THE BOOK THAT MADE A POPE

did I hear trumpets ... no but I did hear the idea of trumpets ... here's a priest in germany ... a professor in a seminary ... who writes a book the pope reads on the apostles' creed ... the pope likes the book so much he makes the priest a bishop then makes him a cardinal and then the cardinal professor becomes pope ... now the priest in his book on the credo spends forty pages on the word credo before he'll agree to get on with the creed ... and like a good professor anywhere he was right to do so ... before a philosopher can know himself before a physician can heal himself they have to define their terms ... turns out in the case of credo the definition pays a dividend of truth I was not the one to expect ... the world I knew had made the word know a fragile container and then had crammed all its hope inside ... what I hadn't caught was the obvious ... adrift on a sea of doubt and sinking mankind's solution to keep afloat was to paddle so fast into hope for the future just to keep hope inside alive it had sailed right past the shoals of theory ... right past meaning altogether ... into control of the future through technique ... a sleight of hand

Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius Press 2004