Benedict XVI's new call against
the modern devil of relativism
by RENATO FARINA
Translated from
August 6, 2009
Benedict XVI, despite his enchanting smile and seraphic voice, can also be caustic.
Yesterday, he said the name of the devil again, declaring war on him.
The devil is called 'the dictatorship of relativism', a term that synthesizes the danger, one which he first used publicly one hour before he entered the Conclave from which he would emerge as Pope.
It was Monday, April 18, 2005. In St. Peter's Basilica, Joseph Ratzinger as Dean of the College of Cardinals, delivered the homily at the Mass pro eligendo Pontefice. He neither painted a rosy picture nor praised the state of the Church.
Instead he said that the world was dominated by this diabolical ideology, the dictatorship of relativism.
It was a way of saying - "Don't elect me, I am not suitable, I am too severe (to be Pope)".
And what exactly is this post-modern Beelzebub? Not pluralism - the fact that there are so many conflicting views of the world, so many philosophies, so many claims to having the key to the universe. No, that's not the dictatorship of relativism.
Rather, it is the imposition of a Single Thought, according to which man cannot know the truth, man cannot be 'capax Dei', capable of knowing God, in St. Augustine's phrase - because every response to any question about meaning is subjective, without authentically penetrating the substance of things.
In short, the Only Truth, according to today's Zeitgeist, is that truth does not exist, and that even if it exists, we cannot know it nor communicate it.
Against which, Benedict XVI answers, God is Love, God is Love in Truth. And he can be known through reason, he can be experienced with all of one's being.
After four years, Papa Ratzinger says the battle against the devil is far from won. The dictatorship of relativism continues to reign.
But there is a point in the universe where it cannot impose itself. The Church. And he, the Pope, has no intention of yielding.
Mocked by some as isolated with only the proverbial four cats to listen to him, he has issued once more - an 82-year-old man with a broken wrist - the battle cry against what he considers the monster that would devour hope, this relativistic tyranny that would refuse to give reason authentic freedom.
It is quite clear: science and research appear to have total license today, according to the relativist ideology, to mutilate embryos for research, without any limitations, in the name of trying to conquer death.
But what role can reason play in unrestricted freedom devoid of ethical principles, when the relativists say reason is ultimately powerless to arrive at any truth? Thus asks the Pope, who is also a great intellectual.
It sounds mad, indeed, that after centuries during which the Church was considered an enemy of reason, now it must be the Pope who exalts and promotes it as man's tool and ally in his quest for God.
Yesterday, the Pope spoke the example of the famed Cure d'Ars, St. Jean Marie Vianney, on the 150th anniversary of his death.
The Pope pointed out that today's society is similar to French society at the time of the French Revolution, and that in fact, the Christian faith faces more complex challenges than those that confronted France after 1789.
He said, "If in his (Vianney's) time there was the 'dictatorship of rationalism', in today's age, there is a 'dictatorship of relativism' in many areas. Both are inadequate responses to man's rightful demand to use his own reason to the full as a distinctive and constitutive element of his own identity".
From his window in Castel Gandolfo, during his Wednesday general audience, the Pope noted that "our time, certainly very different from those in which he lived, (is) marked in many ways by the same fundamental human and spiritual challenges".
Vianney lived from 1786-1959. But "far from reducing the figure of St. Jean Marie Vianney to an example, admirable as it is, of 19th-century denotional spirituality, it is necessary to grasp the prophetic power that marked his human and spiritual personality... (in) post-revolutionary France, which experienced a kind of 'dictatorship of rationalism' intended to annul the very presence of priests and of the Church in society".
In Vianney's time, rationalism reigned. The prevailing political and cultural power accused the Church of being an association of charlatans who exploited sentiment and the gullibility of ignorant masses.
Actually, the extremist representatives of the so-called Enlightenment were not advocating reason but rationalism, an ideology. Rationalism is to reason as lung disease is to the lungs. And lung disease stifles breathing, in the same way that rationalism stifles reason.
Papa Ratzinger sees in the Cure d'Ars the hero of true resistance. "He lived, first of all, during his youth, in heroic clandestinity, walking miles at night in order to take part in Holy Mass. Later, as priest, he distinguished himself by singular and fruitful pastoral creativity, intended to show that the reigning rationalism was in fact far from able to satisfy the authentic needs of man and thus, definitively, not livable".
The authentic needs of man were not met by 19th-century rationalism any more than they are by today's relativism which also translates to "it is forbidden to forbid".
The Pope concluded:
"Rationalism was inadequate because it did not take into account human limitations and claimed to elevate reason alone as the measure for all things, transforming it into a goddess.
"Contemporary relativism diminishes reason because it has come to affirm that the human being can know nothing with certainty beyond what science can know positively.
"But today, like then, the man 'who is a mendicant for meaning and fulfillment' is in constant search for exhaustive answers to the fundamental questions that present themselves ceaselessly".
The expression "mendicant for meaning and fulfillment' comes from Don Luigi Giussani [founder of Comunione e Liberazione'] whose figure stands out as one of the sources for the Magisterium of this Pope.
Let us see if the Pope's defense of reason in the name of faith will awaken some intellectual honesty in the torpor of August.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/08/2009 20:39]