From Pope Benedict

Katie van Schaijik | Jan 23, 2010

A gathering with friends tonight will be focused on some of Benedict XVI’s writings about priesthood. These lines from his August 5, 2009 general audience stood out as helping illumine and “situate” the mission of the Personalist Project. He is speaking about the witness of St. John Vianney.

Dear brothers and sisters, 150 years after the death of the Holy Curé of Ars, contemporary society is facing challenges that are just as demanding and may have become even more complex. If in his time the ‘dictatorship of rationalism’ existed, in the current epoch a sort of ‘dictatorship of relativism’ is evident in many contexts. Both seem inadequate responses to the human being’s justifiable request to use his reason as a distinctive and constituative element of his own identity. Rationalism was inadequate becasue it failed to take into account human limitations and claims to make reason alone the criterion of all things, transforming it into a goddess; contemporary relativism humiliates reason becasue it arrives de facto at affirming that the human being can know nothing with certainty outside the positive scientific field. Today however, as in that time, man ‘a beggar for meaning and fulfillment’, is constantly in quest of exhaustive answers to the basic questions that he never ceases to ask himself.