EUROPE TODAY AND

TOMORROW

by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

Ignatius Press, 2007

125 pages, $14.95

To order: ignatius.com

1-800-651-1531

Pope Benedict XVI wrote this assessment of Europe and its future in 2004, just before his election to the papacy.

In what one reviewer has called “a gentler version” of George Weigel’s 2005 book, The Cube and the Cathedral, the former Cardinal Ratzinger looks at the shape of the continent, focusing in particular on its spiritual underpinnings and their relevance to politics and culture.

Pope Benedict makes abundantly clear that Europe has no future without God and Christianity. He begins by pointing to Europe’s past and the historical role of the Christian faith in giving birth and life to Europe. “The rebirth of Europe after World War II,” he writes, “was likewise rooted in Christianity and, therefore, in man’s responsibility before God.” Those who want to build Europe today “as a bastion of law and justice that is valid for all men of all cultures cannot rely on an abstract reason that knows nothing about God,” he concludes.

He also notes that the fathers of European unification after World War II assumed a basic compatibility between the moral heritage of both Christianity and the European Enlightenment that was centered on the belief in a nature designed by God and in man’s ability to understand it.

In looking at the present state of Europe, Benedict laments the turn it has taken at what should be its hour of greatest success. He cites an “interior dwindling of the spiritual strength that once supported it” as well as a “strange lack of will for the future” marked by the view of children as a threat to and limitation on the present.

He presents two diagnoses: one of Oswald Spengler, who proposed that cultures go through a natural cycle of birth, growth, flowering, slow decline, aging and death, and the other of Arnold Toynbee, who saw the West as being in crisis because it had turned away from religion to secularism and the worship of technology, the nation and militarism.

If Toynbee is correct, Benedict writes that the cure for the crisis may be found in its cause. This would mean the reintroduction of Europe’s religious heritage in the form of certain foundational moral elements, including human dignity and human rights established by God, not by legislative act; monogamous marriage between man and woman, and respect for the sacred as it relates to God.

Although this is thoughtful reading for those interested in the situation in Europe and its implications for the rest of the world, Benedict writes as the scholar he is and those unaccustomed to reading academic texts may find the content challenging.

Benedict’s book ends with four talks on peace and the Christian responsibility for it. Here he writes that Christians must work to provide a moral foundation for law and justice that is inspired by basic Christian ideas. To do this, he continues, they must live out their heritage “with vigor and purity” so that it will be evident in society as a whole. The path of peace, he concludes, cannot be found without the God of the Bible.

Judy Roberts is based

in Graytown, Ohio.