Legal Commentary

From the book God and the World, a conversation between  writer Peter Sewald and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger:

(Sewald): It's obvious that Jesus takes particular delight in children  and in people with a simple faith. He is ----something we rarely see with him----downright enthusiastic: "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden all this from the wise and the learned and have revealed it to the little ones."

(Ratzinger): Yes, here again is the mysterious pattern of the way God acts: the whole magnitude of it is more easily grasped by simple people than by those who, with a thousand distinctions and diverse intellectual baggage, ferret out each little bit on its own and no longer capable of being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the whole.

No rejection of intellectuals, or of detailed knowledge of Scripture, is intended here, but a warning not to lose our inward simplicity, to keep the meaning of the whole in view, and to allow oneself to be impressed, to be ready to accept the unexpected.

It's no secret that for intellectuals this is a great temptation. When we look back on the history of the ideologies of the past century, we can see that simple people have often judged more soundly than intellectuals. The latter always want to make distinctions, to find out more about this and that----and thereby they lose their overall view.

An intellectual himself, then Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) is reminding his fellow brainiacs of two fundamental rules that guide lesser lights like me, and ought to also guide those with larger cerebrums: KISS ("Keep It Simple, Stupid!") and "Don't Lose The Forest For The Trees." Good advice no matter what the subject, but especially important when the subject is your eternal existence.