Internal Division and Faith

Most people in our time cannot believe what they know and do not know what they should believe. Now you yourself combine a unity and integration of thought and faith that is no longer familiar to us skeptical and errant moderns. How does it feel to live like that?

I don't dare judge here whether all modern men in general really lack this inner unity, or whether they don't in fact find unity in many ways. Every man is inwardly pulled between many poles, and this is, of course, true for me and for any priest and bishop. For one's interests, talents and handicaps, knowledge and ignorance, the faith of the Church as a whole, do not coincide automatically. In this sense, there is in every man, including me, an inner tension. Believing with the Church and knowing that I may entrust myself to this knowledge and knowing that the other things I know receive light from it and, conversely, can deepen it -- that does hold me together. Above all, the foundational faith act of faith in Christ, and the attempt to bring one's life into unity in terms of that faith, unifies the tensions, so that they do not become a fissure, a fracture.

Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI)
in an interview with Pete Seewalt,
The Salt of the Earth