"To me, its seems necessary to rediscover - and the energy to do so exists - that even the political and economic spheres need moral responsibility, a responsibility that is born in man's heart and, in the end, has to do with the presence or absence of God"
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Ratzinger is making a deliberately unfashionable wager: modern politics and economics are not self-correcting systems, and technocratic competence is not a substitute for conscience. The line turns on that phrase "rediscover - and the energy to do so exists" which smuggles in both diagnosis and hope. Diagnosis: we have misplaced something we once knew. Hope: the resources for repair are already in the culture, latent but retrievable. He is speaking less like a scold than like a physician insisting the patient still has a pulse.
The subtext is a critique of moral outsourcing. Liberal democracies often try to keep "values" in the private realm while letting public life run on procedure, incentives, and law. Ratzinger is arguing that this separation produces a thin, brittle public ethic: rules without inner restraint, markets without limits, politics without shame. When he says responsibility is "born in man's heart", he is asserting that moral action cannot be generated by policy alone; it requires formation of the person.
The provocation lands in the final clause: responsibility "has to do with the presence or absence of God". This is not just catechism. It's a claim about moral ontology: if God is bracketed, "moral responsibility" risks shrinking into preference, consensus, or utility. In Ratzinger's broader context - postwar Europe, the Church's confrontation with totalitarianism, and later his debates with secular modernity - the insistence reads as a warning. A society can be rich in mechanisms and poor in meaning, and that poverty eventually shows up in the budget, the ballot box, and the lives that get treated as expendable.
The subtext is a critique of moral outsourcing. Liberal democracies often try to keep "values" in the private realm while letting public life run on procedure, incentives, and law. Ratzinger is arguing that this separation produces a thin, brittle public ethic: rules without inner restraint, markets without limits, politics without shame. When he says responsibility is "born in man's heart", he is asserting that moral action cannot be generated by policy alone; it requires formation of the person.
The provocation lands in the final clause: responsibility "has to do with the presence or absence of God". This is not just catechism. It's a claim about moral ontology: if God is bracketed, "moral responsibility" risks shrinking into preference, consensus, or utility. In Ratzinger's broader context - postwar Europe, the Church's confrontation with totalitarianism, and later his debates with secular modernity - the insistence reads as a warning. A society can be rich in mechanisms and poor in meaning, and that poverty eventually shows up in the budget, the ballot box, and the lives that get treated as expendable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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