It was inevitable. In the lead-up to John Paul II’s
beatification, a number of publications decided it was time to
opine about the direction of Benedict XVI’s pontificate. The
Economist,
for example, portrayed a pontificate adrift, “accident-prone,” and
with a “less than stellar record” compared to Benedict’s dynamic
predecessor (who, incidentally, didn’t meet with the
Economist’s approval either).
It need hardly been said that, like most British
publications, the Economist’s own record when it comes to
informed commentary on Catholicism and religion more generally is
itself less than stellar. And the problems remain the same as they
have always been: an unwillingness to do the hard work of trying to
understand a religion on its own terms, and a stubborn insistence
upon shoving theological positions into secular political
categories.
Have mistakes occurred under Benedict’s watch? Yes. Some
sub-optimal appointments? Of course. That would be true of any
leader of such a massive organization.
But the real difficulty with so much commentary on this
papacy is the sheer narrowness of the perspective brought to the
subject. If observers were willing to broaden their horizons, they
might notice just how big are the stakes being pursued by Benedict.
This pope’s program, they may discover, goes beyond mere
institutional politics. He’s pursuing a civilizational
agenda.
And that program begins with the Catholic Church itself.
Even its harshest critics find it difficult to deny Catholicism’s
decisive influence on Western civilization’s development. It
follows that a faltering in the Church’s confidence about its
purpose has implications for the wider culture.
That’s one reason Benedict has been so proactive in
rescuing Catholic liturgy from the banality into which it collapsed
throughout much of the world (especially the English-speaking
world) after Vatican II. Benedict’s objective here is not a
reactionary “return to the past.” Rather, it’s about underscoring
the need for liturgy to accurately reflect what the Church has
always believed — lex orandi, lex credendi — rather than
the predilections of an aging progressivist generation that reduced
prayer to endless self-affirmation.
This attention to liturgy is, I suspect, one reason why
another aspect of Benedict’s pontificate — his outreach to the
Orthodox Christian churches — has been remarkably successful. As
anyone who’s attended Orthodox services knows, the Orthodox truly
understand liturgy. Certainly Benedict’s path here was paved by
Vatican II, Paul VI, and John Paul II. Yet few doubt that
Catholic-Orthodox relations have taken off since 2005.
That doesn’t mean the relationship is uncomplicated by
unhappy historical memories, secular political influences, and
important theological differences. Yet it’s striking how positively
Orthodox churches have responded to the German pope’s overtures.
They’ve also become increasingly vocal in echoing Benedict’s
concerns about Western culture’s present trajectory.
But above all, Benedict has — from his pontificate’s very
beginning — gone to the heart of the rot within the West, a
disease which may be described as pathologies of faith and
reason.
In this regard, Benedict’s famous 2006
Regensburg address may go down as one of the 21st
century’s most important speeches, comparable to Alexander
Solzhenitsyn’s 1978
Harvard Address in terms of its accuracy in
identifying some of the West’s inner demons.
Most people think about the Regensburg lecture in terms of
some Muslims’ reaction to Benedict’s citation of a 14th century
Byzantine emperor. That, however, is to miss Regensburg’s essence.
It was really about the West.
Christianity, Benedict argued at Regensburg, integrated
Biblical faith, Greek philosophy, and Roman law, thereby creating
the “foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.” This
suggests that any weakening of this integration of faith and reason
would mean the West would start losing its distinctive identity. In
short, a West without a Christianity that integrates faith and
reason is no longer the West.
Today, Benedict added, we see what happens when faith and
reason are torn asunder. Reason is reduced to scientism and
ideologies of progress, thereby rending reasoned discussion of
anything beyond the empirical impossible. Faith dissolves into
sentimental humanitarianism, an equally inadequate basis for
rational reflection. Neither of these emaciated facsimiles of their
originals can provide any coherent response to the great questions
pondered by every human being: “Who am I?” “Where did I come from?”
“Where am I going?”
So what’s the way back? To Benedict’s mind, it involves
affirming that what he recently called creative reason
lies at the origin of everything.
As Benedict
explained one week before he beatified his
predecessor: “We are faced with the ultimate alternative that is at
stake in the dispute between faith and unbelief: are irrationality,
lack of freedom and pure chance the origin of everything, or are
reason, freedom and love at the origin of being? Does the primacy
belong to unreason or to reason? This is what everything hinges
upon in the final analysis.”
It’s almost impossible to count the positions Benedict is
politely assailing here. On the one hand, he’s taking on
philosophical materialists and emotivists (i.e., most contemporary
scholars). But it’s also a critique of those who diminish God to
either a Divine Watchmaker or a being of Pure Will.
Of course none of this fits into sound-bites. “Pope
Attacks Pathologies of Faith and Reason!” is unlikely to be a
newspaper headline anytime soon. That, however, doesn’t nullify the
accuracy of Benedict’s analysis. It just makes communicating it
difficult in a world of diminished attention-spans and inclined to
believe it has nothing to learn from history.
So while the Economist and others might gossip
about the competence of various Vatican officials, they are, to
their own detriment, largely missing the main game. Quietly but
firmly Benedict is making his own distinct contribution to the
battle of ideas upon which the fate of civilizations hang. His
critics’ inability to engage his thought doesn’t just illustrate
their ignorance. It also betrays a profound lack of
imagination.
