BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Last March 23, TIME magazine’s cover featured the question ‘IS TRUTH DEAD?’ as a conscious homage to its cover ‘IS GOD DEAD’ IN March 1966. The ‘truth’ issue was far from a philosophical
question as the “God’ issue was, but a matter-of-fact query in the age of ‘fake news’ and leaders like Pope Francis and Donald Trump who do not always respect truth. Nonetheless, Aldo Maria
Valli uses the new TIME cover as a take-off for his Lenten reflection on truth...

Rediscovering the desire for the infinite
Citing Benedict XVI, the last authority to interpellate us
directly on the question of truth
Translated from

April 6, 2017

«Is Truth Dead?». The question, in red letters on black, fills the entire cover of a recent TIME magazine issue.

After the defeat of Hilary Clinton and the election of Donald Trump, the mass media in the USA doubtless have to reflect on the question. [The problem is: Do they even know what truth is, since by now, everything in the dominant mentality of the West is relative. The only absolutes are what that mentality holds, or chooses to hold and uphold here and now, depending on circumstances, since for that mentality, nothing is absolute for always. ’Truth’, like Western ethics and morality, has become purely situational.]

The most influential organs of communication not only supported Clinton 1000 percent but also depicted Trump as unqualified and even unpresentable [as a presidential candidate, let alone as President of the United States]. Except that the voters chose Trump.

And one of the figures who was responsible for placing the media on the dock [for a determinedly biased campaign reporting and polling that unanimously predicted Clinton would handily defeat Trump] was Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, which had been in the front rank of Clinton supporters. He was compelled to apologize to Times readers for his newspaper’s ‘poor coverage’ of the 2016 presidential campaign. [A lingering irony of the Times’s heavy betting on Clinton was that by 11 pm of election night, the newspaper had reversed its pre-election odds of 95% chances for Clinton, its ongoing election count now gave her 95% odds of not winning at all. And of course, Sulzberger's apology did not last longer than the day he made it. Almost all of US media have gone on reporting only the negative about Trump - in which the media's distortion of truth and outright falsehoods are far more offensive than Mr. Trump's unfortunate penchant for stultifying hyperbole and deliberate half-truths.]

But beyond the political and social situation in the United States, TIME’s question has a significance that provides a starting point for a more general reflection.

In this our world which is so overloaded with information and already so interconnected instantaneously, can we really say that we know the truth? Or better yet, do we still believe it is possible to know the truth?

It is not difficult to be aware that perhaps the most paradoxical outcome of information overload and the world’s increasing interconnectivity is precisely the widespread impression that the truth escapes us. In the face of every reported event or statement, especially one that strikes strongly from the emotional point of view because of its inherent drama, the first question that now comes to mind is: But did it happen exactly as it is recounted?

And yet, the question does not impel us to seek the truth. Because deep within us, we recognize that the only answer we can give is that there is no ‘truth’, and that we should start by renouncing the effort to seek it.

The question of truth is central in the thinking of every man in every age. But today, at least in Western culture, it is as if we have raised the white flag of surrender. Dominated by subjectivism (for which what is ‘true’ is only that which the individual experiences at a certain moment), subjected to relativism (in which absolute truth is not pertinent to human reason that can only deal with arduous mediation between multiple and diverse ‘truths’), bombarded by information that accumulates chaotically and impelled to store in oru mind what we can of an unprecedented amount of data, then we come to just one disconcerting conclusion: It is not just that there is ‘no truth’ but that we have no use for it, and we must surrender to living in the dark.

Perhaps the last authority who interpellated us directly on the question of truth – confronting us with the tragedy that results from renouncing the quest for truth, was Pope Benedict XVI.

During his entire pontificate, the present Emeritus Pope fought for the truth in everything he said and did. Not just to show us that truth exists – and it has the face of Jesus – but to call on each of us never to give up seeking the truth.

Because, he told us, he who ceases to seek the truth is no longer authentically human – indeed, he is less than human. Because if we maintain that, through human reason, we cannot raise our sights towards the horizon of truth, that we can only be content with mediating among fragments of the truth, it is as if we are amputating ourselves of the most precious and beautiful faculty we possess.

In a couple of books that I wrote on the teachings of Benedict XVI («La verità del papa»,(The Pope’s truth) in 2010, and «Il pontificato interrotto» (The interrupted pontificate) in 2013), I sought to illustrate Joseph Ratzinger’s battle to uphold the right and duty of every individual to interrogate himself generously about truth. In all his written and oral interventions, the question of truth is a continual theme, as we can see very well, for instance in Volume 2 of his trilogy on JESUS OF NAZARETH, “From the entry into Jerusalem to the Resurrection”, which is particularly appropriate reading these days a we approach Palm Sunday and Holy Week.

To the pragmatic question of Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”, asked with all the skepticism typical of a politician who does not believe in absolutes but only in the practical opportunities and effects of any decision, Benedict XVI echoes, “What then is truth? Can we recognize it? Can it become a criterion in our thinking and desires, in our life as an individual and in that of the community?”

Before such a question, Joseph Ratzinger responds, man today can only rely on empirical sience. And since thought has become weak – or very weak, indeed – and even political ideologies now appear like shadows without substance, what are we left with? And what can science really guarantee us?

Benedict XVI cites the case of the geneticist Francis Collins, who headed the group that deciphered the human genome. Named by Benedict XVI to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Collins is a believer for whom Darwinian evolutionism is inAdequate to explain man in his totality as body and soul. It is true, Collins says ,that we all have something in common with the anthropomorphic apes, but at the origin of everything, there is much more: a God who from the very beginning created not just things but life and the laws of life. He created life because that is how it had to be.

Collins’s is a valuable attempt to hold together physics and metaphysics, empirical science and the mystery of the soul. Nonetheless, Benedict XVI notes, we must admit that even the fact that we can read in the genetic code “the grand mathematics of creation’ does not bring us to the truth. At most, we can say that ‘functional truth’ has become visible, but “the profound truth about ourselves, who we are, where we came from, for what purpose we are in this world, and what is good or bad, cannot unfortunately be read” as we can now read the genetic code.

Rather, he notes, “with our growing knowledge of functional truth, there seems to be at the same time a growing blindness to the truth itself, about what is our true reality and what is our true purpose”.

And therefore? Benedict XVI’s response is clear. If Pilate, the pragmatic and skeptic whom we can see as the image of ourselves, thought that the question of truth was irresolvable (which is why, in political action, he entrusts himself to the logic of power, the only truth from this point of view), the Christian must affirm not only that truth exists but that it is recognizable. The truth of God became recognizable in Jesus Christ because “in him, God entered the world, and thereby raised the criterion of truth into history”.

It is an affirmation which can never be reflected upon sufficiently. As Christians, we insist, quite rightly, on the fact that God, made knowable to us in Jesus, represents a logic opposed to that of the world (weakness rather than strength, sacrifice of oneself instead of domination, goodness instead of cruelty), but this, all told, is a consequence of the moral order with respect to the fundamental novelty represented by the coming of God to the world.

The fundamental novelty is that in Jesus, we are gtiven the key to read everything. Thanks to him, who is God made visible, we are no longer blind. Thanks to him we have an identity card that says not just who we are but why we are.

This is the profound significance of redemption, a concept which in the Church today has perhaps been left too much in a secondary place.

Benedict XVI underscores it effectively: “Let us say that the non-redemption of the world consists, precisely, in the indecipherability of creation, in the non-recognition of truth, a condition that inevitably leads to the dominance of pragmatism, and thereby allows the power of the strong to become the god of this world”.

I repeat: this is a point upon which we do not reflect sufficiently. Sometimes, we believers, intimidated, or at least, made timid and disoriented in the face of the prevalence of subjectivism and relativism, end up by supporting a discourse on moral order (solidarity not selfishness, a sense of brotherhood not hostility, the spirit of forgiveness not vendetta) which is very important but risks being unfounded if it is not centered on the discourse about the truth of God.

Truth which, in Jesus and with Jesus, has been made knowable to man and has become the key to read our history, understood as that of every individual as well as that of the world. Because, devoid of its foundation of truth, the Christian proposition easily falls into nothing more than moralism.

As a father and grandfather, I ask myself: What can I do – not to teach the truth – but at least to transmit the desire to seek the truth? How can I tell those who are younger than me that this quest is well worth the trouble, and that to renounce it at the outset is not a victory for reason but its defeat?

To answer this, I turn again to Benedict XVI, especially the address he delivered on December 14, 2012, to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See. After pointing out that education occupies a priority among the challenges of our time, but that family and school – in the face of the proliferation and wide use of social networks – no longer seem to be the natural terrain for the educational process, that authority is under question everywhere, and that unfortunately, the competence of some educators “is not exempt from cognitive partiality and anthropological deficiency”, Papa Ratzinger concluded, in no half terms, that “nevertheless it is necessary to educate in truth and about truth”.

I believe that every educator should assimilate these words. Rectitude of heart and mind, says Benedict XVI, is certainly most important, but young people have need above all to be aided to raise their sights in order to seek the truth about their own selves, about creation, about life.

“They must be taught that every act by a human being must be responsive and consistent with the desire for the infinite, and that such acts accompany growth and formation in a humanity that is ever more fraternal and free of individualistic and materialistic temptations”.

The desire for the infinite! What a stupendous expression!
And this is what truly makes the difference. This is what the educator, certainly without arrogance but without bending himself to the common mentality, must seek to transmit. Because the desire for the infinite is in every man. It is not about introducing it by force – we must simply inspire it.

I see this well. In the eyes of my children and even in that of my two-year old grandson and my eighteen-year-old granddaughter.