He cited a meeting that Antipope Ratzinger had in 2007* with the clergy of Belluno-Feltre and Treviso (Italian dioceses). Instead of commenting on Heschmeyer's video (many of them are good arguments for standard Catholic teaching, like Mariology), I feel like going to this question in this "apostolic" visit:
Fr Alberto: Holy Father, young people are our future and our hope: but they sometimes see life as a difficulty rather than an opportunity; not as a gift for themselves and for others but as something to be consumed on the spot; not as a future to be built but as aimless wandering. The contemporary mindset demands that young people be happy and perfect all of the time. The result is that every tiny failure and the least difficulty are no longer seen as causes for growth but as a defeat. All this often leads to irreversible acts such as suicide, which wound the hearts of those who love them and of society as a whole. What can you tell us educators who feel all too often that our hands are tied and that we have no answers? Thank you.
Benedict XVI: I think you have just given us a precise description of a life in which God does not figure. At first sight, it seems as if we do not need God or indeed, that without God we would be freer and the world would be grander. But after a certain time, we see in our young people what happens when God disappears. As Nietzsche said: "The great light has been extinguished, the sun has been put out". Life is then a chance event. It becomes a thing that I must seek to do the best I can with and use life as though it were a thing that serves my own immediate, tangible and achievable happiness. But the big problem is that were God not to exist and were he not also the Creator of my life, life would actually be a mere cog in evolution, nothing more; it would have no meaning in itself. Instead, I must seek to give meaning to this component of being.
So far, nothing problematic. Ken Ham would agree with the diagnosis, and so would pretty much Pope Michael II, I think.
Currently, I see in Germany, but also in the United States, a somewhat fierce debate raging between so-called "creationism" and evolutionism, presented as though they were mutually exclusive alternatives: those who believe in the Creator would not be able to conceive of evolution, and those who instead support evolution would have to exclude God.
Uh-oh ... a few misrepresentations here.
- There are, and arguably were even in 2007, Christian Evolutionists who tried to "counterbalance" this. However, he may have meant these were pushed outside the debate.
- But worse, to him, a Christian who is Young Earth Creationist is represented as one who is not "able to conceive of evolution" ...
- ... and a debate which is lively and which doesn't focus on what he considers the golden middle is "fierce" and "raging" ...
This antithesis is absurd because, on the one hand, there are so many scientific proofs in favour of evolution which appears to be a reality we can see and which enriches our knowledge of life and being as such.
Come on. No one can see the process by which a creature with ape hyoid (bearing air sacks that would distort and amplify the outcome of the voice box), with no human FOXP2, with no Broca's area and presumably no Wernicke's area, with ears so thick they could not hear consonants (they are shrill), and the likes of which or other descendants of which make calls that involve only injunctions and encouragement, no statements about interesting but not immediately urgent facts, these calls being one sound or one alternation of sounds, very usually, for one full and complete meaning (injunction, emotional communication), how creatures with this constitution of anatomy, genes, brain and communication system could evolve into creatures with human hyoid (no air sacks, so no distortion and also no amplification), with human FOXP2, with Broca's and Wernicke's area, with ears so thin they can hear consonants, and whose communication system typically involves statements, not always of urgency, and these are divided into morphemes (not always words) which are divided into phonemes, these being sounds with no meaning of their own. No one can see it, and what's more, Evolutionists cannot explain it.** Young Earth Creationists don't deny that peppered moth example.
But on the other, the doctrine of evolution does not answer every query, especially the great philosophical question: where does everything come from? And how did everything start which ultimately led to man? I believe this is of the utmost importance. This is what I wanted to say in my lecture at Regensburg: that reason should be more open, that it should indeed perceive these facts but also realize that they are not enough to explain all of reality. They are insufficient.
Everything, which ultimately led to man ... in other words he is affirming the Evolutionary process as our actual origin.
Our reason is broader and can also see that our reason is not basically something irrational, a product of irrationality, but that reason, creative reason, precedes everything and we are truly the reflection of creative reason. We were thought of and desired; thus, there is an idea that preceded me, a feeling that preceded me, that I must discover, that I must follow, because it will at last give meaning to my life. This seems to me to be the first point: to discover that my being is truly reasonable, it was thought of, it has meaning.
Good point, but that excludes the existance for instance of a being with human ears and hyoid, but no Broca's area, or a communication system where calls can be words in statements ... because one-sound calls are too few, even with a human inventory of possible speech sounds, to waste on adding a few words to the inventory of injunctions and emotion conveyance, since words are usually interesting but not pragmatically important, and sentences are so too.
And my important mission is to discover this meaning, to live it and thereby contribute a new element to the great cosmic harmony conceived of by the Creator.
Discover? He basically said natural law is not apparent other than to a Theist. I would say, if you are not very stupid, you don't want to avoid old age by committing suicide, you don't want to be taken care of more than half of the time by robots and you might even at least squirm at being taken care of by younger people from very different countries, with a very different education, who will be too eager to get you diagnosed with Alzheimer because they'll find things childish that you find open minded or poetic or kind.
In other words, banning abortion and contraception make plenty of sense on simply secular grounds. I have other evidence, from hearsay, on his extending too much of an excuse to Atheists on the Natural Law.
If this is true, then difficulties also become moments of growth, of the process and progress of my very being, which has meaning from conception until the very last moment of life. We can get to know this reality of meaning that precedes all of us, we can also rediscover the meaning of pain and suffering; there is of course one form of suffering that we must avoid and must distance from the world: all the pointless suffering caused by dictatorships and erroneous systems, by hatred and by violence.
Will. Not. Happen.
We can't say "we must" of a thing which will not take place. Also, I'm not sure that dictatorships are what cause suffering, or even have a hunch, they aren't, if non-parliamentarian rule is the only issue.
However, in suffering there is also a profound meaning, and only if we can give meaning to pain and suffering can our life mature. I would say, above all, that there can be no love without suffering, because love always implies renouncement of myself, letting myself go and accepting the other in his otherness; it implies a gift of myself and therefore, emerging from myself. All this is pain and suffering, but precisely in this suffering caused by the losing of myself for the sake of the other, for the loved one and hence, for God, I become great and my life finds love, and in love finds its meaning. The inseparability of love and suffering, of love and God, are elements that must enter into the modern conscience to help us live.
I'm not sure married couples agree all that much.
In this regard, I would say that it is important to help the young discover God, to help them discover the true love that precisely in renunciation becomes great and so also enables them to discover the inner benefit of suffering, which makes me freer and greater. Of course, to help young people find these elements, companionship and guidance are always essential, whether through the parish, Catholic Action or a Movement. It is only in the company of others that we can also reveal this great dimension of our being to the new generations.
Suffering doesn't automatically make one freer and greater. It can do so, if carried in union with the Cross of Christ, though I think St. Therèse in her tuberculosis would have thought of herself as smaller rather than greater. But to tons of people who do not carry it like that, either suffering in the amounts they do or given particular sufferings imposing losses, are more like hampering sanctification and even staying justified. I read one page, it seems to have gone down, on Jesus healing someone because the suffering had stifled charity in that person, who could no longer love God or neighbour.
Let's recall that pointless suffering of beings that could never get sanctified and never go to Heaven is how Evolution explains ... the origin of Man, and of every vertebrate, since at least vertebrates seem capable of true suffering. A vertebrate that suffers now, like a hamster dying in cancer, suffers because Adam sinned.
I don't see how Ratzinger could be too opaque to see that. But I do see that this opacity comes with a benighted naiveté about how well the Theory of Evolution is "proven" or even "seen", and I do see it involves an overevaluation of suffering, as a kind of sanctifier, whatever you do with it. That a suffering man is a saint or at least wiser is possible, but it depends on how he responds. And lack of suffering is not damnation.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Francis of Sales
29.I.2026
* MEETING OF THE HOLY FATHER BENEDICT XVI WITH THE CLERGY OF THE DIOCESES OF BELLUNO-FELTRE AND TREVISO
Church of St Justin Martyr, Auronzo di Cadore | Tuesday, 24 July 2007
https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2007/july/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20070724_clero-cadore.html
I obviously don't agree on calling Ratzinger "Holy Father" or "Benedict XVI" in the title, but this is how the document is named.
** I've double-checked on at least the item of communication system:
Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl: Tomasello Not Answering
Thursday, 28 September 2023 | Posted by Hans Georg Lundahl at 03:50
https://correspondentia-ioannis-georgii.blogspot.com/2023/09/tomasello-not-answering.html
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