From Benedict XVI's Saint Paul :

Evil does not come from the source of being itself, it is not equally primal. Evil comes from a freedom created, from a freedom abused. (p.93)

 That general audience  (Dec. 3, 2008) is worth reading in its entirety.

 His reflections on the mystery of darkness (from its illogicality) and mystery of light (from the suprarational) made me think of Caravaggio and St. Paul–even if the same painting were not on the cover of the book. Now there is a thought for any student of Caravaggio: the mystery of light is greater than that of the dark.

And in case we forget Benedict's intimacy with Greek:

Immediately afterwards, Paul thus defines this new way of living: "which is your spiritual worship". Commentators on this text well know that the Greek expression (ten logiken latreían) is not easy to translate. The Latin Bible translates it as: "rationabile obsequium". The actual word "rationabile" appears in the First Eucharistic Prayer of the Roman Canon: in it the faithful pray that God will accept this offering as "rationabile". The usual Italian translation "culto spirituale" [spiritual worship] does not reflect all the nuances of the Greek text (or of the Latin). In any case it is not a matter of less real worship or even worship that is only metaphorical but rather of a more concrete and realistic worship a worship in which the human being himself, in his totality as a being endowed with reason, becomes adoration, glorification of the living God. (p.106)

 What a shame that the current translation in the liturgy misses the connection with λογός.

Truth and Custom

From Daughter Zion:

...a custom contrary to truth. Such customs either wither away because their root, the truth, has dried up, or they continue to proliferate contrary to conviction, and thus destroy the correlation between truth and life. They thereby lead to a poisoning of the intellectual-spiritual organism, the results of which are incalculable. (p.11)

The purification of Christianity, the search for its original essence, is carried on today, in the era of historical consciousness, almost entirely by seeking its oldest forms and establishing them as normative. The original is confused with the primitive. (p.38)

 The first quote, I believe, makes the case for why we should take thought of those who make Christmas a secular festival.

Benedict on the importance of Classics

From Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977:

Latin, as the foundation of one's whole education, was then still taught with old-fashioned rigor and thoroughness, something I have remained grateful for all my life...In retrospect it seems to me that an education in Greek and Latin antiquity created a mental attitude that resisted sedition by a totalitarian ideology. (p.23)