The difference-maker

Have you heard the one about the "great peace among religions, which recognize each other as different ways of reflecting the one Eternal Being"?

It's likely to be voiced by well-meaning people who drive cars with bumper stickers that bend a handful of disparate religious symbols into the word "Coexist."

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger heard that one, too, even before becoming Pope Benedict XVI. In the preface to the new (2000) edition of his classic Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger described the problem with that relativist outlook (emphasis in the quote below is mine):

"Instead of being the man who is God, Christ becomes the one who has experienced God in a special way. He is an enlightened one and therein is no longer fundamentally different from other enlightened individuals, for instance, Buddha. But in such an interpretation, the figure of Jesus loses its inner logic. It is torn out of the historical setting in which it is anchored and forced into a scheme of things that is alien to it. Buddha -- and in this he is comparable to Socrates -- directs the attention of his disciples away from himself: his own person does not matter, but only the path he has pointed out. Someone who finds the way can forget Buddha. But with Jesus, what matters is precisely his Person, Christ himself. When he says 'I am he,' we hear the tones of the 'I AM' on Mount Horeb. The way consists precisely in following him, for 'I am the way, the truth, and the life' (Jn 14:6). He himself is the way, and there is no way independent of him, on which he would no longer matter."