The Modern Papacy 9781501301803, 9780826430113

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Series Editor’s Preface

A volume on the thought of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI might seem somewhat out of place in a book series devoted to Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers. Very few courses in social or political theory taught in a mainstream, non-religious university include classes on Papal thought. Similarly, standard textbooks or compendiums of social or political thought rarely give coverage to or even mention the writings of the Popes. In this book, however, Dr Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute, USA, sets out the important contribution that the modern papacy has made to social and political thought generally and to aspects of the conservative and libertarian traditions more specifically. At least since the infamous trial of Galileo Galilei for heresy in the seventeenth century, the Catholic Church has had a troubled relationship with modernity. The various Enlightenments posed a range of intellectual and practical challenges to Catholic dogma, doctrine, and practice and in the twentieth century the Church had to respond to the global rise of totalitarian belief systems and regimes that rejected notions of individual inviolability which, in a modern European context, had originated from and were central to Catholic theology. The papacy’s intellectual response to the twin (and arguably linked) challenges of modernity and totalitarianism provides a rich well of learning for anyone concerned with the threat to free societies and individual liberty posed by social and political movements that have little or no

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respect for institutions that are not the product of conscious human design or for the rights of individuals relative to the wishes of governments claiming to represent the collective interest. This book is principally concerned with the thought of two Popes who had painful personal experience of two of the most brutal totalitarian systems of the twentieth century: John Paul II lived through the Nazi and then Communist occupation of Poland; Benedict XVI grew up in Nazi Germany where he was forced to join the Hitler Youth and drafted into the German military toward the end of the Second World War. Gregg’s account of the sophisticated and subtle intellectual response of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to the challenges presented by modernity will be of interest to Catholics and non-Catholics alike; it is clear that mainstream political thought has been impoverished by its neglect of these two important and compelling scholars. This volume makes a crucial contribution to the Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series by setting out one such component of this tradition of thought that has been frequently neglected in mainstream scholarship. In presenting the thought of John Paul II and Benedict XVI in such an accessible and cogent form the author has produced an outstanding volume that will prove indispensable to relatively new students of the subject area as well as more advanced scholars. John Meadowcroft King’s College London

Author’s Preface

Amid discord God strikes At a bell immense, For the Slavic Pope, Open is the Throne. This Pope will not—Italian-like—take fright At saber-thrust But brave as God Himself stand and give fight. For him, the world is dust . . . Love he dispenses as great powers today Distribute arms. With sacramental power, his sole array, The world he charms. So behold, here comes the Slavic Pope, A brother of the people. Juliusz Słowacki, 1849.

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages that are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however 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. Alasdair MacIntyre, 1981.

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Though 140 years separate the Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki and the English philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the distance is more than chronological. Słowacki was a Polish exile who longed for an end to Tsarist domination of his country. MacIntyre is most well-known as one of the twentieth century’s prominent critics of post-Enlightenment Western culture. What links them is the conviction that the West’s history is literally incomprehensible without accounting for the immense influence wielded by the Roman Catholic Church and the unique ability of the occupiers of the papacy—the successors of St. Peter—as head of the Church to shape Western culture. In the wake of 1848, the year of revolutions throughout Europe, Słowacki dreamed of the-then unthinkable—a pope of Slavic origins through whom God’s graces would work to return to Europe an optimism and sense of civilizational purpose. Writing in a very different era, MacIntyre looked for a similar figure—one not perhaps as fond of dramatic gestures as Słowacki’s Slavic pope, but an indisputably Catholic figure who would begin, as St. Benedict did amidst the collapsing edifice of the Roman Empire, to quietly renew Western civilization. Since 1978, several observers have noted the parallels to be drawn between the imaginings of Słowacki and MacIntyre, and the successive elections of Karol Wojtyła and Joseph Ratzinger to the papacy. The first non-Italian pope in five centuries, Wojtyła enjoyed indisputably Slavic origins. Likewise Ratzinger’s choice of the name Benedict following his election to the papacy in 2005, immediately reminded many of MacIntyre’s words and of another quiet figure who, through building a monastery at Monte Casino in A.D. 529, and writing the famous Rule of Benedict, gave Western Europe a lasting cultural configuration. Though Słowacki and MacIntyre are often viewed as romantic, somewhat conservative figures, neither understood themselves in this manner. Słowacki railed against

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Tsar Nicholas I’s reactionary grip upon his native Poland, while MacIntyre’s yearnings for a new order is based in his desire not for a return to pre-1789 certainties, but for a civilization grounded upon truths that, according to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, are discernible through reason. Likewise, although many regard the papacy as an inherently conservative institution occupied by men with conservative instincts, neither Wojtyła nor Ratzinger would accept that label. It is not a question of either man considering themselves to be ‘liberal’ (‘liberalism’ being a broad somewhat ambiguous term embracing often-incompatible positions). Rather it is that the Catholic Church does not consider its teachings to be subsumable under any political designation. Catholicism simply regards its teachings on matters of faith and morals to be the full truth about God and humanity. Such a position is difficult for many in the post-Enlightenment, even post-modern era to comprehend, when reason’s ability to grasp more-than-empirical truths is so often questioned. This is just one of the reasons why one of the great political dramas of Western culture since the early seventeenth century has been the tension between the Catholic Church led by the popes and what is often called “modernity.” The strictures of many Enlightenment thinkers, particularly late-Enlightenment figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on subjects ranging from the nature of reason to the meaning of freedom, resulted in the creation of a range of intellectual positions with which the papacy was compelled to engage, often from the standpoint of critic. This was not simply a function of the violence and social upheaval that shook Europe in the wake of the French Revolution. It was also a result of popes recognizing that the political, social, and religious culture of modernity was one in which Catholicism would be obliged to live, move, and have its being. Though pronouncements by some nineteenth-century popes might suggest that the Church’s

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position toward this modern world was essentially one of intransigence, the reality is rather different. Nowhere, as this short book hopes to show, is this more obvious than in the thought of the popes who led the Catholic Church at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first: John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Hence, although this book may interest Catholics and non-Catholics seeking to understand the thought of two popes recognized, even by their critics, for their intellectual abilities, it also seeks to serve as a source for those students of politics, philosophy, and history—believers and nonbelievers, Christian and non-Christian alike— curious about the significance of the modern project, especially within the European context, but who may also have slight knowledge of the papacy and Catholicism. Christianity took root in Europe, and Europe gave birth to modernity. Wojtyła and Ratzinger were not only continental Europeans, but also believing Catholics in a Europe profoundly marked by both Catholicism and the various Enlightenments. While their ideas belong to a current of thought developed within a religious community whose identity stretches back two millennia and beyond, each pope’s thought was profoundly influenced by their own and Catholicism’s critical engagement with modernity. Another purpose of this text is to provide readers with a point of comparison for a range of modern political philosophies that emerged after the various Enlightenments. Self-described liberals of a variety of positions, for example, may be surprised to learn that the papacy has devoted considerable attention to the origins, nature, and ends of human liberty in all its manifestations, underlining in the process that everyone—including liberals—has metaphysical assumptions built into their respective visions of freedom, all of which should be analyzed in terms of their rational coherence or otherwise. Likewise, self-described

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conservatives will see some clear parallels but also marked divergences between their approach to modernity and that of the Catholic Church, most notably with regard to the latter’s close attention to what the papacy has long considered to be the crucial question of modern times: the relationship between faith and reason. There is no shortage of material to consult in tracing John Paul II and Benedict XVI’s thinking about modernity. Even before their respective elevations to the papacy, each man published numerous books and articles detailing their thoughts on subjects ranging from metaphysics to history. Of course there is a difference between their personal writings, and the texts appearing under their name as pope and formally invested with the papacy’s teaching authority (the “magisterium”). The latter are rarely composed in their entirety by a pope. Normally other figures contribute to the drafting process. But in the end, final authorial responsibility for these documents belongs to the pope: they are truly his texts, for without his signature denoting assent to every word of their content, they remain mere archival curiosities. A related point concerns the varying degrees of authority that the Catholic Church attaches to different texts produced by the magisterium. Documents promulgated by Church Councils (such as Vatican I and Vatican II) which receive the pope’s imprimatur, for example, are more authoritative than a papal allocution to a specific audience. As the purpose of this book is to provide an introductory historical text to the papacy’s relationship with the modern world (and draws upon both magisterial documents as well as non-magisterial texts written by popes in a private capacity rather than speaking ex cathedra), readers interested in how the Catholic Church thinks about the nature of its magisterial teaching may like to consult Magisterium (2007) by Cardinal Avery Dulles S.J. Here they will find a concise and accurate study of this complex subject which is frequently

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misunderstood and caricatured, including by a good number of contemporary Catholic theologians. Given that this is an introductory book which presumes little knowledge of its subject-matter by its intended audiences, the focus is upon themes that both flow immediately from the encounter between Catholicism and modernity while also featuring prominently in the writings of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. A number of significant questions, such as the papacy’s role in shaping the Catholic Church’s encounter with other religions, are not therefore addressed in detail. Likewise, the place of liturgy in the Catholic engagement with modern culture is not discussed in this text. This is a vast and important subject, requiring a good deal of preparatory explanation, and would take us beyond the immediate focus of our inquiry. Readers interested in this dimension of Catholicism’s relationship with modernity are advised to read Tracey Rowland’s Ratzinger’s Faith (2008) which provides careful, extensive, and compelling coverage of this and other important issues. A number of people need to be acknowledged for their efforts in helping to see this book through to production. First, John Meadowcroft is thanked for commissioning the text. His constructive and critical feedback on its content and style has contributed to significant improvements in the text. For allowing me the time to write the book, I thank the Acton Institute, an organization which itself devotes much effort to the engagement between Christianity and the modern world. Lastly and most importantly, I thank my wife and our daughter for their love and support, spoken and unspoken. Concordia voluntatum, summa libertas, felix aeternitas. Samuel Gregg Acton Institute

I.F.E.R. T.M.A.C. M.E.R.

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On Wednesday, June 22, 1633, the scientist and convinced Catholic Galileo Galilei entered a chamber adjacent to the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. After kneeling, he heard the sentence of the tribunal of the Holy Office—the Catholic Church’s highest doctrinal court—read out. You have rendered yourself vehemently suspect of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scriptures, that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world; and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture. (Shea and Artigas 2003: 193)

This judgment marked the culmination of events concerning particular scientific theories and their relationship to Catholic teaching extending back to ideas posited by Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish Catholic cleric, in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). By the year 2000, the Galileo case’s complexities were better understood and less caricatured. As the Catholic theologian and prominent physicist Stanley Jaki notes, Galileo proved himself a better Scripture scholar than his ecclesiastical judges insofar as he took seriously the warnings

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of St. Jerome and St. Augustine about taking literally certain biblical passages on the earth’s immobility. His ecclesiastical judges, however, proved to be better judges of matters scientific insofar as they correctly pointed out at the time that Galileo had provided no experimental evidence to support his claims (Jaki 1991: 90). Symbolically, however, the Galileo affair’s importance goes beyond its particulars and touches upon the greater issue of the difficult relationship between the papacy and the modern world that began to emerge in seventeenth-century Europe. It was not coincidental that shortly after being elected pope in 1978, Copernicus’s fellow countryman and another alumnus of Poland’s Jagiellonian University, the philosopher Karol Wojtyła—better known to history as John Paul II—decided that it was opportune for the Catholic Church to revisit the Galileo case. For John Paul II and his successor, the German theologian Joseph Ratzinger who took the name Benedict XVI,1 the Galileo case was significant because of questions it posed for Catholicism’s view of modernity. These embrace matters of civilizational import, ranging from faith’s relationship to reason, to Europe’s very identity. From each pontiff’s standpoint, the ultimate importance of these themes was their ability to affect Catholicism’s capacity to teach what it regards as the full truth about God and humanity in a postEnlightenment world. Their treatment of these subjects, however, explains much about the nature of Catholicism’s engagement with modernity in the twentieth-century’s last tumultuous decades. This book seeks to explore this engagement through the medium of the writings of John Paul II and Benedict XVI on a select number of subjects which are central to the character of modernity. It then turns to critiques and responses to the papacy’s dialogue with the modern world under both popes, before concluding with an analysis of the wider implications of this conversation, both for Catholicism and for modernity.

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Neither Wojtyła nor Ratzinger came to the papacy as a tabula rasa. As established European thinkers in their own right, they embodied their own intellectual histories. These explain much of their views concerning Catholicism’s relationship with post-Enlightenment culture. Our analysis is further complicated by the fact that Benedict XVI and John Paul II occupied a position with its own history of intellectual engagement with modernity. Grasping this multifaceted picture requires us to excavate and explicate these histories, noting their points of contact but also divergences.

In Enlightenment’s Wake Writing in 1904, the French Catholic physicist Pierre Duhem suggested that the Galileo affair marked the beginning of many European intellectuals’ disenchantment with Catholicism. “Elated,” Duhem stated, “by the dazzling progress of the positive sciences from Galileo to Descartes, and from Huygens to Newton, the rationalist disbelief deprived the Church of its intellectual elite” (Duhem 1904: 260). It was not as if Catholicism had not previously encountered and mastered similar challenges. Launched by a German monk’s criticisms in 1517, the movement inspired by Martin Luther generated the greatest crisis ever confronted by the Catholic Church. By 1545, Bavaria was the only solidly Catholic region in the Germanic world. The conflicting plethora of opinions flowing from Protestant innovators concerning Christianity’s most fundamental dogmas caused Catholic Europe to look to Rome for guidance in the struggle against heresy and to clarify what was and was not authoritative Catholic doctrine on matters such as whether humans possessed free will or whether people were justified, as Luther held, by faith alone.

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These were not trivial subjects. In 1545, the Council of Trent was called to respond to several problems, including genuine abuses then existing in the Catholic Church. Trent had a political dimension (Hsia 1998), but most of the time of its participating bishops, theologians, and papal officials was devoted to discussing and ratifying the official Catholic response to questions raised by Protestant thinkers. Trent’s convener, Pope Paul III, insisted Catholic doctrine be defined so as to distinguish the faithful clearly from heretics. Thus in 1547, the Council voted in favor of a strongly anti-Lutheran decree on justification, and statements which affirmed the Church’s seven sacraments and condemned many Protestant writings. The same session offered a dogmatic definition of the biblical canon and addressed the relationship between Scripture and Tradition—all in ways that underscored the conviction that Protestant ideas were, at their core, heretical. Meeting periodically until closing in 1563, the Council of Trent was marked by wrangling about questions of ecclesiastical reform (such as requiring bishops to reside in their dioceses), but also the swift and clear manner in which it articulated Catholic dogmas and doctrines. In a Europe where there seemed to be as many Protestant opinions as there were Protestants, many of those members of Europe’s elites who had embraced the new ideas returned or converted to Catholicism. In many instances, they were attracted by the consistency and renewed vigor of Catholic teaching, especially when transmitted by new religious orders such as the Jesuits which stressed the merits of learning in both the human and theological sciences. The Catholic Church, which appeared on its knees in 1545, was transformed into a dynamic body which rolled back Protestantism’s frontiers in Europe while simultaneously spreading Catholicism throughout the newly discovered Americas, Africa, and Asia. Images of energy, intellectual rigor, and victory saturated the language of Catholic

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renewal. Throughout this period, the Catholic Church truly merited the title “the Church militant.” Yet by 1700, just when Catholicism appeared to have overcome the reversals of the Protestant revolt, there seems little question that a weakening of resolve became apparent. In his study of post-Reformation Catholicism, Po-Chia Hsia concludes that “gradually and unmistakably, the elites of Catholic Europe lost the militant spirit that had shaped society between 1560 and 1660. . . . The CounterReformation style went out of fashion among the elites: in France the figure of the dévot under Louis XIII gave way to that of the libertine under Louis XV; in Germany princes and noblemen attended operas instead of Jesuit dramas” (Hsia 1998: 206). What underlay this apparent deterioration? Certainly internal disputes, most notably the Jansenist controversy,2 focused the papacy’s attention on intra-Church matters. Another distraction was attempts by eighteenth-century Catholic monarchs to tighten their control of the Church in their respective realms—a process culminating in the Jesuits’ suppression in 1773 after immense pressure was placed on successive popes by various Catholic monarchs to realize this end. But more significantly, the weakening of Catholic resolve may owe something to the adequacy or otherwise of the Catholic Church’s general response to particular intellectual challenges flowing from the various Enlightenments associated with the Age of Reason. The intellectual, social, and political movements flowing from the Enlightenment period shared an emphasis upon applying the tools associated with scientific and instrumental rationality to as many spheres of life as possible. Influenced by theories articulated by Galileo, Descartes, and Leibniz, the disenchantment with metaphysical and religious questions following the wars of religion directed many minds toward the natural sciences and natural philosophy. Sir Isaac Newton’s three-volume Philosophiae

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Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) was especially influential following Newton’s success in integrating the mechanics of physical observation with the mathematics of axiomatic proof, and his subsequent development of a system of scientifically verifiable predictions. Other hallmarks of Enlightenment thought included an emphasis upon utility—that is, the usefulness or otherwise of particular habits and institutions—as well as progress, in the sense of deepening humanity’s understanding of the natural world and continually enhancing the utility of particular objects and ideas. Given the success of such ideas in expanding humanity’s knowledge and control of the natural world, similar approaches were applied to politics, economics, and religion. Though many Enlightenment thinkers were not hostile either to religion in general or Catholicism in particular, others such as the eighteenth-century Scot David Hume were quietly skeptical of the claims of faith. Some, most notably Rousseau, were outright antagonistic. It was not as if the Catholic Church was unsympathetic to parts of the Enlightenment project. Great scientific minds ranging from Copernicus to Galileo were sincere Catholics and saw no necessary conflict between the claims of faith and reason. Indeed, much of Catholicism’s animus against Lutheranism had been driven by what the Dominican theologian Servais Pinckaers denotes as “the anti-humanist reaction of Protestantism” (1995: 289). Likewise the highly rational logic associated with the scholastic tradition allowed sixteenth-century Catholic theologians such as the Dominican, Francisco de Vitoria, to grapple with questions raised by Europe’s encounter with the New World and the subsequent need for a moral universalism that embraced non-Christians—a process that establishes Vitoria as the founder of modern international law and human rights, as Benedict XVI gently reminded the United Nations in a speech to the General Assembly (2008a). Also significant were the humanistic educational

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models employed by the Jesuits that drew heavily upon the Renaissance’s revival of Europe’s Roman-Hellenic legacy (Pinckaers 1995: 289), especially that pioneered in Northern Europe by convinced Christians such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and the Catholic martyrs, Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More. Still, the American philosopher Russell Hittinger appears correct when he suggests that neither the papacy nor the Church responded in an especially systematic manner to the various Enlightenments (2006: 31). That there was a Catholic response has been well-documented (Palmer 1939), if often ignored by historians of the period. One searches in vain, however, for eighteenth-century papal texts that directly engaged the questions raised by the new learning in a way as systematic as the Council of Trent confronted Protestant ideas. Hence, we should not be surprised that when the papacy and the Catholic Church were themselves confronted with the upheavals unleashed by the French Revolution—culminating in state terrorism against Catholics who defied the Revolution’s Civil Constitution of the Clergy and Pope Pius VI’s eventual deportation from Rome in 1799—many Catholics, typified by the French conservative Joseph de Maistre, responded by seeking to bolster throne-and-altar arrangements and adopting negative attitudes toward any Enlightenment phenomenon. In his widely read Du pape (1819), de Maistre argued for the reestablishment of a modern unified Christendom under the pope’s supreme spiritual and limited temporal sovereignty as a way of addressing, containing, and eventually dissipating the moral and intellectual errors that he believed had been unleashed by the various Enlightenments and spread throughout Europe by the armies and administrators of the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte. For a good number of Catholics in the nineteenth century, this seemed entirely reasonable, especially given the degree

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of violence that they had seen inflicted upon the Church during the revolutionary upheavals.

From “Intransigence” to Critical Engagement The nineteenth-century papacy is often portrayed as deeply hostile toward modernity. In 1864, Pius IX issued his famous Syllabus Errorum. This gathered together eighty condemnations from thirty-two of Pius’ public documents and denounced the view that the Roman pontiff “can and should reconcile himself to, or join up with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization” (Pius IX 1864/1971). Though it sounds reactionary, it should be noted that this last statement was taken directly from Pius IX’s 1861 allocution Iamdudum cernimus, which responded to the extension of Piedmont’s anticlerical laws to all of Italy as Italian reunification under the House of Savoy proceeded apace. If this were modernity, no pope would welcome it. In 1869, Pius IX convened the First Vatican Council. Controversies surrounding Vatican I’s dogmatic constitution declaring and defining papal infallibility, Pastor Aeternus (1870), distracted attention from the importance of Vatican I’s other dogmatic constitution, Dei Filius. This text’s significance lay in its defense of Catholicism’s vision of the relationship between faith and reason, and its effort to demonstrate that Catholicism’s vision of reason was not antagonistic to the human and natural sciences, and also deeper than the instrumental understandings of rationality associated with some Enlightenment scholars. Pius’ successor, Leo XIII, also comprehended the need to fashion a fresh Catholic response to intellectual questions posed by a post-Enlightenment world. He thus sought to facilitate a Catholic intellectual revival through commending study of Thomas Aquinas’ work in his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris. But Leo’s numerous encyclicals

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also addressed questions such as whether Deism qualified as a form of natural theology, the idea of natural law, the nature of freedom, etc. Leo’s forays into such issues hardly constituted a Catholic capitulation to modernity. Any fair and full reading of this pope’s encyclicals, ranging from Libertas Praestantissimum (1888), which considers the subject of human freedom, to the more famous Rerum Novarum (1891), soon cures readers of such misunderstandings. Leo was fiercely critical of particular intellectual trends of his time, such as positivism and socialism. Yet he simultaneously affirmed that there was a legitimate plurality of political arrangements (thereby diminishing formal Catholic support for monarchist-restoration movements), and integrated certain Lockean insights into the Church’s essentially Thomistic teachings about property. The approach to modernity pursued by Leo XIII and almost all his successors is thus best described as critical, insofar as it affirms what the Church considers to be good in modernity but without ignoring its shortcomings. Occasionally, the latter involved unambiguous denouncements such as Pius XI’s condemnation of Communism in Divini Redemptoris (1937) and his refutation in Mit Brennender Sorge (1937) of Nazism’s racist dogmas and state worship. The same pope, however, reconstituted the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1936, charging it with promoting the mathematical and natural sciences, and stressing that its membership was not to be confined to Catholics but rather drawn from the most qualified specialists in the fields (Pius XI 1936/2001: 314–16). Similar patterns are evident during Pius XII’s papacy. Though deeply censorious of Communism, Pius XII’s 1944 Christmas Message contains a careful analysis of democracy’s strengths and liabilities. Likewise Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis is remembered for its critique of existentialism, dialectical materialism, idealism, and attempts to explain the totality of human existence

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in terms of evolutionary theory. Fewer appreciate that the same encyclical acknowledges that Catholicism should consider the known facts revealed by science about man’s origins, and that scientists and theologians should be free to explore these facts—provided that they avoid ascribing the status of proven fact to various hypotheses about this subject.

From Engagement to Crisis Given this history, the Second Vatican Council (1962– 1965) seems less an opening and more an acceleration of an already initiated critical engagement by the Church with modernity. Yet the question of how the Church was to reflect upon and address this world was much disputed during the Council. The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner maintained that if the Council was to consider such themes, then it should do so theologically; that is, only reaching doctrinal conclusions on the basis of revealed truth. Several bishops, however, insisted that any text seeking to address the modern world had to speak to humanity on its own terms (McGrath 1986: 328). The pope presiding over most sessions of Vatican II, Paul VI, himself argued that such documents needed to challenge perceptions of the Church and modernity as hopelessly antagonistic (Cottier 1991: 25). The end result—Vatican II’s 1965 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes— combined openness to modernity with the insistence that the Church had distinct things to say to it. Reflecting upon human history, for instance, Gaudium et Spes states, “History itself is accelerating on so rapid a course that individuals can scarcely keep pace with it. . . . And so the human race is passing from a relatively static conception of the nature of things to a more dynamic and evolutionary conception”

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(GS 5). This awareness of the progress unleashed by modernity is nonetheless tempered by the document’s stress that “the Church affirms, too, that underlying all that changes there are many things that do not change, and that have their ultimate foundation in Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (GS 10). Nor did Gaudium et Spes avoid expressing concerns about specific features of modernity. It notes, for instance, the tendency of increasing numbers of people to consider religious belief as incompatible with the natural sciences, not to mention the growth of “a new kind of humanism” (GS 7) grounded in implicitly atheistic visions of man (GS 19–22). Gaudium et Spes affirmed Catholicism’s willingness to profit “from the experience of past ages, from the progress of the sciences, and from the riches hidden in various cultures, through which greater light is thrown on the nature of man and new avenues to truth are opened up” (GS 44). While insisting the natural sciences are not exempt from morality’s demands, the Council emphasized their legitimate autonomy (GS 36), and lamented what it regarded as past unnecessary conflicts between faith and science. In this connection, the Council fathers specifically referenced the Galileo case (GS 36 n. 7). Gaudium et Spes, however, significantly qualified these statements by indicating that listening to others does not mean uncritically accepting their propositions, let alone failing to point out errors—moral or intellectual—in their arguments. In the Council’s words, “it is the task of the whole people of God . . . to listen to and distinguish the many voices of our time, and to interpret them in the light of the divine Word in order that the revealed truth may be more deeply penetrated, better understood, and more suitably presented” (GS 44).3 Hence, though Gaudium et Spes underlined that a “fortress church” was not an option for Catholicism, it also stressed that Catholics were obliged to be critically reflective, and this reflection must be informed by what the Church already knows to be true.

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In the immediate post-conciliar period, many Catholics were optimistic about Vatican II’s potential fruits for the Church’s relationship with modernity. Many reasons have been offered for the crisis into which Catholicism in much of North America and Western Europe—the contemporary engines of modernity—almost immediately fell following Vatican II. Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, reaffirming unbroken Catholic teaching on the illicitness of intentionally preventing the natural conception of children, is often identified as the catalyst sparking the crisis. At a deeper level, however, disputes about Catholicism’s relationship with modernity were the real epicenter of the trauma. Though Paul VI dedicated his papacy to promoting Vatican II’s approach to modernity, by the early 1970s it was clear that Catholics in much of Western Europe and the Americas were very divided about what this meant. Some chose paths similar to the French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, who viewed Vatican II, especially Gaudium et Spes and the Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty Dignitatis Humanae (1965), as a capitulation to modernity. Others embraced what Pinckaers denotes as “secular Christianity” (1995: 305). This involved some Catholics’ relatively uncritical immersion in ideas previously identified by the Church as problematic, including idealism, Marxism, and positivism. For some Catholics, it was no longer a question of identifying what in these ideas was and was not compatible with Catholic faith. Rather, in a complete paradigm shift, it was a question of reinterpreting Christian doctrines to conform to modern secular expectations. Thus some Catholics sought, for instance, to rewrite moral theology from the standpoints of psychology, feminism, and sociology, and of thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Mill, Freud, and Rawls. Inevitably this resulted in efforts to politicize the Church’s self-understanding and its actions (Pinckaers

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1995: 304) in order to align Catholicism with whatever secular modernity interpreted as constituting the essence of progress at any one point in time. No doubt, these developments owed much to the climate of the late 1960s from which no Western institution proved immune. But the crisis also proceeded from confl icting interpretations of Vatican II. In an address to the Roman Curia in December 2005, Benedict XVI stated that Catholicism’s post-Vatican II difficulties in the developed world partly proceeded from an underestimation of the power of sin and modernity’s own inner tensions. Nevertheless, he added, much of the crisis emanated from the clash of two interpretive hermeneutics. One hermeneutic, Benedict suggested, interpreted Vatican II in terms of rupture with the past. It identified statements in Vatican II documents underlying continuity with the past as reflecting temporary compromises that obscured the Council’s “true spirit” which was to be found solely in what was new in its documents. The other interpretive hermeneutic, according to Benedict, was one of a renewal and continuity of Catholic teaching through returning to the sources of Christian inspiration—the Scriptures, Catholic Tradition, and the Church Fathers—and then applying their insights to the present. One factor, Benedict stated, coloring the Catholicmodernity relationship was that it was more complex than many Catholics and even some participants at Vatican II had hitherto realized. For one thing, he noted, the relationship had a difficult beginning with the Galileo affair. Moreover, Benedict commented, the trend of modernity associated with the French Revolution’s radical phase as well as intellectual claims that the only valid form of knowledge was that acquired through the positive sciences was bound to provoke a clash with the Church. But, Benedict insisted, there was another modernity: one

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associated with the church-state model offered by the American Revolution and some scientists’ dawning recognition of the limits of the knowledge attainable through the positive sciences. Vatican II, according to Benedict, was an attempt to open the Church and modernity to each other by engaging three questions: the relationship between faith and the modern sciences; the question of truth and religious tolerance; and the Church’s relationship with the modern state. At the heart of all these tensions, Benedict stressed, was an issue that had engaged Catholicism from its very beginning, especially after Christianity’s encounter with Greek culture: “the perennial problem of the relationship between faith and reason” (Benedict XVI 2005a: 8). Benedict’s analysis of these matters in his discourse is important because it explains much of the papacy’s approach to modernity in the twentieth-century’s last quarter and the beginning of the twenty-first, a methodology deeply influenced by Benedict XVI and John Paul II. Both participated in Vatican II from its beginning until its closure. Even prior to Wojtyła’s election as pope in 1978, both he and Ratzinger were intellectually grappling with such questions, albeit in different ways. Before 1978, Wojtyła’s primary responsibilities were those of an active priest and bishop, though also an engaged academic philosopher overshadowed by the challenge of living in a Communist system. Ratzinger’s energies, by contrast, were primarily consumed by academic theology at a time of intense conflict within Western Catholic intellectual circles, which accelerated after Vatican II. Yet despite these practical and intellectual demands on their time and energy, Catholicism’s relationship with modernity was an omnipresent issue for both men. Their subsequent views and conclusions lent particular complexions to the post-conciliar papacy’s approach to this subject.

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A Philosopher from Kraków Born in Poland in 1920, Wojtyła entered the Jagiellonian University in 1939, intending to study literature and theater. With his formal university courses terminated by the Nazi invasion that same year, Wojtyła worked as a manual laborer until entering Kraków’s clandestine Catholic seminary in 1942. He remained there until ordination to the priesthood in 1946, after which he departed to Rome to commence higher studies at the Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Thomas Aquinas, usually known as the Angelicum. Poland’s experience of the Second World War was especially formative for Wojtyła’s generation of Polish Catholic intellectuals. Between 1939 and 1945, Poland was subject to a totalitarian regime committed to decapitating the leadership from the body of the Polish nation and destroying Polish culture. The Nazi occupiers subsequently imprisoned and executed thousands of aristocrats, army officers, clergy, and scholars. Forced labor was the norm for the rest of the population. Poland’s experience of liberation differed markedly from Western Europe’s. Nazis were replaced by Communists, whose authority ultimately rested upon Soviet bayonets. Given this history, it was not surprising that some Polish Catholic intellectuals began wondering whether such catastrophes were endemic to modernity or exceptions. One such individual, Stefan S´wiez˙awski, noted that Poland’s Second World War experiences forced Catholic thinkers to ask what made modern people capable of such profound evil. It created a preoccupation among Catholic scholars with that fundamental anthropological question: what is man (S´wiez˙awski 1993: ix–xi)? According to S´wiez˙awski, the attempts of such intellectuals at the Catholic University of Lublin to provide answers produced an awareness of “the philosophical poverty of idealistic and materialistic systems” (S´wiez˙awski 1993: x).

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This implies they were dissatisfied with both Kantian idealism and the Marxist materialist alternative. As a result, S´wiez˙awski claims, Catholic intellectuals at Lublin began questioning the worth of much post-Enlightenment philosophy and subsequently sought to bring classical and medieval insights to bear upon modern problems (1993: x–xi). In 1954, Wojtyła was recruited to Lublin’s philosophy department because, S´wiez˙awski writes, his “ethical, anthropological, and metaphysical interests predisposed him completely to our circle” (1993: xii). As a group, the Lublin philosophers were committed to affirming the place of metaphysics in philosophical anthropology and applying Thomistic ideas to modern questions (S´wiez˙awski 1993: xii–xiii). Wojtyła’s specific contribution, S´wiez˙awski suggests, was to prevent “Lublinism” from becoming excessively contemplative (1993: xiv). Wojtyła’s formal entry into the academy did not, however, begin with his appointment to a chair of ethics at Lublin, but rather the decision of Kraków’s archbishop, Cardinal Prince Adam Sapieha, to send Wojtyła to pursue doctoral studies in Rome. Wojtyła’s doctoral thesis, Faith according to St. John of the Cross (1949/1981), was supervised by Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., regarded at the time as perhaps the world’s leading Thomistic scholar and a prominent writer on themes on spiritual and mystical theology. Completed in 1948, this five-part dissertation suggested that contemplation as a mystical experience leads to true faith in God (Wojtyła 1949/1981: 83). There were, Wojtyła argued, limits to reason’s ability to comprehend God. Though people have a natural knowledge of God, human reason cannot access all of the characteristics of the God found in Scripture. Wojtyła insisted, however, that John of the Cross did not believe that faith alone could achieve the intellect’s union with God. It must be faith nourished by love and illuminated by reason (Wojtyła 1949/1981: 153).

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Wojtyła’s attention to the place of reason in a mystic’s writings may reflect Garrigou-Lagrange’s influence as a confirmed Thomist. Scholasticism’s importance for Wojtyła’s thought cannot be underestimated. He first encountered Thomism in his clandestine seminary, specifically through reading Kazimierz Waiz’s Metaphysics (1926), which, Wojtyła stated, allowed him to discover “the deep reasons” that made sense of what he had hitherto only sensed (John Paul II and Frossard 1985: 17). Despite his later engagements with modern thought, Wojtyła’s writings, as Jan Galkowski notes, “repeatedly declare the value of Thomism and that he is making this system the basis for his own work” (1988: 182). Returning to Poland, Wojtyła completed his habilitationsschrift at the Jagiellonian’s Theology Faculty in 1953. Titled On the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethic on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler (1959), it inquired whether Scheler—a sometime-Catholic philosopher formed in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological school—provided a satisfactory basis for Christian ethics. Wojtyła concluded that Scheler failed. Arguing that moral goods were grasped in Scheler through feelings rather than reason, Wojtyła considered this far too subjective. Christian ethics, Wojtyła affirmed, leads to knowledge of objective moral truth to which people may adhere through reason and free will (1959: 34)—an entirely orthodox Thomist argument. Despite these criticisms, Wojtyła’s analysis of Scheler introduced him to phenomenological methods of grasping morality as lived through experiencing human acts. First emerging in the late-nineteenth century, phenomenological approaches to philosophy attempted to import everyday life-experiences into philosophical reflection. Phenomenologists reject empiricism’s fixation with reducing everything to sense-data as well as idealism’s effort to categorize everything in terms of ideal types.

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Phenomenology, by contrast, refuses to separate these things. Instead it focuses on the “whole,” especially the whole which is manifested in human acts. Because it represents a modern effort to go beyond empiricism and idealism through studying human acts, one can see why phenomenology would interest Thomists like Wojtyła who approached ethical questions through analyzing human action. Nonetheless, Wojtyła held that “[a] Christian thinker, and specifically a theologian, although availing himself in his writings of the phenomenological experience, cannot be a phenomenologist” (1959: 125), primarily because Scheler, like many phenomenologists, failed to grasp how much moral choices shape a person interiorly—again, a classic Thomist insight. The same critical openness to contemporary ideas appears in Wojtyła’s 1960 book, Love and Responsibility. Though the subject matter is sexual ethics, it reveals much about Wojtyła’s intellectual development. As he puts it retrospectively, “in Love and Responsibility . . . I formulated the concept of a personalistic principle. This principle is an attempt to translate the commandment of love into the language of philosophical ethics” (John Paul II 1994: 200–1). The term “person,” Wojtyła wrote, captured man’s uniqueness, embracing his ability to reason, his inner spiritual life directed to truth and goodness (Wojtyła 1960/1980: 21–3), and the free will which makes man “his own master” (Wojtyła 1960/1980: 24). Taken as a whole, these comments essentially build Thomist concepts into the modern idiom of personalist anthropology. But despite seeking to translate Christian ethics into contemporary philosophical language, Love and Responsibility expressed deep criticisms of modernity’s utilitarian tendencies. On no account, Wojtyła stated, should one person be used merely as a means to another’s end. This “elementary truth,” as Wojtyła called it, was recognized by many non-Catholics, especially Kant, who, Wojtyła argued,

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insisted that one should “act always in such a way that the other person is the end and not merely the instrument of your action” (1960/1980: 27–8). Modernity’s tendency to reduce people to objects of use, to Wojtyła’s mind, was derived from utilitarianism’s positing “of pleasure in itself as the sole or at any rate the greatest good, to which everything else in the activity of an individual or a society should be subordinated.” While associating utilitarianism with Bentham and Mill, Wojtyła stressed that the “utilitarian attitude” is “characteristic of modern man’s mentality” (1960/1980: 35). Rather than pursue pleasure, Love and Responsibility proposes that people should pursue virtue. Wojtyła notes, however, Scheler’s concern that modern man seemed to resent this task (1960/1980: 143), a theme to which Wojtyła returned at Vatican II. Wojtyła attended all four Council sessions, first as a bishop, then as archbishop of Kraków. By all accounts, it was a formative experience for Wojtyła, not least because of personal encounters with Western European Catholic intellectuals, especially the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, who wrote a preface for Love and Responsibility. Some of Wojtyła’s most significant contributions during the Council were to drafts of Gaudium et Spes. His statements about drafts of this document are especially revealing, not least because Wojtyła is commonly portrayed as enthusiastic about this text. In the first of six speeches on Gaudium et Spes, he objected to the draft text’s tone. “It should,” Wojtyła said, “speak in such a way that the world sees that we are not so much teaching the world in an authoritarian way, but rather we are seeking the true and just solution of the difficult problems of life together with the world. The fact that the truth is already known to us is not in question . . . it is a question of the way in which the world will find it for itself and appropriate it” (1975: 299). The same address, however, described modernity as full of ambiguity: “The modern world is new in good and new in

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evil. It contains new values but also new crises. It is a world of new closeness between peoples . . . but [also] a world threatening and dangerous in a new way for each person and entire societies” (Wojtyła 1975: 300). During the Council’s fourth session, Wojtyła suggested that the draft of Gaudium et Spes lacked “a sense of Christian realism.” It underestimated, Wojtyła stated, “the modern world’s sinful features,” especially modern man’s disinclination to virtue (1977a: 661–2). Despite these criticisms, Wojtyła viewed Gaudium et Spes as affirming the validity of his own dialogue with modern philosophy. It was, he believed, a discussion that should focus on the nature of the person. As Wojtyła explained in a letter to de Lubac in February 1968: I devote my very rare free moments to a work which is close to my heart and which is devoted to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the PERSON. It seems to me the debate is currently playing itself out on that level. The evil of our time consists in the first place in a sort of degradation, even a pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is still even more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order. To this disintegration, planned at times by atheist ideologies, we must oppose, rather than sterile polemics, a type of “recapitulation” of the person’s inviolable mystery. (cited in de Lubac 1992/2006: 176)4

These words written to a prominent French Catholic intellectual need not be interpreted as suggesting that Wojtyła only had Communist regimes in mind. The corpus of his writings indicates that the horizons of his diagnosis included but also went beyond the Marxist world. Wojtyła’s most significant post-conciliar work, The Acting Person (1969), emphasizes Gaudium et Spes’ stress on the importance of a truthful vision of man for any dialogue with modernity (1969/1979: 302 n. 9). The Acting Person

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argues that in the midst of enormous contemporary progress, man is losing a truthful understanding of himself. Wojtyła traces this to modernity’s detachment of ethics from anthropology (1969/1979: 12). He thus attempts to reattach moral issues to anthropological questions through philosophically analyzing what human action reveals about humans as moral actors. In doing so, Wojtyła drew upon “the systems of metaphysics, of anthropology, and of Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics on the one hand, and to phenomenology, above all in Scheler’s interpretation, and through Scheler’s critique also to Kant, on the other hand” (1969/1979: xiv). The Acting Person’s Thomist orientation is evident from its numerous Thomistic references (Wojtyła 1969/1979: 358–9). But Husserl and Scheler are also cited extensively with the Husserlian slogan zurück zum Gegenstand [back to the object] being cited twice (Wojtyła 1969/1979: xiii–xiv). The object Wojtyła had in mind—the human act—may reflect, alongside Aquinas’s tract on this topic, Scheler’s maxim that “the whole person is contained in every fully concrete act” (Scheler 1973: 377). Wojtyła’s attempt to comprehend man through human action was, he acknowledged, “counter to another trend of modern philosophy. Since Descartes, knowledge about man and his world has been identified with the cognitive function. . . . And yet, in reality, does man reveal himself in thinking or, rather, in the actual enacting of his existence (1969/1979: vii–viii)? While rejecting modernity’s fixation with consciousness, Wojtyła suggests that consciousness was insufficiently appreciated by medieval scholastics (1979: 277–99). The Acting Person thus attempts to ground consciousness within the totality of man’s existence as an embodied person with cognitive, emotional, and spiritual capacities (Wojtyła 1969/1979: 39–59). While The Acting Person confines itself to abstract philosophical discourse, this cannot be said of Wojtyła’s last pre-papal book, a collection of twenty-two sermons

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delivered before Paul VI in March 1976. Published as Sign of Contradiction (1976), Wojtyła presented these words as central to modernity’s own crisis (1976/1979: 7). The book’s theme is how man’s encounter with the truth of God is contradicted by “the world,” thus requiring the Church to vigorously affirm the truth rather than simply conform to the demands of secular modernity (Wojtyła 1976/1979: 8). The first argument permeating the text is that modern man’s defiance of the preordained moral order knowable through faith and reason is integral to modernity’s problems. Employing biblical reflection, Wojtyła submits that God’s covenant with man as portrayed in the Book of Genesis is based on both God’s love and the moral truth about reality. Wojtyła portrays the tree of knowledge in Genesis as symbolizing that created man is not set beyond the limits of good and evil “as Nietzsche and other propounders of the autonomy of man would have it” (1976/1979: 23). Wojtyła notes that man ate of the tree because the serpent held out for him the prospect of becoming “like God” (1976/1979: 30). To Wojtyła’s mind, Marx and Feuerbach’s effort to “give everything to man” independently of God’s moral order are modern versions of the serpent’s temptation (1976/1979: 34–5). With people “free” of the objective moral order, Wojtyła claims that there is nothing to prevent each person from being regarded as a “mere tool” (1976/1979: 34). To this end, he cites de Lubac’s argument that atheistic humanism’s claim to liberate man by abolishing God ultimately destroys man’s recognition of his uniqueness (Wojtyła 1976/1979: 16). Looking at the modern world, Wojtyła marvels at “the speed and acceleration of its progress.” In the midst of this, however, he suggests that human thought is becoming disorientated. For despite modern man subduing the earth to a degree unprecedented in history, Wojtyła states,

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“when he has extended so very far the ‘horizontal’ thread of his knowledge, what strikes one most forcibly is a lack of balance in the relation to the ‘vertical’ component of that knowledge” (1976/1979: 11)—that is, cognizance of the transcendent. Wojtyła maintained that philosophical and everyday materialism are “doing their best to turn matter into an absolute in human thought” (1976/1979: 13). Contrasting modernity with the biblical writers and thinkers of antiquity who spoke of Creator or Prime Mover respectively, Wojtyła holds that “[p]resent-day man . . . does not think things through to the end, does not seek the fundamental reasons why.” According to Wojtyła, modern man understands reason essentially in terms of “empirical knowledge.” What was hitherto accepted as transcendent realities—truth, beauty, and goodness—are now dismissed as scientifically unverifiable. Human knowledge has thus “chosen to branch off laterally along a minor road, abandoning the main trunk routes” (1976/1979: 12). One consequence of this is the ambiguity of modern progress. “Nowadays,” Wojtyła states, “one need only consider the progress made in nuclear physics alongside the attendant folly of armaments” (1976/1979: 34). Any development produced by science, regardless of its consequences, is considered a priori to be good. Another result is degeneration. “The word ‘progress’ is,” Wojtyła posits, “on everyone’s lips . . . but real life confronts us with so much loss, calamity and ruin that one wonders whether, broadly speaking, regress is not triumphing over progress” (1976/1979: 156). “Our century of progress,” Wojtyła submits, “has become . . . the age of the concentration camp and the oven” (1976/1979: 157). Qualifying these concerns, Sign of Contradiction insists that people are not doomed by modernity’s cognitive disorders. They can still resist evil though their capacity to know truth and freely choose it (Wojtyła 1976/1979: 119). But where is the truth to be found? One source, Wojtyła

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says, is God: “Truth has a divine dimension; it belongs by nature to God himself” (1976/1979: 120). Another way to truth is to adopt the attitude of love. God’s love, Wojtyła states, was the motive for creation. It is therefore the source of the objective moral order of good and evil encountered by man (Wojtyła 1976/1979: 20). Love and truth are thus inseparable and can prevail in even the most barbaric instances. To illustrate this, Wojtyła refers to Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest murdered by the Nazis at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Kolbe, Wojtyła writes, died “of his own free choice, offering his own life in exchange for that of a fellow prisoner.” “And with that particular revelation,” Wojtyła states, “there passed through that hell-upon-earth a breath of fearless and indestructible goodness” (1976/1979: 51). In freely giving his life, Kolbe undermined Auschwitz by demonstrating the reality of personal human agency and showing that love of others is more basic to man than evil. Auschwitz serves throughout Wojtyła’s writings as a symbol for modernity’s totalitarian and dehumanizing tendencies. Living in Communist Poland made it inevitable that Wojtyła would engage the philosophical source of another modern tyranny: Marxism. The record suggests that Wojtyła did not believe that there was much for Catholics and Marxists to discuss. The Kraków-based “Znak” Catholic intellectual circle, to which Wojtyła was close, kept its distance from Marxist philosophical positions. As one Polish historian records, Znak was “[reluctant] to create a bridge between the Marxist and Catholic ideological positions” (Zmijewski 1991: 73). The first postwar edition of Znak’s newspaper, Tygodnik Powszechny, suggested that while Catholics had no desire to reconstruct prewar Polish economic realities, they did not need Marxist tools to comprehend reality (Piwowarczynk 1945: 1). Wojtyła was interested in two elements of Marxist analysis. One was Marxism’s understanding of human action. In

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several places, he describes the Marxist analysis of human action as only half right and therefore erroneous. Though attentive to human action’s effects upon the material world, Marxism did not appreciate the Thomistic insight that the greatest effect of freely chosen human actions was upon their initiator (Wojtyła 1974: 513–24). Wojtyła also studied Marx’s concept of alienation. Though agreeing with Marx that alienation is a particularly modern problem, Wojtyła argued that alienation proceeds not primarily from man’s relationship to the means of production, but rather from lack of love (1976/1979: 353). In broad terms, however, Wojtyła was dismissive of Marxism as a conversational partner. In Sign of Contradiction, Wojtyła suggested that Marxism as a philosophy had not been taken seriously in Poland since the late 1940s, primarily because of Marxism’s irredeemably materialistic character (Wojtyła 1976/1979: 13). Indeed, by the time of The Acting Person’s initial publication, even few Polish secular intellectuals regarded Marxist philosophy as viable. Nothing more poignantly symbolized this than the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski’s famous 1966 Warsaw University lecture in which his assessment of Marxism was so critical that he was expelled from the Polish Communist Party.

A Theologian of Land Bayern Born in 1927, Ratzinger shared Wojtyła’s experience of living in an intensely Catholic culture which was subject, albeit in often different ways, to the demands of Nazi totalitarianism. Ever since the Counter-Reformation, Bavaria had remained solidly Catholic in a largely Protestant German-speaking world. Following German unification in 1871, Bavaria retained a high degree of autonomy and a consciousness of its particular identity. To be Catholic and Bavarian was thus to be German in a different way than,

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for example, Lutheran Prussians. This difference was intensified by the Kulturkampf waged against the Catholic Church in Germany by the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck between 1871 and 1878 as he sought to tighten the state’s control over Catholic activities, and manifested in the disproportionately low number of Catholics voting for Hitler in Germany’s last free elections in 1933. During the Nazi period, the Catholic Church in Germany proved more successful in retaining its autonomy than its Protestant counterparts, despite various forms of sporadic and systematic harassment and the imprisonment of large numbers of Catholic clergy. Catholics were the largest group in the German anti-Nazi Resistance, and it was the outspoken sermons of Bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster that forced the Nazi regime to dismantle, albeit temporarily, its euthanasia program in 1941. All of this made an impression upon Ratzinger. “Despite many human failings,” Ratzinger wrote, “the Church was the alternative to the destructive ideology of the brown rulers; in the inferno that had swallowed up the powerful, she had stood firm with a force coming to her from eternity” (1998: 42). Ratzinger was also conscious of how weak liberal versions of Christianity had proved in the face of those unbound by any moral constraints. As one of his intellectual biographers notes, Ratzinger regarded “the collapse of liberal theology before the advance of the Nazi ideology . . . as one of the more instructive lessons provided by the history of his homeland” (Nichols 2005: 16). In 1945, Ratzinger entered the archdiocese of MunichFreising’s major seminary. As well as following the usual philosophy courses, Ratzinger read texts by twentieth-century Catholic intellectuals including Romani Guardini, Josef Pieper, and George Bernanos. He also received a thorough introduction to non-Christian writers ranging from the prophet of atheistic-nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche, to the Jewish scholar Martin Buber. At the time, Ratzinger

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believed that there were real prospects for rapprochement between the worlds of faith and science: “we thought,” he wrote, “with the breakthroughs made by Plank, Heisenberg, and Einstein, the sciences were once again on their way to God” (Ratzinger 1998: 42–3). Nonetheless for all his awareness of the contemporary, Ratzinger identified the fourth-century bishop and Church Father, St. Augustine, as his intellectual lodestar. Writing in 1969, Ratzinger commented, “Augustine has kept me company for more than twenty years. I have developed my theology in a dialogue with Augustine, though naturally I have tried to conduct this dialogue as a man of today” (1969a: 543). Ratzinger’s Augustinianism was not, therefore, a mere recitation of past arguments and glories, but one attentive to the challenge of modern problems. Interestingly Ratzinger found the Thomism of his time “closed in on itself” and “too impersonal” (Ratzinger 1998: 44). He likely had in mind the dominance of the rather abstract neo-scholasticism that emerged in the nineteenth century in the wake of Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris. Personified by Wojtyła’s Roman doctoral supervisor, Garrigou-Lagrange, neo-scholasticism was critical of the French-dominated nouvelle théologie movement which emphasized locating Aquinas in his historical context and deepening awareness of other, often more ancient aspects of Catholic theological and philosophical tradition. Moving to Munich for theological studies in 1947, Ratzinger became interested in the movement for Catholic theology to be rethought through a return to the sources of Christian inspiration. Biblical studies became, for Ratzinger, “the center of my theology” (1998: 52), with the proviso that theology had to be done as a way of thinking with rather than against or outside the Church. It was not a question of dispensing with Thomism, but rather making Catholics conscious that the richness of Catholic tradition embraced an array of sources that deserved closer

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study and scrutiny, especially the writings of early Church Fathers. In pursuing this work, Ratzinger was not afraid to draw upon modern exegetical studies of Scripture, but also held that Scripture needed to be interpreted on the basis of the unity of the Old and New Testaments as well as the unfolding of the knowledge contained in Church Tradition (Twomey 2005: 67). Following his ordination to the priesthood in 1951, Ratzinger completed his doctorate, The People and the House of God in St. Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church (1954). For his habilitationsschrift, Ratzinger shifted his attention from Augustine to the Franciscan medieval theologian St. Bonaventure. This shift seem odd until one realizes that much of Augustine and Bonaventure’s work is concerned with the theology of history, and penned in response to particular historical crises. Augustine’s City of God, for example, attempted to answer pagan assertions that Christianity had facilitated the Roman Empire’s collapse, while Bonaventure’s works sought to provide an orthodox Catholic response to the historical-theological prophecies of a twelfth-century southern Italian monk Joachim of Fiore. By Ratzinger’s account, Joachim held that Scripture could be interpreted to show that history was progressing from a “Kingdom of the Father” (the Old Testament), through the “Kingdom of the Son” (the Church until the thirteenth century), to a third “Kingdom of the Spirit” that marked a new and final era of freedom in human history. In Joachim’s schema, this Church of the Spirit had begun with Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan movement. In this new age, Joachim theorized, the church’s hierarchy would be unnecessary and even infidels would unite with Christians in a new spiritual brotherhood of man—a Kingdom of God on earth. By the thirteenth century, many of Joachim’s followers, known as “spirituals,” had embraced very radical interpretations of such ideas, including violence against the established order.

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For Ratzinger, Bonaventure’s importance lies in the fact that he attempted to develop an alternative theology of history to Joachim’s prophecies (Ratzinger 1959/1971). But Ratzinger also argued that Bonaventure was perhaps too tolerant of Joachim’s effort to set up a new second end of history in addition to Christ’s coming. The longer-term significance of Ratzinger’s study of Bonaventure is that it caused him to grapple with what are clearly anticipatory medieval forms of the liberation theologies which the papacy confronted in the twentieth-century’s last decades. As an Augustinian, Ratzinger believed that human history was transitory and that only the City of God lasts forever. Hence, he was unlikely to be sympathetic to Joachim’s attempt to realize “the end of history” in human history or to create God’s Kingdom in the here and now—an ambition that marked not just various liberation theologies but, Ratzinger would argue, any theological or political program that dispenses with or marginalizes a transcendent loving God. Not coincidentally, Ratzinger later made a point of underlining the importance of de Lubac’s study of the influence of Joachim’s thought upon Western intellectual currents (Ratzinger 1998: 110)—a path that led, de Lubac claimed, to Hegel, Auguste Comte, and eventually modernity’s totalitarian movements (de Lubac 1979/1981). Assuming a professorship first at Freising’s college of philosophy and theology in 1958, Ratzinger went on to accept a chair in fundamental theology at Bonn University in 1959. Here he published his next significant book, Christian Brotherhood (1960). This explores the Christian idea of the universal brotherhood of Christians, and how this ought to be related to internal Christian divisions as well as Christian attitudes towards non-Christians. Of interest is the manner in which Ratzinger contrasted the Christian vision of brotherhood with secular notions of universal brotherhood which emerged during the Enlightenment,

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especially through the medium of freemasonry. He added that Marxism represents a secular radicalization of the idea of those who belong to the brotherhood (the party’s committed revolutionary core) and those who do not (everyone else). Importantly, Ratzinger concluded that Christians should be more measured in their expectation of creating universal brotherhood in this world—a comment indicating Ratzinger’s consciousness of the power of human sin. During his time at Bonn, Ratzinger came into contact with Cologne’s Archbishop, Cardinal Josef Frings, who took Ratzinger to Rome as his theological advisor when attending Vatican II in September 1962. Here Ratzinger spent more time with theologians such as de Lubac, Rahner, Hans Küng, and Jean Daniélou S.J. Sharing de Lubac’s and Daniélou’s enthusiasm for the Council’s return to the sources of Catholic theology, especially the Bible and the Church Fathers, Ratzinger was pleased with the Council’s documents on divine revelation, Dei Verbum, and the nature of the Church, Lumen Gentium. This “return” to the sources—commonly referred to by the French term ressourcement—was considered essential by Ratzinger if the updating of Church practices— sometimes described as aggiornamento—and the Church’s dialogue with modernity was to be consistent with Catholic faith. As the Dominican theologian and later cardinal Yves Congar wrote, “only a profound understanding of the tradition can guide [the church] to discern the useful elements in modernity, to select them with certainty, to adapt them with tact” (1950: 339). By 1965, however, Ratzinger had clearly become nonplussed at developments at the Council. He retrospectively describes many Council participants as lapsing into habits more akin to secular politics than a Church Council. “The faith,” Ratzinger wrote, “no longer seemed exempt from human decision making but rather was now determined

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by it” (Ratzinger 1998: 133)—an observation echoed in de Lubac’s memoirs (1992/2006: 119). Many theologians effectively asserted that they, rather than the bishops, should determine what did and did not belong to the Catholic faith. Aggiornamento, to Ratzinger’s mind, was becoming unhinged from ressourcement, permitting aggiornamneto to degenerate into mere accommodation to modern secularism. De Lubac goes so far as to suggest that much Western post-conciliar Catholic theology encouraged a Catholic “ ‘autodestruction’ de l’Eglise et d’ ‘apostasie interne’ ” (1992/2006: 152) and systematic opposition to the papacy among many theologians (1992/2006: 162). In a letter written in Rome on June 5, 1964, de Lubac lamented: Today, even some of the faithful, and even some priests (without excluding the religious), are tempted “to open themselves to the world” in such a manner that they free themselves to be invaded by it. . . . As for non-believers, many will not neglect to say: The Church abandons little by little her dogmas. She is vaguely aware that her role is finished; thus she comes to us in order to preserve herself, without daring to yet abandon her religious phraseology. (de Lubac 1992/2006: 343)

These views manifested themselves in Ratzinger’s critical opinion of various Gaudium et Spes drafts. Like Wojtyła, Ratzinger approved of the Council’s desire to speak to modernity in a “nonauthoritarian” ecclesial manner. Nevertheless he also believed the drafts tended to marginalize the Christian Gospel’s specificity and unique truth. “The text,” he wrote, “as it stood itself prompted the question why exactly the reasonable and perfectly human being described in the first articles was suddenly burdened with the story of Christ” (Ratzinger 1969b: 136). The document’s drafters, Ratzinger contended, had “unfortunately dragged beyond those protecting walls of the theology faculty just those affirmations which

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theology shares anyhow with any spiritual-ethical picture of man whatsoever. Whereas what is proper to theology— discourse about Christ and his work—was left behind in a conceptual deep-freeze, and so allowed to appear, in contrast to the understandable part, even more unintelligible and antiquated” (Ratzinger 1965: 34). Either there was something distinctly true about faith in Christ, Ratzinger suggested, or faith was just another ideology. If Christianity simply presented itself as just another group seeking dialogue with others, then Christianity was not taking its own truth-claims seriously (Ratzinger 1969b: 115–63). Here Ratzinger was critical of tendencies in early Gaudium et Spes drafts to identify modern progress so strongly with Christian redemption that the two seemed indistinguishable. Human progress and technology were only of service to man, Ratzinger insisted, when ordered by the Christian ethos “which itself serves to make man more human, which itself serves love” (1965: 42). Events after the Council appear to have confirmed Ratzinger in his view that something had gone awry in the manner in which many Catholics addressed modernity. Having moved from Bonn to the University of Münster in 1963, Ratzinger assumed a chair in dogmatic theology at the University of Tübingen at the invitation, ironically enough, of Hans Küng (later to become one of Ratzinger’s fiercest critics) in 1966. Two years later, Tübingen was engulfed by 1968’s tide of student radicalism, as modernity itself seemed to implode. According to Ratzinger, “the Marxist revolution kindled the whole university with its fervor, shaking it to its very foundations,” with the Protestant and Catholic theological faculties at the storm’s epicenter (1998: 137). The postwar generation, Ratzinger states, regarded Christianity as “a mistake and a failure” (2000: 11). Ratzinger was especially disturbed at how Marxist categories were transplanted onto Christian concepts, with the party assuming the place of God,

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and Christian eschatology reduced to a determination to realize heaven-on-earth, no matter what the cost. He was also shocked by the 1968 generation’s blindness to crimes committed by Marxist regimes and attempts to rationalize state terrorism through the use of pseudo-theological arguments. Amidst the Tübingen turmoil, Ratzinger delivered a series of lectures for students of all faculties, later published as Introduction to Christianity (1968/2000). The best-selling book’s attractiveness lay in that it was not about being for and against Vatican II, open or closed to modernity. Rather it concerned what it meant to be a believing Christian. Nonetheless Introduction to Christianity also warned that a world without God left humans with “solely the reality of given historical circumstances, which were to be . . . redirected to the right goals by the appropriate means, among which violence was indispensable” (Ratzinger 1968/2000: 15). Precisely for this reason, Introduction to Christianity affirms that the Church must never allow itself to be reduced to a political entity. Moving to the University of Regensburg in 1969, Ratzinger became more involved with other Catholics who also believed that aggiornamento had become detached from ressourcement in the post-conciliar period, and who insisted that there must be some critical distance between the Church and the cultures in which it lives. As well as Daniélou and de Lubac, this included the French convert Louis Bouyer, the Chilean theologian Jorge Medina, the patristic scholar M.-J. Le Guillou, the Italian priest Luigi Giussani, and the Swiss-German theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. At the latter’s suggestion, they founded a journal called Communio in 1972. Balthasar’s objective, Ratzinger later wrote, was “to gather together all those which sought to bring together those who did not want to do theology on the preset goals of ecclesial politics but who were intent on developing theology rigorously

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on the basis of its own proper sources and methods” (Ratzinger 1998: 144). It was immediately perceived as a rival to another post-conciliar journal, Concilium, in which Ratzinger was involved until he became dissatisfied with its tone and emerging agenda. Associated with figures such as Rahner, Küng, and the Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, Concilium developed a reputation for being harshly critical of what it regarded as the papacy’s unwarranted hesitations about modernity—so much so that de Lubac refused to associate himself with a 1968 Concilium declaration, which he described as “indecent,” “without purpose,” “demagogic,” and drafted by theologians determined to impose their own dictatorship on the Church (de Lubac 1992/2006: 367). Over time Concilium’s rival, Communio, developed into a federation of allied language-based journals that, guided principally by von Balthasar, embraced an international network of Catholic intellectuals who believed the Catholic dialogue with modernity was becoming a oneway conversation with Catholics as the silent participants and mere recipients of secularist wisdom. Modernity, they held, needed a Catholicism which spoke to the present through returning to Christianity’s sources. Figures associated with Communio who later assumed important episcopal positions during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI included Jean-Marie Lustiger, Christoph von Schönborn, Angelo Scola, and Marc Ouellet, each becoming cardinal archbishop of Paris, Vienna, Venice, and Quebec City respectively. During this period, Ratzinger began to focus on issues that he later found himself obliged to address in his long tenure as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. His 1977 book Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, for instance, rejected efforts at the time to reduce Christianity’s meaning to politics (a theme of liberation theologians) and argued for more emphasis

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on Christianity’s ultimately transcendental focus and implications. For Ratzinger, Scripture amply testified to Christianity’s recognition of the necessity of politics as a sphere characterized by the art of the possible within the parameters of the natural law, but also implicitly rejected political theology, understood as the attempt to redefine Christianity as an effort to realize perfect justice in this world. Not only did Ratzinger name liberation theology as an example of the problem, but he also specifically criticized the father of political theology, Johann Baptist Metz. “The Kingdom of God,” Ratzinger wrote, “not being itself a political concept, cannot serve as a political criterion by which to construct in direct fashion a program of political action and to criticize the political efforts of other people” (1977/1988: 89). A 1975 essay by Ratzinger on Catholic moral theology illustrates the path that the future pope was attempting to steer. First, it was critical of Catholics whose approach to modernity involved claiming that orthopraxis—the building of a better world—takes precedence over orthodox belief. Ratzinger underlined Marxism’s influences upon such thinking. It is not, Ratzinger said, that the modern concern for orthopraxis is unimportant. On the contrary, its roots lay very much in Christianity. But, Ratzinger insisted, orthopraxis for the Christian must conform to orthodox Christian belief—otherwise it will not accord with Christianity and therefore the truth. Second, Ratzinger was critical of Catholic theologians who believed “Faith does not develop a morality of its own, but adopts the practical reason of contemporary men and women” (1975/1986: 49). Here Ratzinger singled out Küng and the moralist Josef Fuchs S.J., both of whom believed that modern biblical exegesis proves that there is nothing distinctive about Christian morality. Against this view—which translates into Christianity taking its moral guidance from modernity—Ratzinger welcomed the insights arising from

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modern exegetical methods, but stated that they actually prove the opposite of what Küng and others claimed. “Anyone,” Ratzinger wrote, “who has read the Pauline letters carefully will see that the apostolic exhortation is not some moralizing appendix with a variable content, but a very practical setting forth of what faith means; thus, it is inseparable from faith’s core” (1975/1986: 65).5 Ratzinger illustrated that the early Church Fathers understood that being a Christian meant changing the way people had hitherto lived their lives instead of simply conforming to the ways of the non-Christian world. Hence, Ratzinger noted, “the theological and moral aspects are fused inseparably . . . in the basic concept of what Christian reality is” (1977/1986: 61). The pattern of this article is instructive. Ratzinger acknowledges the legitimacy of modern scholarly methods and concerns. He insists, however, upon going back to original sources to illustrate why Catholics can and should speak to contemporary man in a distinctly Christian way. In a later book, Ratzinger spoke harshly of those church leaders who “become dogs without a bark who out of cowardice in front of the liberal public stood by flecklessly as faith was bit by bit traded off for the mess of potage, of the recognition of modernity” (1982: 340). Taken together, these writings called upon Catholicism to examine the treasures of its own heritage so as to propose Christian truth in a fashion capable of breaking through modernity’s constraints. It was an approach to modernity that was to characterize the papacy in the twentieth-century’s last quarter.

A New Papacy, a Distinct Agenda Two years after penning this article, Ratzinger was appointed archbishop of Munich by Paul VI. Less than

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one month later, on June 27, 1977, he was made a cardinal. Sixteen months later, Ratzinger participated in the conclave that elected Karol Wojtyła as pope. Four years later, Ratzinger joined John Paul II in Rome after agreeing to the latter’s request to become Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Roman Curial body charged with promoting and safeguarding Catholic doctrine on faith and morals throughout the world. In 1974, the philosopher Josef Pieper, a friend of Ratzinger’s, encountered Wojtyła at an academic conference in Italy. He subsequently wrote to Ratzinger, suggesting that Ratzinger contact Wojtyła. Thus began an intellectual partnership, first with book exchanges, followed by meetings at the 1977 Synod of Bishops, and the two conclaves of 1978. According to Ratzinger, there was a “spontaneous sympathy between us . . . we spoke . . . about what we should do, about the situation of the Church” (Weigel 2005: 178). Two men forged in twentieth-century Mitteleuropa’s maelstroms and who had formed very definite views about Catholicism’s engagement with modernity thus came to have a unique opportunity to shape the papacy’s approach to modernity. This does not mean their estimations of the possibilities for dialogue between Catholicism and modernity were the same. Yet for all these subtle differences, Wojtyła and Ratzinger began to draw on Catholicism’s rich heritage and their own intellectual journeys to articulate a sophisticated set of propositions to the modern world.

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One of twentieth-century Catholicism’s pivotal intellectuals was the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac. Born in 1896 and dying in 1991, de Lubac experienced the twentieth-century’s upheavals at first hand. He fought in the First World War’s trenches, participated in the French Resistance during the Second World War, worked as a theological expert at Vatican II, and served as a friend and intellectual interlocutor to both Karol Wojtyła and Joseph Ratzinger. De Lubac was the son of a Banque de France official and a mother whose family atmosphere de Lubac once described as “austere, very religious, and ultra-legitimist,” but not followers of the ultra-conservative Action Française (1992/2006: 412) founded by the author, poet and critic Charles Maurras. Entering the Jesuits in 1913, de Lubac quickly became interested in the Church Fathers, especially Augustine and Origen. Following active service in the French Army during the First World War, de Lubac soon came to the attention of his superiors as one possessing rare intellectual gifts. Appointed to the chair of fundamental theology in Lyons’ Theology Faculty in 1929, de Lubac’s writings began to find their way into the influential French theological journals Revue des sciences religieuse and Nouvelle revue théologique. De Lubac’s first major text, Catholicisme (1938)—which explores the social implications of Catholic dogmas—had a profound impact throughout

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Catholic Europe. Following the Second World War, however, de Lubac’s Surnaturel (1946), which critiqued various aspects of the then-dominant forms of neo-scholasticism, attracted criticism from several theologians. Some interpreted Pius XII’s Humani Generis as refuting de Lubac’s position on the grace-nature controversy. De Lubac himself never believed this was the case and revealed later in life that Pius XII encouraged him to continue his work from which the pope said he expected much (1992/2006). Considered theologically suspect by some Catholics before Vatican II, de Lubac’s writings did indeed bear fruit. They were among the most influential of any theologian advising the Council. But after the Council, there emerged what some believed was a “new” de Lubac: a leading voice against what many regarded as the reckless experimentation into which much of the Catholic Church in the developed world descended after Vatican II. The tendency to divide de Lubac into preconciliar “progressive” and post-conciliar “conservative” is widespread but also reflects an inability to see that de Lubac’s consistency lies in his insistence that the Catholic Church could only be truly renewed and engage modernity if it returned to close study of the traditional sources of Christian inspiration, specifically Scripture, the Church Fathers, and the great medieval theologians. Here, de Lubac believed, were to be found authentically Catholic responses to modernity’s challenges. Thus de Lubac, who found himself opposed before Vatican II by adherents of somewhat rigid forms of scholasticism, became after the Council a major, penetrating and influential critic of those anxious to immerse Catholicism in post-Enlightenment philosophies and eventually left-wing social and political movements. For de Lubac, it was never a question of whether the Church ought to address modernity. Rather it was a matter of how to do so in a manner consistent with the fullness of Catholic tradition. Nor did de Lubac entertain

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any romantic illusions about modernity. Modernity, to his mind, was a complex phenomenon, with great potential but also unresolved problems, especially in its civilizational implications. This much is evident from his famous book Le drame de l’humanisme athée (1944/1998). Written during the worst period of the German occupation of France and in a postwar Western Europe where Marxism was becoming intellectually dominant, this is far from a strictly theological book. Examining the thought of Marx, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Comte, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard, de Lubac marveled that, for many self-consciously modern people, abolishing God had become key to man’s liberation. The idea of faith in God and His love for humanity, de Lubac maintained, had been decoupled from faith in man’s ability to know truth and create a better world through reason. According to de Lubac, the modern mind had embraced the notion that any humanism (understood as a commitment to genuinely human progress) that was Christian in its orientation and inspiration was a deception at best and likely to be a source of alienation. The danger, de Lubac insisted, was that any humanism incapable of deriving its inner rationality from belief in the Christian God would eventually result in humanity’s self-degradation. “Exclusive humanism,” de Lubac wrote, “is inhuman humanism” (1950: ix). As long as significant portions of the modern project derived their inner logic from atheistic premises, de Lubac reasoned, man could “only organize the world against man” (de Lubac 1950: ix). Given their close acquaintance with de Lubac’s person and work, it is not surprising that Wojtyła and Ratzinger devoted a considerable portion of the papacy’s intellectual energies in the post-conciliar period to demonstrating how modern man’s humanist aspirations might be successfully regrounded upon what Catholicism regards as the full truth about man. Though this involved commentary on many questions, central to their pontificates’ respective agendas

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was a major effort to articulate Catholicism’s vision of the proper relationship between faith and reason—especially faith and the positive sciences—and the associated issue of truth and freedom. For each pope, controversies about these subjects were integral to the Church’s critical engagement with post-Enlightenment thought and the papacy’s effort to address Catholicism’s associated post-conciliar crisis. In this connection, Europe figured significantly as a focus for each man’s writings. This resulted from more than simply concerns about Catholicism’s difficulties in postEnlightenment Western Europe. Modernity was, after all, born in Christian Europe, and modernity’s more radical manifestations were experienced by Europeans from the French Revolution onwards. As quintessential Europeans, intimately familiar with classical, Christian, and secular European currents of thought, Benedict XVI and John Paul II recognized the benefits conferred by modernity upon Europe. They were nonetheless equally convinced of the growth throughout Europe of precisely those forms of humanism which, in de Lubac’s view, threatened “the annihilation of the human person” (1950: vii).

Restoring Wisdom to Reason, and Faith in Reason The Catholic Church is no stranger to the life of the mind. Leaving aside the fact that the medieval Church was responsible for the founding of the first universities as well as the prominent involvement of Catholics in virtually every field of intellectual endeavor, the Acts of the Apostles records that Christians were conversant with Greco-Roman ideas from the very beginning of the Christian religion. They entered, as St. Paul did, into conversation with “certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers” (Acts 17:18). Through reason, Catholicism always insisted, people can arrive at

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a natural knowledge of God—something stressed by the First Vatican Council—while simultaneously warning against the confusion of practical wisdom with esoteric speculation. In 1998, however, John Paul II issued an encyclical letter, Fides et Ratio, that, as the title suggests, squarely addressed the relationship between faith and reason. The fact that a pope considered this subject to warrant an entire encyclical suggests that he believed that the Catholic Church needed, once again, to explain its teaching on this matter; and, secondly, that there were problems with prevailing conceptions of reason articulated by self-described moderns. Both Wojtyła and Ratzinger were convinced that the sundering of the knowledge conferred by faith from the knowledge attained through reason—a split traditionally associated with modernity’s advent—was something the Church needed to analyze, correct and explain to Catholics living in the modern world, to those who believed the two realms had nothing in common, and to those who believed that the claims of faith somehow threatened the advances made by reason, particularly in the positive sciences. It is true, as Ratzinger remarked at the time of Fides et Ratio’s promulgation, that the precise relationship between reason and faith “was never quite beyond dispute” for Catholics, even after Aquinas’ masterly synthesis (Ratzinger 2004: 177). What was not questioned in the Christian world until the late medieval period was that there was no necessary incompatibility between the two realms of knowledge. Thereafter, according to John Paul, the legitimate autonomy of philosophy and the sciences that had been recognized as essential to the integrity of such intellectual pursuits developed into a type of separatism (FR 45). On several occasions, John Paul reemphasized Gaudium et Spes’ acknowledgment that the Church’s handling of the Galileo case had misled many into thinking that science and faith were opposed (John Paul II

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1979b: 6). But the split was also partly driven, John Paul maintained, by some thinkers’ exaggerated rationalism (FR 45). Here Ratzinger identified Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant as “points along the way of this process of separation” (Ratzinger 2004: 177). The distinction between ratio (the empirical realm of what can be done) and intellectus (reason that contemplates “the deeper strata of being”) was lost, with only ratio remaining. Reason was thus, Ratzinger argues, reduced to solely experimental study, and morality and faith to the purely subjective. The drama of this separation, according to John Paul and Benedict, was played out in Western intellectual history. In Fides et Ratio, John Paul suggests the Christian synthesis of faith and reason was undermined by intellectual systems aspiring to replace faith with rational knowledge, reaching its apogee in nineteenth-century idealism as well as “various forms of atheistic humanism” that effectively presented themselves as new religions (whether their adherents realized it or not) which in turn lay at the root of twentieth-century totalitarianisms (FR 46). Ratzinger elaborates on this analysis. First, he argues that those Enlightenment scholars who self-consciously cut their ideas off from their historical Christian roots, effectively detached themselves from “the basic memory of mankind” (Ratzinger 2006a: 41). While, Ratzinger writes, Hegel attempted to return faith to its correct place in philosophical reasoning, in doing so Hegel tried to transform faith into reason, thereby dissolving faith qua faith. Marx, Ratzinger claims, took the opposite path, insisting the apparent truth of materialism meant that the only valid form of knowledge was exact scientific knowledge, thereby making the very idea of God irrelevant. Paralleling such thinking, Ratzinger adds, was the proposition of the founder of philosophical positivism, the nineteenth-century French scholar Auguste Comte, that all those issues hitherto addressed by metaphysics

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would henceforth be addressed by the positive sciences. Drawing explicitly upon de Lubac’s Le drame de l’humanisme athée, Ratzinger argues that Comte’s claim was the unspoken basis upon which many intellectuals presumed to dissolve Christianity’s separation of metaphysics and physics by subsuming metaphysics into physics. This “triumph of positivism” also allowed theories of evolution to effectively develop into a new religion for all intents and purposes insofar as they attempted to articulate a comprehensive all-embracing explanation of reality which was closed and hostile to external critique. Because the Christian vision of God could not be grasped solely through the positive sciences (which self-consciously insist they eschew the type of philosophical logic that one encounters in figures such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas), Ratzinger maintains that Christianity became viewed as unscientific and therefore irrational (2004: 177–8). The tragedy, according to John Paul and Ratzinger’s minds, is that there was nothing necessary about this separation. Fides et Ratio underscores that the modern sciences first flourished in medieval universities built by the Church and gained much of their precision through their encounter with Catholic theology and principles of logic (FR 45). Catholicism, Ratzinger notes, always understood itself “to be the religion of the Logos,” whose antecedents were not simply Judaism but also those Greco-Romano philosophies that helped undermine the highly superstitious pagan religions that had obstructed the search for truth (2006a: 47). Philosophy, understood as exploring the rational element, had always been a powerful force in Catholicism. Part of the problem, at least by the seventeenth century, Ratzinger claims, was that “the voice of reason had become excessively tame” (Ratzinger 2006a: 48) within the Church. The Enlightenment, Ratzinger states, has the merit of eventually forcing the Church to re-focus its attention upon the value placed upon reason by

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Scripture, the Church Fathers, and medieval theologians, thereby restoring reason to its proper place in Christian discourse (2006a: 48). According to John Paul and Ratzinger, the radical separation of reason and faith associated with modernity resulted in considerable damage first and foremost to faith and reason themselves. This in turn generated an even deeper crisis in man’s confidence in his ability to know anything with certainty. Deprived of reason, John Paul states, faith has in many instances been reduced to “feeling and experience,” thereby weakening faith’s claims as universal propositions presented to peoples’ intellect for their rational assent. This in turn caused faith to degenerate in some cases into superstition (FR 48). Faith’s separation from reason also resulted in some Christians falling into the error of what John Paul denotes as fideism. When Christians no longer take reason seriously, John Paul contends, they sometimes embrace what he calls the widespread symptom of “biblicism”: making Scripture-reading and exegesis the sole criterion of truth (i.e., radical Protestantism). They also become disdainful of the classical philosophical terms that aided understanding of the Christian faith and which played an important role in “the actual formulation of dogma” (FR 55). Ratzinger extends this analysis. In the absence of reason, believers are more susceptible to fanaticism and terrorism, precisely because God becomes for them an idol when they are in fact simply worshipping their own will (Ratzinger 2006b: 109). But the sundering of faith and reason also created what Ratzinger describes as “pathologies of reason” (2006b: 109). In his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, John Paul indicates the separation of faith—specifically faith in Divine Revelation—from reason led some Catholic theologians to posit what he describes as “a complete sovereignty of reason in the domain of moral norms regarding the right ordering of life in this world” (VS 36). Recalling the

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Thomistic insight that Revelation allows humans to know when they have fallen into error despite the best efforts of their reason, Veritatis Splendor maintains that those who claim human morality proceeds solely from human reason have forgotten the Catholic and Scriptural teaching that “the natural moral law has God as its author” and that reason allows people to know this law because human reason itself proceeds from God. In 1975, Ratzinger singled out the Jesuit moralist Josef Fuchs as representative of this error (1975/1986: 66). It is no coincidence that at the time of Veritatis Splendor’s promulgation in 1993, it was viewed in some circles as underlining the essential incompatibility of Fuchs’ methods of moral reasoning with both Catholic faith and the demands of right reason. Looking outside the Church, John Paul maintains that when philosophical learning is stripped of attentiveness to the transcendent, other forms of rationality—most notably the instrumental reason which focuses on questions of utility—assume dominance (FR 47). Though John Paul acknowledges the fruits of applying instrumental reason, especially in the realm of the positive sciences, modernity’s diminishment of reason’s capacity, he argues, to contemplate human existence’s ultimate meaning has left many people in a state of cognitive dissonance (FR 47). Ratzinger suggests that reason’s “turning away from the ultimate questions, has rendered itself insignificant and boring” precisely because it “has resigned its competence where the keys to life are concerned: good and evil, death and immortality” (Ratzinger 2004: 209). Indeed John Paul insists that instrumental reason’s inability to provide answers to the perennial questions has indirectly facilitated the development of nihilist attitudes that reduce human existence to “sensations and experiences in which the ephemeral has pride of place” (FR 46). It also encourages, Ratzinger writes, the prevalence of logical absurdities. One such absurdity is that of scientists concluding

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that “man basically does not possess any liberty,” having ignored the fact that the very fact of free human choice allows them to choose freely to pursue scientific research in the first place (2006a: 42). Reason loses its orientation when “the guiding principle is that man’s capability determines what he does”: that is, the non sequitur that if you know how to do something, then you are permitted to do it (Ratzinger 2006a: 41). One effect of this “positivistic mentality,” as John Paul calls it, was to encourage scientists to prioritize the acquisition of technical knowledge over human life (FR 46). Man, according to Ratzinger, is no longer seen as the Creator’s gift, but rather as a manufactured product, “and what one can ‘make’ one can also unmake” (2006b: 110). Another effect of this “self-authorization,” to employ Ratzinger’s description (2006a: 42), is that people can no longer respond coherently to moral questions. Instead they employ instrumental reason to engage in the literally impossible task of weighing and calculating—something attempted by Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and all utilitarians in one form or another—all the possible (and unforeseen) effects of an action or a rule. According to John Paul, many non-Christians have recognized “the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of evaluating all the good and evil consequences and effects . . . of one’s own acts.” “How then,” he adds, “can one go about establishing proportions which depend on a measuring, the criteria of which remain obscure?” (VS 77). As noted, there is little doubt that this criticism was directed at Catholic theologians of the ethical schools of “consequentialism” and “proprotionalism” associated with Josef Fuchs. But Ratzinger also applied it to modern secular movements. Observing that all totalitarian ideologies try to part company with God in order to construct a new man and world, Ratzinger comments that all the most prominent Marxist thinkers and practitioners

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“understood themselves as the builders of a world on the basis of reason alone.” The sheer cruelty of the programs implemented by Marxists such as Pol Pot, Ratzinger comments, dramatically exemplifies the results (2006b: 109). But, Ratzinger adds, there is a direct parallel here between the consequentialist mentality which says that “ ‘good’ means only ‘better than’ ” (and therefore nothing is intrinsically evil) and totalitarian regimes. The latter held “it can on occasion be ‘good’ to kill innocent persons” “if it helps the construction of the future world of reason” (Ratzinger 2006b: 110–11). Given John Paul and Ratzinger’s conviction that the faith-reason separation is central to the Church’s critique of modernity, it is hardly surprising that they proposed ways to heal the breach. This involved restating what they regard as the correct relationship between faith and reason through, in classic ressourcement fashion, studying the ancient sources of Christian knowledge. Much of Fides et Ratio therefore involves exegesis of the Old and New Testaments to illustrate that biblical writers did not denigrate reason. On the contrary, John Paul states, scriptural authors understood human history as a reality to be “observed, analyzed, and assessed with all the resources of reason” while they simultaneously presented faith as functioning “not to abolish reason’s autonomy” but to help people see God’s hand in these events (FR 17). Fides et Ratio observes that Old Testament sources hold that humans can know much about the world, including nature, through their unaided intelligence, and that the acquired knowledge of the order prevailing in the universe can “lead reason to knowledge of the Creator” (FR 19)—a point, as noted, stressed by the First Vatican Council in 1870. Likewise the New Testament, especially St. Paul’s letters, John Paul argues, demonstrates that reason is not limited to sensory knowledge, but can reflect critically upon the data provided by the senses to “reach the cause which lies

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at the origin of all perceptible reality” (FR 22). Looking at the Church Fathers, John Paul highlights Augustine as one whose work consisted in demonstrating that the unity of thought found in the Bible is “confirmed and sustained by a depth of speculative thinking” (FR 41). In this regard, Fides et Ratio underlines that figures ranging from Augustine to Aquinas viewed metaphysics as the realm where the logic of faith and the logic of reason encountered each other. Intellectually speaking, agnosticism and atheism are, John Paul maintains, products of positivist ways of thinking that sever the mind from its ability to know that which is more-than-material (John Paul II and Frossard 1985: 49). John Paul considers a contemporary “return” to metaphysics essential because it enables reason to escape the trap of reducing reality to the factual and empirical, thereby helping people “to move from phenomenon to foundation” (FR 83): the very place where people inevitably encounter the questions raised by religion and faith. Another approach to overcoming the faith-reason split suggested by John Paul is to stress that while reason and faith are distinct, they nonetheless find their unity in the human mind’s architecture. In short, faith is rational and disbelief irrational. “I know,” John Paul states, “that ‘I believe’ in God, but I also know that this ‘I believe’ is in correlation with an intellectually perceived knowledge” (John Paul II and Frossard 1985: 49). “Christian faith,” Ratzinger suggests, is grounded on the conviction that “at the beginning of all things stands the creative power of reason” (2004: 181). By contrast, he holds, agnosticism and atheism ultimately rely upon a rational affirmation that all is ultimately based upon irrationality. But “can reason really renounce its claim to the priority of what is rational over the irrational, the claim that the Logos is at the ultimate origin of things, without abolishing itself?” (Ratzinger 2004: 182). If that is the case, Ratzinger posits,

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then reason is simply “a chance by-product of irrationality . . . floating in an ocean of irrationality,” making reason itself “ultimately just as meaningless” (2004: 180), and therefore incapable of defending anything—including, one might add, atheism and agnosticism. Thus, Ratzinger states, Christians need to help reason function in a coherent manner precisely by speaking about God in the explicitly Christian terms of God himself as Logos, as “meaning, reason, and word” and “the primal ground of all that is real, the creative reason that gave birth to the world and that is reflected in the world” (2006b: 112). This question of the origins of reason and the inherent limits of positive knowledge led John Paul and Ratzinger to attempt to restate the correct relationship between faith and science. John Paul’s 1979 decision to revisit the Galileo case should be understood in this context. Addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1992, John Paul spelt out what he regarded as science’s contribution to faith. He noted that Galileo himself—following in Augustine and St. Robert Bellarmine’s footsteps— believed that if a verified truth of science apparently contradicted a truth of Scripture, then Scripture was not wrong, but rather the theologian-interpreter of the biblical texts (John Paul II 1992: 5–9). Failure to make this distinction, John Paul added, led theologians of Galileo’s time “unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith a question that pertained to scientific investigation” (1992: 9). Citing Galileo, the pope stated, “Holy Scripture can never lie, provided, however, that its real meaning is understood. The latter . . . is often hidden and very different from what the mere sense of the words seems to indicate” (John Paul II 1979b: 8). Having affirmed that faith cannot ignore truths revealed by science, John Paul asks scientists to reject “scientism”: the refusal “to admit the validity of forms of knowledge other than those of the positive sciences” (FR 88), not least

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because making excessive claims for science is itself irrational. “Scientific proofs in the modern sense of the word are valid only for things perceptible to the senses,” John Paul argues, “since it is only on such things that scientific instruments of investigation can be used” (1985: 1). Scientific inquiry presupposes a range of “metascientific concepts” (John Paul II 1992: 2) derived from philosophical logic rather than science itself, such as the axiom that one cannot admit effects without discerning their cause or that a procedure’s intelligibility cannot be understood without presupposing the procedure’s foreseen goal as chosen by human intelligence. Recalling an insight of Aristotle, Ratzinger observes that “all the sciences are interrelated within a system of reciprocal explanation and dependence. None of these sciences demonstrates or reflects everything; each of them . . . presupposes justifications it originally draws from some other science” (2006a: 108). Debates about theories of evolution are used by John Paul to underline these points. He does not deny scientific data that may lend credibility to particular propositions articulated by various theories of evolution. John Paul carefully notes, however, that “a theory is a meta-scientific elaboration, which is distinct from, but in harmony with, the results of observation” (1996b: 4). Any theory, he adds, involves some importation of “some ideas from the philosophy of nature” (John Paul II 1996b: 4). This means it is more accurate to speak of “theories of evolution,” some of which are materialistic, reductionist, or spiritualist. Here, John Paul claims, the Church should not hesitate to identify philosophical or logical errors existing in particular theories of evolution, precisely because the Church respects—as science should—the demands of truth (1996b: 5). Indeed Ratzinger directly challenges the logic of employing any theory of evolution to explain the entirety of reality. The “ultimate question,” as Ratzinger describes it, of whether reason or irrationality lies at

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“the beginning of all things” is simply not resolvable by scientific data (2004: 181). To his mind, the contradiction involved in attempting to prove through reason that all is essentially irrational or a matter of chance is essentially a self-refuting exercise insofar as it involves using reason to prove the “untruth” of reason. By contrast, the nature in which Christian revelation occurs, in Benedict’s view, affirms the truth of reason: The novelty of Christian proclamation does not consist in a thought, but in a deed: God has revealed himself. Yet this is no blind deed, but one which is itself Logos—the presence of eternal reason in our flesh. Verbum caro factum est (Jn 1:14): just so, amid what is made (factum) there is now Logos, Logos is among us. Creation (factum) is rational. (2008b)

A Crisis of Truth and Freedom John Paul II and Benedict XVI’s attention to the faithreason issue is closely associated with another issue that, to their mind, creates tension between Catholicism and modernity: the relationship between truth and freedom. Ratzinger argues that modernity’s attitude to nonscientific truth is summarized by Pontius Pilate’s question: “what is truth?” (2004: 232). Closely linked to this is the claim of some moderns that “the fundamental condition for any reconciliation of Christianity and modernity” (Ratzinger 2004: 210) is a Christianity that abandons its truth-claims—and thus its very essence. This situation, Ratzinger suggests, owes something to the culture associated with the Enlightenment, which is “substantially defined by the rights to liberty” and “its starting point” which regards liberty as “a fundamental value and the criterion of everything else” (2006a: 34). This has practical consequences, such as limiting the power of the state,

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some of which, Ratzinger notes, Christians would not wish to do without (Ratzinger 2006a: 35). It does, however, create tensions, such as between “a woman’s right to freedom and the unborn child’s right to life” (Ratzinger 2006a: 35). These, Ratzinger argues, emerge because Enlightenment culture’s concept of liberty “is either badly defined or not defined at all” (2006a: 35). The question of definition arises, to John Paul and Ratzinger’s minds, because liberty has been detached from man’s innate capacity to know truth, including those moral and spiritual truths that transcend scientific data. On one level, they affirm that this development owes something to concerns that truth-claims have been used by many, including Christians, to coerce people unjustly. “Truth,” Ratzinger says, “is controversial, and the attempt to impose on all persons what one part of the citizenry holds to be true looks like the enslavement of people’s consciences” (2006b: 55). To the modern mind, relativism therefore appears to be “the real guarantee of freedom . . . especially . . . freedom of religion and of conscience” (2006b: 55). Some Enlightenment thinkers, Ratzinger claims, did not go this far. The Protestant theologian Pierre Bayle is identified as one who, while holding that political freedom did not require metaphysics, nevertheless maintained that such liberty needed the affirmation that there was “only one single, universal, and necessary morality” which came from God and that every law and norm had “to take this truth as its point of reference” (Ratzinger 2006b: 65). As Christianity’s influence waned, however, widespread affirmation of this morality also declined. Another factor contributing to modernity’s separation of truth and freedom, John Paul claims, is the development of intellectual currents which hold that moral truth is not encountered by people, but rather is somehow created through their choices. In this scenario, John Paul

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writes, “human freedom would . . . be able to ‘create values’ and would enjoy a primacy over truth to the point that truth itself would be considered a creation of freedom” (VS 35). John Paul traces the roots of such thinking to ongoing debates about the relationship between human liberty and human nature. Such discussions are not new, John Paul comments, and grew especially heated during the Renaissance and the Reformation, generating very definitive and pointed responses from the Council of Trent. John Paul contends that some moderns have reduced the idea of human nature to “the world of the senses” such as physio-cultural constants, social conditioning, and psychological impulses. Yet other moderns conceive of human beings as “raw material for human activity” that “needs to be . . . transformed, and . . . overcome by freedom, inasmuch as it represents a limitation and denial of freedom” (VS 46). Reflecting upon such developments, Ratzinger remarks that the idea of natural law—which is how the premodern and early-modern worlds philosophically reconciled freedom and truth—presupposes “a concept of ‘nature’ in which nature and reason interlock: nature itself is rational” (Ratzinger and Habermas 2006: 69). The developments outlined above, however, along with the establishment of evolutionary theory as a grand explanatory narrative for everything, Ratzinger suggests, challenged the natural law understanding of nature. Hence, for selfdescribed moderns, human “nature per se is not rational, although it does contain rational behavior” (Ratzinger and Habermas 2006: 70). Not surprisingly, this leads modern philosophers ranging from Richard Rorty to Peter Singer to say that people have “the right and duty to construct the world anew in a rational manner” (Ratzinger 2006b: 157). The problem, Ratzinger suggests, is that having denied that human nature itself is rational and reduced reason to the positive sciences, the question of what is rational

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automatically narrows to issues of technological production, functionality, and effectiveness. Man himself becomes a product to be shaped rationally and thus subject to the control of others—the imperfect are to be weeded out as the quest for the perfect man gains pace. In such a world, Ratzinger suggests, there can be no moral absolutes and ethical questions quickly become dominated by a utilitarian calculus in which, for instance, “higher goals, such as the expectation of success in curing diseases, would justify even the abuse of man, provided that the good one hopes for appears sufficiently great” (2006b: 157). The effects of freedom’s detachment from truth, John Paul and Ratzinger insist, are positively antihuman. This exhibits itself in ways of thinking about moral questions. For some philosophers, John Paul maintains, moral issues become reduced to the statistical study of human behavior and determined by majority opinion (VS 46). The associated abolition of the notion that moral absolutes are inscribed into man’s natural reason leaves utilitarianism as the dominant ethical system, and people attempting to determine what they should do by engaging in literally impossible calculations of all the possible good and evil effects and utility of their choices (VS 77). This ultimately requires arbitrary—that is, unreasonable— decisions about what and how much to weigh. Prioritizing usefulness over truth, Ratzinger notes, inevitably results in people becoming the slaves of those who decide what is useful and what is not (2004: 228). Such attitudes, John Paul claims in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, suggest that skepticism and extreme concepts of subjectivity have become the norms for moral reflection (EV 11, 19). Putting the point bluntly, John Paul states: “When freedom . . . shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth . . . then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good

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and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or . . . selfish interest or whim” (EV 19). Separating truth from freedom, it is suggested, also results in “praxis” emerging as the sole criteria of good and evil. Ratzinger notes that the attention of twentiethcentury German political theologians to “orthopraxis” was profoundly influenced by Marxism’s suspicion of the concept of truth. In these circles, Ratzinger writes, truth is considered “unattainable” and simply “the ploy of interest groups seeking to confirm their position” (1975/1986: 48). Praxis itself becomes the sole determination of something’s value. This logic dictates, Ratzinger insists, that if Christianity is to be valuable, it too must transform itself into “an ‘orthopraxy’ of common action toward a more human future” and abandon orthodoxy—that is, the revealed truths of Christian belief—“as something unfruitful or even positively harmful” (1975/1986: 48). Referring specifically to the liberation theologies which emerged in Latin America under the influence of Latin Americans educated in Western Europe in the 1960s, Ratzinger comments that having adopted the Marxist view that truth itself cannot be understood metaphysically, liberation theology simply embraces the Marxist position that action is truth (Ratzinger and Messori 1985: 185). Orthodoxy in this schema is perceived as constraining creative action and must therefore be marginalized. Such developments, Ratzinger holds, make it all the more urgent that Christians must be absolutely clear about what it means to be a Christian believer and the intimate connection of Christian belief to the truth that human reason apprehends, but does not create: To believe in God means to believe in the truth; to believe in Christ means to believe in its accessibility and in the community that results from the truth and in that very way frees us from the arbitrary stipulations of human praxis, in which

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man becomes his own creature, his own God, and this his own slave. Accordingly, we should defend the Christianity of Jesus Christ himself against such developments by means of the accessibility and expressibility of the truth. (Ratzinger and Maier 2000: 40)

Then, from John Paul and Ratzinger’s standpoint, there is the damage done by this separation of truth from liberty to a coherent idea of conscience. Recalling the Catholic teaching that conscience gives man freedom precisely because it is the primordial voice of God’s truth written into man’s reason and being (VS 61), John Paul states that modernity’s sundering of truth and freedom has left many people convinced that conscience amounts to “an independent and exclusive capacity to decide what is good and evil” (VS 60) quite separate from the metaphysical and moral truth revealed through faith and reason. Ratzinger suggests that this in turn encourages people to believe that there can be no such thing as an erring conscience (2006b: 76), precisely because man’s free moral choices are no longer subject to the demands and judgment of truth. Conscience is no longer understood as “a window that makes it possible for man to see the truth that is common to all of us” or “the power to perceive the highest and most essential of realities” (Ratzinger 2006b: 79). Instead it becomes “a cloak thrown around human subjectivity, allowing man to elude the clutches of reality,” and “the justification of a human subjectivity that refuses to allow itself be called into question” (Ratzinger 2006b: 79). People are relieved of the expectation that they will search for the truth. All they need is to “feel” that they are right, or be self-convinced of their own sincerity, or adjust their opinions to fit the subjective views of others around them in the interests of conflict avoidance. Ratzinger remarks that if such a thesis was true “then even the SS troops under Hitler would have been justified and would now be in heaven, since they

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had committed their evil deeds out of fanatical conviction and without the least disturbance to their consciences” (2006b: 80). Errors arising from freedom’s detachment from truth are not, according to John Paul and Ratzinger, confined to the realm of philosophy and logic. It also has practical implications for the coherence of some of the fruits that modernity tends to claim as its own. John Paul stresses that the idea of human rights creates a sphere of freedom against tyranny. If, however, these freedoms are separated from coherent truth-claims, then their capacity to defend human liberties—even human life itself—becomes weakened, as does their claim to a certain priority over majority opinion. In Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II suggests that a strange paradox of modernity is that for all the prevalence of rights-language (EV 18), rights themselves are increasingly justified by reference to majority opinion and defined by the will of the stronger or according to some utilitarian calculus (EV 20, 23). Rights arbitrarily defined thus become the justification for crushing objective rights, such as when “the right of choice” is employed to extinguish the unborn human being’s “right to life.” A similar logic, John Paul claims, is at work in modern democracy. Noting in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus that totalitarianism—which, by definition, denies liberty— always relies upon denying objective truth, as expressed through rights to religious liberty, private property, etc. (CA 44), John Paul warns that democracy becomes susceptible to totalitarian tendencies once freedom ceases to be grounded in truth-claims (EV 70). Majority opinion does not nullify the demands of objective moral truth. Once they do, John Paul adds, democracy “is transformed into a tyrant State” (EV 20). Making a similar point, Ratzinger observes that democracies which reject metaphysical truths as threats to liberty are quickly reduced to functions such as constructing

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majority support, peaceful power transfers, etc., while majority decision comes to occupy “the position of ‘truth’ in the life of the state” (2006b: 56). To illustrate the effects, Ratzinger refers to the meditation of Hans Kelsen, one of positivism’s modern philosophical fathers, upon Jesus’ trial (2006b: 57–8). In his Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (1929), Kelsen presents Pontius Pilate, Ratzinger notes, as the perfect democrat. For as soon as Pilate asks Christ, “what is truth,” he does not wait for Christ’s response but turns to the crowd for a decision. This, Kelsen states, is what should occur in a procedurally correct democracy based on skepticism of truth-claims. Ratzinger, however, observes that Kelsen seems unconcerned that an innocent man is thereby condemned to death. Such, Ratzinger comments, is the logic of democratic freedom detached from higher truth. It ends, as Ratzinger famously stated in his last speech before being elected pope, in “a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s egos and desires” (2005a). The denial of God, Ratzinger held, implicit to denying that truth is knowable outside the positive sciences could eventually lead to a divinization of the state and whatever was perceived to give the state its ultimate legitimacy. The history of the twentieth century, he held, demonstrated the abyss into which such trends could lead entire civilizations. Neither John Paul nor Ratzinger entertained illusions about the difficulties involving in reconnecting freedom to truth under modern conditions. As Christians, both believed that the fact of human fallibility and human sinfulness rules out any perfect solution. Nevertheless they proposed concrete suggestions which took modernity’s concerns for liberty seriously, challenged freedom’s association with relativism, and did not require Catholicism to abandon its truth-claims. The first, according to Ratzinger, involves intellectuals—Catholic, non-Catholic, believing,

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unbelieving—returning to the origins of the modern movement for freedom. The Enlightenment, he argues, was characterized by a desire for emancipation in Kant’s sense of thinking for oneself and subjecting any claims to authority to critical scrutiny—the only remaining authority was reason. This trend, however, proceeded to split into two streams. One, associated with Rousseau, “ultimately aims at complete freedom from any rule” (Ratzinger 2004: 238) and is directed by an “antimetaphysical” concept of nature (Ratzinger 2004: 239), epitomized, in Ratzinger’s view, by Sartre’s claim that, unlike animals, man has “no nature” (Ratzinger 2004: 244). This was taken to extremes by the French Revolution’s violent phase, Nietzschean and Nazi nihilism, and Marxism, “which has always criticized democratic freedom as merely apparent freedom and has promised a better and more radical freedom” (Ratzinger 2004: 240): the creation of new people through ruthlessly creating new structures that allow whoever is left standing and in charge to do as they please (Ratzinger 2004: 241). From Ratzinger’s standpoint, this positing of freedom from truth leaves no room for Christianity. There is, however, another Enlightenment stream, which Ratzinger labels “the Anglo-Saxon trend,” perhaps associated with certain Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Gershom Carmichael and Francis Hutcheson. This, Ratzinger holds, is more inclined to natural law, tends to ground liberty upon the reason inscribed in man’s nature, regards positive law as subject to natural law (2004: 238), and assumes democracy is grounded on and limited by natural law (2006b: 63). Human rights, according to this vision, also proceed from human nature and thus come from within man; they are not granted to him from without. In this schema, human nature is more than just biology; “it is also a metaphysical idea: inherent in being itself there is an ethical and legal claim.” Such thoughts, Ratzinger concludes, are remarkably close to the Christian concept of

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human nature found in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, “which was inspired by Stoic teaching transformed by the theology of creation” (2004: 239). Ratzinger believes that this particular modern understanding of liberty enjoys sufficient commonality with Catholicism’s vision of human nature, liberty, and rights that it offers the possibility for a meeting of minds. Both share a basic confidence in reason’s ability to make the truth known. Noteworthy in this context is Pope Benedict’s abbreviated underlining of the same point in his 2005 address to the Roman Curia which differentiates between the French and American Revolutions. There is, however, something Ratzinger believes that Christianity as a religion can contribute to this stream of modernity. Not even Kant, Ratzinger writes, could “create the necessary certainty” required by societies valuing freedom on the basis of pure reason (2006a: 51). Ratzinger affirms that “freedom requires content” and there must be a “nonrelativistic kernel” in democracy if democracy is not to degenerate into tyranny (2006b: 54–5). Here Ratzinger highlights the nineteenth-century French social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville’s insight in his Democracy in America that Christianity supplied the common ethical convictions for American democracy’s foundations and institutions (2006b: 51). Elsewhere Ratzinger cites to the same end Tocqueville’s famous axiom: “Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot” (Ratzinger and Pera 2006: 109). The Church’s ability to assist liberty, for Ratzinger and John Paul, is crucially dependent upon the Church remaining distinct from the state. Taking as his cue John Paul’s proposition that the Church seeks not to impose but rather to propose the truth to man, Benedict XVI’s 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est affirms that it is not the Church’s responsibility per se to order the temporal realm. This, he states, is the province of practical “reason and

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natural law,” which Christians along with all other human beings can know because it is derived from human nature (DCE 28). The Church assists this process, Benedict adds, by clarifying consciences and allowing faith to “[liberate] reason from its blind spots and therefore [helping] it to be ever more fully itself” (DCE 28). This returns us to the subjects of human nature, natural law, and conscience. John Paul and Ratzinger were convinced that overcoming modernity’s truth-freedom divide involves reasserting the reasonableness of Catholicism’s vision of these facets of human existence, but also enveloping it in a vision of human flourishing by no means incompatible with living in modernity—not least because it allows natural law to escape the hyper-neo-scholastic rigidity of which Ratzinger complained as a young seminarian. Drawing upon Scripture, various Church Fathers, and Aquinas, John Paul’s Veritatis Splendor explains to those accustomed to confusing natural law with “naturalism” or “physicalism” (VS 47) that natural law “receives this name not because it refers to the nature of irrational beings but because the reason which promulgates it is proper to human nature” (VS 42). This reason enables people to grasp John Paul II calls “ fundamental moral goods” to which humans are naturally inclined, despite sin’s effects (VS 48). Humans thus become truly free when their reason recognizes the truth about themselves expressed in these goods and they freely choose them. Freedom and truth are thus reconnected. Moreover, from this perspective, the prohibitions of natural law expressed, John Paul notes, in the Decalogue’s second tablet,1 are no longer seen as purely restrictive, precisely because they serve to protect the very same goods. The prohibition of killing becomes an invitation to appreciate the good of life while the commandment against adultery is transformed into a call to look at others more purely rather than as mere objects (VS 13). The same perspective

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transforms the Beatitudes expressed in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount into a call for humans to freely perfect themselves (VS 17). A similar approach is found in Ratzinger’s refutation of the notion of conscience-as-subjectivity. Drawing upon the understanding of conscience articulated by Catholics from several epochs (the nineteenth-century Catholic convert John Henry Newman, the sixteenth-century Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More, Saints Augustine and Basil, and finally St. Paul’s letters and the Gospel and letters attributed to St. John), Ratzinger notes that all of them “did not in the least regard conscience as the expression of . . . subjective tenacity” (2006b: 87). This is because, Ratzinger argues, they understood conscience has two levels. The first is the Stoic idea of synderesis or what Ratzinger regards as more precisely expressed by the Platonic concept of anamnesis. Citing Paul, Augustine, and Basil, Ratzinger says this encapsulates the idea that love of God is not imposed from outside but is “a constitutive element of our rational being” (2006b: 91): that is, “a basic prior knowledge of the essential elements of the will of God that had taken written form in the commandments” (Ratzinger 2006b: 93). This implies that all humans are marked by truth and love, both of which come from the same source: God. Suddenly conscience is no longer subjective in its roots but nor can following conscience be perceived as a type of blind rigid obedience. To obey conscience is to follow truth but also to respond to God’s love. The Christian understanding of conscience is therefore no longer “mere moralism” but presents “a message that transcends our own actions” (Ratzinger 2006b: 97–8). At this point, some might suggest that this vision of conscience is insufficiently mindful of liberty. As if to respond to this critique, Ratzinger observes that freedom occupies a prominent place in conscience’s second level—conscientia. This is Aquinas’ way of describing

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the act of conscience which involves applying the basic knowledge of anamnesis to concrete situations. Conscientia involves, Ratzinger writes, individuals making practical judgments—in light of the truth—about what to do. At this level, Ratzinger says, even “an erring conscience obligates” (2006b: 96). But this, Ratzinger notes, does not amount to “a canonization of subjectivity,” not least because it does not necessarily absolve a person of guilt—for “the guilt may very well consist in arriving at such perverse convictions by trampling down the anamnesis of one’s true being,” in the “neglect of my own being that has dulled me to the voice of truth.” This, Ratzinger adds, is “why criminals, like Hitler and Stalin who act out of deep personal conviction remain guilty” (2006b: 97). Hence, while underlining freedom’s role in conscience and its derivation from conscience’s link to truth, Ratzinger demonstrates that this need not be understood as subjectivity. Nor, he believes, does it absolve people from moral responsibility.

Returning Europe to Europe Given that the separations of faith and reason and then truth and freedom first occurred in Europe, especially Western Europe, both Wojtyła and Ratzinger naturally paid close interest to the history of ideas in this continent. The European continent is, after all, the place where Christianity first came to be the dominant religion, and wielded incomparable influence on the shaping of European history and identity. But Europe is also the scene of epic clashes between Enlightenment ideologies and Catholicism. As well as the violence unleashed by the French Revolution, this dynamic manifested itself in the efforts of Catholics to reestablish throne-and-altar arrangements in the postNapoleonic era, the anti-Catholicism of many continental European liberals, Nazism and Marxism’s hostile attitude

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toward Catholicism, the debate about whether a proposed European Constitution would mention Christianity in its preamble, and clashes over subjects ranging from legalizing intentional abortion to granting the legal status of marriage to homosexual relationships. Hence, it is little wonder that Alexis de Tocqueville—himself a Catholic personally wrestling with the question of faith, sympathetic to aspects of modernity, but also conscious of its dark side— was anxious for some form of reconciliation. John Paul II’s thoughts about Europe, its past, and its future occur against a backdrop of the Church’s difficult relationship with modernity. It is, however, also dominated, first, by the fact that Europe was rigidly divided for much of his papacy by Communism’s dominance of Central and Eastern Europe; and, secondly, the implications of the emergence of a post-Communist Europe. While not contradicting the Polish pope, Ratzinger’s focus was somewhat different insofar as it was more explicitly concerned with discerning the impact of the swirl of ideas in Europe that had engaged with Catholicism over the centuries. The moment that he became pope, John Paul made it clear that he regarded Europe’s postwar division as artificial. He was not inclined to the view, much associated with Paul VI and Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, that the Marxist grip on power showed no immediate signs of decay or loosening, which meant that various modus vivendi needed to be established with different Communist regimes so that Catholic clergy living in such countries could carry out the bare minimum of their responsibilities to lay Catholics. By contrast, John Paul’s approach involved reasserting the identity of a Europe fused together through Christianity over and against the division established by the Red Army’s advance to the Oder River in 1945 and formally ratified at the Yalta conference by Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union that same year.

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One manifestation of this was John Paul’s effort to underline Christianity, especially Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, as being as much a historical and cultural constant of Central and Eastern Europe as of Western Europe. In 1980, John Paul proclaimed Saints Cyril and Methodius copatrons of Europe, thus joining the missionaries who first brought Christianity to Eastern Europe’s Slavic peoples, to the name of St. Benedict, proclaimed patron of Europe by Paul VI in 1964. This underlined “the unity of Europe” expressed through these three figures “for Christians and all people of good will” (John Paul II 1980: 1). Five years later, John Paul penned an encyclical epistle, Slavorum Apostoli, to commemorate the eleventh centenary of Saints Cyril and Methodius’ missionary work. This document delineates the cultural and historical unity that John Paul had in mind for Europe. First, it stresses the two missionaries carried out their activity with the authorization of both the Roman Pontiff and the Patriarch of Constantinople, “Photius, who at that time was in full communion with Rome” (SA 6). This evokes the memory of a Christianity then undivided between the Latin West and the Greek East. As “men of Hellenic culture and Byzantine training,” Cyril and Methodius belonged fully to the “tradition of the Christian East,” but did not hesitate to translate Christian teaching and liturgy into Central-East Europe’s Slavic languages (SA 12). They were also adept, John Paul writes, at adapting “to the mentality and customs of the new peoples the subtle and complex elaborations of Greco-Roman law” (SA 13), thereby contributing to Europe’s “Christian religious communion but also to its civil and cultural union” (SA 27). John Paul’s point, it appears, was to acknowledge the legitimate pluralism that always existed in a united European Christianity, Christianity’s respect for Europe’s different linguistic and cultural traditions, and its contribution to political and legal expressions of European

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identity and unity. In concluding this text, John Paul contrasts this vision of Europe, breathing with “two lungs,” with the Europe of 1985, unnaturally split by “ideological distrust” (SA 30). During this period, John Paul did not present Communism’s dominance of Central, Eastern, and Baltic Europe as one of modernity’s bastard children. It was more a matter of presenting Central-East Europe’s Christian heritage as something natural and harmonious with European civilization in a way that Communism never could be. In the post-Communist period, however, John Paul devoted more time to exploring how the Enlightenment had, for better and worse, affected Europe’s cultural self-perception. Thus on several occasions, he sought to root the French Revolution’s aspirations of liberté, égalité, fraternité in Christianity. Here John Paul followed Vatican II’s lead which, employing analogous language to the men of 1789, described “human dignity, brotherly communion, and freedom” as intrinsically human goods to be realized through human enterprise (GS 39). In his 2003 Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in Europa, however, John Paul expressed deep concerns about Europe’s future, especially the type of modernity that he believed was establishing itself as the norm across the continent. Contrasting the Europe of 2003 with the Europe of 1989, John Paul observed that, even as the European Union continued to expand, Europe’s soul appeared to be withering, collapsing, as one theologian comments, “into the black hole created by the denial of the Absolute in public life” (Twomey 2007: 63). In what ought to have been a period of hope following the demise of the second of the two totalitarianisms that had disfigured Europe, “many Europeans,” John Paul wrote, gave “the impression of living without spiritual roots . . . like heirs who have squandered a patrimony entrusted to them by history” (EE 7). This loss of memory, he added, was “accompanied by a kind of fear of the future”

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(EE 8). Alluding perhaps to the effects of the separation of faith and reason, John Paul notes that unbelief has become “self-explanatory” (EE 7) in many European settings, “a feeling of loneliness is prevalent” (EE 8), and entire European societies find themselves in the midst of “a widespread existential fragmentation” (EE 8). Symptoms of this crisis, John Paul suggests, include “the difficulty, if not the outright refusal to make lifelong commitments,” “the weakening of the very concept of the family, the continuation or resurfacing of ethnic conflicts, interreligious tensions, a selfishness that closes individuals and groups in upon themselves, a growing overall lack of concern for ethics and an obsessive concern for personal interests and privileges” (EE 8). Without identifying any one historical trend or philosophical movement as responsible for these developments, John Paul II insists the fundamental cause of Europe’s problems was atheistic humanism—the “attempt to promote a vision of man apart from God” (EE 9). Echoing de Lubac again, John Paul maintains that “Forgetfulness of God led to the abandonment of man” (EE 9). The result, John Paul adds, is nothing less than the dominance “of nihilism in philosophy, of relativism in values and morality, and of pragmatism—even a cynical hedonism—in daily life” (EE 9). This is exacerbated by specific denial of Christianity’s contribution to forging unique bonds that unify Europeans across national and ethnic boundaries. It is impossible to deny, John Paul claims, that the roots of ideas that Europe claims as its own, such as rule of law and religious liberty, are located essentially in Christianity and moreover “found in the Judaeo-Christian tradition a force capable of harmonizing, consolidating, and promoting them” (EE 19). The implication is that a Europe that forgets or actively seeks to marginalize Christianity is not only engaging in historical denial, but loosening the moorings that were hitherto the cultural glue integrating a range of European values and institutions.

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Given that Ecclesia in Europa is an ecclesiastical document, one would not expect John Paul to use it to outline a detailed history of ideas shaping these developments. Writing as a private scholar, however, Joseph Ratzinger was under no such restriction and addressed the subject of Europe on many occasions in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. In doing so, his focus is more orientated to developments in Western Europe, though he is attentive to Central-East Europe. In an important essay first penned in 1979, Ratzinger suggested that “Europe experiences what it is itself most clearly when it is explicitly confronted by its exact opposite” (Ratzinger 1988: 221). To his mind, one such “counterimage” is Islam and the Arab world. Its unEuropeanness consists in part of its “reversion to a monotheism which does not accept the Christian transition to God-made-man and which likewise shuts itself off from Greek rationality and its civilization which become a component part of Christian monotheism via the idea of God becoming man” (Ratzinger 1988: 223). This means that the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal did not develop in Islam, and cannot do so, unless Islam becomes something other than Islam (Ratzinger 1988: 223). The second “counterimage,” Ratzinger suggests, is the movement that reduces reason “to the form of positive reason in the sense of Auguste Comte, something whose only criteria is what can be verified experimentally” (1988: 225). In this world where faith and reason are radically detached, God is relegated to the realm of the purely private and subjective. For Ratzinger, a “post-European” society is one in which positivism has triumphed, morality is totally separated from belief in God, and any questioning of such developments seems “like an offence against tolerance” (1988: 226). The third “counterimage,” Ratzinger posits, is Marxism. Unquestionably, Ratzinger says, Marxism is a European product, but its un-Europeanness comes from Marxism’s assimilation of particular aspects

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of the first and second counterimages for its meaning. From the first, Marxism draws upon a type of religious dynamism full of unrealized messianic promise that “transcends the rational”; from the second, Marxism derives its conviction that everything that has hitherto existed must be overturned in order to realize “complete positivity” (Ratzinger 1988: 227). Against this backdrop, Ratzinger identifies the movements that, both individually and together, constitute the identity of Europe. A Europe that forgot the world of ancient Greece, he says, “could no longer be Europe” (Ratzinger 1988: 228). Here Ratzinger identifies what he calls “the Socratic difference,” where the idea of conscience and the mutual relationship of reason and faith is found, as well as the notion that democracy can only remain democracy when it is linked to “good law” and guided by “what internally is law”—that is, the natural law—which binds the will of majorities in a democracy as much as minorities (1988: 228–9). Upon this layer, Ratzinger says, is built the second vital element of the idea of Europe, which is when Christianity’s epicentre shifted from Jerusalem to Rome, bringing with it “the synthesis mediated in Jesus Christ between the faith of Israel and the Greek spirit” (1988: 230). The third element of Europe, Ratzinger argues, is what he describes as the Res publica christiana. On one level, this involves the Christian transformation of the Roman Empire away from paganism, but also the idea that Europe “became congruent with the West, and that meant with the area of Latin civilization and the Latin Church” (Ratzinger 1988: 230). Ratzinger hastens to add this that civilization was not limited to the Romance languages, but embraced the Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, and many Slavic-language peoples, especially Poland. He also qualifies his remarks by stating that the essence of Western Christian civilization did not consist of “any politically constituted structure,” such as

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the Holy Roman Empire, but rather “in legal systems that transcended tribes and nations, in councils, in the establishment of universities, in the establishment and spread of religious orders, and in the circulation of the spiritual life of the Church with Rome as the ventricle of the heart” (Ratzinger 1988: 230). Noting that this world cannot be restored and that any future Europe would need to transcend the Latin world to embrace the Christian East as well as the modern heritage, Ratzinger nonetheless insists that a Europe which denied its Latin heritage “would mean saying goodbye to Europe” (1988: 231). This brings us to what Ratzinger believes is Europe’s fourth layer, upon which he focuses most of his attention. This is “the indispensable contribution made by the spirit of the modern age.” While underscoring what he regards as its ambivalence—the negative aspects of which he believes are gaining an upper hand—Ratzinger states that Europe cannot reject modernity, as did much of the nineteenthcentury romantic movement as well as some Catholics between the two world wars (Ratzinger 1988: 231). The modern age, Ratzinger suggests, carried through and completed something implicit to Latin civilization: a religious liberty clearly recognized and constrained by civil law, and a political and legal system that distinguished “the internal claims of faith” from “the fundamental claims of ethical principles in which law is founded” (1988: 231). This ideal of “the free humane society”—in which there is “a fruitful dualism of state and Church,” in which “the right of conscience and with it the fundamental human rights are secured,” and in which “different expressions of Christian faith can exist and make room for different political positions”—is nonetheless grounded and linked by “a central canon of values” (Ratzinger 1988: 231). This ideal, Ratzinger notes, has never been realized. Moreover, the danger to Europe, Ratzinger suggests, is the extent to which modernity underestimated freedom’s

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dependence on particular foundational truths about God and man and the tendency of some Enlightenment thinkers and their followers to press for a radical emancipation of reason and law from “the fundamental ethical values that come from the Christian faith” (1988: 232). Writing elsewhere, Ratzinger identifies the French Revolution as the manifestation of an upheaval that erected for the first time “a purely secular state that [discarded] . . . the idea that God is the ultimate guarantor of political life and that it is He who lays down the norms for its conduct” (Ratzinger 2006b: 137). Political life was “now considered a matter of reason alone” and, more particularly, a reason that “cannot clearly recognize God” (Ratzinger 2006b: 137). God and faith, he adds, were considered to “belong to the realm of the emotions” (Ratzinger 2006b: 137). Throughout much of Europe, this model was resisted for a long time, so much so that, Ratzinger writes, for the fathers of European unification after the Second World War, such as Alcide de Gasperi and Robert Schuman, Europe’s essence was unquestionably found in its “Christian patrimony” (Ratzinger 2006b: 145), precisely because the disasters proceeding from the Nazi and Marxist dictatorships were based upon these systems’ hubristic conviction that they could create a new man outside and against the Christian Creator’s design. Marxism, Ratzinger specifies, embodies the most radical version of such thought inasmuch as it regards the world as simply “a product of evolution in which reason plays no role” (Ratzinger 2006b: 156). Though 1989 represented a blow to the Marxist utopia, Ratzinger suggests its influence lives on in Europe, especially among the generation of 1968. When combined with “Hegel’s philosophy of history,” “the liberal dogma of progress,” and “the evolutionist idea that the world we encounter is the product of irrational chance” (Ratzinger 2006b: 156), it results in a “specifically European situation” in which “all that counts

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is technological rationality and the possibilities it opens up to us” (Ratzinger 2006b: 158). Ratzinger sees what he calls this “second Enlightenment” (2006b: 156) ominously at work in contemporary “so-called medical progress” in a Europe that seeks to justify procedures such as cloning, the destruction of embryonic and foetal human beings for research and organ harvesting, etc. (2006b: 147), in attempts to accord the legal status of marriage to homosexual partnerships (2006b: 148), in efforts to deny any legal recognition of the historical fact of Europe’s Christian roots (2006b: 146), and the permitting of virtually any attack on Christian belief and symbols in the name of a tolerance that would never be extended to any European who similarly mocked Judaism or Islam (2006b: 149). Ratzinger does, however, believe that there is an alternative European future. Part of it involves the advancement of what he calls “four theses on the basis of the four dimensions of the European idea” (Ratzinger 1988: 233). The first involves insisting, as the Greeks did, that democracy is subject to law that is not open to manipulation. “Every dictatorship,” Ratzinger writes, “begins with the renunciation of law” (1988: 233). Hence democracy is not above the rule of law, which he broadly defines as the domination of reason and freedom as expressed in the limitation of and transparency of political power (Ratzinger 1988: 233). The precondition of this, Ratzinger adds, is his second thesis: the dependence of public law upon respect for moral criteria and God. While a non-Christian state, Ratzinger adds, is possible in principle, an atheistic state that respects freedom and law is not. This means that God cannot be relegated to the private realm, but also allows freedom for nonbelievers inasmuch as such recognition “should have nothing to do with compulsion in matters of faith” (Ratzinger 1988: 234). Flowing from the recognition of God as the source of all moral good, Ratzinger states, is his third thesis: the need for Europeans to reject

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establishing either the nation or world revolution as the supreme good (1988: 234). Nationalism, Ratzinger writes, contradicts Europe’s spiritual and political heritage, as exhibited by the supranational, non-state institutions such as the universities, religious orders, and church councils of the Latin West. These and analogous contemporary nonstate bodies must, Ratzinger claims, regain their strength if nationalism is to be relegated to the past. Marxism, according to Ratzinger, must be also treated as fundamentally incompatible with European identity, precisely because of its rejection of the facts of European history as well as the manner in which it embodies goals that manipulate and destroy law and morality, leading to the creation of tyrannical regimes. Ratzinger’s last thesis is that modernity’s achievements, including “the recognition and safeguarding of freedom of conscience, human rights, [and] freedom of science and scholarship” should be safeguarded, but without falling away into “the abyss of a reason without transcendence that destroys its own freedom from within” (1988: 235–6). One way of achieving this, Ratzinger writes elsewhere, is to recognize that the fathers of postwar European unification “agreed that was a basic compatibility between the moral heritage of Christianity and the moral heritage of the Enlightenment” (2006b: 155–6). Though the latter sought to replace the biblical concept of God as Creator and Sustainer with Spinoza’s formula Deus sive natura (God, or nature), this meant that faith was retained in “a kind of nature that bore the divine imprint” and in man’s capacity “to understand this nature and to evaluate it as making a rational claim on him” (Ratzinger 2006b: 156). To the extent that this stream of Enlightenment thought still exists, Ratzinger plainly believes that it and Christianity can shape Europe’s future in a manner harmonious with its past. In this regard, Ratzinger suggests Europe can learn something from the American experiment in ordered liberty.

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Ratzinger is far from uncritical of American culture and holds that many of the same trends that he considers to be afflictions in modern Europe are also present in the United States (Ratzinger and Pera 2006: 109). Nonetheless, Ratzinger observes that America avoided most of the fractious disputes that characterized relations between Christians and nonbelievers in continental Europe. Apart from attributing this to the American republic’s decision to have no established church, Ratzinger invokes— once again—Tocqueville and his observation that “the unstable and fragmentary system of rules on which . . . this democracy is founded” functioned because of the Christian-inspired religious and moral convictions pervading every level of American society (Ratzinger and Pera 2006: 108–9). If Europe is to be Europe, he holds, carefully designed institutions are not enough. “Alexis de Tocqueville,” Ratzinger states, “worked out in an impressive way that democracy depends far more on mœurs than on instituta” (1988: 253). Without such convictions, Ratzinger stresses, “compulsion becomes a necessity: freedom presupposes conviction, conviction education and moral awareness” (1988: 254). Hence, he concludes, “[w]hen mœurs are left out of consideration we have not an increase in freedom but a preparation for tyranny; this prognosis of de Tocqueville’s has been confirmed only too clearly by the developments of the last one hundred years” (Ratzinger 1988: 254). This observation leads Ratzinger to two very concrete suggestions, one directed to European Christians, the other to European nonbelievers. Underlining the English historian Arnold Toynbee’s observation that a society’s fate always depends upon “its creative minorities” (Ratzinger and Pera 2006: 80), Ratzinger insists that European Christians should act in ways that give credibility to the Christian mœurs that sustain freedom in European societies, not least by defending their rational basis and making

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“God credible in this world by means of the enlightened faith they live” (2006a: 52). Elsewhere he cites St. Benedict as an example of one man, “who, in an age of dissipation and decadence . . . in the midst of so many ruins . . . assembled the forces from which a new world was formed” (Ratzinger 2006a: 52–3). As for nonbelievers, Ratzinger’s challenge is that if they share the Church’s diagnosis of what is wrong with Europe, then they ought to “reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: Even the one who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless to try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist” (2006a: 51). Recalling this was the advice that the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal—a convinced Catholic writing at the time of the Enlightenment’s dawn—gave to his nonbelieving friends, Ratzinger insists this path “does not impose limitations on anyone’s freedom; it gives support to all our human affairs and supplies a criterion of which human life stands sorely in need” (2006a: 52). It is not, however, that this tension is somehow exclusive to a post-Enlightenment Europe. In many ways, Benedict believes, it flows from Christianity’s emphases on both the necessity of human freedom and man’s willingness to submit to the truth revealed through faith and reason. An insistence on linking these concepts was, to Benedict’s mind, present from the very beginning of the Christian church and deeply marked the medieval period. Unless contemporary Europe is willing to bind these two dimensions of human life together, it will be stranded between the opposites of relativism and fundamentalism. As Benedict put it to a meeting of French intellectuals: With the word of Spirit and of freedom, a further horizon opens up, but at the same time a clear limit is placed upon arbitrariness and subjectivity, which unequivocally binds both

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the individual and the community and brings about a new, higher obligation . . . namely, the obligation of insight and love. This tension between obligation and freedom, which extends far beyond the literary problem of scriptural exegesis, has also determined the thinking and acting of monasticism and has deeply marked Western culture. This tension presents itself anew as a challenge for our own generation as we face two poles: on the one hand, subjective arbitrariness, and on the other, fundamentalist fanaticism. It would be a disaster if today’s European culture could only conceive freedom as absence of obligation, which would inevitably play into the hands of fanaticism and arbitrariness. Absence of obligation and arbitrariness do not signify freedom, but its destruction. (2008b)

Seeking Responses The program for Europe outlined by Karol Wojtyła and Joseph Ratzinger was a markedly ambitious agenda. Neither pope displayed nostalgia for an ancien régime past. Indeed it is a program open to conversation with those moderns who, for whatever reason, believe that European modernity should open itself to Catholicism’s insights. But nor did Ratzinger or Wojtyła entertain any utopian illusions about what may be possible. Ratzinger himself states that many European secularists of good will struggle to enter into conversation with Catholicism precisely because they find the Catholic vision of the relationship between faith and reason incomprehensible (Ratzinger and Pera 2006: 133). Moreover, Ratzinger notes that the most recent Church teachings on politics recognize that for Christians, “it is a question of what is feasible and of getting as close as possible to that which the conscience and reason have recognized as the true good for the individual and society” (Ratzinger and Pera 2006: 134). Modernity, it seems,

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creates particular challenges for Christians wishing to do so, despite the fact that, Ratzinger and Wojtyła believe, the best of modernity is reconcilable with and finds its deeper roots in Catholic Christianity. The scale of the intellectual agenda advanced by John Paul II and Benedict XVI outlined in this chapter as part of Catholicism’s engagement with modernity is such that it could not but elicit a range of responses. The immediate question is what type of responses have been generated by this program, not only from within the Catholic Church, but from those outside the Church’s confines. The answers are surprising.

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In 1990, John Paul II paid his first visit to Czechoslovakia, a country that had recently liberated itself from one of the most oppressive Marxist regimes in Eastern Europe. Welcomed to Prague by Czechoslovakia’s new President, the former dissident Vaclav Havel, the Pope announced that the Church’s Synod of Bishops would address as its next theme the subject of Europe and how the Church should address the problems and opportunities arising from the post-Communist stage of European history. As if recognizing that such a Synod would be more than a survey of practical issues, some commentators suggested that much larger ambitions were afoot. Writing in the Guardian, Martin Kettle described John Paul II “as one of the few European leaders with a hegemonic project.” This was denoted as the establishment of “a political movement based on belief in God, simultaneously rejecting both irreligion and materialism” (Kettle 1990: 14). There is little in the writings and thought of Benedict XVI and John Paul II indicating that either was concerned with creating or sustaining such a movement. Indeed both pontificates continued a gradual process of delinking the Catholic Church from European Christian Democratic parties. Nevertheless, Kettle’s suggestion implied that some Western secular intellectuals recognized that the papacy under the guidance of Wojtyła and Ratzinger was determined to be proactive in shaping the character of

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post-Communist modernity and its view of Catholicism. The French newspaper Le Monde was closer to the mark when editorializing that the papacy was aiming at nothing less than “a reconquest of the European mind” (1990). The “reconquest,” to employ Le Monde’s dramatic phrase, that John Paul II and Benedict XVI had in mind was not the reestablishment of a premodern world. Rather it was to reopen Western minds to particular questions, some of the answers to which might, in Wojtyła and Ratzinger’s view, resolve underlying tensions between Catholicism and modernity. Given the ambitions implicit to such a project and the challenge that it represented to established patterns of thinking, both within and outside the Catholic Church, it is not surprising that it met with mixed receptions from Catholics and non-Catholics in West Europe and North America. This chapter considers a representative sample of these thinkers. Perhaps the most interesting dimension of the responses is that they do not fall neatly into established categories, ranging from “progressive” or “conservative,” “modern” or “premodern,” or “religious” or “secular.” This suggests many things, including the inadequacy of contemporary political language when confronted with such thought, to the possibility that the ideas articulated by Wojtyła and Ratzinger simply transcended such categories.1

Restorationists, Accomodationists, and Liberationists A cursory survey of Catholic responses to Wojtyła and Ratzinger’s approaches to modernity soon indicates a significant body of Catholic intellectuals substantially rejected their diagnosis of Catholicism’s relationship with modernity and their proposals for how the Church ought to approach the modern world. One grouping was

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exemplified by the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers. Dying in 1991, Lefebvre was suspended in 1976 by Paul VI for ordaining priests without authorization in his seminary in Switzerland. Lefebvre was eventually excommunicated by John Paul II in 1988, following his illicit ordination of three bishops and the breakdown of negotiations between Lefebvre and Ratzinger, in which the latter insisted upon Lefebvre’s acceptance of the authoritative documents of Vatican II and subsequent magisterial teaching. On one level, the dispute concerned liturgical changes introduced into the Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council. The underlying tension, however, involved Lefebvre’s contention that Vatican II’s affirmation of religious liberty—in the sense of freedom from coercion in matters of faith—represented a departure from Catholic tradition which, Lefebvrists held, required Catholicism to be the official religion in an officially Catholic state. The conciliar text at the heart of the dispute, Dignitatis Humanae, does not forbid such arrangements, but nor does it suggest that they ought to be the norm. On a deeper level, however, Lefebvre appears to have rejected, even in principle, any conversation with modernity—even one with as firm parameters as those proposed by Wojtyła and Ratzinger. As one writer observed of Lefebvre, “When the final choice had to be made, he hated modernity more than he loved Rome” (Weigel 1999: 564). Rejection of John Paul and Benedict’s approach to modernity also prevailed among other, very different sets of Catholic thinkers. First, there was the group of theologians associated to varying degrees with Hans Küng and the theological journal Concilium. Very early in John Paul’s papacy on December 15, 1979, Küng’s ecclesiastical mandate to teach as a Professor of Catholic Theology was formally withdrawn by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the German Catholic Bishops Conference. This was a result of Küng denying, among

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other things, fundamental Catholic teachings, such as the doctrine that the Catholic Church’s magisterial authority derives directly from Christ (Balthasar 1980). Surveying the corpus of Küng’s writings, there is little evidence of any interest in John Paul and Benedict’s approach to the relationship between Catholicism and modernity. Küng’s own study of Old Testament writings, for example, maintains that Scripture does not possess a moral wisdom that transcends cultures, but rather simply adopted the moral insights of the world around it from time to time. This attitude was exemplified by his 1993 book, Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow. In this text, Küng culturally relativizes every aspect of Jewish law, so that the Torah and halakhah become one transient “paradigm-dependent” expression of the covenant—so much so that any Jewish fidelity to Jewish law at any level appears anathema to Küng. One Jewish scholar remarks that Kung’s thought on this subject and others appears driven by a refusal to grant any religious institution any authority—even noncoercive moral authority—over its adherents. Everything for Küng is determined by historicity (Mittleman 1993: 45–8). It follows, Küng believes, that “contemporary Christians” must take their moral guidance from what is going on around them. Also apparently unconvinced by Ratzinger and Wojtyła’s approach to modernity was another Concilium-associated theologian, Karl Rahner (1904–1984). Rahner is significant insofar as his work influenced a whole generation of North American and Western European Catholic theologians in the immediate post-Vatican II period. Ratzinger and Rahner collaborated together during Vatican II, and Wojtyła cited Rahner in a number of his writings. But though Rahner was very familiar with Scripture and the Church Fathers, he was more interested in the Thomism associated with the sixteenth-century theologian Francisco Suárez, and more significantly, Ratzinger

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observes, reading it in light of German idealist philosophy and the thought of Martin Heidegger (Ratzinger 1998: 128). Rahner’s problem, Ratzinger thought, was that he simply “attempted too much.” Rahner sought to create “a philosophical and theological world formula on the basis of which the whole of reality can be deduced from necessary causes” (Ratzinger 1987: 169). Not even science, remarks Vincent Twomey, holds that such a formula can exist (2007: 42). Throughout his writings, Rahner acknowledged the relationship between modernity and Catholicism is problematic, but wrote that modernity was simply part of the unfolding of history Catholics must accept. Rahner also argued that assessing which aspects of modernity could be affirmed by Catholics was not a matter of returning to the sources of Christian inspiration. Rahner maintained that Christians could determine “the authenticity of a given aspect of the secularization process” through exercising what he called a global “faith instinct” (1974: 238–40). The philosopher John Finnis remarks that this “faith instinct” appears to have little to do with a reading or even awareness of authentic Christian sources, but rather seems to be equated “with sheer will, operating without or beyond reason” (1991: 100). Rahner’s importance also lies in the fact that his anthropology of man was influential in shaping the schools of moral theology commonly known as “proportionalism” and “consequentialism” that emerged after Vatican II. Associated above all with Josef Fuchs, these schools were subject to detailed criticism by Wojtyła and Ratzinger. These criticisms were derived from their conviction that the understanding of Catholic moral reasoning articulated by these schools was utilitarian in its essential foundations and methodology, but also, it seems, because Wojtyła and Ratzinger viewed these schools as having abandoned the reference points and methods that root any authentically Catholic moral theology in Christian Revelation.

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Following the controversies surrounding Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, Catholic moral theology was consumed by debates between adherents of consequentialism and proportionalism such as Fuchs, Bernard Häring, Richard McCormack S.J., Charles Curran, and Louis Janssens on the one hand, and critics of such theories, most notably Germain Grisez, Martin Rhonheimer, Servais Pinckaers, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis on the other. Fuchs and others insisted that their way of doing moral theology would help the Church avoid the legalistic character of much pre-Vatican II Catholic moral theology. While not disputing that Catholic moral theology required renewal, their opponents regarded the primary objective of consequentialists and proportionalists as “to conform the Church’s moral teaching to ‘modernity,’ often retaining only scattered elements of this teaching, which they arranged as they saw fit” (Pinckaers 2003: 50). At the heart of the debate were many questions, some of which, in John Paul and Benedict’s view, were critical to determining whether Catholicism’s engagement with modernity would remain faithful to Catholic faith or dissolve into a de-Christianized secularism. These issues included: What is the relationship between a person’s choice for Christ—their “fundamental option”—and their specific individual moral choices? Is human nature marked by a moral law inscribed upon reason itself and activated by the will? The post-conciliar debate about Humanae Vitae’s teaching on contraception was not concerned with sexual morality per se. Rather it concerned the issue of whether there were any intrinsically evil moral acts—acts that are in themselves evil, independent of any situation or circumstance. This in turn raised the question of whether there were any truly universal moral laws. By definition, proportionalism and consequentialism’s core suggestion (though there are variants of this) that moral judgment involved balancing all of action’s possible good and evil effects

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amounted to a denial that such acts existed—the implication being that there were no real or substantial limits to what humans could do. Rhonheimer, Pinckaers, Grisez, Boyle, and Finnis maintained that the sources of Christian knowledge, most notably Scripture and Tradition, and right reason itself confirmed that there were intrinsically evil acts and thus universal moral laws that bound people regardless of time, culture, or circumstance. Relatively early in his tenure as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger insisted upon the truth of intrinsically evil acts, noting that this was affirmed not only by Scripture and Catholic Tradition but also sound moral reasoning. He additionally suggested that consequentialist thought inevitably facilitated moral relativism. Consequentialism, he argued, essentially denied the Christian idea that moral truth was inscribed into human reason and nature itself (Ratzinger and Messori 1984: 90). John Paul II likewise reaffirmed Catholic teaching about intrinsically evil acts on numerous occasions (1988: 7), insisted that moral absolutes went beyond general exhortations to love thy neighbor, and eventually ruled decisively against consequentialism and associated theories in Veritatis Splendor. Though from the standpoint of official teaching, Veritatis Splendor settled the intra-Catholic debate about proportionalism and consequentialism in favor of their opponents, neither theory disappeared immediately from the Catholic intellectual landscape after Veritatis Splendor. They continued to exert some influence despite Ratzinger’s subsequent amplifications of consequentialism’s essential incompatibility with Catholicism. Some consequentialists were openly defiant (Wilkins 1994). Others claimed that the critique offered by Ratzinger and Wojtyła amounted to attacking a straw man (Meith 1994). That Ratzinger and John Paul were in turn unconvinced by these responses was evident from John Paul’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium

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Vitae. This encyclical spelt out in considerable detail the public implications of embracing consequential and proportionalist logic. In a world stripped of moral absolutes, the encyclical argued, particular features of modernity designed to protect freedom become weakened or even dangerous. Once, John Paul stated, something with as modern a lineage as human rights become subjectivized in the name of a freedom detached from truth, it becomes subordinate to the whims of the stronger or the majority, and redefined in ways that endanger human freedom. This is at the heart of what John Paul often referred to as a “culture of death.” Though Evangelium Vitae was harshly criticized by Küng, a number of Veritatis Splendor’s critics conceded that Evangelium Vitae’s description of the effects of utilitarianlike reasoning was difficult to deny (McCormick 1995). The fact, however, that such acknowledgment did not persuade some proportionalists and consequentalists to reexamine their theories may suggest Pinckaers’ diagnosis of the fundamental reasons for their continuing dissent may well be accurate: conforming to modernity was more important for them that articulating a morality grounded in Catholic faith and reason. John Paul and Benedict devoted considerable attention to these questions because they recognized the positions assumed by theologians after Vatican II were significant in shaping Catholic views about the modern world. Hence, while Catholic theologians such as Fuchs and Häring continued to articulate proportionalist and consequentialist positions until their deaths, perhaps the greater significance of John Paul and Benedict’s conclusions was that they established in the minds of bishops, clergy, and many lay Catholics that consequentialist approaches to moral issues reflected a view of modernity irreconcilable with Catholicism. A similar realization among many Catholics was more obvious in the rise and demise of liberation theology during

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John Paul’s pontificate. George Weigel notes that the term “liberation theology” is a misnomer, given that a number of such theologies had emerged since the 1970s (Weigel 1998: 283). Though usually associated with Latin America, liberation theology’s characterization as an indigenous Latin American phenomenon was always questionable. While drawing upon awareness of the often substandard material conditions in which most Latin Americans lived, liberation theology’s most prominent proponents such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Juan Luis Segundo S.J., Jon Sobrino S.J., and Leonardo Boff (a student of Rahner) studied in West European universities in the 1960s and thoroughly absorbed the Marxist methods of social and economic analysis then in vogue in many such institutions. Not coincidentally, many liberation theologians comprehended Latin America’s problems in Marxist-structural terms and, to varying degrees, advocated Marxist-like solutions, such as committing the Church to class-struggle, with the use of violence featuring in some such schema. By the 1970s, liberation theologians were exercising considerable influence in a number of seminaries and even upon bishops, most notably in Brazil, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. The attention given by John Paul and Ratzinger to liberation theology from 1979 onwards did not simply proceed from consciousness of Catholicism’s sheer numbers in Latin America. Equally concerning was the fact that liberation theology’s radical revolutionary options was far removed from the critical engagement with modernity proposed by Vatican II—a point acknowledged by liberation theologians (Gutiérrez 1973). Hence, in his 1979 speech to Latin American Bishops at Puebla in Mexico, John Paul formally disassociated the Christian concept of liberation from Marxist interpretations, burdened, he said, as they were with thoroughly materialist presumptions (1979b: 100–1). For John Paul, while Christians have political responsibilities, the Church cannot endorse any political theology

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inasmuch as such theologies assume that a perfect society can be created on earth through human activity alone. It is clear, however, considerable support already existed among Latin America’s Catholic bishops for a formal challenge to liberation theology—especially from figures such as the Brazilian bishop Boaventura Kloppenburg who had been deeply critical of liberation theology since 1974. Though many Latin American bishops subsequently used John Paul’s Puebla speech as the basis for diminishing liberation theology’s influence, liberation theologians persisted in pursuing their agendas, even to the point of participating in Marxist-orientated governments such as Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime. The response of John Paul and Ratzinger was to support Latin American bishops working to disassociate the Church from partisan politics, initiate formal examinations of the writings of influential liberation theologians (most famously Gutiérrez and Boff), and outline what Catholicism considered an authentically Christian theology of freedom. Much of this was accomplished through two Instructions signed by Ratzinger, approved by John Paul, and issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The first document, Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation (1984), identified the problems with liberation theology, especially its reading of Scripture through Marxist lens and its vision of history. Also heavily criticized was liberation theology’s reduction of truth to praxis through its shift of emphasis from the Catholic position of action-presupposing-truth to the existentialist and Marxist notion of action-creating-truth, and liberation theology’s subsequent abandonment of the orthodox Christian understanding of freedom being dependent upon the truth known through faith and reason. The second document, Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation (1986) specifies that the fullness of human liberty is not found in secular ideologies. Acknowledging the progress made through science and technology since

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the Enlightenment, the Instruction maintains that true liberty is found in “the freedom to do good . . . in this alone happiness is to be found. . . . In consequence, man becomes free to the extent that he comes to a knowledge of the truth, and to the extent that this truth—and not any other forces—guides his will” (CDF 1986: 26). By truth, the Instruction meant more than the material and empirical. It also embraced spiritual, moral, and metaphysical truths—the existence of all these dimensions of human existence being denied by Marxism. Though liberation theology was not addressed in detail in this second Instruction, the implications were clear. Marxism’s effective denial of the Christian vision of good and evil and its absolutization of praxis rendered many liberation theologians unfit participants in any Catholicmodernity discussion about the nature of freedom, thereby nullifying the essence of the liberation theology project. That this was grasped by most Latin American bishops is evident from their subsequent statements, which slowly became imbued of the Wojtyła-Ratzinger vision of freedom, though residues of liberationist thought persisted in some bishops’ tendency to blame the developed world for Latin America’s economic problems (Weigel 2005: 257). Reactions among liberation theologians themselves differed. Boff’s views did not substantially change. He eventually left the priesthood. Others moved their liberationist focus from class-questions to issues of race and sex. Some, such as Sobrino, persisted in seeking to develop liberation theology in a manner consistent with its pre-1979 trajectory, only to find his writings formally declared incompatible with the Catholic faith during Benedict XVI’s pontificate (CDF 2006). Liberation theology’s diminishment as a force within the Catholic Church in Latin America owed much to another implosion: that of Communism in Central-East Europe and the USSR. With that collapse came Marxism’s discrediting, both as a tool

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of political analysis and an underlying economic program. Reflecting upon the promise Marxism once held for some Catholics in the 1970s, Benedict remarked in Deus Caritas Est in words whose significance was not lost on the diminishing adherents of liberation theology within the Catholic Church: “This illusion has vanished” (DCE 27).

Modernity Critics, New Natural Lawyers, and Catholic Whigs Given the scale of the attention directed to various Catholics’ rejection of John Paul II and Benedict XVI’s approach to modernity, this has distracted attention from those Catholics who embraced, either partly or wholly, the critical engagement pursed by Wojtyła and Ratzinger. Yet even here there are important nuances to consider. By 2000, a number of Catholic intellectuals who could not be considered dissenters from orthodox Catholicism were beginning to question aspects of the Church’s post-Vatican II engagement with modernity. Scholars such as the political philosopher Robert Kraynak and the theologian Tracey Rowland claimed that Gaudium et Spes and much of the post-Vatican II Church had embraced an excessively optimistic vision of modernity and underestimated the degree to which modern culture was antithetical to Catholic teaching. Their implication was that, to varying degrees, John Paul II’s thought reflected some of these problems, while Benedict XVI was less susceptible to these tendencies. Drawing upon the reflections of the theologian David Schindler and the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, Rowland argued that the modernity dominating Western culture since the seventeenth century embodied metaphysical and anthropological assumptions that were, for the most part, deeply opposed to the Catholic vision

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of culture and the person, especially as expressed by Augustine and Aquinas. To cite MacIntyre: “The moral presuppositions of liberal modernity, whether in its theory or in its social institutions, are inescapably hostile to Christianity and all attempts to adapt Christianity to liberal modernity are bound to fail” (1999: 67). In Rowland’s view, secular ideologies ranging from liberal humanism to Nietzschean self-assertiveness drew deeply upon a view of man that was at least implicitly anti-metaphysical and closed to the transcendent. There were, Rowland states, many mid-twentieth-century Catholic intellectuals aware of this problem—most notably von Balthasar, the theologian Romano Guardini, and the Jesuit Erich Przywara— but none of these individuals were invited to attend Vatican II as theological advisors (2003: 24). Turning to Gaudium et Spes, Rowland stressed that despite its claims to be addressing the modern world, the document’s employment of phrases like “modern world” was marked by excessive “terminological looseness” (2003: 18). “The term ‘modern man’ is not explained,” Rowland writes, “nor is it clear how, from within the parameters of Christian doctrine, it can be deduced that personalities are now more highly developed by the culture of modernity” (2003: 25). Deepening her critique, Rowland maintains that Gaudium et Spes’ vision of history could be read as more Hegelian in parts than Christian (Rowland 2003: 25). There are, Rowland holds, also questions concerning the meaning of the metaphor of aggiornamento, exemplified by the question put by the Reformed Calvinist theologian Karl Barth to Paul VI in 1966: “What does aggiornamento mean? Accommodation to what?” (Barth 1969: 20). In doing so, Rowland pointed to unresolved debates about the external standard that Vatican II had in mind. Concerning Wojtyła and Ratzinger, Rowland presents a mixed picture of their receptiveness to this critique. She suggested that John Paul II’s use of expressions like

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“modernity” was almost always ambiguous. It depended upon what he meant in a particular address or document by “modernity.” This, Rowland maintained, left unresolved many problems of interpretation as well as tensions among Catholics about modernity’s actual content (2003: 44). On the other hand, she stresses that John Paul gave a distinctly Christological reading of Gaudium et Spes—specifically through insisting that it should be read “through” the lens of paragraph 22 of the document—precisely in order to resolve potential interpretive problems and to signify rejection of Rahner’s theory that secular modernity is somehow intrinsic to God’s unfolding creation (2003: 44). At the same time, Rowland argues that John Paul’s effort to imbue “modern” language with Christian content is “problematic in that some words and concepts obstinately retain their liberal meaning in a culture so deeply imbued with liberal principles” (2008: 153). Could, for example, Western liberal cultures even begin to understand rights as legal expressions and protections of elements of human flourishing and grounded in a decidedly non-relativist understanding of human beings, when the dominant ways of thinking about rights tend to deny a link between rights and truth and instead construe rights primarily in terms of autonomy alone? Concerning Ratzinger, Rowland posits that his writings— especially those concerning Gaudium et Spes—indicate that he was more sympathetic to this critique of Vatican II. She notes, for instance, Ratzinger’s 1969 article describing sections of Gaudium et Spes as embodying “a downright Pelagian terminology” (Rowland 2003: 24)—the idea that each individual is left to form himself with nothing but the materials of his own will and intellect. At times, Ratzinger stated, Gaudium et Spes’ treatment of freedom seemed to emphasize the modern idea of liberty of choice, rather than the Christian notion of freedom lived in God’s presence. Ratzinger, according to Rowland, appeared more willing

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to affirm that there are large distances between a culture grounded in Catholic belief and practice on the one hand, and distinctly Protestant or modern cultures on the other. Nonetheless, Rowland also claims that the ressourcement movement with which Ratzinger was associated before and after Vatican II began to eclipse what she described as accommodationist interpretations of Vatican II after the 1985 Extraordinary Synod called by John Paul to reflect upon developments in Catholicism since Vatican II. Rowland’s skepticism about modernity’s openness to any genuine dialogue with Catholicism as well as the adequacy of Vatican II’s conception of modernity was shared by Robert Kraynak, who raised questions about John Paul’s extensive use of the language of rights and his endorsements of democracy. In Kraynak’s view, many Catholics erred “in drastically misjudging the negative side effects of [embracing modern democracy]—in underestimating the corrosive effects of a culture of rights and the leveling effects of mass democracy on the human soul and on the institutions that are necessary to sustain a sense of the sacred” (2001: 168). For Kraynak, the roots of the problem are traceable to what he calls “Kantian Christianity.” Though some Catholic thinkers (including Wojtyła) have utilized Kantian ideas while avoiding what, from a Catholic standpoint, are its errors, Kraynak insists that Kant’s anthropology—understood as the reduction of human dignity to human autonomy—is deeply problematic from the standpoint of basic Christian doctrines such as original sin and grace. Moreover, the type of liberal democracy associated with Kantian thought and its professed neutrality about the good is, Kraynak claims, “merely a pretext for imposing an exclusive view of the Good Life. Though claiming to take no stand on the ultimate purpose of life, modern liberal democracy, in fact, promotes a life dedicated to middle-class materialism, popular entertainment, and secular humanism” (2001: 201).

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On one level, Kraynak’s remarks constituted a critique of Catholic theologians such as Rahner and Bernard Lonergan who sought to incorporate Kant’s epistemology and ethics into a Christian framework. Yet they may also reflect uneasiness about the extent to which John Paul II utilized the language of rights in addressing modernity. As observed, Wojtyła drew upon Kantian ethics to articulate ideas about human dignity and rights. This, for Kraynak, is not surprising because “the notion that human dignity implies human rights is not in Thomas; and it cannot be developed from Thomism because Thomism holds that man’s rational and social nature requires subordinating personality to virtue, the common good, and a hierarchy of perfection” (Kraynak 2004: 521). An associated problem arising from Kraynak and Rowland’s reflections is that no matter how carefully the Catholic Church defines and uses the language of rights, secular modernity will always hear something different because its understanding of rights is marked by the underpinnings of Kantian autonomy. The result, it appears, is a cognitive dissonance between Catholicism and modernity. Figures such as Kraynak and Rowland viewed Ratzinger in a somewhat different light, precisely because of his Augustinian leanings. “Whereas the Conciliar generation of Catholic scholars tended to favor Kant as the most acceptable father of the Liberal tradition,” Rowland states, “members of the post-Conciliar generation are returning to St Augustine and other patristic scholars for a theological reading of the relationship between the Church and the world” (2003: 166). This, she stresses, does not mean that an Augustinian approach is somehow “closed” to the world or riddled with a type of Calvinist pessimism. Rather, she means an Augustinianism that, while appreciative of the “world’s” particular achievements, “none the less recognizes the necessity of Christ’s Revelation to transcend its limitations and breach its aporia, or doubt” (Rowland 2008: 10). In this camp, she squarely locates Ratzinger.

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A different view was taken by another group of Catholic intellectuals, commonly known as the “new natural law” or “new classical natural law” school. Associated with the legal scholars John Finnis and Robert P. George, the theologians Germain Grisez and William E. May, and the philosopher Joseph Boyle, this school found aspects of the approach to modernity articulated by Wojtyła and Ratzinger giving impetus both to their own intellectual project of reviving natural law theory and their interpretation of Vatican II. To their mind, the strategy of critical engagement with modernity was in itself consistent with Catholic tradition. Finnis held, for instance, that the Catholic adoption of rights-language from the modern tradition was similar to the early Church Fathers’ habit of “plundering the spoils of the Egyptians” (1982: 314); that is, taking concepts from non-Christian sources that do not directly conflict with Catholic doctrine and attempting to integrate them into Catholic teaching, much as St. Paul integrated Stoic ideas into his various letters, or when he used Greek ideas to engage the minds of pagan philosophers in the Areopagus of Athens. Finnis acknowledges that “the picking-out of a word from the great babble of human intercourse involves risks that Christianity has, from the very beginning been willing to run, but not to run unconditionally” (1982: 316). Nonetheless, he and other new natural law scholars posit that the argument of the Scottish Enlightenment thinker David Hume—that no “ought” can be derived from an “is”— needs to be taken seriously (Finnis 1981). This, they argue, necessitated a move away from the neo-scholasticism that had dominated Catholic thinking about natural law since Suárez, and a fresh reading of Aquinas. According to new classical natural law theorists, this rereading of Aquinas’ understanding of natural law allowed Catholic thought to take certain fruits of modernity (liberal constitutionalism, human rights, and a commitment to public reason as

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the primary means through which political communities make decisions) and imbue them with content that differs from certain Enlightenment philosophical commitments (Finnis 1998: 136). Thus, Finnis suggests, “If its logic and its place in practical reasonableness about human flourishing are kept in mind, the modern usage of claims of rights as the principle counter in political discourse should be recognized (despite its dubious seventeenthcentury origins and its abuse by fanatics, adventurers, and self-interested persons from the eighteenth century until today) as a valuable addition to the received vocabulary of practical reasonableness (i.e., to the tradition of ‘natural law’ doctrine)” (1980: 221). In this schema, “rights” were specifically associated with the protection of particular concrete moral goods, such as knowledge, life, aesthetic experience, religion, marriage, and practical reasonableness. On this basis, the new natural lawyers claimed that their theory allowed construction of an idea of public reasoning about the good life and the role of law in shaping a society’s moral ecology which was far thicker than the versions offered by secular modernity (most famously by the American liberal philosopher John Rawls) inasmuch as it neither posits autonomy and subjective choice as the trump cards of reasoned discussion in the modern world nor suggests that religious believers’ contributions to such discussion are somehow illegitimate because they are articulated by people with religious convictions. The affinities between the Wojtyła-Ratzinger approach and the new natural law school are apparent in aspects of two official Church documents produced in the last quarter of John Paul II’s pontificate. The first is Evangelium Vitae. This encyclical was deeply critical of the modern habit of ascribing the status of “legitimate expressions of human freedom, to be acknowledged and protected as actual rights” (EV 10) to contraception, abortion, euthanasia, and reproductive technologies, not to mention the

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modern attitude “that tends to equate personal dignity with the capacity for verbal and explicit, or at least perceptible, communication,” and the modern tendency to carry “the concept of subjectivity to an extreme and [recognize] as a subject of rights only the person who enjoys full or at least incipient autonomy” (EV 19). Yet the encyclical goes to considerable lengths to claim that this need not involve a Catholic repudiation of the rights project per se. Like the new natural lawyers, John Paul maintained that erroneous conceptions of the basis for human rights, dignity, and liberty are at fault. A similar argument appears in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Doctrinal Note on some questions concerning the participation of Catholics in political life (2003). Issued under Ratzinger’s signature and countersigned by John Paul, the Doctrinal Note affirms that “the rightful autonomy of the political or civil sphere from that of religion and the Church—but not from that of morality—is a value that has been attained and recognized by the Catholic Church and belongs to the inheritance of contemporary civilization” (CDF 2003: 6). This legitimate secularity was consistently underscored by the new natural law school, and, Finnis claims, “implicitly affirms concepts of public reason and democratic legitimacy which overlap substantially with Rawls” (Finnis 2003: 9). The real problem, stated the Doctrinal Note, is “A kind of cultural relativism . . . evident in the conceptualization and defence of an ethical pluralism, which sanctions the decadence and disintegration of reason and the principles of the natural moral law” (CDF 2003: 2). Nor, the CDF commented, does the fact that some moral truths recognized by reason may also be matters of Catholic faith “lessen the political legitimacy or the rightful ‘autonomy’ of the contribution of those citizens who are committed to them, irrespective of the role that reasoned inquiry or confirmation by the Christian faith may have played in recognizing such truths. Such “autonomy” refers first of all

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to the attitude of the person who respects the truths that derive from natural knowledge regarding man’s life in society, even if such truths may also be taught by a specific religion, because truth is one” (CDF 2003: 6). These statements reflect an application of the vision of faith and reason articulated by John Paul and Benedict to Catholic participation in modern politics. Finnis took the argument further by using it as a basis for underlining what he considers to be the unreasonableness of Rawls’ view that those religious believers “who hold that their positions on fundamental rights ‘are open to and can be fully established by reason’ ” ought not to be permitted to affect the “overlapping consensus” that should be the basis for political decision making in modern pluralist societies. According to Finnis, Rawls “more or less covertly assumes” that the views of rational religious believers are unreasonable, despite the fact many such claims involve no explicit religious assumptions. For Finnis, this is somewhat ironic, given that by the end of his life, Rawls—having dedicated himself to establishing a coherent theory of justice and rights—was reduced to vindicating human rights on the basis of a consensus of opinion, rather than any truthclaim resting on more-than-consensual grounds (Finnis 2003: 9). An unresolved matter is how much the new natural law school owes their approach to modernity to the path marked out by Wojtyła and Ratzinger, and how much of their thinking is derived from their own scholarly pursuits. While there are certain affinities between the new natural law school’s view of modernity and that of Wojtyła and Ratzinger, the primary principles of new natural law thought—most notably in Finnis’ Natural Law and Natural Rights and key Grisez articles—were in place by 1980, less than two years after Wojtyła’s pontificate began. A related issue is the extent to which some of John Paul’s teaching documents and various CDF instructions drew upon new

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natural law insights rather than vice versa, especially when it came to the papacy’s defense of classical Catholic moral theology against consequentialism as well as statements on Catholic approaches to politics. In 1986, Grisez, May, and Finnis were among the first laymen appointed to the CDF’s International Theological Commission. This indicates that their views were taken seriously by Wojtyła and Ratzinger relatively early in the former’s pontificate. It is also the case that Ratzinger’s private theological writings were drawing upon Finnis’ critique of consequentialism and proportionalism (Ratzinger 1988: 217 n. 13) as early as 1984. Nor is it an understatement to say that the bulk of the academic criticism of these schools of thought in the years preceding Veritatis Splendor was undertaken by Grisez, Finnis, George, May, and Boyle. There was, however, another group of Catholic intellectuals that appeared to draw more direct inspiration from the papacy’s late-twentieth-century approach to modernity. Far less uniform in identity than the new natural lawyers or the modernity critics, a number of these scholars—most notably papal biographer George Weigel, the theologian Michael Novak, the commentator Richard Neuhaus (often described as “Catholic Whigs”), and, to a more limited extent, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver and Cardinal George Pell of Sydney—drew deeply upon John Paul II’s thought in their pursuit of several intellectual projects, ranging from an extensive rearticulation of Catholic social thought on political and economic subjects, to discussion of the place of the Anglo-American world in Catholic thought in general. Though they were usually, for example, longtime critics of liberation theology, their critiques drew heavily upon John Paul 1979 Puebla address and the CDF Instructions of 1984 and 1986, embracing the more explicitly theological dimension of these critiques to compliment their political and economic reservations about liberation theology. The “Catholic Whigs”

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also derived much encouragement from John Paul and Ratzinger’s writings when it came to their efforts to underline the differences between the Anglo-American and Continental European Enlightenments. Pointing to John Paul and Ratzinger’s careful distinctions between different trends in the post-Enlightenment world, the Catholic Whigs developed the case that features of the American experiment such as the church-state relationship, as conceptualized in the American founding, and the association of liberty with a commitment to self-evident truths delineated in the Declaration of Independence, were more congenial to Catholic belief and practice than the political arrangements bequeathed to continental Western Europe by the French Revolution. A number of them also arrived at similar conclusions to those of Wojtyła and Ratzinger when it came to assessing the impact of Vatican II on Catholic approaches to the political order. Chaput, for example, developed extensive reflections on the place of Catholics in modern American democracy that drew significantly upon Ratzinger’s ruminations upon how Vatican II shaped the nature of many Catholics’ engagement with the political order (Chaput 2008). Like Wojtyła and Ratzinger, members of this same group were unafraid to underline certain continuities between Christianity and the various Enlightenments. While there are good reasons (Rowland 2008: 179) not to identify George Pell squarely with the “Catholic Whig” camp, Pell does summarize much of their position very well: Thinkers such as Rowland, MacIntyre, and David Schindler who counsel about the dangers of any sell-out to secular liberalism do an important service. But there is a need for moderation. The Catholic Church is a great church and not a sect. The critical question is the nature of the terms in our dialogue with modernity. The Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment worlds are not such strangers to our own

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tradition that we have nothing to say to them and everything to fear. The Enlightenment itself is in many ways a child of Christianity, however unexpected and puzzling the offspring. Indeed, Enlightenment modernity fails to understand itself fully unless it acknowledges its Christian roots and context: how can we understand Hume without the background of Calvinist faith and ethics to which he is responding? The French Enlightenment thinkers without Jansenism? The existentialists and deconstructionists of our own time without the traditions of Christian essentialism and Christian authority against which they are rebelling? We may feel we have little in common with these other traditions, but as in all families with messy genealogies, there is still enough common DNA around for us to speak (parts of) each other’s language, while being wary of the dangers of compromise. (2007: 60–1)

Significantly, some continental Catholic European intellectuals appeared to agree with the Catholic Whigs’ assessment. One such figure was the Italian philosopher Rocco Buttiglione. Even before Wojtyła’s election as pope, Buttiglione had imbibed Wojtyła’s philosophical writings and sought to apply their implications to a range of political, social, and economic questions. Some of his conclusions, in certain respects, mirrored those of the Catholic Whigs (Buttiglione 1997a: 378–9), especially in terms of the manner in which the Catholic Whigs utilized insights in John Paul’s social encyclicals to present Catholic alternatives to the mixed economy models often associated with Catholic social thought and their willingness to appropriate certain insights of American modernity into their own thought (Buttiglione 1997b). Yet another group of Catholic intellectuals employed a mixture of the approaches flowing out of the WojtyłaRatzinger papacies to facilitate a dialogue with modernity. Much less identifiable as a cohesive group as the Catholic Whigs or the new natural lawyers, figures such as

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Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, Cardinal Christoph von Schönborn of Vienna, and Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec City were associated to varying degrees with the Communio circles fostered by Ratzinger and Balthasar from the 1970s onwards. On one level, they shared Ratzinger’s ressourcement enthusiasms, especially when it came to excavating Scripture and the Church Fathers and applying their insights to contemporary problems. Yet none hesitated to engage modern thought on its own terms if they believed this would advance the discussion. Lustiger, for instance, did not hesitate to suggest in his many writings that the French Revolution did not draw solely upon the late-French Enlightenment for inspiration, but—like John Paul II (1996a: 716–20)—sought to associate the Revolution’s aspirations with particular Christian themes (Lustiger 1987). Likewise Schönborn’s critical engagement of modern evolutionary theory drew explicitly upon many of the approaches to the complex subject of faith, reason, and science found in John Paul and Benedict’s writings. This was especially true with regard to what Schönborn considered to be the tendency of many evolutionary theorists to present evolutionary theory as an all-embracing explanation of the universe as well as their conflation of scientific evidence with tenuous explanatory theories that more-or-less assumed atheistic-materialist premises (Schönborn 2006).

Secular Rejection, Secular Engagement Looking outside the Catholic Church, assessing the intellectual impact of the Wojtyła-Ratzinger pontificates is a more difficult exercise. Confining ourselves to Western intellectual circles, the Church’s approach to modernity seems to have been largely rejected by what might be called European and American progressives. Though the ideas

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proposed by Wojtyła and Ratzinger purport to embrace certain modern insights, European and American progressives recognized that John Paul and Benedict’s thoughts challenged at a fundamental level the reasoning underlying what might be called the secular liberationist programs often associated with the generation of 1968. This is especially true when it comes to progressivist views of sexual morality, the nature of liberty, the content of progress, and the character and ends of the positive sciences. When combined with many progressives’ effective embrace of various versions of utilitarianism (especially when assessing the morality of intentional abortion, euthanasia, and various new biotechnologies) and an often negative assessment of Christianity, Western progressives remained largely closed to Wojtyła and Ratzinger’s efforts to open up discussion about the path of Western civilization. This became more evident during the 2003–2004 debate concerning whether the preamble to the European constitutional treaty should include a specific reference to Europe’s Christian heritage. The fact that the original draft referenced the Greco-Roman contribution and the Enlightenment while excluding any reference to Christianity suggested that, despite Wojtyła and Ratzinger’s impeccably European credentials, much of Western Europe’s political leadership was at best indifferent to Christianity’s specific contribution to Europe’s identity, or even adhered to a distinctly anti-Christian outlook. The point was made in a more radical fashion when the European Parliament rejected Italy’s nomination of Rocco Buttiglione as European Union Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security. Buttiglione was rejected not because he was regarded as someone who would use his position to pursue a specifically Catholic agenda (something he explicitly denied), but rather because a majority of the parliamentary committee were unwilling to approve the nomination of anyone who openly stated that

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he believed and accepted Catholic teaching about marriage and the moral status of homosexual acts. In light of this and related controversies, commentators such as the legal scholar Joseph Weiler—himself an observant Jew— described the prevailing high culture of Western Europe as “Christophobic” (Weiler 2003). Much of this, Weiler posited, was attributable to what he called “the 1968 mindset,” an outlook which included a deep ambivalence verging on hostility to Europe’s Christian roots. The implication was that, until the West European generation marked by 1968 passed from the scene, many of the primary formers of contemporary European culture would remain closed to the Wojtyła-Ratzinger approach to modernity. It was, however, no less significant that more conservative political trends in Western Europe do not appear to have been profoundly impacted by the papacy’s engagement with modernity under Wojtyła and Ratzinger. Some American political conservatives (including many Evangelical Protestants) resonated with aspects of the papacy’s critical stance towards particular intellectual movements, and its attempts to generate debates on questions of civilizational import for the West such as the faith-reason issue (Noll 1994). The response of conservative-inclined West Europeans was, however, far more tepid. Certainly West European center-right intellectuals welcomed Wojtyła and Ratzinger’s reemphasis upon Catholicism’s highly critical view of Marxism and the papacy’s shift away from Paul VI’s Ostpolitik toward East European Communist regimes. Yet few European conservative thinkers seem to have engaged the metaphysical and civilizational questions pressed by Wojtyła and Ratzinger. One exception was Germany’s leading postwar conservative philosopher Robert Spaemann. An intellectual colleague of Ratzinger, Spaemann’s interests lay primarily in the meaning of freedom, the philosophical underpinnings of different evolutionary theories, modernity’s significance for the

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development and identity of European civilization, and the interrelationship between faith, reason, and the sciences (Spaemann 2005). Like Wojtyła and Ratzinger, Spaemann underlined the negative consequences for both faith and reason that followed their intellectual separation. Most notable among these, Spaemann insisted, was modernity’s absolutization of instrumental reason and the subsequent emergence of “scientism” and “the belief that we are not in fact what we thought ourselves to be, namely, rational and free, self-determining creatures” (2005: 622). The irony, Spaemann claimed in a manner similar to Fides et Ratio, was that Christian faith “grants a greater scope to reason, ratio, than scientism does. Ratio means both reason and cause. The scientific worldview takes the world and thus itself to be groundless and irrational. Faith in God is faith in a reason for the world, which is itself not groundless and therefore irrational, but ‘light’—transparent to itself and in this sense its own ground” (2005: 622). A further echo of John Paul and Raztinger’s thinking on these questions is found in Spaemann’s claim that denial of God leaves man alone in “the banal nihilism of the entertainment society . . . the precise and desperate awareness of what it in fact means to say that God does not exist,” and “persuaded that we are merely machines for the spreading of our genes,” with human reason—in a feat of self-contradiction—understood as “nothing more that the product of evolutionary adaptation” (2005: 633). Spaemann was, however, an orthodox and theologically informed Catholic. A more common trend among much late twentieth-century European conservative thought was a general skepticism of any political or theological “grand narrative” and an attachment to the wisdom contained in tradition rather than the knowledge embodied in specific metaphysical claims. Such thinking manifests itself in Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) as well as later writings by the philosopher John Gray (1995).

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Further complicating matters was the fact that many conservatives were of the same mind as European progressives when it came to controversial questions such as abortion, not least because some conservatives had embraced the generally utilitarian consensus concerning these issues prevailing throughout Europe. Yet another reason for conservative “nonengagement” with the Wojtyła-Ratzinger agenda was that many European conservatives’ focus in the 1980s and early 1990s was upon introducing market-orientated reforms into Western Europe’s sclerotic economies. Though they welcomed John Paul’s carefully phrased approval of the market economy in his encyclical Centesimus Annus (1991: 42) and similar thoughts expressed by Ratzinger concerning the legitimate autonomy of economic science as a field of intellectual inquiry (Ratzinger 1986), there is less evidence that they absorbed Centesimus Annus’ claim concerning the need to ground economic liberty in a specific type of moral culture, a particular anthropology of man, and a certain set of institutional arrangements. Though several European conservative political leaders, such as Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar, Germany’s Angela Merkel, and Estonia’s Mart Laar, argued for a reference to Europe’s Christian roots in the constitutional treaty’s preamble, more noticeable was many European conservatives’ silence on this question, and even, as in the case of some French conservatives, their opposition to such a reference on the basis of the French principle of laïcité—the rule legally prohibiting the state recognizing any religion, even in purely historical terms. But what is perhaps most revealing about West European conservative and progressive reactions to the WojtyłaRatzinger approach to modernity is that it confirms that the late-twentieth-century papacy was focusing upon subjects that simply did not fit typical secular progressiveconservative divisions. This is underlined by the fact that

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those European intellectuals who proved receptive to Wojtyła and Ratzinger’s ideas were far more eclectic in their thinking than most other Western thinkers and did not always conform to the expectations generated by modern conservative-progressive categories. Two European secular intellectuals from opposite ends of the political spectrum—Jürgen Habermas and Marcello Pera—typified this reaction. Commonly regarded as the exemplar of postwar German progressive thought, Jürgen Habermas—a self-described “methodological atheist”—loomed as a significant figure in postwar Continental and German philosophy. In his early career, Habermas was a follower of the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who contributed significantly to Western Marxist critical theory, and a student of Theodor Adorno, another German philosopher who influenced postwar critical theory. Both Horkheimer and Adorno were associated with the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school active in New York and the University of Frankfurt. Habermas’ intellectual interests were in laying the foundations for what he regarded as the fundamental emancipation and democratization of European society. Some suggest that in pursuing this project, Habermas constructed a system that underpins modern European social democratic impulses, much as John Rawls’ Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism has achieved the same status in much North American modern liberal thought and politics (Nemoianu 2006: 21). Like Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas was highly influenced by twentieth-century Western Marxist philosophical currents. Significantly, Ratzinger referenced each of these thinkers as influences upon the emergence of Marxist-orientated liberation theology (Ratzinger 1985: 178). This being the case, one might assume only polite antagonism would exist between Habermas’ thought and the questions posed by Wojtyła and Ratzinger to late-twentieth-century modernity. The background to

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Habermas’ thought, however, is more complex than the rearticulation of Marxist conventionalities. In the first instance, Habermas—like Adorno and Horkheimer—was deeply critical of the post-Enlightenment dominance of instrumental reason. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno pondered why the Enlightenment, with its promise of progress through the application of scientific method, had bequeathed a world “radiant with triumphant calamity” (1973: 1). Though identifying classical Greek and Hebrew thought as contributing to modernity’s problems, they insisted that another source was the Enlightenment’s promotion of fear of the unknown and a quest for domination, especially man’s quest for domination over his own nature (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973: 11). Auschwitz, they believed, was not an anomaly: it was indicative of these fundamental problems in modernity. From Horkheimer and Adorno’s perspective, any society which prioritized the pursuit of whatever it defined as progress—regardless of the cost—was one in which anything and anyone appearing to obstruct such progress was bound to be abused and eventually destroyed. Indeed, in his encyclical Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict noted that Adorno and Horkheimer “were equally critical of atheism and theism.” He added that “Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the image of a good and just God” (SS 42). Despite this critique, Dialectic of Enlightenment did not reject the Enlightenment. Instead Adorno and Horkheimer presented modern Western society as emerging through the interaction and mutual dependence of two factors. This was summarized as: “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973: xviii). By this, they meant many pre-Enlightenment philosophies and religions bore within them the seeds of enlightenment and, despite their

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alleged redundancy in the wake of secularization, they may have more to contribute to the enlightenment process. The second part of the statement reflects Horkheimer and Adorno’s awareness that modernity has its dark side, that secularization has not been cost-free, but also their conviction that some pre-Enlightenment thought was genuinely regressive in nature. Given the extent to which Dialectic of Enlightenment’s articulation of critical theory relies upon Marx’s analysis of history and social change, we ought not exaggerate the extent to which those highly influenced by Adorno and Horkheimer were open to an engagement with religion, let alone Catholicism. Yet this background may help to explain Habermas’ gradual turn toward precisely such an engagement with key points of Wojtyła and Ratzinger’s agenda. In 2001, Habermas surprised many when he delivered a speech in which he deplored attempts over the previous 150 years to convert science into an “alternative faith.” Habermas added that religious arguments should be permitted in the secular public square, and argued there were areas in which religious believers and nonbelievers should collaborate in order to address modernity’s troublesome aspects. If, Habermas commented, the modern West’s identity was to be rooted in more than simply godlessness, the West had to reenergize its sources of morality. This implied some form of positive engagement with the West’s specific religious inheritance (Habermas 2002). Even greater surprise followed after Habermas’ decision to debate Ratzinger at the Bavarian Catholic Academy in Munich in January 2004, on the subject “Prepolitical moral foundations in the construction of a free civil society.” In his presentation, Habermas did not deny the legitimacy of asking whether secular states were sustained by sources that secularism essentially rejects. Much of his paper argued that the modern secular state is fully capable of deriving legitimacy from sources independent

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of religious and metaphysical positions (Raztinger and Habermas 2006). To this extent, Habermas echoed the consensus of many secular intellectuals in North America (especially Rawlsians) and Western Europe, though he acknowledged that such views are more culturally conditioned than some were willing to concede. In the latter half of his paper, however, Habermas commented that “something can remain intact in the communal life of the religious fellowships . . . something that has been lost elsewhere” (Ratzinger and Habermas 2006: 43). Religions had kept alive ideas that seriously address a number of problems—“lives that have gone astray, with regard to social pathologies, with regard to the failure of individuals’ plans for their lives” (Ratzinger and Habermas 2006: 43–4)—that neither hyperrationalist societies nor his own “post-metaphysical” position had proved capable of resolving. “We find in sacred writings and religious traditions,” Habermas stated, “intuitions about error and redemption, about the salvific exodus from a life that is experienced as empty of salvation; these have been elaborated in a subtle manner over the course of millennia and have been kept alive through a process of interpretation” (Ratzinger and Habermas 2006: 43). Speaking specifically of Catholicism, Habermas noted the crucial contributions made by Catholic theology in the Middle Ages and the early-modern Spanish late-Scholastics to the formation of the idea, albeit secularized, of human rights (Ratzinger and Habermas 2006: 24). Though he believed that the Catholic Church had only engaged “the intellectual challenges of the revolutionary constitutional state” (Ratzinger and Habermas 2006: 24–5) at a much later date, Habermas acknowledged that “the Catholic tradition, which is comfortable with the lumen naturale, has no problem in principle with an autonomous justification of morality and law (that is, a justification independent of the truths of revelation)” (Ratzinger and Habermas 2006: 25).

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As if to reaffirm the point, Habermas stressed “A radical skepticism vis-à-vis reason is profoundly alien to the Catholic tradition” (Ratzinger and Habermas 2006: 37). But even more surprising was Habermas’ insistence that if the state is to be “neutral” when it comes to worldviews, then the state cannot act as an agent for universalizing the secularist worldview. Indeed, he added, secularized citizens should not deny in principle that religious understandings of reality have tremendous power to express truth. Habermas concluded by stating—contra Rawls— that secularized citizens should allow “their believing fellow citizens the right to make contributions in a religious language to public debates” (Ratzinger and Habermas 2006: 51). Habermas’ remarks amounted to considerable concessions from a scholar widely perceived as post-Enlightenment culture’s foremost representative. But they are not entirely surprising, given that Habermas’ own intellectual formation was shaped by secular scholars not closed to religion’s potential contributions to human happiness. It may be the case that Habermas’ engagement with Ratzinger in January 2004 contributed to even more revealing comments articulated in Habermas’ A Time of Transitions (2006). Here Habermas presented “Christianity, and nothing else [as] the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter” (2006: 27). Not surprisingly, Pope Benedict did not hesitate to cite similar remarks by Habermas. In an address to Austrian politicians and diplomats, for example, Benedict commented: In this context, permit me to quote Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher not of the Christian faith. He has stated: “For the normative self-understanding of the modern period Christianity

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has been more than a mere catalyst. The egalitarian universalism which gave rise to the ideas of freedom and social coexistence, is a direct inheritance from the Jewish notion of justice and the Christian ethics of love. Substantially unchanged, this heritage has always been critically re-appropriated and newly interpreted. To this day an alternative to it does not exist.” (2007a)

Recognition of the West’s Judeo-Christian roots did not impair the prospects of intercultural understanding, Habermas held, for the West could not even begin to understand other civilizations unless it understood its own. In the same book, Habermas stated he was “enchanted by the seriousness and consistency” of Aquinas’ thought, which he contrasted with what Habermas described as the “unseriousness” of the modernizing efforts of many contemporary theologians. Habermas also described the contemporary tendency to “unbridled subjectivity” as a danger to “what is really absolute . . . the unconditional right of every creature to be respected in its bodiliness and recognized in its otherness, as an ‘image of God’ ” (Habermas 2006: 70). The same book indicated that Habermas had arrived at conclusions concerning the faith-reason question which paralleled particular ideas expressed in Fides et Ratio and Ratzinger’s thinking. Reflecting upon the Decalogue’s first commandment—You shall have no other gods before me—Habermas stated, “from a philosophical point of view, the first commandment expresses that ‘leap forward’ on a cognitive level which granted man freedom of reflection, the strength to detach himself from vacillating immediacy, to emancipate himself from his generational shackles and the whims of mythical powers” (2006: 80). Habermas also underlined—as does Fides et Ratio—how reason provides tools for clarifying the implications of Christian belief, especially when it comes to politics. “But,” he added, “the political philosophy capable

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of making this contribution bears the stamp of the idea of the Covenant no less than that of the Polis. Therefore this philosophy also hearkens back to a biblical heritage” (Habermas 2006: 97). A somewhat different—and more explicitly positive— response to the Wojtyła-Ratzinger agenda was also articulated in 2004, this time by the Italian philosopher and politician, Marcello Pera. Another self-described nonbeliever and a follower of the philosopher Karl Popper, Pera delivered a lecture at the Pontifical Lateran University, titled “Relativism, Christianity, and the West,” in May 2004. Much of the lecture was devoted to critiquing what Pera considered to be the establishment of ethical, intellectual, and cultural relativism as modern Europe’s secular orthodoxy. Pera noted, however, that similar tendencies had become apparent in the work of some Christian theologians. The resistance to, and condemnation of such trends by John Paul II and Ratzinger, Pera argued, was not an instance of “fundamentalism,” but rather an affirmation of what the Church teaches to be the truth knowable through faith and reason. Pera’s defense of this position resembled Fides et Ratio’s careful explanation of how Catholicism’s vision of faith and reason allowed Christians to affirm the truth of Catholic faith but without lapsing into fideism, while simultaneously exercising tolerance toward people of other faiths and none but without adopting a relativistic stance toward the other religions’ particular claims. Having suggested that it is possible for a nonbeliever to take seriously the logic underlying John Paul and Ratzinger’s explicitly metaphysical and religious arguments, Pera stated that, though a nonbeliever, he recognized that European history was incomprehensible without Christianity. The freedoms usually associated with modernity and what Pera described as European values, such as the “rights and the duties associated with equality, tolerance, respect, solidarity, compassion,” were

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unthinkable without what Pera called “the Christian revolution” (Ratzinger and Pera 2006: 36–7). Drawing upon a number of John Paul II’s commentaries on Europe, including Ecclesia in Europa (Ratzinger and Pera 2006: 35), Pera described many Europeans’ apparent amnesia concerning Christianity’s shaping of Europe as proceeding from the same relativism that undermined, in Pera’s view, Western Europe’s ability to confront radical Islam. Expanding on these ideas, Pera indicated his agreement with John Paul II and Ratzinger that a form of modernity now existed in Europe which was characterized by a type of internal paralysis and the embrace, in some instances, of a contempt for Western civilization bordering on the pathological (Ratzinger and Pera 2006: 87). Pera went further, however, and suggested—in a manner similar to Ratzinger—that when it came to questions of Christianity’s relationship with modernity, Europe could learn something from the American experiment (Ratzinger and Pera 2006: 89–90), especially the American Revolutionaries’ treatment of church-state issues and their affirmation of religion as indispensable for the type of moral culture that sustains free peoples. But perhaps the most revealing dimension of Pera’s thinking on these matters was his concordance with Ratzinger’s challenge to European nonbelievers: to live and act as if God exists (Pera in Ratzinger 2006a: 18). Pera’s reason for advocating this was very Tocquevillian: “the one outside the Church who acts veluti si Deus daretur becomes more responsible in moral terms” (Pera in Ratzinger 2006a: 19). This is especially important, Pera added, when it comes to ensuring the modern sciences serve man rather than destroy him and that they do not establish the absolutization of subjectivity and imprisonment of the divine in a ghetto as the price of scientific progress (Pera in Ratzinger 2006a: 14). It would also, in a sense, help the scientist—and, by extension, modern man—to live in reality. In Pera’s words, “He will no

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longer say that an embryo is a ‘thing’ or a ‘lump of cells’ or ‘genetic material’ . . . that the elimination of a fetus or an embryo does not infringe any rights . . . that a desire that can be satisfied by some technical means is automatically a right . . . that all scientific and technological progress is per se a liberation or a moral advance . . . that the only rationality and the only form of life outside the Church are scientific rationality and an existence bereft of values” (Pera in Ratzinger 2006a: 19). This was not to suggest, Pera commented, there is no longer any room for debate. It would, however, help to facilitate a culture, Pera claimed, that allowed for a more fruitful dialogue between Catholicism and those moderns who accepted aspects of the Church’s critique of modernity while also affirming—as Wojtyła and Ratzinger likewise affirmed—that specific benefits had flowed from the Enlightenment which profited believers and nonbelievers alike. Such a development, Pera hoped, would also help to overcome what he called the “schism” between the world of science and the world of faith sparked by the Galileo case (Pera in Ratzinger 2006a: 9–10).

A New Terrain Secular-minded intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas and Marcello Pera were very much the exception when it came to secular receptions of the papacy’s engagement with modernity under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. It is not simply that Habermas and Pera took seriously Wojtyła and Ratzinger’s thoughts about subjects as complex as faith and reason. Equally important is the fact that they were willing to engage at all, given most Western secular thinkers’ indifference and often hostility towards Catholicism. There was an irony in the fact that these particular nonbelievers regarded the late-twentieth-century

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papacy as having important and distinct things to say about subjects they recognized as having civilizational importance, whereas a considerable number of Western Catholic intellectuals persisted in pursuing a quite different project—that of accommodating Catholicism to modernity’s expectations. On one level, this suggests that the traditional divisions in the post-1789 West between the self-consciously religious and the self-consciously secular have broken down, and been replaced with a different paradigm. This is a more fluid division between, on the one hand, those—Catholic or otherwise—who believe late twentieth-century modernity is the yardstick by which Catholicism should measure itself, and, on the other, those—Catholic or otherwise— who reject accomodationism and believe that the Catholic Church must continue to raise important questions about modernity through a genuine two-way conversation with self-identified modern people. As observed, there are divisions among the Catholics in the second group about how fruitful such a conversation can be and the extent to which modernity is capable of engaging in this discussion. It remains, however, that John Paul II and Benedict XVI changed the intellectual terrain for the encounter between the Catholic Church and modernity, the implications of which, as we will see, continue to be played out in Western intellectual and political culture.

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Paradoxes of Enlightenment

On Tuesday, September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI entered the Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg, where he has once taught as a professor, and proceeded to deliver a lecture that would enter the annals of history’s most controversial addresses. His remarks, most notably his citation of comments by the fourteenth-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palelogus concerning Islam’s history of violence, sparked protests from Muslim communities across the world. Within non-Islamic countries, Benedict’s comments were greeted with a mixture of approval and disquiet from Christians and non-Christians alike. Subsequent debates over the implications of Benedict’s address for relations between Catholicism and Islam, as well as Western and Middle-Eastern countries continued for months afterwards. Ironically, the focus on Benedict XVI’s comments about Islam—specifically, Islam’s understanding of God’s nature—followed weeks later by a papal visit to Turkey (an overwhelmingly Muslim country then seeking entry to the European Union), distracted attention from his Regensburg address’s real focus: the relationship between faith and reason in Christian and Post-Enlightenment culture. While scholars will speculate for decades upon the precise reason Benedict included statements about Islam in his address, there is little question that these remarks underscored the universal implications of the papacy’s

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ongoing conversation with the modern world. They go to the essence of modernity’s self-understanding, but also that of Catholicism, and by extension to the nature of religion in general. Especially important contributions were made to this discussion by the papacy in 2005 and 2006, as it transitioned from John Paul II to Benedict XVI.

Enlightenment, Progress, and Ideologies of Evil At the end of his life, several conversations between John Paul II and his intellectual collaborators were published in his last book, Memory and Identity (2005). It included the pope’s extended reflection on Catholicism’s relationship with modernity. Memory and Identity identified Descartes’ maxim, cogito, ergo sum, as being at the core of the revolution wrought by the Enlightenment. This indicates an unbroken continuity in John Paul’s thought about modernity’s essence, which he had signaled in his pre-pontifical philosophical writings. Descartes, John Paul wrote, “marked the decisive abandonment of what philosophy had been hitherto, particularly the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas.” Whereas pre-Enlightenment thought, John Paul held, had regarded “God as fully Self-sufficient Being” as “the necessary ground . . . of all created beings, including man,” now “philosophy became a science of pure thought” (2005: 8–9). For John Paul, this had more than simply abstract philosophical implications. For one thing, “God was reduced to an element within human consciousness” (2005: 10), rather than being understood as the ultimate explanation for everything. This in turn erected man rather than God as the “one who would decide what is good and what is bad, as one who would exist and operate etsi Deus non daretur, even if there were no God” (2005: 10). John Paul

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unabashedly described this as a common factor of “ideologies of evil” (2005: 7). The belief that man alone can define good and evil was, John Paul stated, implicit to Nazism’s extermination programs and analogous policies pursued by Marxist regimes. For once the idea of human nature as a given reality is replaced by the notion that humans are simply the product of freely formed thought, then, John Paul claimed, there is no limit to man’s potential to use and manipulate other human beings (2005: 12). This is not to say, John Paul adds, that Enlightenment thought postulated there should be no guidance to man’s use of his freedom. But by positing pleasure and utility as the primary guides (the greatest pleasure of the greatest number) to the proper use and ends of human liberty, John Paul believed that the utilitarianism which he particularly associated with Bentham and Mill assumed that human reason can do something that is literally impossible— calculate all the possible pleasures and pains of an act or rule (2005: 34–6). Yet even this measure, John Paul held, was now being dispensed with by modernity: “Appeal is made today to freedom alone . . . what matters is to be free, released from all constraint or limitation, so as to operate according to private judgment, which in reality is often pure caprice” (2005: 34). John Paul II’s concluding reflections on the Enlightenment were not, however, primarily negative. Though noting “the polemical attitude of many Enlightenment thinkers toward Christianity” (2005: 98), he likened Catholicism’s encounter with modernity to that of St. Paul speaking to the Athenian philosophers in the Areopagus. St. Paul, the pope stressed, knew Greek philosophy. By appealing solely to rational data, Paul was able to converse with his listeners, though some of them reacted negatively when he began referring to the person of Jesus Christ and Christian Revelation. Yet, John Paul noted, some of Paul’s listeners wanted to hear more.

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Some were even convinced by his claims (2005: 94–5). For John Paul, there was a direct analogy between Paul’s Athenian audience and Enlightenment thinkers. Most Enlightenment philosophers “did not reject the existence of the ‘unknown God’ ” (2005: 97). Nonetheless, the most radical among them, John Paul added, explicitly disassociated themselves from Christianity. Despite tensions, John Paul insisted that there were many positive fruits of the Enlightenment. He suggested, for example, that “the French Enlightenment paved the way for a better understanding of human rights” (2005: 107). Though noting that the French Revolution led to gross violations of these rights, John Paul claimed that the wider acknowledgment of human rights marked a positive transition away from feudalism (2005: 108). The irony for John Paul was that the very same rights find their roots in the Christian understanding of the person. “It is striking,” John Paul wrote, “how often the logic of Enlightenment thought led to a profound rediscovery of the truths contained in the Gospel” (2005: 109). In a way, he commented, the documents of Vatican II reflected the encounter of Christianity and the Enlightenment, with the Council, in his view, attempting to permeate modern Enlightenment thought from within, thereby attempting to return the Enlightenment project to its Christian cultural and intellectual foundations (2005: 109–10).

Benedict at Regensburg Modernity and Catholicism were unquestionably a primary focus of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address. Close analysis of this text indicates that the subject of Islam was somewhat marginal to Benedict’s purpose per se—a point which becomes more apparent in light of other documents subsequently authored by Benedict. Regensburg was more

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immediately concerned with religion’s relationship with reason, and the respective challenges that this created for believers and nonbelievers living in a context of modernity. While much of Benedict’s analysis paralleled John Paul’s Memory and Identity, the mixture of theological, philosophical, and historical reflection was different, especially its attention to the interplay between faith and reason in European history. Reflecting upon the Emperor Manuel II Palelogus’ comments about Islam and violence, Benedict stressed that the core of the Emperor’s argument was that using violence to spread a religious faith “is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.” But Benedict proceeded to quote the Emperor in order to stress that “God . . . is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. . . . Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence or threats” (Benedict XVI 2006b). As if to reemphasize the point, Benedict repeated: “The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature” (Benedict XVI 2006b). The implication is that insofar as Islam adheres to a view of God as—to use Benedict’s expression—“absolutely transcendent” in the sense of being detached from rationality, then it is futile to appeal to reason to explain why a particular act undertaken in religion’s name might be unreasonable. Benedict then quoted the French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who noted that some Islamic thinkers, most notably the Spanish Muslim Ibn Hazm (994–1064), even stated that “God is not bound even by his own word. . . . Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry” (Benedict XVI 2006b). By way of contrast, Benedict noted that Christianity reflects a rapprochement between “the biblical understanding of faith in God” and “what is Greek in the best

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sense of the word.” He commented that the Gospel of John begins by modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis by stating “In the beginning was the λóγoς.” This word, Benedict observed, is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, συ`ν λóγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word—a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: “Come over to Macedonia and help us!” (cf. Acts 16:6–10)—this vision can be interpreted as a “distillation” of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry. (Benedict XVI 2006b)

This synthesis, Benedict argued, is an inseparable part of Western identity, and indeed helped distinguish Western culture from other civilizations. Much of the drama of subsequent Western and European history, Benedict suggested, can be understood as periods where Christianity’s distinctive view of God as Logos is affirmed or split asunder. It contributed, he held, to Europe’s depaganization while simultaneously keeping and purifying the best of Greek thought (Benedict XVI 2006b). Significantly, Benedict did not ascribe the responsibility for all subsequent sunderings to the Enlightenment. Indeed, he identified particular Christian intellectual movements operating throughout history as having split faith and reason apart to the detriment of both faith and reason. The synthesis of faith and reason that Benedict

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associated with Augustine and Aquinas was first disturbed in the late Middle Ages, he argued, by the emergence of forms of voluntarism—the idea that God is not Logos or even rational will, but rather simply Will. This led to the claim that humans “can only know God’s voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done” (Benedict XVI 2006b). There is little to distinguish such positions, Benedict maintained, from that of Ibn Hazm. This problem of what Benedict called “dehellenization” reemerged in different points of subsequent history, albeit in somewhat different guises. The first occurred during the Reformation. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. (Benedict XVI 2006b)

Another instance of Christians contributing to Western dehellenization, Benedict claimed, was the rise of liberal thought in nineteenth-century Catholic and Protestant theology. Associated with the theologian Adolf von Harnack, Benedict described liberal theology as reading Christianity through the lens of “modern reason,” by which he meant the empirical and mathematical scientific methods. The intrinsic limitations of such methods—such as their inability to look beyond the empirical—necessarily

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excluded, Benedict stated, the question of God. Thus, he held, no one should be surprised that this tends to reduce Christianity to “a humanitarian moral message” (Benedict XVI 2006b), devoid of theological or transcendental significance. In the first volume of his Jesus of Nazareth (2007b), Benedict continued this critique, suggesting that those adopting such approaches to the question of who is Jesus Christ (especially those characterized by an almost exclusive reliance on the historical-critical method of analyzing Scripture) invariably ended up advocating positions virtually identical to those of many secular progressives—“a world governed by peace, justice, and the conservation of creation” (2007b: 53–4)—and trivializing, if not rigidly excluding any possibility of the transcendent, let alone what the reality of that transcendent might suggest about the intrinsic flaws of secularist utopian impulses. In short, as Marcelo Sánchez writes, dehellenization, from Benedict’s standpoint, “eliminated not only every form of objective transcendence but also every absolute and transcendent value of the principles of reason” (2008: 9). Like John Paul, Benedict concluded his Regensburg address by insisting that the Catholic Church was not anti-Enlightenment in principle. Benedict stressed his commentary “has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age” (Benedict XVI 2006b). Indeed Benedict celebrated modernity’s positive aspects. Rather his point was to underline the need for broadening Western man’s concept of reason and to “overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable” and “once more disclose its vast horizons” (Benedict XVI 2006b). Here he pointed to theology as having a critical role to play, “not merely as a historical discipline, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith” (Benedict XVI 2006b).

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Hence, while Benedict was convinced that religion needs the purifying force of natural reason to cleanse faith of any inclination to unreasonable acts or claims, he insisted that a West which maintains only a positivistic understanding of reason has, by definition, cut itself off from reality— the reality of both reason itself and the reasonableness of the divine. Science itself, Benedict argued, demonstrates there is a rational structure built into the nature of human matter. “The West,” Benedict commented, “has long been endangered by . . . aversion to the questions that underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby” (Benedict XVI 2006b). As the Anglican theologian Ian Markham—by no means himself in strong agreement with the teachings of orthodox Catholicism—writes: You cannot assume a rationality and then argue that there is no foundation to that rationality. Either God and rationality go or God and rationality stay. Either Nietzsche or Aquinas, that is our choice. (1988: 115)

A Wider Agenda Much of Benedict XVI’s message about religion and reason at Regensburg was lost sight of in the ensuing controversies. This did not prevent Benedict from returning to these themes in his 2006 Christmas address to the Roman Curia. Having noted that his Regensburg address was not concerned with Islam per se, but rather “the dialogue between faith and reason,” Benedict further underscored this point by reminding his audience of his January 2004 encounter with Habermas, especially Habermas’ stress upon modernity’s need for Christianity’s “encoded convictions” to be translated into secular language. Benedict viewed the situation slightly differently. “Reason,” he stated, “needs the Logos which was at the beginning and is our light. Faith,

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for its part, needs the conversation with modern reason to take stock of its own greatness and to correspond to its own responsibilities” (Benedict XVI 2006a). Though Benedict did not specify what he meant by the latter, he may have been indicating that reason prevents faith from dissolving into fundamentalism, that reason aids and clarifies the understanding of faith, and that reason is necessary if Christian faith is to be communicated and understood. As he wrote in 2008, “The Logos, the reason for hope must become apo-logía; it must become a response” (2008b). Benedict was not, however, content simply to clarify the meaning of Regensburg, because he used his Christmas 2006 speech to place his remarks in the context of the past and the future. He noted that the relationship between Catholicism and modern reason has been difficult since the Enlightenment. “On the one hand,” Benedict warned, Catholicism was confronted with the prospect of “a dictatorship of positivist reason that excludes God from the life of the community and from public organizations, thereby depriving man of his specific criteria of judgment.” At the same time, Benedict urged Christians to “welcome the true conquests of the Enlightenment, human rights and especially the freedom of faith and its practice, and recognize these as being essential elements for the authenticity of religion” (Benedict XVI 2006a). In one sense, Benedict stated, Catholicism’s search for a “correct position” concerning its view of the Enlightenment’s legacy “will certainly never be concluded once and for all.” Nonetheless, he stressed in the same address that the Second Vatican Council found “real solutions” for the Catholic Church in addressing these issues. But perhaps the most important aspect of Benedict’s Christmas 2006 address was not his revisiting of the faith-reason-Catholicism-modernity nexus, but rather the manner in which he invested this conversation with global significance. In doing so, he underlined

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Regensburg’s true significance for Islam. Catholicism, Benedict stated, has long been engaged in a critical, often difficult conversation with the post-Enlightenment world. For all its tensions, however, this discussion had never been definitively broken off, even at the worst moments of secular or religious intolerance. Benedict then commented, “the Muslim world today is fi nding itself faced with an urgent task . . . [a task] very similar to the one that has been imposed upon Christians since the Enlightenment.” “The Islamic world,” Benedict added, “with its own tradition faces the immense task of fi nding the appropriate solutions in this regard” (Benedict XVI 2006a). To this extent, Benedict appeared to be presenting the Catholicism-modernity discussion as one that the Islamic world could observe and, if its internal dynamics permitted, replicate in different areas. At the same time, Benedict believed that an even greater challenge faces the self-consciously secular mind. “Secularized reason,” he wrote, “is unable to enter into a true dialogue with the religions.” The cause, Benedict noted, is simple. “It remains closed to the question of God, and this will end by leading to the clash of cultures” (Benedict XVI 2006a). Here we observe that Benedict did not suggest that those who do not believe in God or who were undecided about God’s existence had nothing to contribute. Rather he emphasized that those forms of reason incapable of considering the issue of God have nothing to say about the divine to those who are believers—Jew, Christian, or Muslim— beyond dismissing the religious believer as suffering from self-delusion. Certainly Jews, Christians, and Muslims have very different understandings of God. To understate these differences—especially when it comes to the competing ideas of God as Logos or God as sheer Will—would be a mistake, not least because they can obstruct any meaningful conversation between these groups. Nonetheless,

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the believing Jew, Christian, and Muslim share the conviction that there is a God. This forms the starting point for some type of discussion. The convinced positivist-secularist, by contrast, cannot even enter into that conversation, because, with varying degrees of intensity, he rejects its very starting point. By contrast, those who share Benedict’s view of God as Logos—Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim, or even certain types of deists—can coexist with and even respect those who do not believe in God or are skeptical of his existence (subject, of course, to the degree of tolerance extended by nonbelievers and believers alike to each other). The same cannot, however, be said of those who view God as pure untrammeled Will. Oddly enough, the voluntaristic religious believer and the committed positivist-secularist are similar insofar as neither can engage with those who believe in human reason in all its fullness—be it as a form of participation in the divine reason or simply as something capable of going beyond the strictly positive sciences—with anything but indifference at best or outright hostility at worst.

Twenty-First-Century Challenges Throughout the reflections of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the conviction prevails that, in historical terms, the encounter between Catholicism and post-Enlightenment intellectual currents will be a perpetual conversation. Both popes believed, as a matter of faith and reason, that the Catholic Church will continue its march through history until what Catholicism believes to be the true end of history: Christ’s Second Coming. Neither pope, however, viewed any Enlightenment streams of thought as likely to disappear in the future. The turn to modernity, both popes believed, marks something new in human history. Though sharing their predecessors’ varying degrees of

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skepticism about aspects of modernity, neither John Paul nor Benedict dismissed the post-Enlightenment world as hopelessly irremediable or irrevocably committed to a hostile view of Catholicism. In more recent decades, a number of scholars have illustrated that the view taken by the papacy and the Catholic Church towards the emergence of modernity is considerably more complex than hitherto realized. In his acclaimed Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France (1939), the American historian R. R. Palmer underlined the intensity of debates between French late-Enlightenment thinkers and Catholic intellectuals. The eighteenth-century Catholic theologian Dom Nicholas Jamin was not afraid to take the field against Voltaire and, by some accounts, had the better of the argument. Likewise, educated European circles were fully aware of the powerful critique of Rousseau’s Émile by the French Benedictine cleric Pierre Deforis. Indeed, the reaction of many philosophes to such criticism, as Palmer—himself an admirer of many Enlightenment thinkers—observes, was anything but respectful: In theory, the philosophers stood for the toleration of all beliefs and the free expression of ideas. In fact, however, the situation was less simple. The philosophers were by no means willing to allow liberty to their opponents. Not even to those who were far from representing the formidable power of the church. Their method was not often the mild persuasion favored by liberals. They talked much of reason, but their sharpest instruments were ridicule and vilification, which enabled them to throw off a man’s arguments by defaming his character or belittling his intelligence. La Baumelle went to jail, thanks partly to Voltaire, whose works he had ventured to criticize. Fréron, a conservative and Catholic journalist, was called by Voltaire, in a single work, a scribbler, toad, lizard, snake, spider, viper’s tongue, crooked mind, heart of filth,

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doer of evil, rascal, impudent person, cowardly knave, spy, and hound. He found his journal gagged, his income halved and his career ruined by the concerted attacks of the philosophers. To silence him, at least two of these philosophers, Marmontel and d’Alembert, appealed to the censors whose very existence the enlightened thinkers are supposed to have abhorred. It is not possible, in short, to accept as characteristic of these thinkers the statement often attributed to Voltaire, that, though he disagreed with what a man said, he would fight to the death for his right to say it. (1931: 7)1

Nonetheless, as observed by the historian Nigel Aston, there is little question that the Catholic Church “had by Louis XVI’s reign absorbed some mainstream Enlightenment values” (2000: 87). The picture of an intransigent Church locked in a life-and-death confrontation with philosophes throughout the eighteenth century increasingly appears a caricature. It was after all another intellectual pope, Benedict XIV, who actively promoted the positive sciences and entered into correspondence with Voltaire. The philosophe dedicated his 1744 play, Mahomet, to Benedict. Speaking of France’s Catholic clergy, another historian of the period comments: “No other estate responded more thoroughly to the varied stimuli of the Enlightenment” (Jones 1995: 129). In his L’ancien régime et la révolution (1856), written only sixty years after the bloody events of the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (who himself oscillated between faith and skepticism) commented that, based on the archival evidence, the French Catholic clergy on the eve of the Revolution were probably the besteducated clergy in France’s history, overwhelmingly orthodox in their faith, and yet very conversant with the world of the human and natural sciences. This is not to suggest that either eighteenth-century popes or Catholic thinkers abandoned their struggle against any philosophe ideas that they regarded as heretical

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or erroneous. Voltaire’s Mahomet dedication and his correspondence with Benedict XIV did not dissuade this pope from condemning Voltaire’s works as incompatible with Catholic belief and reaffirming the Church’s denunciation of freemasonry in 1751. In his study of the French CounterEnlightenment, the historian Darrin McMahon points out that there were plenty of anti-philosophe Catholics who assailed every aspect of the eighteenth-century writers’ thought and actions, ranging from the basic coherence of Enlightenment insights to the sexual morals (or perceived lack thereof) of Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Nor were they slow to insist that the barbarism associated with the French Revolution’s steady lurch towards violence was the logical consequence of the philosophes’ utilitarianism, godlessness, and contempt for moderation (McMahon 2001). But this real, prolonged and at times violent conflict should not blind us to the fact that many eighteenth-century European Catholics appreciated insights contained in books such as Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, or, like another Benedictine, Dom Joseph Pernetty, saw no conflict between his orthodox Catholicism and his writing of a Newtonian mathematical course or his decision to accompany the French explorer, the Comte de Bougainville, during his journeys of scientific discovery throughout the Pacific and circumnavigation of the world between 1766 and 1769. Such Catholics were well aware that the origins of political devices such as constitutionalism and representative government or the methods of the modern sciences were to be found in the High Middle Ages presided over by the Catholic Church, precisely because the Christian passion for the truth. Benedict XVI made oblique reference to this in an address to French intellectuals in Paris when he stated: it is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance, sciences which show us the path towards

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language. Because the search for God required the culture of the word, it was appropriate that the monastery should have a library, pointing out pathways to the word. It was also appropriate to have a school, in which these pathways could be opened up. Benedict calls the monastery a dominici servitii schola. The monastery serves eruditio, the formation and education of man—a formation whose ultimate aim is that man should learn how to serve God. But it also includes the formation of reason—education—through which man learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word itself. (2008b)

Eighteenth-century French Catholic thinkers were equally conscious that the earliest critiques of absolutism had been authored by Catholic scholars such as Cardinal Robert Bellarmine S.J. (1542–1621), and Juan de Mariana S.J. (1536–1624), and that many of the arguments contained in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations were prefigured by Catholic scholars ranging from Bernardino of Sienna (1380–1444) to Martin de Azpilcueta (1493–1586) (Grabill 2007). Yet for all this dialogue, it took less than a year after July 1789 for conflict between the largely Enlightenmentinfluenced French Revolution and the papacy to turn into full-scale violence against the Church in France. Many historians have noted that the most powerful impetus given to the forces opposing the French Revolution came via the Revolution’s attempt first to subordinate and then terminate the Catholic Church in France and most of those regions conquered by the Revolutionary armies. It turned thousands of European Catholics who had sympathized with much of the early Revolution’s program into ardent defenders of the pre-1789 order. Our analysis of Wojtyła and Ratzinger’s writings demonstrates that neither could be considered reactionary in their view of modernity. While different emphases pervade their respective thinking, it cannot be said that either

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pontiff wished that modernity had never happened. To this extent, there is considerable distance between these popes and many aspects of the Counter-Enlightenment movements which began in the eighteenth century. At the same time, both were determined to shift the conversation between Catholicism and modernity away from what might now be retrospectively seen as somewhat peripheral subjects, toward a more intense discussion of what Catholicism and modernity shared and where they disagreed—most notably by focusing on certain fundamental issues where the discussion could only be difficult. This, it may be suggested, represented a shift away from particular interpretations put upon Vatican II. The approach of Wojtyła and Ratzinger did not involve a formal or de facto repudiation of Vatican II. Rather, it implied a sharpening of the discussion so as to force open within both the Catholic Church and the modern world a genuine and more substantial debate about crucial matters such as the nature of human reason and progress. In Spe Salvi, for example, Benedict XVI argued that Christianity’s insistence upon the possibility of eternal life fundamentally reorientated human history by saving pagan Europe from an understanding of life as essentially purposeless. Christianity encouraged people to view the world as one in which things made sense (SS 2). The same God who gave man hope of eternal life was understood to be a thoroughly rational deity—the Logos—rather than a willful, capricious divinity. Thus astrology began giving way to astronomy, as humans accelerated their quest for truth, confident that humanity’s existence was not the work of mere chance or a master clock-maker, but rather came from a God who was simultaneously Love (Caritas) and Truth (Veritas). But Benedict then poses modernity with the question of what happens when Christian hope begins to fade from a society’s cultural horizon. This, he suggests in Spe Salvi, is what occurred when some Enlightenment thinkers,

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exemplified by the scientist-philosopher Francis Bacon, began to believe that human reason could eventually solve all of humanity’s problems (SS 16–17). This ideology of progress, Benedict suggests, resulted in people imagining that it was possible to realize the Kingdom of God on earth. The French Revolution, Benedict holds, was the first political attempt to implement this ideology and ended in bloodshed (SS 19). The same logic, he argues, was central to the Marxist project. In Benedict’s view, Marxism could not help but leave behind “a trail of appalling destruction” (SS 21). Marx, Benedict says, was virtually silent about the end-state of his promised heaven-on-earth because he “forgot man and he forgot man’s freedom” (SS 21). In other words, once we accept the reality of human liberty, we know that society can never be static, never perfect. There is no human-engineered “end of history.” Ironically, Benedict states, Marxism’s denial of liberty meant that its politics could never get beyond the “dictatorship of the proletariat” phase. Thus, Benedict observes, “having accomplished the revolution, Lenin must have realized that the writings of the master gave no indication as to how to proceed” (SS 21). Perhaps one of the most important features of the papacy’s engagement with modernity during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI is that neither regarded Vatican II as the final word on Catholicism’s engagement with modernity. Neither the modern world nor the Catholic Church stood still in the decades following 1965. While it might be true that some potential solutions to the Catholicism-modernity conundrum were discussed and outlined at Vatican II, both John Paul and Benedict believed that developments at the level of politics, technology, and culture made necessary an urgent discussion of even more fundamental questions. It is doubtful, for example, that many Council fathers at Vatican II would have envisaged that within thirty years of the Council,

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Communism would have collapsed in the former U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, that much of Western Europe would have largely de-Christianized, that barely civil debates would be raging about the nature and ends of the positive sciences, or that various forms of Islam were raising such powerful questions about religion’s place in the public square that even a philosopher with as impeccably secular—even secularist—credentials such as Jürgen Habermas would consider himself bound to engage such a subject. To this extent, the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI succeeded in shifting the parameters of the modernity-Catholicism discussion in a manner similar to the way in which the Galileo case changed the same conversation in the early seventeenth-century. Just as Galileo did not reject the Catholic faith, neither John Paul nor Benedict regarded modernity as something to be disdained, let alone dismantled. They were nonetheless convinced that the post-Enlightenment world was incomprehensible without appreciation of the Christian civilization from which the Enlightenment emerged. John Paul and Benedict were equally certain that the same Christian culture was capable of providing the intellectual coherence desperately needed by post-Enlightenment societies as they found themselves unable to break loose of what the popes regarded as the suffocating and dehumanizing straightjacket of utilitarianism, which turned the Enlightenment’s real achievements against man himself. As Benedict XVI puts it: Quaerere Deum—to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times. A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences. (2008b)

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As noted, much secular opinion during the Wojtyła and Ratzinger pontificates remained unconvinced that their project was necessary, let alone valid. Nonetheless, just as the questions raised by Galileo did not disappear, nor have the matters highlighted by these two post-Vatican II popes. Such questions may be ignored, trivialized, or even forgotten by many secularists and Catholics alike, but this does not lessen their salience. That secular thinkers ranging from Pera to Habermas considered themselves bound to engage rather than arbitrarily dismiss the questions posed by John Paul and Benedict indicates that, appearances to the contrary, a significant number—albeit perhaps a minority—of secular-minded scholars believed that the papacy had important things to say to modernity. Like or loath them, the achievement of John Paul II and Benedict XVI may perhaps have been their reestablishment of the papacy as a significant intellectual reference point in the modern world for many secularists and Catholics alike, following the disorder in which much of the Catholic Church fell after Vatican II. The extent to which the post-Enlightenment world is willing to engage with, or even capable of listening to such ideas is a different question. Certainly both popes’ writings suggest that they were well-versed in past and present secular intellectual currents and very conversant with secular objections to their own positions. Much of their activity involved identifying the Enlightenment’s positive offerings to humanity and distinguishing them from what Wojtyła and Ratzinger consider to be the Enlightenment’s errors. Like their predecessors, they were willing—even happy—to embrace those aspects of truth that might never have seen the light of day without the various Enlightenments. Nonetheless, both had serious reservations concerning modernity’s ability—even willingness—to open its own windows to the Catholic critique, especially in light of modernity’s insistence on clinging to a truncated concept of reason.

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It may well be that a resurgent Islam—not to mention Catholicism’s explosive growth in the developing world— may have more impact in terms of causing self-described moderns to take religion more seriously. But perhaps the strongest guarantee that the intellectual agenda pursued by the papacy under Wojtyła and Ratzinger will not disappear is that it touches upon questions that modernity—indeed, humans in any age—cannot escape precisely because all humans at some point of their lives must engage these issues, even if it is to profess indifference to such ponderings. Does God exist? If so, what is his nature? Through what means, if any, can humans comprehend this higher reality? If God has revealed himself to humanity, how does this Revelation relate to the truths knowable through natural reason? Does this Revelation have any significance for the choices made by individuals and societies? If so, does this mean that man is essentially free or is humanity simply subject to the whims of an arbitrary Supreme Being? What does it mean to do good and avoid evil? Do categories such as good and evil possess their own concrete content? Or are they simply synonyms for useful and less useful, better and worse? Is death the end and oblivion, or the culmination of one beginning and the commencement of something new? These questions are truly eternal and their answers are ultimately metaphysical and theological—including for unbelievers. They arise in all contexts, be it the terrible reality of the Gulag and Auschwitz, or the very different postwar world of twenty-first-century Western Europe. As long as the papacy continues to pose these questions to a post-Enlightenment world—a world deeply marked by the hermeneutics of suspicion and in which figures such as Wojtyła and Ratzinger (rather than rebellious Catholic intellectuals) are the true dissenters—the papacy need never fear that it will lapse into irrelevance. The moment

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the papacy ceases to explore these matters or begins, as Ratzinger writes, to present a vision of Jesus Christ as someone who “demands nothing, never scolds, who accepts everyone and everything, who no longer does anything but affirm us” (2005b: 8), it will surely have nothing distinctive to say. The loss would be everyone’s.

Notes

1 Encountering Modernity 1

2

3 4 5

Each individual is referenced by their pre-papal name when discussing their pre-papal thought or history, and their papal designation for papal writings and history. Named after Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), or Jansenius, the bishop of Ypres, Jansenism was a movement in the Catholic Church between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that derived its ideas from readings of St. Augustine and St. Paul. Its remarkable closeness to Calvinist teaching on the question of nature and grace, especially when it came to subjects such as justification and human sinfulness, resulted in the formal condemnation of Jansenist theology as contrary to Catholic doctrine on faith and morals by Pope Clement XI in the papal bull, Unigenitus, in 1713. Largely confined to increasingly diminishing groups of lower clergy in France, Jansenism was nonetheless a background influence on a number of Enlightenment thinkers. The conflict between Jansenist-inclined lawyers with the Jesuits was one precipitating factor in the Jesuits’ suppression in 1773 (Palmer 1939: 23–52). Emphasis added. Author’s translation. Between the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation, there are twenty-one documents in the New Testament canon that take the form of letters or epistles. St. Paul is associated with fourteen of the twenty-one letters.

2 Against the Dissolution of Man 1

From deca (ten) and logos (word), the Decalogue is the phrase used to describe the precepts inscribed by God (Exodus 20: 1–17 and Deuteronomy 5: 6–21) on two tables of stone which were given to Moses on Mount Sinai. The second tablet contains the following

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prohibitions: Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house; neither shalt thou desire his wife, nor his servant, nor his handmaid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his.

3 Inside the Modern Areopagus 1

We recognize that this focus excludes consideration reactions from, for instance, believers from other religions and, to a certain extent, those living in predominately non-Western cultures. Given, however, that our attention is upon the papacy’s approach to modernity, it would seem concentration upon the responses of Catholic and secular thinkers will yield the most pertinent insights into our chosen subject matter.

4 Paradoxes of Enlightenment 1

For firm evidence of Voltaire’s intolerance, one need only examine the index to his collected works (1877–1885), specifically the entries under “Juifs” (for his anti-Semitism), “Larcher,” “Trublet,” “Guenée,” and “Chaumiex.”

Bibliography

Throughout this book, the following universally accepted abbreviations are used for the following official Church documents. The number immediately following the citation of the abbreviation in the text refers to the listed paragraph numbers of the document to which reference is being made. Gaudium et Spes (GS), 1965. Slavorum Apostoli (SA), 1985. Centesimus Annus (CA), 1991. Veritatis Splendor (VS), 1993. Evangelium Vitae (EV), 1995. Fides et Ratio (FR), 1998. Ecclesia in Europa (EE), 2003. Deus Caritas Est (DCE), 2005. Spe Salvi (SS), 2007. The pre-pontifical and pontifical texts of Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI are vast in number. Hence, the articles, books, and church documents listed in this select bibliography are only those referenced in the text.

Works of Joseph Ratzinger Ratzinger, J. (1954), Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustins Lehre von der Kirche. Munich: K. Zink. —(1959/1971), The Theology of History in Saint Bonaventure. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press. —(1965), Ergebnisse und Probleme der Dritten Konzilsperiode. Cologne: Bachum. —(1968/2000), Introduction to Christianity. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. —(1969a), “Glaube, geschichte und philosophie: zum echo auf einführung in das Christentum,” Hochland, 61, 540–9.

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Ratzinger, J. (1969b), “The dignity of the human person,” in H. Vorgrimler (ed.), Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 5. New York: Herder and Herder. —(1975/1986), Principles of Christian Morality. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. —(1977/1988), Eschatology—Death and Eternal Life. Regensburg: Pustet. —(1982), Theologische Prinzipienlehre. Munich: Wewel Verlag. —(1986), “Church and economy,” Communio, 13, (3), 199–204. —(1988), Church, Ecumenism, and Politics. Middlegreen: St. Paul Publications. —(1998), Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. —(2004), Truth and Tolerance. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. —(2005a), “Homily at mass ‘pro eligendo romano pontifice’,” www.vatican. va/gpII/documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en.html —(2005b), On the Way to Jesus Christ. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. —(2006a), Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. —(2006b), Values in a Time of Upheaval. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Ratzinger, J. and Habermas, J. (2006), The Dialectics of Secularization. San Francisco: Ignatius. Ratzinger, J. and Maier, H. (2000), Demokratie in der Kirche: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen. Limburg: Lahan-Verlag. Ratzinger, J. and Messori, V. (1985), The Ratzinger Report. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Ratzinger, J. and Pera, M. (2006), Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam. New York: Basic Books.

Works of Benedict XVI Benedict XVI. (2005a), “Christmas greetings to the members of the roman curia and prelature.” www.vatican.va/ holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2005/december/documents/ hf_ben_xvi_spe_20051222_roman-curia_en.html — (2005b), Deus Caritas Est. www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/ encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritasest_en.html —(2006a), “Christmas address to the roman curia.” www.vatican.va/ holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/december/documents/ hf_ben_xvi_spe_20061222_curia-romana_en.html —(2006b), “Faith, reason and the university: memories and reflections.” w w w.vatican.va/holy_ father/benedict _ x v i/speeches/2006/

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s e p t e m b e r/d o c u m e n t s / h f _ b e n - x v i _ s p e _ 2 0 0 6 0 9 1 2 _ university-regensburg_en.html —(2007a), “Address to Austrian authorities and the diplomatic corps.” www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2007/ s e p t e m b e r/d o c u m e n t s / h f _ b e n - x v i _ s p e _ 2 0 0 7 0 9 0 7 _ hofburg-wien_en.html —(2007b), Jesus of Nazareth. New York: Doubleday. —(2007c), Spe Salvi. www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/ encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi_en.html —(2008a), “Address to the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization in New York.” www.vatican.va/ holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/april/documents/ hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080418_un-visit_en.html —(2008b), “The Origins of Western Theology and the Roots of Western Culture. Address at Meeting with Representatives from the World of Culture, Collège des Bernardins, Paris.” www.vatican.va/ holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/september/documents/ hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080912_parigi-cultura_en.html

Works of Karol Wojtyła Wojtyła, K. (1949/1981), Faith according to St. John of the Cross, tr. J. Aumann. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. —(1959), Ocena moz˙ liwos´ci zbudowania etyki chrzes´cijan´skiej przy załoz˙eniach systemu Maksa Schelera [The Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethic on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler]. Lublin: TNKUL. —(1960/1980), Love and Responsibility. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. —(1969/1979), The Acting Person, tr. A. Potocki. Dordrecht: Reidel. —(1975), “De ecclesia in mundo huius temporis” (October 21, 1964), Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II. Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, III, (5), 298–300. —(1976/1979), Sign of Contradiction. New York: Geoffrey Chapman. —(1977a), “Il problema del costituirsi della cultura attraverso la ‘praxis’ umana,” Rivista de Filosofia Neo-Scolastica, 69, (3), 513–24. —(1977b), “Oratio de ecclesia in mundo huius temporis pars I,” Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II. Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, IV, (2), 660–3. —(1979), “The person: subject and community,” Review of Metaphysics, 33, (2), 277–9.

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Bibliography

Works of John Paul II John Paul II (1979a), “Address to the third annual assembly of CELAM,” in Puebla: Pilgrimage of Faith. Boston: St. Paul Publications. —(1979b), On the Centenary of the Birth of Albert Einstein. www.ewtn. com/library/PAPALDOC/JP2ALEIN.HTM —(1980), Egregiae Virtutis. www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_ paul _ ii/apost _ letters/document s/h f _ jp -ii _ apl _ 31121980_ egregiae-virtutis_lt.html —(1985), Slavorum Apostoli. www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/ encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_19850602_slavorum-apostoli_en.html —(1986). Augustinum Hipponensem. www.vatican.va/holy_father/ john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_26081986_ augustinum-hipponensem_en.html —(1988), “Address to moral theologians,” L’Osservatore Romano (English edn.), December 19–26. —(1991), Centesimus Annus. www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0214/_INDEX.HTM —(1992), “Discours aux participants à la session plénière de l’académie pontificale des sciences.” www.vatican.va/holy_ fat her/john _pau l _ ii/speeches/19 92/october/document s/ hf_jp-ii_spe_19921031_accademia-scienze_fr.html —(1993), Veritatis Splendor. www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0222/__PA.HTM —(1994), Crossing the Threshold of Hope. London: Cape. —(1995), Evangelium Vitae. www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/ encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae_en.html —(1996a), “Allocution at the 1500th anniversary mass for the baptism of Clovis, Reims,” Notitae 32, 716–20. —(1996b), “Message to the pontifical academy of sciences: on evolution.” http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP961022.HTM —(1998), Fides et Ratio. www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/ encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html —(2003), Ecclesia in Europa. www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/ apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_20030628_ecclesia-ineuropa_en.html John Paul II and André Frossard. (1985), Be Not Afraid. New York: Image Books.

Books—General Aston, N. (2000), Religion and Revolution in France 1780–1804. Washington, DC: CUA Press.

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Barth, K. (1969), Ad Limina Apostolorum. Edinburgh: St. Andrews Press. Buttiglione, R. (1997a), Karol Wojtyła: The Thought of the Man Who Became John Paul II. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. —(1997b), The Moral Mandate for Freedom: Reflections from Centesimus Annus. Grand Rapids: Acton Institute. Caprile, G. (1968), Il Concilio Vaticano II, vol. 2, Primo Periodo. Roma: Civiltà Cattolica. Chaput, C. J. (2008), Render unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. New York: Doubleday. Congar, Y. (1950), Vraie et Fausse Réforme dans l’Eglise. Paris: Cerf. De Lubac, H. (1944/1998), Le drame de l’humanisme athée. Paris: Cerf. —(1979/1981), La postérié spirituelle de Joachim de Flore. Paris: Cerf. —(1992/2006), Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes écrits. Paris: Cerf. De Maistre, J. (1819/1966), Du pape. Genève: Droz. Dulles S.J., A. (2007), Magisterium: Teacher and Guardian of the Faith. Naples, FL: Sapientia Press. Finnis, J. (1980), Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford: Clarendon. —(1991), Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth. Washington, DC: CUA Press. —(1998), Aquinas: Moral, Legal, and Political Theory. Oxford: OUP. Grabill, S. J. ed. (2007), Sourcebook in Late-Scholastic Monetary Theory: The Contributions of Martín Azpilcueta, Luis de Molina, S.J., and Juan de Mariana, S.J. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Gray, J. (1995), Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the end of the Modern Age. London: Routledge. Grisez, G. (1993), The Way of the Lord Jesus, vol. 2, Living a Christian Life. Quincy: Franciscan Press. Gutiérrez, G. (1973), A Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll: Orbis. Habermas, J. (2006), A Time of Transitions. Oxford: Polity. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (1973), Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. J. Cumming. London: Allen Lane. Hsia, R. (1998), The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770. Cambridge: CUP. Jaki, Stanley L. (1991), Scientist and Catholic: Pierre Duhem. Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press. Jones, P. (1995), Reform and Revolution in France. Cambridge: CUP. Kelsen, Hans (1929), Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie. Tübingen: Mohr. Kraynak, R. (2001), Christian Faith and Modern Democracy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Küng, Hans (1993), Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow. New York: Crossroad. Lustiger, Jean Marie (1987), Le Choix de Dieu. Paris: Le Fallois.

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Index

Each individual is referenced by their pre-papal name when discussing their pre-papal thought or history, and their papal designation for papal writings and history. abortion 65, 96, 103, 106 Acting Person, The, (Wojtyła) 20–1, 25 Acts of the Apostles 41, 122 Adorno, Theodor 107–9 Aeterni Patris (Leo XIII) 8–9, 27 America, see Latin America; United States American Revolution 14, 61, 114 see also United States anthropological questions 16, 21, 90–1, 104–5 Aquinas, Thomas (saint) on anthropological questions 21, 90–1 on conscience 63–4 on faith-reason relationship 42, 49, 112, 123, 125 historical context and 27, 118 on metaphysical questions 90–1 on natural law 62, 95–6 post-Enlightenment study of 8 on truths grounded in reason xiii Aristotle xiii, 44, 51 Aston, Nigel 130 Augustine (saint) on anthropological questions 90–1

City of God 28 on faith-reason relationship 2, 49, 50, 63, 91, 94, 122, 123 historical context and 27–8, 38, 49, 139n. 2 on metaphysical questions 90–1 Aznar, Jose Maria 106 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 33, 34, 82, 91 Barth, Karl 91 Bayle, Pierre 53 Bellarmine S.J., Robert 132 Benedict (saint) xi, xii, 76 Benedict XIV 130-31 Benedict XVI biography of x Christmas address in 2006 by 125–7 on Church, and identity of Europe 122 on conscience 62 on consequentialism 83–6 on dehellenization, and identity of Europe 121–2, 123–4 Deus Caritas Est 61–2, 90

152 Benedict XVI (continued) on Enlightenment legacy 124, 126, 128–9, 135 on faith-reason relationship 14, 41, 61–2, 117, 122–6, 131–5 on faith-reason relationship in European history 121–5 on Galileo case 2, 13 on global faith 126–8 on God as Logos 122–3 on Habermas, and role of Church in modernity 111–12, 125 on humanism 40–1 on human rights 6 on Islam 117, 121, 127 Jesus of Nazareth 124 on liberation theologies 89–0, 123–4 on Marxism 90, 134 on modernity xiv–xv, 2–3, 13–14, 90, 116, 133, 136 on moral theology 84 on overcoming truth-freedom divide 76–7 on political theology 98 on positivist mentality 126 post-Communist modernity and 79–80 on post-Vatican II crisis 13 Regensburg address 117, 120–5 Spe Salvi 108, 133–4 on truths 2–3 on Vatican II 134–5 on violent conversion 121 see also Ratzinger, Joseph Bentham, Jeremy 47 Bernanos, George 26 birth control 12, 84, 96 Boff, Leonardo 87, 88, 89 Bonaventure (saint) 28–9 Bouyer, Louis 33

Index Boyle, Joseph 84, 85, 95, 99 brotherhood, universal 29–30 Buber, Martin 26 Buttiglione, Rocco 101, 103–4 Carmichael, Gershom 60 Casaroli, Agostino 65 Catholic Church Benedict XVI on identity of Europe, and role of 122 contraception, and position of 12 de Lubac’s writings, and dogmas, of 38–9 intellectual discourse, and role of 41–2 on Marxism 12, 16, 72–3 Pera on identity of Europe, and role of 114 political state without faith and 72–3 political theology, and role of 12–13 post-Reformation era, and deterioration of 5 Protestantism, and response of 4–5 Ratzinger on identity of Europe, and role of 75–6, 133 as religion of Logos 44 universities, and role of 41, 44, 71 see also papacy Catholicisme (de Lubac) 38–9 Catholics and Unbelievers . . . (Palmer) 129 Catholic Whigs 99–101 Centesimus Annus (John Paul II) 58, 106 Chaput, Charles 99, 100 Christian Brotherhood (Ratzinger) 29 Christmas messages 9, 125–7

Index Church-culture relationship, see faith-reason relationship church-state relationship, in U.S. 75, 100, 114 City of God (Augustine) 28 Clement XI 139n. 2 Communio (journal) 33–4, 102 Communism 9, 20, 65, 67, 79–80 Comte, Auguste 43–4, 69 conception of children 12, 84, 96 Concilium (journal) 34 Congar O.P., Yves 30 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) Doctrinal Note 97 Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation 88 Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation 88–9 Küng’s mandate to teach withdrawn by 81 Ratzinger as Prefect of the 34, 37, 85, 97 conscience Aquinas on 63–4 Benedict XVI on 62 Habermas on 111 John Paul II on 57 Ratzinger on 53, 57–8, 63–4, 71, 74, 77 Wojtyła on 21 consequentialism 83–6, 99 conservatives xv, 104, 106–7 contraception 12, 84, 96 conversion, violent 121 Copernicus, Nicolaus 1, 6 Council of Trent 4, 7 cultural relativism 82, 97, 113 Curran, Charles 84 Cyril (saint) 66 Daniélou S.J., Jean 30 de Azpilcueta, Martin 132

153

debate, between Habermas and Ratzinger 109–10, 125 Decalogue 61, 112, 139–40n. 1 Deforis, Pierre 129 de Gasperi, Alcide 72 dehellenization, and identity of Europe 121–2, 123–4 Dei Filius (Vatican I) 8 Dei Verbum (Vatican II) 30 de Lubac S.J., Henri biography of 38 Catholicisme 38–9 Church dogmas, and writings of 38–9 on Concilium 34 Le drame de l’humanisme athée 40 on faith-reason relationship 33–4 on historical context 29, 30, 39 on humanism 40 Marxism 40 on metaphysical questions 20 modernity 39–40 neo-scholasticism, and writings of 39 Pius XII, and relationship with 39 on political theology 39 Ratzinger, and relationship with 40 Surnaturel 39 truths 22, 68 on Vatican II 31 Wojtyła, and relationship with 19, 20, 40 de Maistre, Joseph 7 de Mariana S.J., Juan 132 democracy 58–9, 73–5, 107, 110 Democracy in America (de Tocqueville) 61 De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Copernicus) 1 de Tocqueville, Alexis 61, 75, 130

154

Index

Deus Caritas Est (Benedict XVI) 61–2, 90 de Vitoria O.P., Francisco 6 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 108 Dignitatis Humanae (Vatican II) 12, 81 Divini Redemptoris (Pius XI) 9 Doctrinal Note (CDF) 97 Le drame de L’humanism athée (de Lubac) 40 Duhem, Pierre 3 Dulles S.J., Avery xv Du pape (de Maistre) 7 Ecclesia in Europa (John Paul II) 67–9 economic models 101, 106 emancipation xiv, 18, 60, 94, 97–8, 107, 110 see also truth-freedom relationship Enlightenment domination over nature and 108 emancipation and 60 fear of the unknown and 108 historical context for Church during 43 legacy of 118–19, 124, 126, 128–30, 135 metaphysical questions during 5, 60 moral heritage of 74 post-Enlightenment studies and xii, xiii, 2, 8 Ratzinger, and effects of xiv reason vs. faith during 5–6, 44, 118–20, 136–7 responses to ix, xiv–xv, 7–8 Wojtyła, and effects of xiv Eschatology (Ratzinger) 34–5 Europe Benedict XVI on identity of 122

Church, and identity of 75–6, 103–4, 106, 114, 122, 133 conservatives in 106–7 constitutional treaty of 103, 106 dehellenization, and identity of 121–2, 123–4 democracy in 73, 74–5, 107, 110 faith-reason relationship in 131 Greek history, and identity of 70 historical context for Church in 66, 68, 73 history of ideas in 64, 131 Islam as counterimage in 69, 73 Jerusalem’s role in identity of 70, 73 Latin history, and identity of 70–1 law’s dependence on moral criteria, and identity of 73 Marxism as counterimage in 69–70 modernity’s achievements, and identity of 74 nationalism, and identity of 73–4 non-believers, and identity of 75, 76 Pera on identity of 114 political-church relationship in 5, 9, 64, 100 political state, and identity of 71–3 positivist counterimage in 69 postwar division in 65 progressives in 102–3, 106–7 Ratzinger on identity 75–6, 133 secular intellectuals in 109–10 spirit of modernity, and identity of 71 spiritual crisis in 67–8 unity of 65, 66–7 euthanasia 26, 96, 103

Index Evangelium Vitae (John Paul II) 55–6, 58, 85–6, 96–7 evolutionary theory 51–2, 102 Faith according to St. John of the Cross (Wojtyła) 16 faith-reason relationship Aquinas on 42, 49, 112, 123, 125 Augustine on 2, 49, 50, 63, 91, 94, 122, 123 Benedict XVI on 14, 41, 61–2, 117, 121–6, 131–5 de Lubac on 33–4 Enlightenment and 5–6 in Europe 121–5, 131 Galileo case and 3, 42, 115, 135 Habermas on 112–13 John Paul II on 118–19, 135 Ratzinger on 26–7, 33–4, 42, 43–7, 67, 92–3, 94 secular state-religion debates and 109–10, 111, 115–16 Wojtyła on 16–17 faith-reason separation, healing 48–50, 105, 125 Fides et Ratio (John Paul II) 42–3, 44, 45, 46, 48–9, 50–1 Finnis, John 83–5, 95–9 First Vatican Council, see Vatican I France 7, 20, 33, 106, 130, 131, 132 free will xiv, 18, 47, 60, 94, 97–8, 107, 110 see also truth-freedom relationship French Revolution 7, 13, 60, 61, 102, 120, 131, 132 Frings, Josef 30 Frossard, André 17, 49 Fuchs S.J., Josef 35, 46, 47, 83, 84, 86 Galileo case 1–3, 11, 13, 42, 115, 135 Gałkowski, Jan 17

155

Garrigou-Lagrange O.P., Réginald 16, 17, 27 Gaudium et Spes (Vatican II) 10–11, 19–20, 31, 67, 90–1 George, Robert P. 95 Giussani, Luigi 33 global faith 126–8 God as Logos 52, 122–3, 127–8, 133 love of 16, 63 Gray, John 105 Greek history, and identity of Europe 70 Grisez, Germain 95, 98, 99 Guardini, Romano 26, 91 Gutiérrez, Gustavo 87 Habermas, Jürgen on Church’s role in modernity 111–12, 125, 135, 136 citations 54, 110, 111 on conscience 111 debate between Ratzinger and 109–10, 125 on democratization of Europe 107, 110 on emancipation 107, 110 on faith-reason relationship 112–13 on reason 108 on science as alternative faith 109 on secular state-religion debates 109–10, 111, 115–16 A Time of Transitions 111 Häring, Bernard 84 Havel, Vaclav 79 Heidegger, Martin 83 historical context Aquinas and 27, 118 Augustine and 27–8, 38, 49, 139n. 2

156

Index

historical context (continued) Bonaventure and 28 de Lubac on 29, 30, 39 Enlightenment, and Church’s 43 Europe, and Church’s 66, 68, 73 John Paul II on 48, 120 Küng on 82 for papacy in modernity xv Paul’s letters and 48–9 Ratzinger on 27–9, 44 Vatican I on 48 Hittinger, F. Russell 7 Horkheimer, Max 107–9 Hsia, R. Po-Chia 4, 5 Humanae Vitae (Paul VI) 12, 84 human autonomy 47, 60, 94, 97–8 Humani Generis (Pius XII) 9–10, 39 humanism 40–1 human rights 6–7, 58, 85, 93, 98, 119 Hume, David 95 Husserl, Edmund 17, 21 Hutcheson, Francis 60 Iamdudum cernimus (Pius IX) 8 Ibn Hazm 121, 123 Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation (CDF) 88 Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation (CDF) 88–9 intellectual discourse 16, 24, 41–2, 109–10 Introduction to Christianity (Ratzinger) 33 Islam 69, 73, 117, 121, 127, 137 Jaki, Stanley L. 1–2 Jamin, Nicholas 129 Jansen, Cornelius 139n. 2 Jansenism 5, 139n. 2 Jesuits 4, 5, 7, 139n. 2

Jesus of Nazareth (Benedict XVI) 124 Jewish law (halakhah) 82 Joachim of Fiore 28–9 John Paul II Centesimus Annus 58, 106 citations 17, 49 on Communism 65, 67 on conscience 57 on consequentialism 83–6 on democracy 58 Ecclesia in Europa 67–9 on economics 106 on Enlightenment legacy 118–19, 128–9 on European unity 65, 66–7 on Europe’s spiritual crisis 67–9 Evangelium Vitae 55–6, 58, 85–6, 96–7 on evolutionary theory 51 on faith-reason relationship 41, 42, 44, 45–6, 48–9, 118–19, 135 Fides et Ratio 42–3, 44, 45, 46, 48–9, 50–1 on Galileo case 2, 50 on healing faith-reason separation 48–9, 50 on historical context 48, 120 on humanism 40–1 on human rights 58, 85, 93, 119 on ideologies of evil 118–19 on liberation theologies 86–9, 99 magisterium, and authorship of xv on Marxism 65 Memory and Identity 118 on metaphysical questions 57, 113 on modernity xiv, xv, 2–3, 90, 116, 133, 136 moral absolutes and 55, 62–3, 84, 85–6

Index on natural law 62 on new natural law 96–7, 98–9 overcoming truth-freedom divide and 62–3 on political theology 88, 98–9 on positivist mentality 47, 49 post-Communist modernity and 79–80 on postwar division in Europe 65 on proportionalism 83–5 publications, and modern views of xv Puebla speech of 87–8, 99 on scientism 50–1 Slavorum Apostoli 66–7 on totalitarianism 58 truth-freedom relationship and 53–6, 59–60, 61, 118–19 on truths 2–3 on Vatican II 134–5 Veritatis Splendor 45–6, 47, 54, 55, 62–3, 85 see also Wojtyła, Karol Judaism (Küng) 82 Kant, Immanuel 16, 18, 43 Kelsen, Hans 59 Kettle, Martin 79–80 Kloppenburg, Boaventura 88 Kołakowski, Leszek 25 Kolbe, Maximilian 24 Kraynak, Robert 90, 93, 94 Küng, Hans 35, 36, 81–2 Laar, Mart 106 L’ancien régime et la révolution (de Tocqueville) 130 Latin America, and liberation theologies 56, 87–9 Latin history, and identity of Europe 70–1

157

law, and dependence on moral criteria 73 Lefebvre, Marcel 12, 81 Le Guillou, M-J. 33 Leo XIII 8–9, 27 liberation theologies Benedict XVI on 89–90, 123–4 John Paul II on 86–9, 99 in Latin America and 56, 87–9 Marxism and 87–9, 107 metaphysical questions and 89 Ratzinger on 29, 34, 35, 56, 87–90, 107 Libertas Praestantissimum (Leo XIII) 9 Logos Church, as religion of 44 God as 52, 122–3, 127–8, 133 healing faith-reason separation and 49, 50 reason and 126 Lonergan S.J., Bernard 94 Love and Responsibility (Wojtyła) 18–19 Lumen Gentium (Vatican II) 30 Lustiger, Jean-Marie 102 Luther, Martin 3 McCormick S.J., Richard 86 MacIntyre, Alasdair xi, xii, xiii, 91 McMahon, Darrin M. 131 Magisterium (Dulles) xv magisterium, writing of xv–xvi Mahomet (Voltaire) 130, 131 Manuel II Palelogus, Emperor 117, 121 Markham, Ian 125 Marxism Benedict XVI on 90, 134 Church, and views on 12, 16 counterimage in Europe of 69–70 de Lubac on 40

158

Index

Marxism (continued) John Paul II on 65 liberation theologies and 87–9, 107 Paul VI on 65, 104 political state without Church and 72–3 Ratzinger on 30, 32–3, 43, 47–8, 56, 69–70, 104 truth concept suspicion in 56 Wojtyła on 22, 24–5 Maurras, Charles 38 May, William E. 95, 99 The Meaning of Conservatism (Scruton) 105 Medina, Jorge 33 Memory and Identity (John Paul II) 118 Merkel, Angela 106 metaphysical questions Aquinas on 90–1 Augustine on 90–1 de Lubac on 20 Enlightenment and 5, 60 John Paul II on 57, 113 liberation theologies and 89 modernity and 137 papacy, and responses to 136–7 Ratzinger on 58, 104–5, 110, 113 Wojtyła on 16, 104–5 Metaphysics (Waiz) 17 Methodius (saint) 66 Metz, Johann Baptist 35 Mill, John Stuart 47 Mit Brennender Sorge (Pius XI) 9 modernity, hostility toward 8–10 see also Enlightenment Le Monde 80 moral theology 17–18, 21, 35–6, 72–3, 84–6, 132n. 5, 139n. 5 More, Sir Thomas 63 myth and mythology 108–9, 112

nationalism, and identity of Europe 73–4 natural law 9, 35, 54, 60, 62, 95–6 see also new natural law Natural Law and Natural Rights (Finnis) 98 Nazism x, 9, 15, 72 see also World War II neo-scholasticism 17, 27, 39, 95 Neuhaus, Richard John 99 new (classical) natural law 95–9, 101–2 Newman, John Henry 63 Newton, Sir Isaac 5–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 26, 40, 60, 91, 125 Noll, Mark 104 non-believers, and truths 73, 75, 76, 95, 114, 119 non-Western cultures, and reactions to modernity 80, 140n. 1 Novak, Michael 99 On the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethic (Wojtyła) 17 Ostpolitik 104 Ouellet, Marc 34, 102 Palmer, R. R. 7, 129–30 papacy emancipation, and position of xiv faith-reason relationship, and position of xv historical context for modern xv, 38 magisterium, and authorship by xv–xvi on metaphysical questions 136–7 on modernity xi, xiii–xiv, 129, 136

Index political theology, and role of xiii theological questions, and role of 136–7 on truths xiii Western culture shaped by xii see also Catholic Church Du pape (de Maistre) 7 Pascal, Blaise 76 Pastor Aeternus (Vatican I) 8 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World 10–11 Paul (saint) on conscience 63 historical context, and letters of 48–9 intellectual discourse and 41 Jansenism and 139n. 2 moral theology, and letters of 36, 139n. 5 on non-believers and truths 95, 119 truth-freedom relationship and 61, 63 Paul III 4 Paul VI biography of x on contraception 84 Humanae Vitae 12, 84 Lefebvre suspended by 81 on Marxism 65, 104 on modernity 10 Ostpolitik 104 patron saint of Europe proclaimed by 66 Pell, George 99, 100–1 The People and the House of God . . . (Ratzinger) 28 Pera, Marcello on Church’s role in modernity 113–14, 136 citations 61, 75, 77, 114

159

on cultural relativism 113 on faith-reason relationship 113 “Relativism, Christianity, and the West” 113 on science serving man 114–15 on secular state-religion debates 107, 115–16 on U.S. church-state relationship 114 Pernetty, Joseph 131 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Newton) 5–6 Pieper, Josef 26 Pinckaers O.P., Servais 6, 7, 12, 84, 85, 86 Pius VI 7 Pius IX 8 Pius XI 9 Pius XII 9–10, 39 Political Liberalism (Rawls) 107 political theology xiii, 12–13, 33–5, 39, 77, 88, 98–100 Pontifical Academy of Sciences 9 Pontius Pilate 52, 59 Popper, Karl 113 positivism 9, 12, 43–4, 47, 49, 59, 69, 126 post-Communist modernity 79–80 post-Enlightenment xii, xiii, 2, 8 post-Reformation era 5 progressives 102–4, 106–7, 124 proportionalism 83–5, 99 Protestantism 3–4, 4–5, 6, 7 Przywara S.J., Erich 91 Rahner S.J., Karl 10, 82–3 Ratzinger, Joseph biography of 14, 25, 36–7 Christian Brotherhood 29 on Church, and identity of Europe 75–6, 133 on conscience 53, 57–8, 63–4, 71, 74, 77

160

Index

Ratzinger, Joseph (continued) on consequentialism 99 debate between Habermas and 109–10, 125 on democracy 58–9, 73, 74–5 on economic science 106 education of 26–8 Enlightenment, and effects on xiv Eschatology 34–5 on Europe’s spiritual crisis 69 on evolutionary theory 51–2 on faith-reason relationship 26–7, 33–4, 42, 43–5, 46–7, 67, 92–3, 94 on Greek history, and identity of Europe 70 on healing faith-reason separation 48, 49–50 on historical context 27–9, 44 on history of ideas in Europe 64–5 Introduction to Christianity 33 on Islam as counterimage in Europe 69, 73 on Jerusalem’s role in identity of Europe 70, 73 on Latin history, and identity of Europe 70–1 on law 73 on liberation theologies 29, 34, 35, 56, 87–90, 107 on love of God 63 on Marxism 30, 32–3, 43, 47–8, 56, 104 on Marxism as counterimage in Europe 69–70 on metaphysical questions 58, 104–5, 110, 113 on modernity 14, 36, 37, 74, 77–8 on moral absolutes 35–6, 73, 85, 132n. 5

on nationalism, and identity of Europe 73–4 on new natural law 96, 99 on non-believers and truths 73, 75, 76, 114 on overcoming truth-freedom divide 62 The People and the House of God . . . 28 on political state, and identity of Europe 71–3 on political theology 33–5, 77, 88, 100 on positivist mentality 43–4, 69 on post-Communist modernity 80 as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 34, 37, 85, 97 on proportionalism 83–5, 99 on Rahner’s philosophy 83 rejection of relationship to modernity by 80–1 on science 51 on self-authorization 47 on spirit of modernity, and identity of Europe 71 on subjectivity 64 teaching positions of 29, 32 on truth-freedom relationship 52–7, 59–61, 92–3 on truths 32, 73, 76, 114 on universal brotherhood 29–30 Vatican II and 14, 30–2, 133 Wojtyła, and relationship with 37 World War II, and effects on x, 15, 24, 25–6 see also Benedict XVI Ratzinger’s Faith (Rowland) xvi Rawls, John 96–8, 107 Regensburg address 117, 120–5 “Relativism, Christianity, and the West” (Pera) 113

Index reproductive technologies 96, 103 Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII) 9 Rhonheimer, Martin 84 Rorty, Richard 54 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques xiii, 6, 60, 129, 131 Rowland, Tracey xvi, 90–3, 100 Sánchez, Marcelo 124 Scheler, Max 17, 18, 21 Schillebeeckx O.P., Edward 34 Schindler, David 90 scholasticism 17, 27, 39, 95 Schönborn O.P., Christoph von 34, 102 Schuman, Robert 72 science, as alternative faith 5–6, 44, 50–1, 109, 114–15, 118–20, 131–2, 136–7 see also faith-reason relationship Scola, Angelo 34 Scottish Enlightenment 60, 95 Scruton, Roger 105–6 Second Vatican Council, see Vatican II secular state-religion debates 72, 109–10, 111, 115–16 see also faith-reason relationship Segundo S.J., Juan Luis 87 sexual ethics 18–19 Sign of Contradiction (Wojtyła) 22–4, 25 Singer, Peter 54 Slavorum Apostoli (John Paul II) 66–7 Słowacki, Juliusz xi, xii–xiii Smith, Adam 132 Sobrino S.J., Jon 87, 89 socialism 9 see also Marxism Spaemann, Robert 104–5 Spe Salvi (Benedict XVI) 108, 133–4

161

Stoicism 41, 61, 63, 95 Surnaturel (de Lubac) 39 S´ wiez˙awski, Stefan 15–16 Syllabus Errorum (Pius IX) 8 theological questions, and role of xv-xvi, 136–7 Theory of Justice (Rawls) 107 Thomism 9, 16–18, 21, 25, 46 A Time of Transitions (Habermas) 111 Toynbee, Arnold 75 truth-freedom divide, overcoming 62–3, 76–7 truth-freedom relationship 3–4, 52–7, 59–61, 92–3, 118–19 truths Aquinas on xiii Benedict XVI on 2–3 de Lubac on 22, 68 John Paul II on 2–3 non-believers and 73, 75, 76, 95, 114, 119 papacy on xiii post-Enlightenment, and beliefs in xiii, 2 Ratzinger on 32, 73, 76, 114 Wojtyła on 22–3 Twomey, D. Vincent 28, 67, 83 Tygodnik Powszechny (newspaper) 24 Unigenitus (Clement XI) 139n. 2 United States American Revolution in 14, 61, 114 church-state relationship in 75, 100, 114 conservatives in 104 democracy in 75 progressives in 102–3, 104 secular intellectuals in 109–10 universalism 6, 29–30

162

Index

universities, and role of Church 41, 44, 71 Vatican I 8, 42, 48 Vatican II Benedict XVI on 134–5 crisis after 12, 13 Dei Verbum 30 Dignitatis Humanae 12, 81 on Enlightenment legacy 126 on Galileo case 11 Gaudium et Spes 10–11, 19–20, 31, 67, 90–1 Lumen Gentium 30 on modernity 10–15 on political theology 100 Veritatis Splendor (John Paul II) 45–6, 47, 54, 55, 62–3, 85 violent conversion 121 Vitoria O.P., Francisco 6 Voltaire 129–31, 140n. 1 Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (Kelsen) 59 von Galen, Clemens 26 von Harnack, Adolf 123 Waiz, Kazimierz 17 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) 132 Weigel, George 37, 87, 89, 99 Weiler, Joseph 104 Western culture, shaped by papacy xii see also Europe; specific countries Wilkins, John 85 Wojtyła, Karol The Acting Person 20–1, 25 on ambiguity of progress 23 on anthropological questions 104–5 biography of xii, 15, 19 Communism, and condemnation by 20

on conscience 21 education of 15–16 Enlightenment, and effects on xiv Faith according to St. John of the Cross 16 on faith-reason relationship 16–17 on free will 18 on history of ideas in Europe 64–5 on intellectual discourse 16, 24 Love and Responsibility 18–19 on love of God 16 on Marxism 22, 24–5 on metaphysical questions 16, 104–5 modernity 14, 19–20, 37, 77–8 on moral absolutes 17–18, 21 new natural law 96, 98 personalistic principle of 18–19 on political theology 100 On the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethic 17 post-Communist modernity and 80 on proportionalism 83–5 publications, and modern views of xv Ratzinger, and relationship with 37 rejection of relationship to modernity by 80–1 on sexual ethics 18–19 Sign of Contradiction 22–4, 25 on truths 22–3 Vatican II and 14, 19, 133 World War II, and effects on x, 15, 24 see also John Paul II World War II x, 9, 15–16, 24, 25–6, 72