Among the unmerited gifts of my life was Gregory's tutelage in Toronto.  His weaving the personal and social dimensions of faith together has had a lasting impact.

Once in conversation he offered an observation that has long helped me understand diverse pulls in the Church.  We were reading Johannes Baptist Metz, and he grounded that remarkable thinker's life's work in a personal question, offering a clarifying contrast.

Metz and Ratzinger were roughly the same age, raised in nearby Bavarian villages.  Their early social and religious experiences so similar, yet their life work so different.  The Holocaust set the question with which Metz has grappled ever since:  How was it possible that, in such devout Catholic setting, fervent, believing Catholics offered so little, if any, resistance to the rise of absolute evil in history?  Whereas Ratzinger felt deeply the loss of that peasant Catholicism in the face of modernity.

One of those concernss became Gregory's, too.