Robert Spaemann.

Robert Spaemann, the German philosopher, died. It was on December 10. He was 91 years old. For those like me who love philosophy, ideas, and the destiny of the Church, his passing is very painful. Spaemann was not only a man of ideas a public intellectual, but a man of social and political commitments. Born in the 1920s, 1927, to a mother and a father who were converts to the Catholic Church, he studied philosophy and theology in Munster and Munich. Interesting is the fact that after his mother died, his father was ordained as a Catholic priest. Expert in the Catholic tradition, ethics, and the thought of modernity, he taught at Stuttgart, Heidelberg, and Munich until his retirement in 1992. Joseph Ratzinger was, in all these endeavors, his colleague and long-life friend.
For me, Spaemann was not only a philosopher whom I read assiduously, especially in Moral Philosophy, but above all, I looked at him as a witness in the controversy about the ambiguities and uncertainties of the Amoris Laetitia. Spaemann criticism of the document was explicit. He adamantly rejected primarily some AL passages that express a “breach with the teaching tradition of the Catholic Church.”
Spaemann was right. He is right, now more than ever.
Spaeman had warned, thus, everyone, but especially those in the Church hierarchy, about the strong temptation to adapt to all trends so that the people do not run away from the Church. No, said Spaemann. The truth does not need to be adjusted to be “liked.” The only thing that we need, as philosophers and believers, is truth and fidelity: fidelity to reality and fidelity to revelation without breaking the two thousand years of Church Tradition. The rest is vain. Professor Spaemann RIP