Pope Benedict's New Book

Today the Pope's new book has been published. "The Example of Benedict in the Crisis of Cultures" is released in Italy today. I imagine that it will be released to the rest of the world later. According to Catholic News Agency it has been published by Libreria Editrice Vaticana and is 144 pages long.

The Holy Father started this book while he was a Cardinal. The Benedict he refers to is the St. Benedict who founded the order.

According to excerpts published by the newspaper, the Pope maintains that “the extreme attempt to shape things without considering the presence of God leads us more and more to the edge of the abyss.” The axiom of the enlightenment should be turned on its head, writes the Pontiff: “Even if one cannot find the way to belief in God, one ought to live as if God existed anyway.” The live in such a way poses no threat to man’s freedom, he states.

Likewise, he challenges readers with the question, “Who is threatened or offended if a call to the Christian roots of Europe is put forth?” to which he responds, “Muslims do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundation, but rather by the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundation (…) It is not the mention of God that offends the faithful of other religions, but rather the attempt to build a human community without God.”

This seems to confirm that the Holy Father took the name Benedict as a symbol of the man who helped save Western Civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire. The subject of his first book published while Pope addresses the myriad problems which face Europe today.