A few days ago, I posted the last of a seven-part guest blog in the National Catholic Register which is a tribute to Benedict XVI by author Benjamin Wiker, that I had been unaware of earlier. Here are the first three parts of the series:
The tale of two Benedicts
by BENJAMIN WIKER
February 19, 2013
It is certainly sad that Pope Benedict will be leaving us, but we should not forget all that he has left us — a great legacy of the deepest theological and philosophical reflection that can guide and inspire the New Evangelization he’s demanded of us. A little history puts that legacy in its proper context.
The first Benedict, St. Benedict of Nursia (480-547), left us a rule that established monastic order in the West and, in doing so, grounded the evangelization of Europe. Benedictine monasticism was the deepest root of the Church’s infusion of order into a pagan society, creating a fountain of spiritual, intellectual and moral discipline that saturated the fragile seeds of the Gospel planted in the Church’s first centuries so that they could grow into Christendom, a unified civilization built out of the woefully disparate elements of a decaying empire and brutal, warring local tribes.
It is this precise sense of integration through the faith that Hilaire Belloc’s famous epigram so admirably captured: “Europe is the faith, and the faith is Europe.”
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who has lived through much of Europe’s disintegration, chose an appropriate name upon becoming Ppe in 2005. When I heard that he took the name Benedictus XVI, the chilling ending of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s
After Virtue immediately came to mind.
Drawing a parallel between the fall of Rome and consequent Dark Ages of barbarism and societal disorder in the fifth century, and the radical moral and social disintegration of our own time that is ushering in a new barbarism, MacIntyre wrote that
“We are not entirely without hope. This time, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”
While it is premature to speak of canonization, Pope Benedict has seen all too clearly the forces of disintegration in Europe caused by drying up the faith that was the original source of its integration. For Benedict, the horrors of the 20th century were a kind of return to pagan barbarism, a barbarism much darker than the one from which the Christian faith saved the West a millennium and a half before.
Benedict sees at the heart of this return to darkness and disorder the West’s embrace of radical secularism, a creed that explicitly denies the truths of the faith and reduces human beings to soulless material creatures. It is the creed that, in attacking the faith, purposely unwinds Christendom and returns us to a worse kind of paganism and barbarism than that from which the faith had once delivered us.
“When a culture attempts to suppress the dimension of ultimate mystery, and to close the doors to transcendent truth,” Pope Benedict warned, “it inevitably becomes impoverished and falls prey, as the late Pope John Paul II so clearly saw, to reductionist and totalitarian readings of the human person and the nature of society.”
If anything, Pope Benedict has been more insistent than Pope John Paul II on this point.
But the danger doesn’t just threaten Europe. The just-quoted words come from Pope Benedict’s ad limina address to the American bishops in early 2012. We, too, face the same forces of disintegration, for we are cultural offspring of the Christendom that defined Europe. And so the Pope issued a call to all of us:
Here, once more, we see the need for an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity, endowed with a strong critical sense vis-à-vis the dominant culture and with the courage to counter a reductive secularism which would delegitimize the Church’s participation in public debate about the issues which are determining the future of American society.
The preparation of committed lay leaders and the presentation of a convincing articulation of the Christian vision of man and society remain a primary task of the Church in your country; as essential components of the New Evangelization, these concerns must shape the vision and goals of catechetical programs at every level.
Benedict vs. the dictatorship of relativism
by BENJAMIN WIKER
February 25, 2013
In his homily to the 2005 conclave that would soon choose him as the successor of Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger warned those attending, “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
This is a warning that Pope Benedict has not tired of repeating during his pontificate.
Relativism is a poison. It attacks our most human capacity, the capacity to seek and know the truth, including the moral truth. A dictatorship of relativism imposes by real cultural force (and even by political force) a no-standard standard, a command that all must imbibe this poison.
At first blush, it would seem contradictory to have relativism united to dictatorship. Isn’t relativism just a healthy dose of humility, a way to cool the intellectual or religious hot-head who insists, “I, only I, have the truth”?
The proof of the pudding of relativism is in the eating. How has it fared?
In
Without Roots, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:
In recent years I find myself noting how the more relativism becomes the generally accepted way of thinking, the more it tends toward intolerance.
Political correctness … seeks to establish the domain of a single way of thinking and speaking. Its relativism creates the illusion that it has reached greater heights than the loftiest philosophical achievements of the past. It presents itself as the only way to think and speak — if, that is, one wishes to stay in fashion. …
I think it is vital that we oppose this imposition of a new pseudo-enlightenment, which threatens freedom of thought as well as freedom of religion.
That last point is key. While appearing to be the very essence of neutrality and equity — “all views are equal and equally valid” — it actually undermines both the freedom of thought and the freedom of religion.
As to the latter, it does so (ironically) as a new religion itself, “a new ‘denomination’ that places restrictions on religious convictions and seeks to subordinate all religions to the super-dogma of relativism.”
As Cardinal Ratzinger noted in his
Truth and Tolerance, “relativism … in certain respects has become the real religion of modern man.” It has become, especially in Europe, but now increasingly in America, the religion that stands at the heart of modern secular civilization in the way that Christianity defined the heart of Christendom.
It is the religion, Pope Benedict insists, which the Church must combat in the third millennium for the sake of civilization itself. A civilization built upon dogmatic relativism is one that ensures its own destruction. It is also a civilization in which Christianity — challenging dogmatic relativism with the proclamation that Jesus Christ himself is the Way, the Truth and the Life — must be persecuted.
What is the ultimate source of this dogmatic relativism? I’ll explore Pope Benedict’s thoughts in my next blog post.
A gem of a Pope
by BENJAMIN WIKER
March 01, 2013
Benedict XVI is a gem of a Pope, a diamond who has been treated roughly by the liberal press as if he were a mere growling guard dog of benighted and ossified orthodoxy.
But he is a man deeply read in history, philosophy and theology, and the Church has not had nearly enough time, in his short pontificate, to explore the many facets of his profound learning.
In great part, his courageous defense of orthodoxy comes from his profound grasp of the roots of relativism, his defense of the truth from a deep understanding of the worldview that would destroy it (along with our humanity).
In the last blog post, I discussed Pope Benedict’s warning that we are, more and more, the unhappy subjects of a dictatorship — a “dictatorship of relativism” that seeks to impose the poisonous notion that human beings cannot know the truth.
This poison attacks the very core of our humanity. Made in the image of God, we are rational animals whose greatest perfection is to know and love the truth. And the greatest truth is Jesus Christ himself, the Way, the Truth and the Life.
But dictatorial relativism commands us to submit to the malignant mantra, “But this is only my truth, a mere subjective description of my prejudices, my historical situation, my subjective needs and desires.” The faith is thereby bent down to become my faith, my own personal swirl of irrational predilections that happen to give me comfort.
The dictatorship of relativism demands the same humbling of all claims of moral truth as well. “Abortion is wrong” must become “I don’t happen to like abortion.” “Heterosexual monogamous marriage is right” must become “I prefer traditional marriage.”
Such are the dictates of the dictatorship of relativism. But what are its historical and philosophical roots?
As Benedict maintains, the roots of our relativism lie in the modern attempt to constrict reason, to reduce its domain, while at the same time making it absolute ruler in that dwarfed domain. The dream — it began, largely, as the dream of the philosopher Rene Descartes — was to make human reason infallible, absolutely certain, by restricting reason to the material aspects of reality that could be measured by mathematics. Anything beyond what was physical and precisely measurable was not real or at least not rationally knowable — or, as it came to be called, merely “subjective.”
Faith? Can it be weighed and measured? No. Then it’s merely subjective.
God? Put on the scale? Sorry. He’s not real — he’s just a subjective projection of our desire for a father.
Morality? Can we weigh different arguments about good and evil? No. Then they’re merely subjective descriptions of our particular desires, our “values.”
The soul? Can’t put it under the microscope; can’t see it — must be a subjective fiction.
This reductionist view of rationality came to define science, and, as a result of its successes, reductionist science came to define all of reality.
As Pope Benedict noted, this view is an “anti-metaphysical” philosophy that has “no place for God.” It is, Benedict rightly sees, “a self-limitation of … reason that is adequate in the technological sphere but entails a mutilation of man if it is generalized. … This philosophy expresses, not the complete reason of man, but only one part of it. And this mutilation of reason means that we cannot consider it to be rational at all”
(Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures).
This mutilated view of reason, resulting in a mutilated view of man, became the foundation of modern secularism. Secularism is both dictatorial and relativist. It claims to define reason and reality and desires to impose its secular view upon everyone else. What it imposes is relativism: the belief that all truth claims are merely projections of each individual’s desires, which are themselves reducible to measurable, material and ultimately irrational causes.
This is especially true — so asserts secular reason — in regard to morality. Moral disagreements cannot be reconciled because there is no moral standard against which they can be measured. We must, therefore, accept relativism. We can count up the number of people who think abortion is wrong and the number who think it is right (in the same way we can count up the number of people who really like chocolate ice cream best vs. those who love vanilla). But that is the limit of reason.
In merely counting up different views, but not deciding between them, it would seem that secular reason is being quite humble and tolerant and welcoming to anyone and everyone. Such is not the case, however. Instead, as Benedict rightly points out, secularism wants to impose secularism. Its alleged tolerance is actually the greatest intolerance.
As Benedict argues in
Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures,
Secularism is the expression of a consciousness that would like to see God eradicated once and for all from the public life of humanity and shut up in the subjective sphere of cultural residues from the past.
In this way, relativism, which is the starting point of the whole process, becomes a dogmatism that believes itself in possession of the definitive knowledge of human reason, with the right to consider everything else merely as a stage in human history that is basically obsolete and deserves to be relativized.
The dictatorial aspirations of secular relativism arise from hubris not humility, from the desire to eliminate God and our spiritual nature, so that we can live a comfortable this-worldly life, unburdened from Divine commands or even the call to greatness of soul.
The mutilation of man — the reduction of him to a mere material animal with no goal other than comfortable self-preservation and the satisfaction of his physical desires — is the price secularism asks us to pay.
Among other 'old material' that I have neglected to post so far is this excerpt from an interview John Allen did in Argentina with Maria Elena Bergoglio, 64, Pope Francis's only surviving sibling. The interview and published in the Fishwrap on April 4. One must congratulate Mr. Allen for his enterprise, and thank Senora Bergoglio for her sense and sentiments. It's a tired refrain by now, from me, but if only the cardinals of the Church had her sense and sentiments!
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/popes-sister-francis-plenty-tough-enough-lead
There’s only one other person on earth who can really understand what your brother’s going through, and that’s Benedict XVI. They’ve already spoken several times. In the same way, there’s probably only one other person who can appreciate what you’re going through, and that’s Benedict’s brother Georg. Have you thought about calling him for advice?
You know, no one’s asked me that before. It’s true, probably no one knows what my brother is feeling as much as Benedict. I’ve never thought about calling his brother, but I’m sure it would be a very interesting phone call.
If you did have that phone call, what would you want to ask him?
It’s not so much that I have anything I’d want to ask, but I would like to congratulate him for the brother he has. Benedict XVI is an extremely humble man and an extremely honest man, and it takes a lot of guts to renounce power like he did. Also, I’d like to express how grateful I am to Benedict XVI, because he did all the hard work.
First of all, he had to follow John Paul II, which was almost impossible, especially because Benedict was more introverted and shy, more intellectual. I also feel sorry for Benedict because in many ways he had to do the dirty work in the Church, such as starting to talk about the bad things in the Church, the rotten tomatoes, such as the abuse cases.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/05/2013 12:54]