As Pope Benedict XVI greeted dignitaries at the White House on
Wednesday morning, Nancy Pelosi, the pro-abortion Catholic Speaker
of the U.S. House of Representatives, appeared in the line. She not
only enthusiastically shook the Holy Father’s hand but kissed it,
hogging the moment a bit. It looked to me, as I watched the
exchange on TV, that the Holy Father wanted his hand back.
Pelosi’s momentary fawning notwithstanding, Pope Benedict enters
Washington, D.C., at an ironic moment, in which many of his critics
are Catholics and his allies Protestants.
The Pelosis, Kennedys, and Kerrys press for an irrelevant and
secularized Catholicism, an empty faith without works, as it were.
Meanwhile, a Protestant President applauds the Holy Father for his
faith and works, for defending God and objective truth in a time of
relativism.
Their speeches on Wednesday at the White House harmonized,
causing some disappointment to the press corps. Scrambling for a
storyline, the press had hoped for tension and conflict between
them over “immigration” and “Iraq.” How the Holy Father could get
to the left of a (basically) pro-amnesty president on the issue of
immigration isn’t clear to me.
On his trip to America Pope Benedict is addressing two crises at
once, which are connected more deeply than the press can compute.
One crisis afflicts the world, the other the Church. Both result
from the same cause: the post-Enlightenment rupture in the
relationship between faith and reason, God and man, that
marginalized Jesus Christ.
At the very moment society was plunging into de-Christianized
chaos, the American Catholic Church decided to join it. The press,
ostensibly concerned about the sex abuse scandals in the Church in
America, fails to see this connection, refusing to admit
secularism’s role in the corruption. Journalists decry the effects
of the sexual revolution on the priesthood, then call for its
renewed advancement.
Pope Benedict has spoken of modern secularism as a “dictatorship
of relativism,” as President Bush invoked in his own speech. Modern
secularism could also be described as a poison or acid, which burns
through everything it touches, including an American Catholic
Church that has shriveled in proportion to its exposure to it.
In the press’s estimate, the remedy to a crisis caused by the
poison of secularism, whether the crisis appears in the world or in
the Church, is to urge people to swallow larger and larger doses of
it. The Church needs “to be more open,” less rigid, etc., etc.,
while the world is exhorted to take its Enlightenment experiments
to their most remote points.
The theme of the Holy Father’s visit to America is “Christ Our
Hope,” which revives the theme of his recent encyclical on hope,
Spe Salvi, in which he traces the malaise of modern times
to the bogus self-sufficiency of secularism: a “faith in progress”
without reference to the will of God that terminates in despair for
the simple reason that man, no matter how extensive his plans,
cannot save himself from death.
It is reason itself, reflecting upon its own limitations, that
finds the self-sufficiency assumed by modern secularism to be
unreasonable. How, secularists scoff, can Pope Benedict dare enter
the public square and speak of “Christ Our Hope”? Because it is
reasonable for man, who is manifestly not self-sufficient, to open
himself up to revelation, to see the need for a God who comes to
him, a “God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end,
each one of us and humanity in its entirety.”
Whether addressing the secularists at the United Nations or the
secularized presidents at teetering Catholic universities, Pope
Benedict is really addressing the same crisis: the breakdown in the
understanding of reason and revelation. The first group sees no
reason to open themselves to God; the second sees no reason to
offer him to them.
In Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict notes that after the
Enlightenment, under its rejection of the reasonableness of
revelation, “reason” became an instrument of irrational rationalism
while “faith” reduced itself to a private hobby with no universal
truth to offer the world.
The moral chaos at the UN and an American Catholic Church that
has produced a generation of pro-abortion legislators like Nancy
Pelosi appear like unrelated problems. But they are not; they are
the inevitable byproducts of the same post-Enlightenment
distortions.
It is not reason without faith, or faith without reason, that
formed Catholicism into a universal religion, but reason and
revelation together, the latter building on and never contradicting
the former while holding out to all men a redemption that comes not
from man’s powers but God’s. Jesus Christ, the Holy Father has come
to say, is the hope of the world.
