Benedict’s Prophetic Voice, by Michael Warsaw

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER: While Pope Benedict foresaw the mistakes of our day with crystalline clarity, he responded to these errors with Christian hope, not with despair.

By Michael Warsaw, EWTN News, January 6, 2023

Michael Warsaw is the Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the EWTN Global Catholic Network, and the Publisher of the National Catholic Register.

During Joseph Ratzinger’s more than 70 years of priestly service, his formidable Catholic intellect blessed us with a legacy of insights matched by very few others in the long history of the Church. And he was never more profoundly prophetic than when he warned in April 2005 about “the dictatorship of relativism” that is crippling so many lives in our increasingly irreligious modern world.

While it would come to serve as a defining catchphrase for his papacy, the term was actually coined one day before he was elected as Pope Benedict XVI. It was delivered in the context of the homily that then-Cardinal Ratzinger preached at the Mass immediately before the assembled cardinals went into the conclave and elected him as Pope St. John Paul II’s successor. …