Welcome Benedict XVI

Catholics have a new pope... the conclave elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, who has taken the name Benedict XVI.

One of his quotes gives me hope for the future of the Church. It comes from a pre-conclave Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's one ego and one's own desires."

See the article at My Way News. Surely, more analysis and speculation will follow.

In fact, Michael Novak of National Review has a little something... and here's a little gem from him. Novak helps define the Pope's stance against relativism.

The fact that we each see things differently does not imply that there is no truth. It implies, rather, that each of us may have a portion of the truth, and that in this or that matter some of us may hold more (or less) truth than others. Therefore, since each of us has only part of all the truth we seek, we must work hard together to discern in all things wherein lies the truth, and wherein the error.

[...]

It is no more than a fact that ours is a pluralistic world, in which individuals have virtually an infinite variety of views. For Ratzinger, not only is this individual variety normal and to be praised; it shows the infinite number of ways humans have been made in the image of the infinite God. Each one of us, as it were, mirrors a different aspect of the infinite abundance of God.

But the fact of human “relativity” — that is, the fact that we each see things differently, or that the life-voyage of each of us is unique and inimitable — should not be transformed into an absolute moral principle. The fact of relativity does not logically lead to the principle of moral relativism.

No great, inspiring culture of the future can be built upon the moral principle of relativism. For at its bottom such a culture holds that nothing is better than anything else, and that all things are in themselves equally meaningless. Except for the fragments of faith (in progress, in compassion, in conscience, in hope) to which it still clings, illegitimately, such a culture teaches every one of its children that life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

Read it all... it's rather good.