My title is Religious Freedom and the Common Good Catholic Teaching and Contemporary Challenges.

On the day before John Paul II died, April 1st, 2005, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was given the Benedict Award in recognition for his lifelong service to Christian culture.

And on the occasion of receiving the award, Ratzinger delivered an address titled

on Europe's Crisis of Culture, and he began as follows.

We are living in a time of great dangers and great opportunities,

a time which is also of great responsibility for us all.

During the past century, mankind's possibilities and its dominion of a matter grew by truly unthinkable measures.

However, his power to dispose of the world has been such as to allow his capacity for destruction

to reach dimensions which at time horrifies it.

Less visible, but no less disquieting, are the possibilities of

self-manipulation that mankind is acquired. He has plumbed the depths of being, he has deciphered

the components of the human being, and is now capable, so to speak, of constructing man himself.

Who thus no longer comes into the world as a gift of the creator but as a

product of our action a product that therefore can be selected according to the

exigencies established by ourselves thus the splendor being an image of God no

longer shines over man which is what confers on him his dignity and inviolability.

I begin their remarks on the theme of religious freedom with this citation from Ratzinger,

because I think it is important for us to recognize that the most fundamental issues and

the most difficult challenges of our times turn on the question what does it mean to be a human

being what is the foundation of human dignity a foundation of dignity that first justifies and

defines human rights what is freedom and what is the relationship between freedom and the

truth of human nature as created by God and for God.

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