The
Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion): If his 2004 debate with Habermas and his lecture to the Italian Senate three months later give us, in capsule form, Ratzinger's analysis of Europe's cultural condition today, what role does he envisage for the Catholic Church in helping repair the damage that nihilism, scepticism and relativism have done to what he called, in the Italian Senate, "that which holds the world together"?
Pope Benedict has sometimes been accused of being a nostalgic for the intact (Catholic) culture of his Bavarian youth, which was first destroyed by the Third Reich and then supplanted by a new Germany that eventually turned its back on both its Catholic and Lutheran roots. There is something to this, but Ratzinger is far too intelligent a man and far too sophisticated an analyst of the tides of history to imagine that any kind of rollback to a pre-modern (or pre-postmodern) past is possible. Rather, his first obligation, as he understands it, is to make Europe look closely at itself, in the unsparing but non-scolding way he did in the Italian Senate in early 2004:
"At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralysed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.
"Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as if they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen as a liability rather than as a source of hope. There is a clear comparison between today's situation and the decline of the Roman Empire. In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice it was already subsisting on models that were destined to fail. Its vital energy had been depleted."
Having held the mirror of reality up to faces that might have been reluctant to gaze into it, for fear of what they could find there, the man who became Benedict XVI then urged his audience of Italian political leaders to reject Spenglerian gloom and to refuse to concede that the West was "rushing heedlessly toward its demise". Rather, he proposed that men and women of conscience adopt a vision of possibility drawn from Arnold Toynbee, in which "the energy of creative minorities and exceptional individuals" can lead to a revitalisation of culture that will allow "the inner identity of Europe to survive throughout its metamorphoses in history".
The Catholic Church, Benedict XVI believes, can be one of those "creative minorities" in 21st- century Europe and indeed throughout the West. To be that, the Church must regain a clear sense of its own identity, primarily through a resacralisation of its worship. It must recover a firm grasp on the truths it proposes, putting behind it the "liberalism" in religion that John Henry Newman deplored. It must raise up a generation of bishops and priests who are persuasive evangelists and witnesses, according to the model established by John Paul II. It must demonstrate, not so much by argument as by sanctity and beauty, that it offers the men and women of today a path on which they can encounter "that which holds the world together."
And to do all of that, the Church must purge itself of its corruptions, a point on which Pope Benedict has been insistent for years, most recently in regard to the appalling defaults of Irish Catholicism. This will take some time, given the density of clerical culture and the fact that popes are not, pace media distortions, absolute monarchs who can effect massive institutional change at the click of a finger. It will probably take more time than Anglophone cultures will like, given the still-languid, Italianate ways of the Vatican. No one should doubt, however, that Benedict XVI understands that, for the Church to become the "creative minority" of his imagination, it must be a credible minority that lives the truths it proclaims and deals decisively with those in its midst who betray the trust given them.
Benedict's vision of the Church in Europe's future has nothing to do with the rebuilding of a mythical ancien régime. He has shown himself sympathetic to the desire of some Catholics to worship according to the old ways, but he has no truck with the restorationist political fantasies that are at the root of the Lefebvrist movement. As he sees the Catholic future, in Britain and elsewhere, the public task of the Church is to form alliances with those who understand that the democratic project requires a far more secure moral cultural foundation than that offered by pragmatism or utilitarianism. And in the Pope's mind, those alliances should be built in a genuinely intercultural and pluralistic way, formed around the truths we can know to be true as a result of putting various religious and philosophical traditions into vigorous conversation.
That is the proposal of the man who will beatify Newman and challenge Britons to lift themselves out of the slough of secularist despond. If that proposal gets drowned out by a cacophony of media scandal-mongering (itself amplified by the usual Vatican communications incompetence), and by the antics of the New Atheists (to which British and American editors seem curiously addicted), Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, will not be the loser.
Read the entire piece. As for the "curious addiction" of editors to the antics of the "new atheists," my guess is that Weigel is being coy. He knows as well as anyone that small minds "think" alike.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles:
• Faith in the Triune God, and Peace in the World | Joseph Ratzinger | From
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• Pope Benedict XVI On Natural Law | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• The Two (And Only Two) Cities | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Secularity: On Benedict XVI and the Role of Religion in Society | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• "A Requirement of Intellectual Honesty": On Benedict and the German Bishops | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Intellectual Charity: On Benedict XVI and the Canadian
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• The Temptation of the Earthly City: Tolkien's Augustinian Vision | Dr. Jose Yulo
• The State Which Would Provide Everything | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Are Truth, Faith, and Tolerance Compatible? | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
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• Author Page for Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI
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