Cardinal Ratzinger has brought out an essay collection whose third and most substantial part is devoted to what can be called the theological foundation of political ethics. These essays are worth examining, not only for their own conceptual merits, but also for the light they throw on the criticism of liberation theology which has come from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under his leadership, as indeed on the interventions in favour of human rights made by Rome during the time of John Paul II.

What emerges from the analytic summary which is offered in this article is, I believe, a twofold conclusion. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is headed by a powerful and original theological mind. That mind is, however, alien to the philosophical and theological tradition which has provided the customary idiom for the magisterial interventions of the popes in both dogmatic and ethical issues for the last hundred years. Almost no trace of Christian Scholasticism in its Thomist-Aristotelian form can be found in these writings. Rather do they draw for their inspiration on a variety of sources rarely tapped by figures in the Cardinal’s position: Christian Platonism in its various historic manifestations; the Catholic Tubingen school of the early nineteenth century, which worked out an account of the relation between revelation and reason in the light of Kant’s critique of human understanding; and, not least, the voices of European literature.