When asked to comment on this, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) remarked: '...it is a fact that the choice of "little things" and "little people" is characteristic of God's dealings with humanity. We see this characteristic first of all in the fact that God chooses the earth as his theatre of action, this grain of dust in the universe; and in the fact that there Israel, a virtually powerless people, becomes the vehicle for his own action; and again in the fact that a completely unknown village, Nazareth, becomes his home; finally, in the fact that the Son of God is born at Bethlehem, outside the village in a stable. All of this is consistent' (God and the World, p. 213). Francis and Th