Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Editorial
October 21, 2011
Several of the cardinals who elected Pope Benedict said that they had turned to him because he would be the most capable leader to guide the Church in the reevangelization of the supercilious and scornfully secularist societies of Europe and, more generally, the West. He has not been letting them and the Church down.
In-house, he has been mobilizing the entire Church toward this new type of missionary effort, not only by founding the Vatican’s new Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization and convoking a Synod for Bishops next October to catalyze how the Church should do this as a body, but also by taking the attention of Catholics away from peripheral issues and focusing it, through his encyclicals, apostolic exhortations and homilies, on the true foundations of our faith: the love of God and neighbor, the Eucharist, sacred Scripture, the promotion of true human development and justice in society, and the profound reasons for the rational hope within us. On Sunday he announced that beginning a year from now, we will begin a 13-month “Year of Faith,” dedicated to helping Catholics rediscover and repropose with confidence the greatness of our faith as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Second Vatican Council.
As important as all of these ad intra efforts have been, however, they are small in comparison to the enormously significant work that Pope Benedict has been doing personally in the engagement of secular political and intellectual leaders. On September 22, before the parliamentarians of the Bundestag in his native Germany, he completed a grand slam of four monumental September addresses — following upon Regensburg in 2006, Paris in 2008 and Westminster in 2010 — that have gotten honest secular leaders to sit up and pay attention. The series of speeches, respectively, have been on the importance of human reason: to purify faith of irrational violence, to guide culture, to provide the ethical basis for civil discourse and political choices, and, last month, to ground the foundations of a free state of law. His September 22 thoughts are as relevant and as urgent for us in the United States as they are for those in his native Germany, especially since the executive branch of our federal government has been becoming increasingly militant in the imposition of secularist ideals on the rest of society, as we wrote about last week.
Pope Benedict began his address to the German political leaders by focusing on what “should ultimately matter for a politician.” He recounted the story of King Solomon’s asking God for a “listening heart so that he may govern God’s people and discern between good and evil.” This illustrates, he commented, that politics must above all be a “striving for justice,” for “doing what is right,” not merely a path for material gain or the satisfaction of personal ambition, motivations, he said, that “can be seductive and can open up the path towards … the destruction of justice.” Quoting his intellectual mentor, St. Augustine, he asked, “Without justice, what else is the state but a great band of robbers?,” who take advantage of their authority to impose their will on others for personal aggrandizement. Pope Benedict reminded his countrymen that they witnessed with the Nazis “how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the state became an instrument for destroying right: a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss.” This concern is not merely an historical one, he added, because man still has the power to “destroy the world … manipulate himself … make human beings and deny them their humanity.” The fundamental task of the politician, he summarized, is to “serve right and fight against the dominion of wrong,” but in order to do this, the politician must recognize what is right. For that reason, the “decisive issue” facing politicians and politics today is how to acquire a Solomonic heart so as to be able to discern between good and evil.
Pope Benedict says that good and evil aren’t and cannot be determined by democratic vote. Even though majority rule can suffice for many of the matters that need to be regulated by law, he said, for the fundamental issues, where “the dignity of man and of humanity is at stake,” the majority principle is not enough. This is clear enough in German history with the democratic ascent of the Nazis as well as in U.S. history where majority rule determined that slaves were only three-fifths persons and trampled on their dignity. These abuses ended up being opposed precisely on the basis of a higher law than that of the majority, what Pope Benedict called “the law of truth” that grounds good and evil. He admitted, however, that the question of determining what corresponds to this higher law of truth, while it has “never been simple,” has become “harder” today because “underlying anthropological issues” — limited or false understandings of the human person and what he can know — have made this determination “less obvious.” Pope Benedict then sought to help political leaders fulfill their fundamental task by pointing out how and where they can recognize what is right.
Many in the Bundestag, especially the more secular among them, likely anticipated that the pope would just hand out copies of the Bible and “Catechism” as the principle fonts where they could find this law of truth that contained the principles by which they could lead with the wisdom of Solomon. He didn’t. In fact, he explicitly said that in the history of humanity, the Church stands in marked contrast to pagan systems of thought that explicitly tried to align political and juridical order with their polytheistic revelation. Instead of proposing revelation, the Church from St. Paul through the present day has proposed reason and nature as the universally valid source of this law of truth. These sources, heard in conscience, were the source of Solomon’s “listening heart,” he said.
In the last 50 years, since the U.N.’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights, he went on, there has been a “dramatic shift” away from reason and nature such that “one almost feels ashamed even to mention the term … natural law.” This is because of the influence of the thought of philosophers Kant and Hume who taught that one can’t derive an “ought” from an “is,” that nature is irrelevant to morality. Consequently, no law can ever be “discovered,” but only “determined” by the will of a lawmaker, whether benign or Nazi. There is no truth or objective moral order, modern positivists argue, but rather all appeals to moral truth must treated as subjective and extraneous to the realm of reason, which can only discover what “is,” not what one should do. Pope Benedict compares this reductivist vision of reason a “concrete bunker with no windows.” He says that the windows must be “flung open again [to] God’s wide world” where reason can “rediscover its true greatness.”
One place where this has occurred, he said, is in the modern ecological movement, which he said was a “cry for fresh air.” The young had begun to realize that “something is wrong in our relationship with nature, that matter is not just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth has a dignity of its own.” It’s simply wrong to destroy the environment, the young have recognized, even if civil law allows it. They have seen that nature has a built-in truth and an inherent, discoverable value and morality derived from that truth that needs to be respected. Likewise, the pope said, there is also an “ecology of man.” Like the environment, “man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he respects his nature, listens to it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled.” Without this conviction, he suggested, we would have never discovered the idea of inalienable human rights, the equality of people before the law, the inviolability of human dignity and the awareness of personal responsibility.” If we wish to maintain these rights, the pope argued, we need to ground it in this law of truth found in nature and reason rather than in social consensus, majority rule, or the will of those in power. That is what the West, which grew out of the encounter between “Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law,” has historically done and needs to rediscover.
He finished by praying that today’s leaders, when given the choice to make a request for anything whatever, would, like young King Solomon, desire above all a listening heart so that they will be able to “discern between good and evil, and thus to establish true law, to serve justice and peace.”