Joseph Ratzinger on Politics and Morals

Although he never formally articulated a theology of political life or a fundamental moral theology, Joseph Ratzinger's attentiveness to the Church and its relation to the modern world occasioned a wealth of reflection on Christian ethics and the primacy of God in the social order. In Joseph Ratzinger on Politics and Morals, D. Vincent Twomey, S.V.D., elucidates the German theologian's insights in these areas, drawing out their unity and rootedness in a deeper vision of man's God-given capacity for truth and communion. Twomey takes as his starting point Ratzinger's linking of Christian morality and discipleship—that Christian living is the result of an encounter with Christ that transforms and fulfills the rational creature's relationship to God. For Ratzinger, this moral dimension of Christianity does not distance the Church from the world, but instead gives it a missional impetus to incorporate and reorient mankind's great ethical intuitions, which reflect the natural law and man's creation for union with God. Against this background Twomey unpacks Ratzinger's considerations of conscience and the impacts of sin on the person and society, all of which testifies to man’s need for the healing grace of Christ. He in turn shows how Ratzinger's own theology of political life trades on a proper distinction between the spheres of faith and of politics, an affirmation of justice as the goal of politics, and acknowledgment of God's primacy in both the personal and the political realms.

D. Vincent Twomey, S.V.D. (PhD, University of Regensburg) is a priest of the Society of the Divine Word and professor emeritus of moral theology at St. Patrick's Pontifical University, Maynooth. He studied under Joseph Ratzinger at the University of Regensburg and has been a member of the Ratzinger Schülerkreis, or Circle of Alumni, since its inception in 1978. Among Twomey's other books are Pope Benedict XVI, the Conscience of Our Age: A Theological Portrait, Moral Theology After Humanae Vitae, and Apostolikos Thronos: Rival Accounts of Roman Primacy in Eusebius and Athanasius.