Paul VI. Archbishop Ratzinger explained the irony of his life by telling the legend of the first bishop of Munich-Freising, St. Corbinian. As the saint was riding to Rome, a bear ran out of the forest and devoured his horse. The saint ordered the bear to carry his pack to Rome for him. Ratzinger made the bear part of his coat of arms, likening himself to that bear: instead of indulging in the theological thinking, writing, and teaching, he had no choice but to carry the heavy pack of St. Corbinian, the burden of the pastoral office.”[1]

Kereszty goes on to explain that Ratzinger saw the metaphor of the bear not only in his own life, but prototypically for him (Ratzinger), in the life of Augustine. Kereszty comments: “We can better understand Benedict’s unique blend of theology, exegesis, and contemplation if we compare it with the theological style of the Church Fathers and with that of St. Augustine in particular. When visiting St. Augustine’s tomb in Pavia, Pope Benedict explained that the second stage in Augustine’s conversion took place at the time when Augustine accepted ordination to the priesthood and gave up his contemplative scholarly existence for the sake of the ministry. He devoted himself to learning how to teach the most sublime mysteries of faith to the simplest folks in the city of Hippo. Through all this, he did not cease being a theologian; he merely abandoned the esoteric language and lifestyle of the scholar. Eventually, he succeeded in expressing the deepest theology in the simplest language, comprehensible for his provincial audience and yet an enduring challenge for the learned.”[2]

Benedict XVI Deepened His Theology More As “Bear” than as Scholar

Ratzinger, like Augustine, deepened his contemplative source more in his pastoral offices than in the exclusive dedication to scholarship.

Dogma (Fixed) and History (Change)

I take a sentence from a work of Joseph Ratzinger that has not yet been published in English (and which I had translated years ago). It reads:

“If… tradition is not a compilation of rigidly systematized propositions that are to be passed on unchanged, but rather that it constitutes the expression of the continuing appropriation, via the Church’s faith, of what Scripture witnesses to, then it follows not only that there can be a real history of Christian faith but that there must be, and that faith’s identity exists only in the context of historical changes, which may be referred to as the condition of its identity”[3] (underline mine).

Let me translate. What Ratzinger-Benedict is ultimately talking about with the notion of “tradition” is the experience one has of oneself and the self-consciousness that accompanies it. Tradition is not primarily conceptual but the memory and continuation of consciousness. That self-consciousness is “anamnesis” or “not-forgetting” that cognitively sustains the identity of who one is. Without the memory of consciousness through continuous experiences of self-mastery/self-gift (or not self-gift), there is no “I.”

Dogmas are concepts that are symbols that we form when reflecting on the given consciousness that comes from the experience of the self as subject of action. Dogmas are the objectifications of conceptual knowing when reflecting on the experiential consciousness of being “another Christ.” Normally, concepts are formed in the process of abstraction from the distinct experience of sensible things, the reading of Scripture and hearing of the Word spoken to us in the Church. So Benedict says that “tradition” is “the expression of the continuing appropriation… of what Scripture witnesses to.” The “appropriation” is the act of becoming “another Christ” by the self-giving. Why? Because the revelation itself is an act of Self-gift. And when we become gift by “hearing the Word,” we become like Him Who is gift. We become revelation in ourselves.[4] There is a likeness of being between us and Christ, and with that likeness, a like consciousness to that which Christ has of Himself. We begin to know ourselves the way Christ knows Himself. This, I think, makes sense of the above: “faith’s identity exists only in the context of historical changes, which may be referred to as the condition of its identity” because I am becoming like Christ by the historical action I perform of self-giving in ordinary family and professional life.

Since the “form” of my being is to be image of the Son (Who is pure relation to the Father), the more I become relational by this self-giving that is faith in the course of chronological history, the more there is development in the experience of being Christ, and therefore the consciousness of being Christ. When there is a corresponding development in the reflection on that ever-deepening consciousness, there will be a growth in the number and depth of the concepts that we understand to be dogma.

Notice that these concepts are like photographs that are still and fixed. They are static like the frames on movie film that become life-like representations provided they move at a speed programmed to be proportionate to real life. The analogy to history is the motion and speed of the film that portrays the living, existential subject – the meaning – that is contained but not yet liberated in the distinct static frames.

Ratzinger goes on to say “Identity and change together form the essence of history… Where there is only identity, there nothing has happened; where there is only diversity, there as well there can be no question of history. If the previous Catholic approach to the writing of the history of dogma was, to all intents, one-sided and taken from the perspective of identity, and if the Protestant approach, on the other hand, was that of the history of decadence, in the last resort validating only diversity and seeing the nature of history only through the prism of diversity, then, from the standpoint of the self-understanding that we have just elaborated, we may well assert the possible unity of the two, which offers the chief possibility for a real history of dogma.”[5]

If we take the pithy expose of Ratzinger’s habilitation thesis on faith and revelation, we find that revelation is not Scripture, nor is faith a conceptual dogma. Rather, revelation is “the act in which God shows himself, not to the objectified result of this act. And because this is so,” faith, as “the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of ‘revelation.’ Where there is no one to perceive ‘revelation,’ no re-vel-lation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it… (R)evelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it. This in turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down. And this again means that there can be no such thing as pure sola Scriptura (‘by Scripture alone’), because an essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.”[6]

Notice that “tradition” is the identity of the self as consciousness of being Christ coming from the experience of the historical action of self-gift (relation).

Let me do the philosophy of this – which really makes it easier. The act of faith is the total being of the believing person mastering self [freedom], possessing self, and making the gift of itself to the revealing Person of Christ. Carried to its end, it would be martyrdom. This faith-action of self-gift to death changes the orientation of the being of the person (the architecture of the human person) from substance-in-self to being-for-other. It is the fulfillment of the human person who has been constituted ontologically as a relation in the image of the divine Persons. Here phenomenology enters full bore, since we must speak about “experience.”

Experience has an existential dimension as contact with reality, and a cognitive dimension that is “consciousness.” Consciousness is not “knowledge” in the sense of conceptual knowing.

Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) wrote: “It lies in the essence of cognitive acts performed by man to investigate a thing, to objectivize it intentionally, and in this way to comprehend it. In this sense cognitive acts have an intentional character, since they are directed toward the cognitive object: for they find in it the reason for their existence as acts of comprehension and knowledge. The same does not seem to apply to consciousness. In opposition to the classic phenomenological view, we propose that the cognitive reason for the existence of consciousness and of the acts proper to it does not consist in the penetrative apprehension of the constitutive elements of the object, in its objectivation leading to the constitution of the object. Hence the intentionality that is characteristic of cognitive acts – to which we owe the formation and an understanding of the objective reality on any of its levels – does not seem to be derived from acts of consciousness. These are not essentially intentional by nature, even though all that is the object of our cognition, comprehension, and knowledge is also the object of our consciousness. But while comprehension and knowledge contribute in an intentional way to the formation of the object – it is in this that consists the inherent dynamism of cognizing – consciousness as such is restricted to mirroring what has already been cognized. Consciousnesses, so to speak, the understanding of what has ben constituted and comprehended. The purport of the preceding remarks is that the intrinsic cognitive dynamism, the very operation of cognition, does not belong to consciousness. If acts of cognition consist in constituting in a specific way the meanings referring to cognitive objects, then it is not consciousness that constitutes them, even if they are indubitably constituted also in consciousness…

“As ‘consciousness’ we understand then ‘reflecting consciousness’ – that is, consciousness in its mirroring function. If we see it as if it was the derivative of the whole actively cognitive process and of the cognitive attitude to the external reality, like the last ‘reflection’ of the process in the cognizant subject, it means that we recognize this reflecting or mirroring as possible insofar as we attribute to consciousness the specific quality of penetrating and illuminating whatever becomes in any way man’s cognitive possession. (But such penetrative illumination is not tantamount to the active understanding of objects and, subsequently, to the constituting of their meanings). If we are to keep to this description, the penetrative illumination is rather like keeping objects and their cognitive meanings ‘in the light,’ or ‘in the actual field of consciousness.’”

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Consciousness Is not an Autonomous Subject:

“To deny the intentional nature of the acts of consciousness seems to be contrary to most contemporary opinions on that issue. Looking at consciousness, however, we see it not as a separate and self-contained reality but as the subjective content of the being and acting that is conscious, the being and acting proper to man. Disclosing consciousness in the totality of human dynamisms and showing it as the constitutive property of action we strive to understand it, but always in its relation to the action, to the dynamism and efficacy of the person. This manner of seeing and interpreting consciousness – consciousness in what we call the substantival and subjective sense – protects us from conceiving it as an independent, self-contained subject. Indeed, to recognize that consciousness is an independent subject could pave the way to a conception of it in absolute terms and consequently would lead to idealism, if it was taken as the sole subject of all the contents… The subject of this state (of consciousness)… is not consciousness itself but the human being of whom we rightly may say that he is or is not ‘conscious’…”[7]


That is, the experience of ourselves as gifts (in the sense that a man or woman experience the total love of self-giftedness as spouse). That “experience” always has a cognitive dimension accompanying it. As self-gift to Him Who is Self-Gift, the likeness of the experience gives us a likeness of consciousness. We experience being “Like” God, and therefore we know in a way like God knows.

Analogy: Conversion (metanoia) is this rather strange anthropology which is really the priesthood of Christ as testified to by Paul in Hebrews 9-10. Christ is priest and victim. He is the agent who masters himself in his totality. Christ is not a substance who accidentally subdues “parts” of himself like “will” and “intellect.” It is this mysterious self-mastery, and even more mysterious self-giving.

Surfing: Identity by Change

Ratzinger takes the account of Dietrich von Hildebrand on Christian metanoia to explain how one not only stays the same person, but becomes the same person by changing. Personally, I use the metaphor of surfing. The surfer maintains his position on the wave only by constantly moving and adjusting.

“Freedom comes, and comes only, to one who has the courage to change – the courage that the Bible calls metanoia; but it is precisely this courage that is wanting to us: ‘Unreserved readiness to change is the indispensable prerequisite for the reception of Christ in our soul’ a statement that should startle us, for it is exactly what the precursor of Christ demanded, and it is only along the way he preached that we are led to Christ.

“Thus, the fluidity of existence that is required of the Christian is, at the same time, ‘the exact opposite… of the cult of constant activity… Readiness to be changed by Christ has nothing to do with the lack of direction of a reed shaken by the wind: it has nothing to do with that indecisiveness about existence, that facile conformity that can be pushed in any direction. It is, rather, a standing-firm in Christ, a ‘standing-firm against all tendencies to change that come from below and a sensitive receptivity to every change that would mold us from above.’ In other words, Christian metanoia is, to all intents and purposes, identical with pistis (faith, constancy), and change that does bit exclude constancy but makes it possible. The New Testament speaks, with a sternness that may well make us uncomfortable, of the immutability of the basic decision in favor of Christianity: ‘As for those people who were once brought into the light and tasted the gift from heaven and received a share of the Holy Spirit and appreciated the good message of God and the powers of the world to come and yet in spite of this have fallen away – it is impossible for them to be renewed a second time…’ One who reverses his conversion goes backward, not forward. Once the true way, that is, the way of truth, has been found, it never ceases to be a way, a path; it never ceases to be a goal and to demand movement toward it. But as a way it is no longer changeable, because turning aside or turning back will always be a turning away from truth. Von Hildebrand rightly calls attention to the fact that this constancy in the way of discovered truth is something entirely different and must always be a ‘formal conservatism:’ its prominence is grounded in the enduring validity of truth.”[8]

John the Baptist: Scandalized

Notice how simply yet profoundly Benedict – now as the bear - presents the figure of John the Baptist in a state of scandal because he perceives only with his eyes and external senses and fails to re-cognize the “face” of the Person Who is the Kingdom of Heaven:

1) “In words of burning power John had prophesied the coming of the judge and had painted in fiery colors the great day of the Lord. He had portrayed the Messiah as the judge with the winnowing fan in his hand that would separate the chaff from the grain and throw the chaff once and for all into eternal fire.”[9]

2) “God’s presence had begun… but what a difference from what John had imagined! No fire fell from heaven to consume sinners and bear definitive witness to the just; in fact, nothing changed at all in the present world. Jesus went about preaching and doing good in the land, but the ambiguity remained. Human life continued to be a dark mystery to which people had to entrust themselves with faith and hope amid the world’s darkness.
“Clearly, it was this utterly different personality of Jesus that most tormented John during the long nights in prison: The eclipse of God continued, and the imperturbable advance of a history that was so often a slap in the face to believers.”[10]

3) “In his distress John sent messengers to the Lord: ‘Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?’ (Mt. 11, 3)… ‘Are you really he: the Redeemer of the world? Are you really here now as the Redeemer? Was that really all that God had to say to us?’”[11]

4) Jesus sends back this answer to John: “Go and tell John what it is that you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense at me” (Lk. 7, 22-23).

Meaning: “This means that it is in fact possible for men to take offense at him. Even when he comes he does not bring such absolute clarity to the human situation as to eliminate all questions and solve all riddles; people can take offense at him, but ‘Blessed is he who takes no offense.’ Blessed is he who ceases to ask for signs and absolute certainty. Blessed is he who is able, even in this darkness, to go his way in faith and love.”[12]

5) The Great and Final Task of John: Conversion = self-gift, holiness as divinization. Ratzinger puts it this way: “We can see him only by becoming like him, by reaching the level of reality on which God exists; in other words, by being liberated from what is anti-divine: the quest for pleasure, enjoyment, possession, gain, or, in a word, from ourselves. In the final analysis it is usually the self that stands between us and God. We can see God only if we turn around, stop looking for him as we might look for street signs and dollar bills, and begin looking away from the visible to the invisible.”[13]

Our Scandal

Ratzinger (1964): “I believe the real temptation for someone who is a Christian, as we experience it today, does not just consist in the theoretical question of whether God exists; or even the question of whether he is three or one; or even the question of whether Christ is God and man in one person. What really torments us today, what bothers us much more is the inefficacy of Christianity: after two thousand years of Christian history, we can see nothing that might be a new reality in the world; rather, we find it sunk in the same old horrors, the same despair, and the same hopes as ever. And in our own lives, too, we inevitably experience time and again how Christian reality is powerless against all the other forces that influence us and make demands on us. And if, after all our labor and efforts to live on the basis of what is Christian, we draw up the final balance sheet [and, of course, this is on the level of empirically discernible successes], then often enough the feeling comes over us that the reality has been taken away from us, dissolved, and all that remains in the end is just an appeal to the feeble light of our goodwill. And then in moments of discouragement like that, when we look back on the path we have traveled, the question forces its way into our minds: What is all this array of dogma and worship and Church, if at the end of it all we are still thrown back onto our own poor resources? That in turn brings us back again, in the end, to the question about the gospel of the Lord: What did he actually proclaim and bring among men?”[14]


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Escriva Before the Same Scandal

“Let me tell you about an even of my own personal life which happened many years ago. One day I was with a friend of mine, a man with a good heart but who did not have faith. Pointing toward a globe he said, ‘Look, from North to South, from East to West.’ ‘What do you want me to look at?’ I asked. His answer was: ‘The failure of Christ. For twenty centuries people have been trying to bring his doctrine to men’s lives, and look at the result.’ I was filled with sadness. It is painful to think that many people still don’t know our Lord, and that among those who do know him, many live as though they did not. But that feeling lasted only a moment. It was shortly overcome by love and thankfulness, because Jesus has wanted every man to cooperate freely in the work of redemption. He has not failed. His doctrine and life are effective in the world at all times. The redemption carried out by him is sufficient, and more than sufficient.”[15]

* * * * * * *

What Did Christ Bring? The Kingdom of God!

But what is the Kingdom of God? “The kingdom of God is not a concept, a doctrine, or a program subject to free interpretation, but it is before all else a person with the face and name of Jesus of Nazareth, the image of the invisible God.”[16]

The Kingdom of God, in Benedict XVI’s “Jesus of Nazareth” is “(t)he core content of the Gospel…The center of this announcement is the message that God’s Kingdom is at hand. A look at the statistics underscores this. The phrase ‘Kingdom of God’ occurs 122 times in the New Testament as whole; 99 of these passages are found in the three Synoptic Gospels, and 90 of these texts report words of Jesus.”[17]

Benedict’s basic point is that Jesus Himself – divine Person - is the Kingdom. He says: “Jesus is speaking in the present tense: the Kingdom of God cannot be observed, yet, unobserved, it is among those to whom he is speaking. It stands among them – in his own person… In him the future is present, God’s Kingdom at hand, but in such a way that a mere observer, concerned with recording symptoms or plotting the movements of the stars, might well overlook the fact. In a splendid coinage of Origen’s, Jesus is he autobasileia, ‘the Kingdom in person.’ This leads on to another text about the Kingdom whose reference to the present is (even less debatable. In Luke and Matthew we read: “If it is by the finger God that I cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11, 20). This verse carries the above reflections to a deeper level and clarifies them in the light of the Gospel’s own inner logic. Jesus is the Kingdom, not simply by virtue of his physical presence but through the Holy Spirit’s radiant power flowing forth from him. In his Spirit-filled activity smashing the demonic enslavement of man, the Kingdom of God becomes reality, God taking the government of this world into his own hands. Let us remember that God’s Kingdom is an event not a sphere. Jesus’ actions, words, sufferings break the power of that alienation which lies so heavily on human life. In liberating people, they establish God’s Kingdom. Jesus is that Kingdom since through him the Spirit of God acts in the world.”[18]

Kingdom of God = Kingdom of Heaven

The large point to be made here is that the Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven are here and now insofar as they are determined christologically. Ratzinger states: “It (Heaven) is not an extra-historical place into which one goes. Heaven’s existence depends upon the fact that Jesus Christ, as God, is man, and makes space for human existence in the existence of God himself. One is in heaven when, and to the degree, that one is in Christ. It is by being with Christ that we find the true location of our existence as human beings in God. Heaven is thus primarily a personal reality and one that remains forever shaped by its historical origin in the paschal mystery of death and resurrection. From this Christological center, al other elements which belong to the tradition’s concept of heaven may be inferred. And, in pride of place, from this Christological foundation there follows a theological affirmation: the glorified Christ stands in a continuous posture of self-giving to his Father. Indeed, he is that self-giving. The paschal sacrifice abides in him as an enduring presence [the action of Calvary as instantiated as act of self-gift wherever there is transubstantiation of bread and wine into His Body and Blood]."[19]

And so, Heaven is here and now, and the believer, before his development through successive conversions, might expect that the divine power of Jesus Christ as God would transform the society into a res publica of law and order as well as peace and justice where the good would be rewarded and the bad punished. But the huge point that must be made is that the action of God cannot be perceived by our senses, nor perhaps by our understanding until we go through the necessary conversion to become like Him to be able to so recognize Him; that is, recognize His face.

The Clericalization of the Secular Humanity of Christ

“But We Don’t See the Kingdom of God. Therefore, We Project It Beyond the Stars and After the End of the World”

The genius and honesty of Benedict come forth here. He explains: “Christian theology, which was very soon confronted by this discrepancy between expectation [of the fulfillment of the Kingdom here on earth by the Incarnation such that we could recognize it with our senses] and fulfillment in the course of time turned the kingdom of God into a kingdom of heaven that is beyond this mortal life; the well-being of men became a salvation of souls, which again comes to pass beyond this life, after death. But theology did not thereby provide an answer. For what is sublime in this message is precisely that the Lord was talking not just about another life, not just about men’s souls, but was addressing the body, the whole man, in hi embodied form, with his involvement in history and society; that he promised the kingdom o God to the man who lives bodily with other men in this history. As marvelous as the knowledge is that has been opened up for us by biblical scholarship in our century (that is, that Christ was not just looking forward to another life, but was talking about real people), it can also disappoint and unsettle us when we look at real history, which is in truth no kingdom of God.”[20]




The Solution: The Experience of Giftedness

The will of Jesus Christ is the “conversion” of each person in the deep ontological sense of “metanoia” into “another Christ.” The following are the foundational moments of Opus Dei:

- August 7, 1931: Locution: “Et si exaltatus fuero a terra, omnia traham ad meipsum” (Ioann. 12, 32). “A voice, as always, perfect, clear:… And the precise concept: it is not in the sense in which Scripture says it; I say it to you in the sense that you put me at the summit of all human activities, so that in all the places of the world, there may be
Christians with a personal and most free dedication, that they be other Christs.”
- October 16, 1931: Locution: “You are my son, you are Christ.” And I only knew how to repeat: Abba, Pater!, Abba, Pater! Abba!, Abba!, Abba!

The Spirit of Opus Dei: To become Christ, the Kingdom, in the Exercise of Ordinary work

Escriva: “We are celebrating, therefore, the most sacred and transcendent act which we, men and women, with God’s grace can carry out in this life: receiving the Body and Blood of our Lord is, in a certain sense, like loosening our ties with earth and time, so as to be already with God in Heaven, where Christ himself will wipe the tears from our eyes and where there will be no more death, nor mourning, nor cries of distress, because the old world will have passed away.

“This profound and consoling truth, which theologians usually call the eschatological meaning of the Eucharist, could, however, be misunderstood. Indeed, this has happened whenever people have tried to present the Christian way of life as something exclusively spiritual – or better, spiritualistic – something reserved for pure, extraordinary people who remain aloof from the contemptible things of this world, or at most tolerate them as something that the spirit just has to live alongside, while we are on this earth.

“When people take this approach, churches become the setting par excellence of the Christian way of life. And being a Christian means going to church, taking part in sacred ceremonies, getting into an ecclesiastical mentality, in a special kind of world, considered the ante-chamber to Heaven, while the ordinary world follows it own separate course. In this case, Christian teaching and the life of grace would pass by, brushing very lightly against the turbulent advance of human history but never coming into proper contact with it.




Encounter Christ in Everyday Life



“On this October morning, as we prepare to enter upon the memorial of our Lord’s Pasch, we flatly reject this deformed vision of Christianity. Reflect for a moment on the setting of our Eucharist, of our Act of Thanksgiving. We find ourselves in a unique temple; we might say that the nave is the University campus: the altarpiece, the University library; over there, the machinery for constructing new buildings; above us, the sky of Navarre…

“Surely this confirms in your minds, in a tangible and unforgettable way, the fact that everyday life is the true setting for your lives as Christians. Your daily encounter with Christ takes place where your fellow men, your yearnings, your work, and your affections are. It is in the midst of the most material things of the earth that we must sanctify ourselves, serving God and all mankind….

“Don’t doubt it, my children: any attempt to escape from the noble reality of daily life is, for you men and women of the world, something opposed to the will of God.
God and the Ordinary

“On the contrary, you must realize now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve him in and from the ordinary secular and civil activities of human life. He waits for us everyday, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home, and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.”[21]











Rev. Robert A. Connor
[1] Roch Kereszty, “The Challenge of Jesus of Nazareth for Theologians,” Communio 34 (Fall 2007) 457.
[2] Ibid. 456.
[3] J. Ratzinger, “The Problem of the History of Dogma in the Light of Catholic Theology,” Das Problem der Dogmengeshicte in der Sicht de Katholischen Theologie (=Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur Forschungen des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen: Geisteswissenschaften, Bd. 139), Koln und Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1966.
[4] This sounds like a modernist thesis of that trinomial of vital immanence, religious sentiment and evolution condemned by Pascendi. However, with the metaphysical development of the being of the person as relation (“for”), the likeness (the proportionate means of identity between Christ and the believer) is the very being of the believer as gift. And if this being is capable of divinization (not just accidentally but totally) such as to become “another Christ” (Gal, 2, 20; 3, 16; 3 28), then we have another and now transcendentally orthodox “modernism” that is Vatican II and the Magisteria of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
[5] Ibid
[6] J. Ratzinger, “Milestones…” Ignatius (1997) 108-109.
[7] Karol Wojtyla, “The Acting Person,” Reidel (1981) 32-34.
[8] J. Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius (1987) 60-64.
[9] J. Ratzinger, “Dogma and Preaching,” Franciscan Herald Press (1985) 74-75.
[10] Ibid 75.
[11] Ibid 75-76.
[12] Ibid. 76.
[13] Ibid. 76.
[14] J. Ratzinger, “What It Means To Be A Christian,” Ignatius (1965-2005)25-26.
[15] Josemaria Escriva, “Christ is Passing By,” Scepter #129.
[16] John Paul II, “Mission of the Redeemer,” #18.
[17] Benedict XVI “Jesus of Nazareth,” Doubleday (2007) 47.
[18] J. Ratzinger, “Eschatology,” CUA (1988) 34-35.
[19] Ibid 234.
[20] J. Ratzinger, “What It Means to Be a Christian” Ignatius (2006) 28-29.
[21] Josemaria Escriva, “Passionately Loving the World,” Scepter 3-5.