Sadly, my lame attempt to teach myself German (“eins, zwei, drei, vier, funf…”) has thus far yielded little to allow me, unaided, to enjoy the Holy Father’s television interview for German broadcast. Luckily, it has been transcribed and translated to English here and the audio dubbed over in English here.
Watching the interview, it seems the Holy Father doesn’t miss a beat, neither hemming nor hawing over a question. He simply plows right into the meat of his answer, and as we have come to expect from him, his answers are quite rich. He really is good on his feet, and the interview seems to suggest that while Benedict may not be quite the media darling John Paul was, he will not be shy about keeping the papacy in the public eye.
A favorite snippet (because it seems to stress the correlative of Gilson’s “Piety is never a substitute for technique.”):
Progress becomes true progress only if it serves the human person and if the human person grows: not only in terms of his or her technical power, but also in his or her moral awareness. I believe that the real problem of our historical moment lies in the imbalance between the incredibly fast growth of our technical power and that of our moral capacity, which has not grown in proportion. That’s why the formation of the human person is the true recipe, the key to it all, I would say, and this is what the Church proposes. Briefly speaking, this formation has a dual dimension: of course we have to learn, acquire knowledge, ability, know-how, as they say. In this sense Europe, and in the last decades America, have done a lot, and that’s important. But if we only teach know-how, if we only teach how to build and to use machines, and how to use contraceptives, then we shouldn’t be surprised when we find ourselves facing wars and AIDS epidemics. Because we need two dimensions: simultaneously we need the formation of the heart, if I can express myself in this way, with which the human person acquires points of reference and learns how to use the techniques correctly.
I’ll take the liberty to make it sound-bite-able: “Technique is never a substitute for piety.” (But to quote Rocco Palmo: “…to snip it would be to do Ratzi an injustice”…just read/listen to the whole thing.)
