First I have to remark that Josef Ratzinger it's the pope to Roman Catholics only, while Christians include Evangelists, Metodists, Waldesians, Ortodoxes, Anglicans, Lutherans and many other. I live in Italy where the Vatican has its headquarter and my grandmother tried (vanely) to raise me as a Catholic despite my parents are atheists. Here Vatican has much power and strongly affects politics and people's opinion, even though our Constitution clearly says Italy and Vatican are two separated states, free on their own. Shame on you if you don't respect Catholic issues, and obviously anyone can state God exists but you're pretty a lousy uneducated unrespectful shit if you say there's no god (when the UAAR – the Italian union of atheists, agnosticists and rationalists, put on buses a publicity saying «The bad new's God does not exist, the good one is you don't need him.» a terrible polemic rose). Anyway, here Catholicism is not a faith for most Catholics: they (maybe) go to church on Sunday and feel annoyed to, they send their children to Sunday school and receive sacraments (you must get them all if you want a magnific marriage in church), but in daily life they don't act much Catholic. No doubt most young couples have premarital sex and use condoms before and after marriage (and definitely don't feel guilty to), and that's just one example. They have no respect for atheists, nor for people having a different faith, not even for other Christians, and THIS they learnt from Vatican and popes – it's a fact Josef Ratzinger recently said only Catholic churches are true, that is, all other Christian churches are eretics and their adepts will go to hell.