From December 27, 2004, issue of NRODT, by Mike Potemra:

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is not just the Catholic Church’s enforcer of theological orthodoxy; he is also one of Christianity’s most valuable contemporary thinkers. In his new book, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (Ignatius, 284 pp., $15.95), he tackles the issue of the plurality of religions with intelligence and insight. “Today’s man,” he writes, is “inclined to recognize himself in the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant”: A king summoned all the blind men in his city to have them feel different parts of an elephant, and naturally the blind men disagreed about the nature of the creature they were touching — and eventually came to blows, as each contended that his own generalization from the part he was touching was the fundamental truth about the elephant. Is this not, modern man asserts, an apt metaphor for mankind in its religious quest?
No, says Ratzinger: “Someone who is born blind knows that he was not born to be blind . . . Man’s resignation to the verdict that, when it comes to what is essential, that on which his life ultimately depends, he was born blind is merely apparent. . . . Man cannot come to terms with being born blind, and remaining blind, where essential things are concerned. The farewell to truth can never be final.” The thirst for truth is innate, whether that truth makes itself available through the natural reason, or through divine revelation, or through both. All people have dignity in the eyes of God, and should be treated with respect, but not all truth claims are equal. “For Christian faith,” Ratzinger writes, “the history of religions is not a circle of what is endlessly the same, never touching the essential thing, which itself ever remains outside of history; rather, the Christian holds the history of religions to be a genuine history, to be a path whose direction we call progress and whose attitude we call hope.” Ratzinger’s book is both erudite and accessible, a very helpful engagement with the religious thought of East and West.