Summary
The cited article, published by CNA/EWTN News on March 17, 2026, reports on a statement by Bishop Heiner Wilmer, chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, commemorating the late philosopher Jürgen Habermas and his 2004 dialogue with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The bishop praises the event as demonstrating that “theology cannot exist without philosophy and philosophy cannot exist without theology,” and celebrates Habermas’ “visionary power to build bridges between philosophy and religion.” The article presents this dialogue as a model of constructive engagement between faith and secular reason. This perspective, however, from the standpoint of integral Catholic faith, reveals a profound and deliberate abandonment of Catholic doctrine in favor of the indifferentist and modernist principles condemned by the pre-conciliar Magisterium. The bishop’s words do not witness to the triumph of Christ the King but to the abject surrender of the post-conciliar sect to the “dialectical foundations of secularization” it claims to discuss.