essential area that has long been neglected.5 Ratzinger shows how brotherhood was originally based on the fatherhood of God in creation, as well as on our common descent from Adam and Noah. Mankind was thus created to form one worldwide familia Dei. The covenant of brotherhood in God’s family was then utterly broken by sin in successive stages: at the fall, the flood and the Tower of Babel. When God graciously made a covenant with Abraham, a new and different kind of brotherhood was formed on the