Education Quote by Joseph Ratzinger

Ratzinger’s line doesn’t just praise a holy exemplar; it smuggles in a whole argument about what modern life has trained us to avoid. “Suffering” is not framed as an accident to be managed or a scandal to be explained away, but as a teacher. Pairing it with “the gift of himself” turns pain into something more pointed: not private endurance, but self-offering. The grammar matters. He doesn’t say we can learn to suffer; we can learn “from him” that suffering, joined to self-gift, becomes an “essential gift.” That’s a reversal designed to unsettle a culture fluent in comfort and allergic to sacrifice.

The subtext is theological and political in the small-p sense. Ratzinger is pushing back against a late-modern moral imagination that treats the good life as maximal autonomy with minimal cost. “In our time” is doing heavy lifting: it implies an era of distraction, consumer choice, therapeutic self-regard, and a thinning of communal obligations. In that setting, suffering becomes either meaningless (a problem for medicine or psychology) or intolerable (a reason to opt out). He’s insisting it can be meaningful when it’s oriented outward.

Contextually, this sits squarely in Ratzinger’s broader project: defending a Christian understanding of personhood as relational, formed through love that includes sacrifice. The intent isn’t to romanticize pain; it’s to reclaim the moral authority of witness - the kind of life that convinces because it costs. In a world suspicious of grand claims, he bets on the persuasive power of a person who gives himself away.