Catholic World News News Feature

Ratzinger Says Relativism Is Number One Danger To The Faith October 20, 1997

VATICAN CITY (CWN) - After Liberation Theology, relativism is the number one problem facing the Christian faith, wrote to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the preface of a new book recently.

"Relativism have effectively become today the fundamental problem for the Faith," Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in the preface of the "Encyclopedia of Christianity," recently published in Italy. "In the last 80 years, liberation theology has been the greatest danger to the faith of the Church," he added.

But he said that movement has lost vigor since the "events of 1989" when many Marxist governments in the world were replaced by more democratic forms of government. He said it provoked "an enormous disillusionment which hasn't been appeased. The decline of that unique system which proposed a scientific solution to human problems, has left in its place a nihilistic worldview and a total relativism."