Two messages from Benedict:
First, yesterday’s catechesis on Augustine:

Distance from God means distance from oneself. Addressing his words directly to God he acknowledges (“Confessions,” III, 6, 11): “You are more intimately present to me than my inmost being and higher than the highest element in me,” — “interior intimo meo et superior summo meo” — so that, he adds in another passage remembering the time preceding his conversion, “you were in front of me, but I, instead, had gone far from myself and could not find myself again, and even less could I find you again” (Confessiones, V, 2, 2).

Because Augustine personally experienced this intellectual and spiritual journey, he managed to convey it in his writings with immediacy, depth and wisdom; in another two famous passages of the “Confessions” (IV, 4, 9 and 14, 22), he acknowledged that man is “a great enigma” (magna quaestio) and “a deep abyss” (grande profundum), an enigma and an abyss that Christ alone enlightens and saves.
This is important: A man who is distant from God is also distant from himself, estranged from himself, he can find himself only by meeting God. This path leads to himself, to his true self and identity.
In “De Civitate Dei” (XII, 27) Augustine underlines the fact that the human being is by nature a social animal, but antisocial in his vices. Man is saved by Christ, the only mediator between God and humanity, and as repeated by my predecessor John Paul II (“Augustinium Hipponensem,” 21), he is “the universal path to freedom and salvation.”
In the same text, Augustine affirms that “no one has ever found freedom or will ever find freedom” (“De Civitate Dei,” X, 32, 2) other than by following this path which has always been accessible to man. Christ, as the only route to salvation, is head of the Church and inscrutably united with it. Augustine affirms, “We have become Christ. In fact, if he is the head of man and we are the body, together we make up the whole” (“In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus,” 21, 8).
People of God and house of God: The Church in the Augustinian vision is closely associated with the concept of the Body of Christ, based on the Christological rereading of the Old Testament and on the sacramental life centered on the Eucharist, in which the Lord gives us his Body and transforms us in his Body. It is then essential that the Church — people of God in the Christological and not sociological sense — be really placed in Christ, who “prays for us, prays in us, is prayed to by us,” as Augustine affirms beautifully on the written page: “He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our chief, he is prayed to by us as our God: so we recognize in him our voice, and in ours, his” (“Enarrationes in Psalmos,” 85, 1).

This morning, the Pope addressed the CDF, meeting in Rome. The full text in Italian is here, and John Allen summarizes:

In late June, the congregation issued a document on the famous phrase from the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) that the one church of Christ “subsists in” the Catholic church. In essence, the congregation asserted that the phrase means the Catholic church alone possesses the fullness of what it means to be a church.
During the council, some analysts interpreted the phrase “subsists in” as a departure from the traditional claim that the Catholic church is the lone “true” church. When the doctrinal congregation issued its clarification, some leaders of other Christian denominations warned of negative ecumenical fallout.
It’s a critique which Benedict obviously does not accept, insisting that the clarification is actually “necessary for the correct development of ecumenical dialogue.”
“Far from impeding authentic ecumenical dialogue,” Benedict said, “it will be a stimulus, so that the debate on doctrinal questions is always marked by realism and full awareness of the aspects that still separate the Christian confessions.”

“To cultivate a theological vision that regards the unity and identity of the church as attributes ‘hidden in Christ’, so that historically the church would exist only in multiple ecclesial confessions, reconcilable only in an eschatological perspective, would generate a slowdown and ultimately paralysis in ecumenism itself,” the pope said.
Benedict also defended a recent doctrinal note on evangelization, asserting that the quest for explicit conversion to Christ remains an essential duty of the faith.
“The recognition of elements of truth and goodness in the religions of the world,” he said, “and of the seriousness of their religious efforts, dialogue with them and a spirit of collaboration for the defense and promotion of the dignity of the person and universal moral values, cannot be understood as a limitation on the missionary duty of the church, which compels it to incessantly announce Christ as the way, the truth and the life,” he said.
In remarks to the pope at the beginning of the audience, American Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, confirmed that his office is preparing a new document on bioethics as a follow-up to the 1987 text Donum Vitae.
Levada mentioned cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and the situation of frozen embryos as issues to be addressed in that document.