Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI For more than 50 years, the writings of retired Pope Benedict XVI on the relationship between Faith and politics have insisted that the measure of human freedom is the extent to which each person acknowledges being dependent on the love of God, Pope Francis wrote.
The future Pope’s “direct experience of Nazi totalitarianism led him from the time he was a young academic to reflect on the limits of obedience to the state in favour of the freedom of obedience to God,” Pope Francis commented in the preface to a new book.
Liberating Freedom: Faith and Politics in the Third Millennium is a collection of essays written over the course of several decades, including during Pope Benedict’s eight years as Pope.
It is scheduled to be published in Italian by Cantagalli in May 11.
Atheist ideology
Pope Francis said that when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger worked alongside St John Paul II, “he elaborated and proposed a Christian vision of human rights capable of questioning on a theoretical and practical level the totalitarian claim of the Marxist state and the atheist ideology on which it was based”.
Pope Francis said Cardinal Ratzinger saw definite contrasts between Christianity and Marxism or communism.
“We must learn – once again, not only at the theoretical level, but in the way we think and act – that alongside the real presence of Jesus in the Church and in the sacrament, there exists that other real presence of Jesus in the little ones, in the trampled of this world, in the last, in whom he wants us to find him,” Pope Francis quoted the cardinal as writing.