Long before his election as Pope Benedict XVI, the young Joseph Ratzinger was known among Augustine scholars for his path-breaking studies of Augustine's ecclesiology. Later, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he was known widely for speaking out on political issues and controversies of our day, particularly those related to the future of Europe and the place of Christianity within it. Rarely has anyone connected his interest in politics with his early writings on Augustine. In the past sixty years of scholarship on Augustine's political thought, Ratzinger has received barely a mention, and as far as I am aware, Michael Bruno's valuable 2014 monograph on the past century's interpretations of Augustine's political thought was the first ever to classify Ratzinger as even having offered such an interpretation. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Bruno is the second, the first being Ratzinger himself. In a 1990 public lecture titled “Europe: Chances and Dangers,” he made a number of bold claims about the historical importance of the “decisive interpretation” that Augustine had given to the “Platonic tradition … [of] political philosophy” and supported those claims with a footnote to a monograph chapter he wrote in 1961 on Augustine's debate with Roman “political theology.” Drawing on that chapter, Ratzinger now made a series of claims about Augustine (in relation to controversies over the meaning of Europe today) that must be striking to any scholar of Augustine's political thought and are worth quoting at length.