Reddit reviews Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church

My favorite is not really a book but a collection of interviews with Cardinal Ratzinger while he was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church Paperback – June, 1985 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0898700809/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Fair enough. My previous comment was rather hastily written and I agree with a lot of what you said.

I do not blame the individual, I acknowledge that they feel love as subjectively strong and I do. It is real for them.

I am however upset at modernity as a whole. My concerns are best summed up in a passage by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would later became Pope Benedict XVI. In 1984 he gave an extended interview that was turned into a book called The Ratzinger Report. Which contains the following:

>In a world like the West, where money and wealth are the measure of all things, and where the model of the free market imposes its implacable laws on every aspect of life, authentic Catholic ethics now appears to many like an alien body from times long past,... Economic liberalism creates its exact counterpart, permissivism, on the moral plane....The issue is the rupture between sexuality and marriage. Separated from motherhood, sex has remained without a locus and has lost its point of reference: it is a kind of drifting mine, a problem and at the same time an omnipresent power.

Ratzinger then explained the chain of reasoning that proceeds from the false premises he identified as infecting society at the time of the interview:

>....It logically follows from this [today's false premises] that every form of sexuality is equivalent and therefore of equal worth. It is certainly not a matter of establishing or recommending a retrograde moralism, but of lucidly drawing the consequences from the premises: it is, in fact, logical that pleasure, the libido of the individual, become the only possible point of reference of sex. No longer having an objective reason to justify it, sex seeks the subjective reason in the gratification of the desire, in the most 'satisfying' answer for the individual, to the instincts no longer subject to rational restraints....Hence it naturally follows that all forms of sexual gratification are transformed into the 'rights' of the individual. Thus, to cite an especially current example, homosexuality becomes an inalienable right.

The harm from homosexuality, and other forms of degeneracy today, often doesn't come from the act itself but from external factors. Such as a sub-replacement fertility levels. Which is what all but a few Western nations are now facing. It's ironic really, the more liberal, the mor secular a nation, the lower the birth rate. Conversely, the most religious nations (Christian and Muslim nations in Africa) are seeing a population explosion with a fertility rate of 5+. Compare that with the West with a fertiliry rate of around 1.6 on average. To maintain a population at current levels requires a fertility rate of 2.1

I believe this is the price we are paying for turning away from traditional familial values and structures.

I must confess it is difficult for me to not hold individuals responsible in a way when the LGBT agenda is so celebrated and so prideful.