Schall & Ratzinger In Two Parts

In a two-part essay available here, Fr. Schall reviews a collection of Cardinal Ratzinger's essays: Europe: Today & Tomorrow. Part one is the lengthiest treatment I have seen of what Card. Ratzinger thought (and presumably still thinks -- the essays or speeches were all given within 3 years of his ascent to the papacy) about war. As you might expect from both Ratzinger & Schall, the position defies the easy categorization most apologists give it. Part two concerns the cultural rupture of Europe & the opportunistic rise of Islam. Well worth your reading, as it's hard to summarize. Liked this though:

Ratzinger knows the theoretic issue: "whenever abortion is considered a right, a personal freedom, the freedom of one person is placed above the right to life of another" (65). Human life itself is relativized.

This result of giving dominion of one person over another was what C. S. Lewis had foreseen in his Abolition of Man. What are the theoretical implications?

Here the values that had built Europe are completely overturned. Even worse, there is a rupture here with the complex moral tradition of mankind: there are no longer any values apart from the goals of progress; at a given moment, everything can be permitted and even necessary, can be 'moral' in a new sense of the word. Even man can become an instrument; the individual does not matter. The future alone becomes the terrible deity that rules over everyone and everything. (29)

These are ideas that more particularly sway the European intellectual whom Ratzinger sees as embracing much the same voluntarism that is found in Islamic thinkers.