Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has made few contributions to the life of the Church since his retirement, preferring instead to “watch and pray”. But he has just issued one lengthy reflection on the dangers of relativism, which because of its rarity as well as its revisiting of old themes, deserves more attention than it has attracted so far. Relativism was one of the traps he warned the Church to avoid in his address to the cardinals prior to the conclave that elected him. It was a key theme of the document, Dominus Iesus, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when he was its prefect in 2000, which has since become somewhat notorious for the bluntness of its language. Relativism was also one reason for the CDF’s censoring of the major work by the great Je