On the final day of 2022 at the age of 95, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI passed into the next world. His last words were “Lord, I love you.” Sic transit Gloria mundi.
He will be remembered as a gentle and saintly man, and a brilliant theologian. But he was also a philosopher with a keen eye for errors in thought that plagued the modern world.
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In his homily at the opening of the conclave on April 18, 2005, which would conclude with him being elected the Church’s 265th pope, the then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger made the following statement: “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
Pope Benedict XVI’s reference to “a dictatorship of relativism” has become an identifying phrase with him for it captures in a nutshell the essential philosophical pathology of the modern world.
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