“The state”, he writes along these lines in one of the texts presented in this volume, “is not the whole of human existence and does not encompass all human hope. Man and what he hopes for extend beyond the framework of the state and beyond the sphere of political action. This is true not only for a state like Babylon, but for every state. The stat

But it seems to me that it is not unwarranted to formulate man’s duty to obey God as a right vis-à-vis the state, and in this respect, it was probably quite logical when John Paul II found in the Christian relativization of the state for the sake of freedom to obey God the expression of a human right that preexists all state authority.

If Kant and Hegel had been right, the progress of the Enlightenment should have made man ever freer, more reasonable, and more upright. Instead, the demons we had so eagerly declared dead rise ever more powerfully from the depths of man and teach him to feel a profound anxiety at his own power and powerlessness: his power to destroy, his powerlessn

“Is it possible to pray honestly as long as we have done nothing to wipe the blood from those who have been beaten and to dry their tears?

Man is the unhappy being that does not know what it is, what it is for, what it is supposed to do with itself.

The multiplication of rights leads finally to the destruction of the concept of law and ends in a nihilistic “right” of man to deny himself—abortion, suicide, and the production of a human being as a thing become rights of man that at the same time deny him.

The fusion of politics and religion in Islam, which necessarily restricts the freedom of other religions, and thus of Christians, too, is contrasted with the freedom of religion, which now to a certain extent also views the secular state as the correct form of government that allows room for the freedom of religion that Christians have claimed from

Of course, behind it something deeper is noted: we have a sense that, actually, we do not have to be redeemed by Christianity but, rather, from Christianity;

It is very easy to forget the reality of original sin and to arrive at optimistic positions that are naïve and do not do justice to reality.