Cardinal Jospeh Ratzinger, Avvenire, 14.5.2004:
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"There is a hate of itself in the West that is strange and that can only be considered as something pathological; the West tries to open itself full of comprehension to outside values in a laudable manner, but it does not love itself anymore; of its own history as of now it only sees what is deplorable and destructive, without being able of perceiving that that is great and pure".
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What are the inside values of this "West", as opposed to outside values to which this "West" is opening itself?
Then further...
Cardinal Ratzinger, on Europe, from his book in Italian "Senza Radici" (Without Roots, 2004.) co-written with Marcello Pera, President of the Senate of the Italian Republic, the phrase is by the Cardinal Ratzinger:
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"Europe, in the same hour of its maximum success, seems emptied from its interior, like paralyzed due to a circulatory crisis, a crisis that puts in peril its life by trusting it in the hands of transplants that cancel its identity. With the lowering of the sustaining spiritual forces it is added an increasing ethnic decline. There is a strange lack of will for future"
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The ethnic decline is obvious, the future Pope is very right about pointing it out. But the phrase:
Europe, in the same hour of its maximum success, seems a bit contradictory to the second part of the quotation. Can that what is Europe currently going through be considered as "success"? Hardly.