THE CHURCH IN POLITICS
Four days before Italy's parliamentary elections, Sandro Magister on www.chiesa.espressonline.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=47661&eng=y
summarizes recent statements made by the Pope and the Church hierarchy on the role that the Church must play inthe public sphere, particularly where it concerns life, the family and the education of children.
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Italy Is Voting:
Here’s the Stance of the Church’s Hierarchy
The pronouncements come from two addresses by the Pope
and his vicar, and three articles in
La Civiltà Cattolica.
A question: Can everything be voted on in a democracy?
by Sandro Magister
ROMr, April 5, 2006 – Next Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, Rome and the rest of Italy will vote in parliamentary elections. The top members of the Church’s hierarchy have not said for whom Catholics should vote. But on several occasions, and in a number of ways – in the days leading up to the elections – they have imparted practical lessons on the relations between Church and politics.
Benedict XVI did this in his speech to the representatives of the European People's Party whom he received at the Vatican on March 30.
Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope’s vicar for the diocese of Rome and the president of the Italian bishops’ conference, CEI, did the same thing in his introductory address to the latest meeting of the permanent council of the CEI, held on March 20.
And to their remarks have been added three articles in the last edition of
La Civiltà Cattolica, the magazine of the Rome Jesuits that is printed – down to the last line – with the inspection and authorization of the highest Vatican authorities.
In chronological order, the first of the contributions cited is that of Cardinal Ruini.
In referring to the Italian elections on April 9, the president of the CEI repeated the stance that he had formulated on the eve of previous elections:
“... which is that of not involving ourselves, as a Church and thus as clergy and ecclesiastical bodies, in any political configuration or party affiliation. But at the same time,
we propose to the voters and future elected officials those inalienable principles [...] that constitute an essential part of the Church’s social doctrine, yet are not norms peculiar to Catholic morality, but rather elementary truths regarding our common humanity.”
Among these “inalienable principles” Ruini cited “respect for human life from conception to its natural end” and “concrete support for the legitimate family founded upon marriage, particularly in its tasks of generating and educating children.”
In Italy, among the Catholic candidates running in the elections, there are some who have chosen to promote these principles within the coalition of the left, and others in that of the right.
It is obvious that the first of these have the more arduous task, as they are mixed in among men and parties of pronounced secularist tendencies. But in spite of this, the list of leftist candidates includes, for example, neuropsychiatrist Paola Binetti, a numerary of Opus Dei and the former president of the “Science and Life” committee which, during the first months of 2006, organized the successful Italian campaign in defense of the inviolability of the conceived embryo, against the referendum promoted by the radicals and by much of the left. Cardinal Ruini personally inspired and guided the campaign. And it concluded on June 12 with the defeat of the referendum, which was shunned by over 75 percent of the citizens.
Life, family, and freedom of education were the three “non-negotiable principles” recalled also by Benedict XVI in his address on March 30 to the representatives of the European People's Party:
“These principles are not truths of faith, even though they receive further light and confirmation from faith; they are inscribed in human nature itself and therefore they are common to all humanity.”
So the Church’s activity in promoting these principles in the public sphere, the pope specified, “is not confessional in character,” and “does not constitute a form of intolerance or an interference.” On the contrary:
“
Such interventions are aimed solely at enlightening consciences, enabling them to act freely and responsibly, according to the true demands of justice, even when this should conflict with situations of power and personal interest.”
Pope Ratzinger asked the politicians seated before him in the Hall of Blessings to “defeat a culture that is now fairly widespread in Europe, which relegates to the private and subjective sphere the manifestation of one’s own religious convictions. Policies built on this foundation not only entail the repudiation of Christianity’s public role; more generally, they exclude engagement with Europe’s religious tradition, which is so clear, despite its denominational variations, thereby threatening democracy itself, whose strength depends on the values that it promotes. [...] In this context one has to recognize that a certain secular intransigence shows itself to be the enemy of tolerance and of a sound secular vision of state and society.”
The three articles published in
La Civiltà Cattolica on April 1, 2006, develop in the form of a dispute this criticism of secularist culture by the pope.
The first of these is the lead editorial. It does not have a byline. It is entitled “Democracy and the Church.” And it begins by summing up the opposing positions, in particular those recently expressed in the magazine Micromega by Gustavo Zagrebelski, a former president of the Italian constitutional court.
La Civiltà Cattolica then disputes these positions one by one.
For example, there is this passage on abortion, the declining birth rate, and Islamization in Europe:
“
How can one categorize as 'cold and abstract doctrines' the questions of abortion, the family, and the transmission of life, when these are dramatic and extremely concrete matters, which should preoccupy and vex all Italian citizens – and thus the bishops, too, who are also Italian citizens – both because of the weight of suffering that they bring, and on account of the country’s future? Recently, Bassam Tibi, a Muslim born in Damascus who is now a professor of international relations at Cornell University, recalled that
in Europe ‘the number of Islamic immigrants has risen from 800,000 in 1950 to 20 million today, and in 2015 there will be 40 million of them, while the [non-Muslim] European population will decline. In the end, as in Israel, the Muslims will be in the majority.’ In this decline of the Europeans, is no role at all played by the voluntary interruption of pregnancies, of which there were 684,041 in Italy from 1997 to 2001?”
Or there is this other passage against Zagrebelski’s thesis according to which the Church overlooks charity in order to impose its own truths:
“As it says in the letter to the Christians of Ephesus, one must live ‘according to the truth in charity’ (Ephesians 4:15). This means that faith and charity are two inseparable realities. [...] It is from the Truth, which is Jesus, and from the truth of his word that Christian charity is born: if, in the other, the Christian recognizes a brother to be helped, it is partly because Christ said that the poor and needy are his ‘least brothers’ (Matthew 25:40). And in fact,
when the hierarchy defends life in condemning abortion, or defends the family against its counterfeits, what else is it doing but an act of charity, defending the weak, like the children in the womb and the children who need stable and united families in order to grow up?”
But the most interesting passage is the one in which the authoritative magazine of the Rome Jesuits brings the majority vote into question:
“
Today there is a rather widespread tendency to ask for the legalization of euthanasia, assisted suicide, common law couples, and homosexual unions with the ability to adopt children. This fact brings up the question of the majority vote. Undoubtedly, this vote is an essential characteristic of the democratic system, so much so that this system would not exist if it could not have recourse to the majority vote. But when can and should the majority be brought into play? It seems to us that such recourse is useful and necessary when it comes to peacefully resolving problems regarding the political, social, legal, and economic life of the country, problems on which there is legitimate difference of opinion, but which must be decided one way or another in order to permit the peaceful unfolding of the nation’s life. But
we ask ourselves whether it is wise and opportune to opt for a majority vote in the case of problems and practices that involve moral principles and values that touch the most intimate depths of much of the population’s conscience.”
What is interesting about this passage from the editorial in La Civiltà Cattolica is that it effectively exposes the Church to one of the strongest criticisms of its secularist opponents: that of
lèse-démocratie.
According to the reasoning reproduced above, in fact, the Church would reject the majority vote, for example, on the “non-negotiable principles” that Benedict XVI recalled to the European members of parliament.
In other words, in order to defend objective truths from relativism, the Church would end up rejecting the idea that these truths should be submitted to a vote.
But is that really the way it is?
On the theoretical level, the opposition between the relativists and those who uphold objective truth seem to be insuperable.
But it’s different on the practical level. On December 2, 2005, in an address later collected in a book entitled “Truth and Freedom,” cardinal Camillo Ruini summarized the problem and its solution as follows:
“I would like to advance a proposal that might sound obvious, but which has the merit of overcoming on the practical level the stalemate caused by the opposition between the supporters and opponents of the relativistic approach in matters of public ethics, without obliging either side to stop acting according to their own convictions.
“My proposal is that we rely, even in these areas, on the free exchange of ideas, respecting democratic results even when we cannot share them.
“This is essentially what already does happen, fortunately, in a democratic country like Italy, but it would be well for all of us to become more conscious of this in order to defuse the atmosphere of tension that is likely to continue for a long time, continually fed by new issues.
“The proponents of relativism will continue to think that in some cases the ‘rights of liberty’ have been violated, while those who hold to an approach based on human nature will continue to maintain that in other cases the rights founded upon nature, which thus come before any human choice, have been violated. But there will be no reason for reciprocal accusations of antidemocratic extremism.”
It is surprising that the editorial in
La Civiltà Cattolica, which is completely dedicated to demonstrating the compatibility between the Church and democracy, did not revive this “gentlemen’s agreement.”
On the contrary, the conclusion of the editorial is full of fuel for controversy:
“There’s something rather strange going: while the Church is accused of wanting to impose its own ‘truth’, even upon those who reject it, through its constant and burdensome ‘interference’ in political life, in reality it is the Catholics who must accept laws (abortion and divorce) that contrast with their consciences, while attempts are made to approve others that are no less problematic for them – like those on euthanasia, common law, and homosexual unions – with the motivation or pretext of combating the Church’s attempt to impose ‘its’ truth on all Italians.”
Even more polemical is the second article that the magazine dedicates to this topic, written by Fr. Giandomenico Mucci and entitled “Secularism, Church, and Catholics.”
This is its final paragraph:
“
The secular world tolerates a Church that speaks out and struggles, but only on the condition that it be the loser in society, that it exercise little or no influence on the culture, that its foothold in public opinion be superficial and unsteady. It cannot tolerate a Church that shows itself capable of confronting issues and problems of great social relevance, and of elaborating, at a time of general uncertainty and crisis, ethical, doctrinal, and behavioral clarifications that find interest, attention, and agreement even outside of organized Catholicism. A Church that fights and loses is acceptable, while a Church that fights and wins is less so. [...] It doesn’t seem to have been an accident that the pope, in describing the tolerance that the secular world displays in regard to God, spoke of hypocrisy.”
The third article in
La Civiltà Cattolica from April 1, written by Fr. Giuseppe De Rosa, is an accompaniment to the previous ones. It defends from secularist criticism the “eight per thousand” system which has been in place in Italy since 1985.
In this system, every taxpaying citizen indicates each year how to distribute – between the state, the Catholic Church, the Jews, the Waldensians, the Lutherans, the Seventh-day Adventists, etc. – 0.8 percent of that year’s total tax bill.
Each year, about 80 percent of taxpayers in Italy choose the Catholic Church.
This totals more than 900 million euros every year, which are destined “to a great extent to those who suffer in body and spirit, to young people and children, to the marginalized, gypsies, needy people in whatever condition, in Italy and the Third World.”
Fr. De Rosa concludes:
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It seems to us that, at a time of such severe crisis in essential human values, like those of life, the family, public morality, fraternity, and dialogue among religions, one should not underestimate the contribution that the Catholic Church makes to the preservation and growth of these values. It is not a gesture of victimism to highlight the fact that it is precisely because of its defense of such values that the Catholic Church is made the target of harsh and unjust accusations.”
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[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/04/2006 16.15]