Archbishop Gänswein echoes Benedict XVI’s warning on relativism at Lithuania’s Šiluva Declaration conference, urging recovery of truth and reason.
Newsroom (30/10/2025, Gaudium Press ) Twenty years after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger cautioned against a “dictatorship of relativism” on the eve of his election as Pope Benedict XVI, his longtime secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, renewed the alarm during a keynote address at a conference here dedicated to the 2021 Šiluva Declaration.
Gänswein, the former prefect of the papal household and current apostolic nuncio to the Baltic states, spoke to an audience of academics, civic leaders, clergy and public intellectuals gathered to examine the declaration’s call to defend human rights, cultivate virtue and advance the common good.
The document, issued Sept. 12, 2021, during Šiluva’s annual Marian festival, anchors society in truth, family values, human dignity and faith in God. The shrine town hosts one of Europe’s earliest Church-approved Marian apparitions.
In his lecture, Gänswein traced relativism as a “constant theme” in Benedict’s thought, warning that sidelining faith or reason produces “pathologies and the disintegration of the human person.”
Archbishop Kęstutis Kėvalas of Kaunas opened the proceedings, urging resistance to “temptations to experiment with human nature and dignity.” He described Šiluva’s shrine as a symbol of fidelity to divine order in creation.
“The holy place of Šiluva invites respect for the order that the Creator has given to this world,” Kėvalas said.
Gänswein argued that confronting technical rationality and globalization begins with reclaiming reason’s full scope. He contrasted authentic reason — inherently truthful — with relativism, which he labeled “an expression of weak and narrow-minded thinking … based on the false pride of believing humans cannot recognize the truth and the false humility of refusing to accept it.”
Quoting John 8:32 — “The truth will set you free” — he insisted truth demands humility and serves as humanity’s measuring rod.
Relativism, Gänswein concluded, acts as modernity’s “creeping poison,” eroding freedom through self-sufficiency and social-media amplification. Humanity’s ultimate aim, he said, is “to come to the knowledge of the truth, which is God, and thus to attain eternal life.” The remark drew prolonged applause.
This marked the third annual conference on the Šiluva Declaration, co-organized by the Institute of a Free Society, the Lithuanian Christian Workers’ Trade Union and Vytautas Magnus University’s Faculty of Catholic Theology.
Additional sessions addressed Lithuania’s moral and political identity, liberal democracy’s strains, post-Soviet transitions and the public role of faith and family. A closing panel examined Europe’s ethical trajectory, free speech and Christian renewal.
Archbishop Gintaras Grušas of Vilnius invoked Pope Leo XIV’s assertion that the Church “can never be exempted from the duty to speak the truth about man and the world, using, when necessary, even harsh language that may initially cause misunderstandings.” He urged all Christians, especially public figures, to champion truth as “not an abstract idea but a path along which a person discovers true freedom.”
- Raju Hasmukh with files from CNA
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