Unexpected Praise

From Reuters:

PARIS (Reuters) - Pope Benedict has reaped praise before his visit to his German homeland next month from one of the last people one would expect -- the sharp-tongued leader of the former communists from old East Germany.

Gregor Gysi, parliamentary leader for a small party in the German Bundestag called The Left, thanked the conservative pontiff Thursday for consistently preaching that a modern society must have moral norms in order to function properly.

"It won't work without the concept of the good," he wrote in the weekly Christ und Welt. "But modern science can't tell us what is good. Its concepts focus on empirical experience. Ideas such as morality play no role there."

Despite his reputation as a staunch conservative, Gysi wrote, Benedict turns out to be a modern theologian who says societies need both religious traditions and rational arguments to forge the moral consensus they need to operate.