"By holding on to the Creator, faith's praxis protects the creation against...a total manipulation of reality. ...Faith's praxis depends on faith's truth, in which man's truth is made visible and lifted up to a new level by God's truth. Hence, it is fundamentally opposed to a praxis that first wants to produce facts and so establish truth."
Joseph Ratzinger, "The Church's Teaching: Authority--Faith--Morals" (1974) in Principles of Christian Morality, San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986, 70.
"...[A] faulty concept of God leads to faulty moral behavior..." Ibid., 65.
"Contrary to appearances, the flight into pure orthopraxy, as well as the attempt to banish substantive morals from the realm of faith (with the teaching authority that is an integral part of the realm of faith), turn reason into a heresy... The first obligation of the teaching office is to continue the apostolic exhortation and to protect these fundamental decisions against reason's capitulation to the age, as well as against reason's capitulation in the face of almighty praxis. There must be a correspondence with basic insights of human reason, albeit these insights have been purified, deepened and broadened through contact with the way of faith...
"The whole Church:...the life and suffering of Christians, living out their faith in the midst of the times,...the reflections and questionings of the scholars,...[and] the watchful attention, listening and deciding undertaken by the teaching authority...is involved in the process of assimilating what is genuinely rational and rejecting what is only superficially reasonable." Ibid., 71-72.
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