I just finished Pope Benedict's (then Cardinal Ratzinger, of course) book, What It Means to Be a Christian, which is a collection of three sermons he gave in Munster in 1964. It's very short at only 86 pages and keeps itself from being heavy reading. I'd say it's typical Benedict - uncannily precise without being weighty or difficult to penetrate. It was, however, packed with quotables so I'll be dropping them here and there as I get a chance. First up, a pointed critique of a faith lived with its eyes closed:
It seems to me that we quite often run a particular risk: that of not wanting to see these things. We live with shades down over our windows, so to speak, because we are afraid that our faith could not stand the full, glaring light of the facts. So we shield ourselves against this and push these facts out of our consciousness, so as to avoid falling on our face. But a faith that will not account for half of the facts or even more is actually, in essence, a kind of refusal of faith, or, at least, a very profound form of skepticism that fears faith will not be big enough to cope with reality. It dares not accept the fact that faith is the power that overcomes the world. In contrast to that, true believing means looking the whole of reality in the face, unafraid and with an open heart, even if it goes against the picture of faith that, for whatever reason, we make for ourselves.
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