The Great Objective of the Pontificate of Benedict XVI

Cardinal Ruini, fresh out of a job with the Italian bishops’ conference, returns to his vocation as a teacher of theology and philosophy in this address translated on Sandro Magister's site. Here he confidently asserts that "the great objective of the pontificate of Benedict XVI" is nothing less than a "new encounter between faith and reason in our time." he goes on to critique the "Critique of Pure Reason" of Immanuel Kant, saying:

The nucleus of this objection is the correspondence between mathematics, a creation of our intelligence, and the real structures of the physical world, a correspondence that is continually verified by the successes of science and technology, and which implies the deep intelligibility – as imperfect and incomplete as the understanding may be – of reality on the part of our reason.

This overturns the central point of the Kantian position, and inevitably brings back into question – because of the very dynamism of human intelligence, which does not give up in the face of certain open problems – the origin of this correspondence, and the “hypothesis” of a creating Intelligence, or God.

Nice to see Ruini and the Pope are on the same wavelength.