I rejected Catholicism for Orthodoxy, which is hardly a "lapse" and more of a "fine tuning". Later events saw my opinions change further, but I would say I was a very typical American Catholic.

I think getting into a larger discussion over "render unto Caesar" and its larger context would be futile, but Ratzinger specifically mentions, in a different part of the book reviewed here, that part of the mission of Christ was to deny dominion over the earth, and that any power that has sought to impose good by compulsion has ended creating evil because of the flawed nature of man. I would say that, compared with all the other statements, there is a very strong rejection of the notion of temporal power by the Church (which makes the Roman Empire's adoption of Christianity all the more unusual) and this rejection has had an impact on the development of the Western world from its very inception as a concept.