This is the first of a seven-part series on the papacy of Benedict XVI. Part 1: Pope Benedict vs. Secularism.
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 in 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 pope 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.”
I will be offering the following six guest blogs as a contribution to that effort.
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Perhaps I was just “looking for” a special insight into Pope Benedict’s service on behalf of the Lord and the timing of what you wrote contributes to my true appreciation of this series: when you make note of the “fountain of spiritual, intellectual and moral discipline” Benedict of Nursia left us, you remind me so well of the gifts Joseph Ratzinger leaves to us, both before and during his tenure as Pope. The Holy Spirit has a flawless batting average when it comes to picking popes in my lifetime!
Thank you, and I look forward to reading the next six parts of your series.
You might be planning an article on Relativism, in which case my apologies - please read the following as an appetizer for that.
But if you were not, I would say that Pope Benedict is more specifically opposed to Relativism than Secularism - although the two overlap.
Pope Benedict’s “Dictatorship of Relativism” homily, at the start of the conclave which elected him, was seen by many as the keynote speech of his pontificate. http://www.ewtn.com/pope/words/conclave_homily.asp That homily did not use the word “secularism”.
Secularism, although materialistic, has non-relativistic forms. eg Marxism is secular but not relativistic - it claims to be objectively true. Many confused Christians are Relativists but not quite secularists.
Objective forms of Secularism can oppose violent Islamism - but Relativism cannot.
At the risk of throwing a cat amongst the pigeons, I read the US Constitution and the Enlightenment values it is based on, as being a fairly secularist text.
@leo, I see your point. I think it like equating capitalism and democracy. More often there is overlap, but they are really descriptions of two different yet often coexisting systems. I think secularism provides a nice soil in which things like relativism or the cult of evangelical atheism can take root. They thrive on each other as the political and economic examples I citd above. Oftentimes descriptions do not distinguish. I too see the Pope as keenly aware of these phenomena and the dangers of relativism as a belief system. I’m a scientist and I cannot tell you how many of my colleagues “believe” in science. Or “believe” in evolution. It tells me they are quite confused. Something a rich soil of secularism permits to grow.
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