NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT

Dialog according to Benedict XVI:
The concrete terrain
of cultural encounter
by Lucetta Scaraffia
Translated from
the 12/5/08 issue of



In the letter to Marcello Pera published in the book Perché dobbiamo dirci cristiani (Why we should call ourselves Christians), Benedict XVI wrote that an "intercultural dialog is necessary) to examine in depth the cultural consequences of fundamental religious choices".

Although the statement provoked many reactions, it was certainly not the first time that the Pope has expressed this position and has sought to direct inter-religious dialog in this direction.

After the first Mass he celebrated as Pope on April 20, 2005, he said, "I will not spare effort and dedication to follow the promising dialog started by my venerated predecessors with different civilizations, because it is reciprocal understanding that will bring about the conditions for a better future for all".

This statement, followed and confirmed by other similar statements, made it clear that the attitude of the Holy See on dialog with other religions - among which, obviously, Islam stands out - would take a new tone. That it would pass from a theoretical exchange to a concrete encounter between the cultures that have been the fruit of various religious traditions.

The 2000 declaration Dominus Iesus had, in fact, clarified irrevocably that inter-religious dialog should stay away from any path that would lead to a 'relativism of religions', a danger that had become real in a climate that had turned - in the words of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger from an interview published in La Repubblica on January 16, 2005 - into "some kind of moral and intellectual anarchy... (which) leads to no longer accepting a unique truth. Inter-religious dialog should never become a movement towards a void".

In fact, if the dialog should turn to theological subjects like the nature of God and the way to salvation, then it would be impossible not to get into the sterile plane of obvious divergence, or on the other extreme, to consider all religions as equally true.

Dominus Iesus was intended to take a clear stand not only on the various lines that were being manifested in inter-religious dialog on a theoretical level (i.e., in view of new 'openings' advanced by some Catholic theologians) - although this was the only aspect that merited the attention of commentators - but also with regard to a concrete process of inter-religious practices that were under way in various international organizations.

At the United Nations, in fact, well-financed international groups were forming in the guise of diverse inter-religious movements that propose to do away with traditional religions in favor of a a world religion, which would be common to everyone, and that would supposedly guarantee peace in the world.

In a climate that was increasingly less interested in religious freedom - and seeking, because of this, to place all religions on the same footing, whether they were tolerant or intolerant, willfully equating proselytism with violence - UN documents were already stating that whoever considered his own religion true as opposed to any other was guilty of fanaticism and therefore of 'religious hatred', even if the attitude of simply practising one's own religion did not imply recourse to discrimination or violence.

Indeed, today, there is already a global network in place, formed by some 15 international organizations that call themselves inter-religious, and which have managed to organize big meetings.

It was in the face of these facts - of which many Catholics involved in inter-religious dialog appear not to be aware of - that the Church considered it necessary to define and declare certain points unequivocally - namely, the uniqueness and universality of the salvation offered by Christ to mankind, with his Church as the absolute mediatrix of this salvation.

In effect, Dominus Iesus defined the theological terms within which dialog with other religions can take place - terms which are obviously not flexible or negotiable.

But Benedict XVI has made clear that dialog should be between the cultures that have been the product of the world religions. Having a cultural focus allows the dialog to take up central cultural issues like the dignity of the human being, respect and equal rights for women, religious freedom - issues which are not touched in theological dialog or prayer meetings.

Benedict XVI's first meeting with representatives of other religions took place in Cologne, in the fifth month of his Pontificate, during the 20th World Youth Day.

Particularly significant was his meeting with Muslim leaders on August 20, 2005, which was billed strictly as a cultural encounter. At the time, the Jesuit priest Samir Khalil Samir commented that the Pope's words indicated a new pragmatic line: "Dialog with Islam and other religions cannot be essentially theological or religious except in the broad sense of moral values. It should be a dialog of cultures and civilizations".

And this is because, the Lebanese scholar on Islam pointed out, "it has to do with living together under concrete aspects involving politics, the economy, history, culture, customs and practices".

Thus. Benedict XVI proposed that if religions were to find a common basis, they should "set the anthropological foundations for a cultural dialog, because only these are universal and common to all human beings".

Shifting the focus to cultural dialog from the religious has allowed Benedict XVI to focus on central issues like human dignity and religious freedom, but also to keep a distance from certain aspects of Western modernity which are contrary to Catholic tradition and teaching.

This has to do above all with what distinguishes Western culture and other traditions - the role of women, and consequently, sexual and family ethics.

The Pope, while a strong advocate of equality for women, does not share the Western women's liberation emphasis on separating sexuality and reproduction, distancing itself from, and even rejecting, women's biological role as mother.

It is part of what he sees as the moral crisis of the West, as he noted in the interview book Salt of the Earth, identifying such a moral crisis as the principal reason for the conflict with the Muslim world.

"The great moral crisis of the West is that of the Christian world," Cardinal Ratzinger said. "In the face of the profound contradictions in the West and its internal confusion - even as the Arab world has gained economic power - the Islamic spirit has reawakened, and they feel, 'We have the better, stronger identity; our religion has endured, whereas you have lost yours'. So they feel that they have remained on the scene as the world's most vital religion, that they can give the world something, and because of this, they are the true religious force of the future... (because) Europe has come to hate itself."

And there is no doubt that the cardinal identified one of the central reasons for the decadence of the West in that the separation between sexuality and procreation has become a Western 'right' and article of secular faith.

Since the Pope and the Church clearly do not share this mindset, he has an opening for a positive relationship with other cultures who look with concern and a certain contempt at what is going in the West.

It includes the attempt to rid marriage of everything that could mean sacrifice and renunciation, in favor of individual realization by each partner, thus destroying - or at least, emptying the institution of its social significance.

In this context, the Pope, in his first encyclical Deus caritas est, reminded both the secularized Western culture and other cultures about the richness of Christian marriage. And so, once again, a theological subject like love and matrimony can be oriented towards cultural dialog, to an encounter that is non-ideological but linked to the daily life of human beings, to that daily life in which coexistence among different cultures is experienced and realized.

Thus, the displacement of dialog from theoretical and theological grounds, which are abstract, to the more concrete forms of cultural expression, allows for a genuine attempt to work out ways of coexistence instead of creating nothing but the appearance of dialog.
It also highlights the differences between the cultural tradition born from Catholicism and the markedly secularized drift of contemporary Western culture.



Marcello Pera's now-celebrated book actually was not presented in Rome till this afternoon (12/4) by former Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema and Cardinal Camillo Ruini. L'Osservatore Romano published a substantial portion of the cardinal's presentation.

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Perché dobbiamo dirci cristiani
Marcelo Pera
Milan, Mondadori, 2008, 196 pp.

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Liberalism negates itself
when it is outside Christianity
by Cardinal Camillo Ruini
Translated from
the 12/5/08 issue of



Marcello Pera's book is definitely important in itself, but it has become even more important for the unusual letter that Benedict XVI has written to the author.

One could call it a book with a thesis in the positive sense, in that it sustains a position that is stated clearly from the start and then reasoned out through all the pages.

Already, in his introduction, Pera writes: "My position is that of a layman and a liberal who looks to Christianity to ask of it the reasons for its hope".

The conclusion of it all - and of each of the three parts in which the book is divided - is that 'we should call ourselves Christians" - a powerful conclusion that is very much against the mainstream, something the author is well aware of.

Therefore the book is well within the debate on Christianity which has pervaded the West for so many years, with new vigor. It is a debate that moves between two [p;es: those who would like to expunge Christianity from our public culture, or at least, re-dimension its presence, and those who are trying to maintain and re-motivate this presence, maintaining that it is particularly necessary and beneficial today.

In this context, Benedict XVI's letter is extremely important. An unaccustomed letter, I said earlier, but not at all isolated. It is part of a sustained relationship and series of convergences between Marcello Pera and Cardinal Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI.

The book is dense with references and rich in profound analyses, but its structure is substantially simple and serves each of the three chapters, dedicated, respectively, to liberalism, Europe and ethics.

Since it is not possible here to follow the thread of the various developments, I will limit myself to some nodal points which I think most relevant.

The first, which the author expressly addresses only in the third chapter, but which plays an essential role throughout the book, is the relationship between liberalism and relativism.

Elsewhere in the book it is made clear that authentic and original liberalism - that of the 'fathers', embodied principally by John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Immanuel Kant - was the doctrine of the fundamental rights of man as man - the rights now recognized in international charters - which precedes every positive decision made by States and are based on an ethical conception of man that is considered true and trans-cultural.

Still with reference to the 'fathers' of liberalism, the author underscores the theistic and Christian matrix of these rights, inscribed into our nature by the Creator: for this, as the American Declaration of Independence says, "all men are created equal... endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights". Thus, while on the one hand, the incompatibility of liberalism with relativism is confirmed, on the other hand, its 'not extrinsic nexus', historical and conceptual, with Christianity emerges.

One value of the book is to have subjected to an examination in depth the positions and motivations of some of the principal theoreticians of liberalism who do not share its thesis, among them, most especially, John Rawls and Juergen Habermas (though the latter is not a liberal in the strict sense).

They stand by the self-sufficiency of political liberalism, in the sense that it is not based on on any 'pre-political' reading - whether it is ethical, metaphysical or religious - and and also that it distinguishes and separates the public non-religious sphere from the private sphere, religious or other type: even if later, this aspect of separation, in the same authors - especially Habermas - is in good measure attenuated and corrected, making their position somewhat uncertain and not very consistent even.

Marcello Pera shows how this self-sufficiency of liberalism is only apparent, since in reality, it presupposes recognition of the other as a person and as an end in himself.

Quite different was the position of Benedetto Croce - especially in his celebrated essay Perché non possiamo non dirci cristiani (Why we cannot not call ourselves Christian) - who makes a great and moving eulogy of Christianity as the greatest as well as the most decisive revolution that mankind has achieved.

His liberalism is not a juridico-political doctrine, but "a total conception of the world and reality": concretely, freedom is the Spirit in history, whereas "the development of the Spirit" is the path itself of freedom.

In this immanentist conception, the Christian revolution can only be one moment in the development of the Spirit, destined to the be reabsorbed into the immanence of the Spirit itself. Therefore, while the idealist philosopher sees in the religious man his 'younger brother, himself at an earlier moment", the latter cannot not see in the philosopher "his adversary, much less his mortal enemy".

Pera concludes that in this way, Benedetto Croce - despite himself -ends up giving a philosophical justification, which is not just contingent as for example, anti-clericalism is, on the 'secular equation' that would identify authentic liberalism with overcoming religion and with secularism.

At this point, it is possible to take note more rapidly of other defining theses of this book. In particular, that regarding multi-culturalism, which the author examines, correctly, right after speaking of relativism, with which multiculturalism has a profound connection.

It does not only have to do with the fact that modern societies are complex and contain minorities - communities, groups, of various races and cultures. Specific and decisive in the multicultural approach is the conviction that there cannot exist any criteria to evaluate if one culture is better or worse than another: that every form of culture, in fact, would have its own irreducible characteristics which deserve the very same respect as the others.

Marcello Pera of course recognizes the contribution of cultures to the formation of personal identity and to the very life of a free society, on condition that the fundamental and natural rights of the human being are respected and prevail over any cultural difference.

It is here where multiculturalism shows its limitations, because its internal logic leads it to misrecognize the universal and inalienable character of such rights.

Its practical consequences are in turn often regrettable: they make the most open society insecure of itself and can lead it to repudiate its own identity, whether cultural or religious, while on the other hand, it does not facilitate but impedes the effective integration of immigrants.

Even in this respect, Benedict XVI's letter contains unequivocal words: "Not less impressive is your analysis... of multiculturality
in which you show the internal contradiction of this concept and therefore, its political and cultural impossibility".

Connected to the great questions on liberalism, relativism and multiculturalism is the question of Europe and its identity and unity, in relation to the role that Christianity had and has on the continent.

The entire second part of the book is dedicated to this, but let us limit ourselves to the central point: Marcelo Pera identifies the key reason for the persistent difficulty in the process of European unification, particularly, of the failures so far in connection with the European Constitution, in the refusal to recognize adequately the role played by Christianity in the formation of Europe and its identity, and even in the construction of the liberal State.

In fact, it is true that the traditions of Europe are composite, and that in the course of centuries, an ample mix of cultures has occurred, but the soul of Europe is Christianity, which articulated, fused and brought to unity these diverse cultures and traditions into a framework that made Europe 'the Christian continent'.

Christianity, as Habermas acknowledged, is the spring which nourishes what Habermas himself defines as 'the normative self-understanding of modernity', without which present-day optional alternatives would not be available.

Not to acknowledge this decisive datum, and to want to base European unity only on an abstract 'constitutional patriotism', Habermas seems to propose, leaves Europe without a precise identity and without a truly unifying principle, besides dividing the West by distancing Europe from America.

For these reasons, Pera concludes without hesitating: "Europe should call itself Christian", getting strong agreement from Benedict XVI who writes him: "Of fundamental importance is your analysis of what Europe could be and of a European Constitution in which Europe does not transform itself into a cosmopolitan reality, but finds, starting from its Christian-liberal foundation, its own identity."

With regard to the problem of religious fundamentalism, and in particular, Islamic fundamentalism, the book also deals with the subject of inter-religious dialog, to which the Church has invited all Catholics since the declaration Nostra aetate of the Second Vatican Council.

Marcello Pera states clearly that such a dialog, "in the technical and strict sense", cannot exist, because it presupposes that the interlocutors are ready to change and even to reject the truths with which they start off their dialectical exchange, whereas religions, especially the moontheistic and revealed religions, each have their own truths and their own criteria for accepting truth.

Thus, recalling the invitation to a 'dialog of cultures' with which Benedict XVI concluded his famous Regensburg lecture, he proposes that religions establish among themselves this second form of dialog, not about their dogmatic nucleus, but the cultural consequences - particularly of the ethical kind - of the different religions, namely, the rights that are attributed or denied to man, the social customs that are allowed or prohibited, the forms of interpersonal relationships that are permitted or censured, the political institutions that are recommended or banned.

This intercultural dialog among religions can be a dialog in the strict sense and could lead the interlocutors to review their own initial positions, correct, integrate, or even reject them, without this necessarily implying that their own dogmatic nucleus is placed in question.

The moral patrimony of humanity, inalienable and non-negotiable, represents, in Pera's view, the great common ground for such a dialog.

One last point that I wish to note is that of "the trajectory of liberal ethics', which the book treats towards the end. With Kant as his first point of reference, then John Stuart Mill, and finally the interpretations of liberalism that are prevalent today, Marcello Pera traces this trajectory:

With Kant, moral law is the law (Christian) of the categorical imperative, by which universal reason commands the will, in a way that is equally universal. This law imposes respect on the person.

With Stuart Mill, moral law is the law (utilitarian) which sees as good any action or rule which results in the greatest usefulness for everyone. This law imposes respect for freedom.

For the prevalent liberal currents today, there is no universal moral law, religious or secular, and - in this liberal world, particularly in the West - what matters is respect for the free choice of values by individuals.

We have thus passed from universality to relativity, and from the integral human being to a subject who is the only norm for himself. The author draws the consequence that here, too, we find ourselves before a crossroads for liberalism - between Christianity and secularism - as he indicated at the start of the book.

And at this point, the crossroads may be described this way: either liberalism joins itself to a concrete doctrine of good, in particular, Christian doctrine of which it is a congener (the same roots), in which case, it has something to offer to the contemporary moral crisis; or liberalism professes its self-sufficiency, 'neutral' or 'secular', and thus becomes itself a multiplier of the crisis.

Even here, Beneedict XVI shows his interest and agreement, writing: "You show that liberalism, without ceasing to be liberalism but, on the contrary, in order to be faithful to itself, can link itself to a doctrine of good, in particular, the Christian doctrine which is its congener, thus truly offering a contribution to overcoming the crisis".


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Interestingly - and questionably - the extract of Cardinal Ruini's intervention published in OR omits an important paragraph that Sandro Magister noted in his blog yesterday:


High politics:
Ratzinger's thinking
condensed in 5 precepts

Dec. 4, 2008


The precepts have to do with Europe, liberalism, multi-culturalism, inter-religious dialog adn public ethics.

Each is condensed in a few clear and unequivocal lines in the letter that Benedict XVI wrote Marcello Pera, which appears as a preface to the latest book written by the philosopher senator.

Of the five precepts, the first one - on the Christian liberal foundation of Europe - is not new in the thought of Joseph Ratzinger. But the others cannot be taken for granted, as Cardinal Camillo Ruini remarked in presenting the book today along with the author and Massimo D'Alema as a counterpoint.

"The other positions [taken by the Pope] - " Ruini said, "on the rootedness of liberalism in the Christian image of God, on multiculturality, in onter-cultural rather than inter-religious dialog, and finally on the relationship between liberalism and the Christian doctrine of good - are surely well within the lines of thinking that Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI has expressed and examined in depth on many occasions, but nevertheless constitute - by their content, by the vigor and clarity with which they are formulated - significant developments or clarifications that contribute not a little to the current debate on the relationship between Christianity adn the contemporary world."

In fact, Magister has posted the entire text of Cardinal Ruini's presentation, which I will post as soon as I have translated it, having learned to admire Cardinal Ruini's own clear pbilosophical and theological thinking - thanks to full texts of his important discourses that Magister has been posting.