By MICHAEL RUSE - THE HUFFINGTON POST
Added: Fri, 16 Apr 2010 23:00:00 UTC

Original link
The Richard Dawkins article in The Washington Post that Michael Ruse links to is not working - this is the article he is referring to http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/richard_dawkins/2010/03/ratzinger_is_the_perfect_pope.html

I was born in 1940 in England. There is, therefore, not much surprise that I grew up with a prejudice against Roman Catholicism. It was not just the bells and smells and all of that stuff about the Virgin Mary -- although that was bad enough -- but that the Church was run by foreigners. The Archbishop of Canterbury may not have been that impressive, but at least he was one of ours. He was British.

As it happens, I moved to Canada in 1962 and then on to the States in 2000. So I have spent most of my life as a foreigner. I feel quite alien now when I go back to England and don't much care for the beer. I'd like to think that I have grown up in many ways since those early days and that one way I have matured is with respect to institutions that seem to me strange because they are outside my immediate cultural ken. I confess that I still have trouble with the Mormons, but with respect to Catholicism, I have come a long way.

In part, this is because I am a professional philosopher. You cannot do my job without coming to respect the work of the great Catholic theologians-philosophers. I read something in Saint Augustine and think, "No you're wrong. You missed this point." Then I turn the page and he says, "Oh, by the way, you may think I've missed this point. Here's how I explain it." He is simply a superior mind and makes me proud to be a philosopher and humble about what I can do. I feel the same way about others, including Aquinas, even though there is much with which I disagree.

I work a lot on nineteenth-century thought, and a particular favorite of mine is John Henry Newman, the great theologian who began life as an Evangelical, moved on to lead the Anglican High Church movement, and then crossed over to Rome, ending his life as a cardinal. I'm drawn to him in part because I taught for over thirty years in Canada in a society that was in respects as much Catholic as Protestant. My university was in a small town in Southern Ontario, with a population that was about one third Italian -- most of them post-war immigrants, or their children and grandchildren -- and that is before you start to count the Dutch and the Poles and the Ukrainians and so many others. My classes were filled with kids whose last names contained more cees and vees and zees than seemed possible. And I loved them. Bringing together so many people of such diverse backgrounds, including religions, made my classes so vital and worthwhile. The thought of teaching in a monoculture of Presbyterianism -- the predominant Protestant religion in that part of the world -- made me shudder.
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