The seminars sponsored by the Diocese of Rome's Pastoral Ministry for Universities on Benedict XVI's great secular discourses ended last night at the Lateran Apostolic Palace. The following is a major excerpt from the lecture of Mons. Mario Toso, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace... Unfortunately, his language is too academic, no matter how I tried to simplify it by breaking up his sentences wherever I could, but I had to use his terms...
Benedict XVI at Westminster Hall:
The secular state and the common good
by Mons. Mario Toso
Translated from the 2/4/11 issue of
For integral social development, the encyclical
Caritas in veritatis postulates a personal first-person ethic based on the intrinsic capacity of every human subject to tend towards the perfect good, God.
This is contrary to what has become lately of secular ethics, a third-person ethic that is skeptical about knowledge of truth, of goodness and of God - and this does not lead to just collaboration among individuals who often consider themselves free to do whatever they please.
Nor does this ethic lead to a satisfactory state of affairs, since it maximizes the median usefulness of an activity in society, while setting aside the interests of weaker citizens who are incapable of taking part in the public dialog or in the social contract.
Religions - or better said, a critical reflection on the religious experience - help to recover integral reason in the context of actual living conditions and practical knowledge. While religions relativize the claim of reason to be the only source of standards, they also reinforce reason by highlighting its meta-sociological and meta-historical dimensions which transcend but do not negate the usual phenomenologic level to which reason is reduced. This allows religion to formulate a human
'teloe' - the ensemble of beneficial things measured in relation to the Supreme Good that God represents.
But religion is not always able to exercise the function of purifying reason. This happens, Benedict XVI pointed out, when religion undergoes distortions due to sectarianism and fundamentalism. In this case, religion becomes a problem to be solved rather than a 'resource' for society.
How do we purify the religious experience from that rationalism which is deleterious for religion as well as for society as a whole? As Benedict XVI himself teaches in
Caritas in veritate, it is possible only on the basis of ethical judgment that is structured by reason not imprisoned in the empirical, but open to the integrity of truth and to the Transcendent.
Such a rationality subsists and is exercised only in discernment that is based and focused on charity and on truth (CIV, 55). Cognitive experience of charity in truth gives rise to the criterion of 'all of man, and all men' as the basis both for judging and purifying all religions, as well as for structuring them in a way that is consistent with their essence.
'Re-semanticizing' secularity
[giving the term 'secularity' a meaning that more appropriately defines it that what has come to be its common connotation] in a democratic state presupposes substantial confidence in the human being. in his reason - meaning, his capacity to distinguish good from evil, even if it is not always infallible, in his moral consciousness.
In the face of the modern and post-modern phenomenon of progressive desemantization of secularity by the dominant culture that is increasingly secularized to the point of becoming secularism, it is indispensable, as Benedict XVI says repeatedly, to make a multi-directional commitment to the rediscovery of integral, rather than partial or specialized, human reason, and to disseminating an ethos that is open to Transcendence as well as to realizing a new evangelization.
This is indispensable not only for announcing Christ the Savior to a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, but in order to liberate and humanize cultures and their respective ethics, which are the basis of the juridical order and secularity of the State.
The secular state based on law, in the face of the primacy of the person and of civilian society, cannot consider itself the source of truth and morality on the basis of its own doctrine or ideology.
The State receives from outside - from a pluralist civilian society that is harmoniously convergent - the indispensable measure of knowledge and truth about what is good for man as an individual and in groups.
Ir does not receive these inputs as pure rational knowledge, to be guarded and protected through a philosophy that is totally independent of historical context, since pure rational evidence does not exist divorced from history.
Metaphysical and moral reason operate only in a historical context - it depends on that context, at the same time that it transcends it. In effect, the State draws its support from pre-existing cultural and religious traditions, and not from bare reason.
It is sustained by reason that has matured within a system of practices and institutions favorable to it, in the historical form of religious faiths, which, without deterioration, keep alive the ethical sense of existence and of its transcendence.
The attempts today to remove religion from the public sphere, even as on the one hand, the promise is renewed to keep democratic living viable and peaceable, promotes its weakening because it is deprived of its vital lymph (religion).
A healthy democracy must recognize personal faiths and their communitarian groupings. It is not enough to have a 'civilian religion' based only on social consensus (such a 'religion' would be founded on fragile moral bases that are as changeable as fashions), nor a religion enclosed within privacy - one that is considered only as a subjective and irrational choice which is therefore irrelevant or even harmful to social life. Nor will there be any use for any religion that mortifies the dignity of persons and prevents their human fulfillment through horizontal and vertical transcendence.
The religious dimension in humans does not lie outside the universality of reason, but transcends it without contradiction. The faith of citizens, like the corresponding religious communities that educate them in their faith, nourish the 'social capital' - consisting of stable relationships, lifestyles, shared values, civilian friendships, fraternity - which no democracy can do without, if it is not to be reduced to pure administration of disparate and conflicting interests.
If this is true, then democracies should cultivate towards religions an attitude of openness that is not passive but active, in the sense that they must acknowledge and promote a public space - which is quite distinct from state institutions - within its civilian society, where spiritual and cultural families are formed in an ethos that should revitalize them, especially in the plural and convergent task of building the common good.
Vatican Radio's summary report is more representative of the Thursday night session:
The Pope's secular discourse:
'Secularity is not always negative'
4 FEB 2011 (RV) -A session dedicated to the theme "Secularity is not neutrality: A new way for the integral development of the human being", as an occasion to re-examine the address delivered by Benedict XVI on September 17, 2010, at Westminster Hall in London, concluded the cycle of encounters on the Pope's three great secular discourses, organized by the Vicariate of Rome's Office for Pastoral Ministry for Universities, at the Lateran Apostolic Palace Thursday evening. Roberta Barbi reports for us:
Secularity and neutrality: two characteristics of our time which synthesize the relationship between the religious and political dimensions today.
The Pope, in his address to the civilian authorities and cultural representatives in Westminster Hall, exhorted the faithful to assume responsibility, using the words of Jesus who called on everyone to take up his own cross.
But secularization is not secularism, and is not necessarily a negative concept. Prof. Lorenzo Ornaghi, rector of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore explained the difference
"Secularization is not negative in itself. Rather, it has its positive aspects even in relationship to religion. Secularism is something else. There are different ideological shells to what we consider secularization. For example, there is a conceptual clarity which refers to the fundamentals that allow us to draw from secularization its positive aspects while seeking to abandon its worst aspects".
The focus of the Holy Father's address at Westminster Hall, with an audience that included most members of the British Parliament, is the reality today that religion is marginalized from the political sphere and from public lif,e in general. It is a phenomenon that particularly strikes at Christians and the nations that were historically Christian and more tolerant.
It is in this latter countries where today, religion is sought to be silenced, or at least, relegated to the individual's private sphere. But it is a tendency that is not without consequences for modern democracy, as Mons. Toso clarified.
"In this way, the democratic ethic and the moral consensus of society are debased. The very basis of law itself is debased, to be ultimately replaced by almost anything whatsoever, even by the arbitrary".
The role of reason in today's political debate is therefore to confer a basis for broadening political thought, offering fertile ground for the ethic of democracy. A democracy which is in crisis today - an institutional crisis as well as a crisis of values, but a crisis that can be overcome, as Mons. Toso explained:
"By finding solid foundations, as Benedict XVI has said on many occasions - solid foundations which can be found by linking the social consensus to natural moral law which, in principle, is found in the conscience of every man, whatever his race or religion".
Thus, one returns to the question of witnessing to the faith that Catholics must give within society, even if some would exclude them or would want them to behave against their conscience. The Pope, in facing this argument, cites Thomas More, "admired by believers and non-believers for the integrity with which he was able to follow his conscience, even at the cost of displeasing his sovereign of whom he was 'a good servant'."
The example of that great man of faith and English statesman, said Mons. Toso, still speaks to us today: "Thomas More acknowledged a moral law beyond the positive law set by the King and his ministers, a law which has its basis in our conscience. It means this precisely: that we should render unto God what is God's, and to Caesar that which is his.
The evening session closed the cycle of seminars dedicated to the Pope's great secular discourses, not so much to understand them better, but to use them as guides to behaving and acting better, especially at a time when Christians are more than ever called to give the best of themselves in announcing the Gospel and bearing witness to and for Christ.
Mons. Lorenzo Leuzzi, director of the Rome Vicariate's Office for Pastoral Ministry in the universities, summed it up:
"The most beautiful conclusion is the knowledge that Benedict XVI is showing the entire Church a new Christian presence. But this means that believers who have experienced and are living a full encounter with Christ, become aware of the great responsibility that they have not just for themselves but even to society.
"Bearing witness to our faith today must be reinforced by this awareness - that announcing the Gospel does not mean encroaching on the secular world, but it means rendering a service, because wherever the Gospel reaches, the basis is laid for a true secularity as the Pope pointed out in his address at Westminster Hall."
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/02/2011 05:44]