Pope's Meeting with Representatives of Culture

APOSTOLIC JOURNEY
OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
TO FRANCE ON THE OCCASION OF THE 150th ANNIVERSARY
OF THE APPARITIONS OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY AT LOURDES
(SEPTEMBER 12 - 15, 2008)

MEETING WITH REPRESENTATIVES FROM THE WORLD OF CULTURE

ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI

Collège des Bernardins, Paris
Friday, 12 September 2008






Your Eminence,
Madam Minister of Culture,
Mr Mayor,
Mr Chancellor of the French Institute,
Dear Friends!

I thank you, Your Eminence, for your kind words. We are gathered in a historic place, built by the spiritual sons of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and which Your venerable predecessor, the late Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, desired to be a centre of dialogue between Christian Wisdom and the cultural, intellectual, and artistic currents of contemporary society. In particular, I greet the Minister of Culture, who is here representing the Government, together with Mr Giscard d’Estaing and Mr Jacques Chirac. I likewise greet all the Ministers present, the Representatives of UNESCO, the Mayor of Paris, and all other Authorities in attendance. I do not want to forget my colleagues from the French Institute, who are well aware of my regard for them. I thank the Prince of Broglie for his cordial words. We shall see each other again tomorrow morning. I thank the delegates of the French Islamic community for having accepted the invitation to participate in this meeting: I convey to them by best wishes for the holy season of Ramadan already underway. Of course, I extend warm greetings to the entire, multifaceted world of culture, which you, dear guests, so worthily represent.

I would like to speak with you this evening of the origins of western theology and the roots of European culture. I began by recalling that the place in which we are gathered is in a certain way emblematic. It is in fact a placed tied to monastic culture, insofar as young monks came to live here in order to learn to understand their vocation more deeply and to be more faithful to their mission. We are in a place that is associated with the culture of monasticism. Does this still have something to say to us today, or are we merely encountering the world of the past? In order to answer this question, we must consider for a moment the nature of Western monasticism itself. What was it about? From the perspective of monasticism’s historical influence, we could say that, amid the great cultural upheaval resulting from migrations of peoples and the emerging new political configurations, the monasteries were the places where the treasures of ancient culture survived, and where at the same time a new culture slowly took shape out of the old. But how did it happen? What motivated men to come together to these places? What did they want? How did they live?

First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum. Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They were searching for God. They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is. It is sometimes said that they were “eschatologically” oriented. But this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, as if they were looking ahead to the end of the world or to their own death, but in an existential sense: they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional. Quaerere Deum: because they were Christians, this was not an expedition into a trackless wilderness, a search leading them into total darkness. God himself had provided signposts, indeed he had marked out a path which was theirs to find and to follow. This path was his word, which had been disclosed to men in the books of the sacred Scriptures. Thus, by inner necessity, the search for God demands a culture of the word or – as Jean Leclercq put it: eschatology and grammar are intimately connected with one another in Western monasticism (cf. L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu). The longing for God, the désir de Dieu, includes amour des lettres, love of the word, exploration of all its dimensions. Because in the biblical word God comes towards us and we towards him, we must learn to penetrate the secret of language, to understand it in its construction and in the manner of its expression. Thus it is through the search for God that the secular sciences take on their importance, sciences which show us the path towards 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.

Yet in order to have a full vision of the culture of the word, which essentially pertains to the search for God, we must take a further step. The Word which opens the path of that search, and is to be identified with this path, is a shared word. True, it pierces every individual to the heart (cf. Acts 2:37). Gregory the Great describes this a sharp stabbing pain, which tears open our sleeping soul and awakens us, making us attentive to the essential reality, to God (cf. Leclercq, p. 35). But in the process, it also makes us attentive to one another. The word does not lead to a purely individual path of mystical immersion, but to the pilgrim fellowship of faith. And so this word must not only be pondered, but also correctly read. As in the rabbinic schools, so too with the monks, reading by the individual is at the same time a corporate activity. “But if legere and lectio are used without an explanatory note, then they designate for the most part an activity which, like singing and writing, engages the whole body and the whole spirit”, says Jean Leclercq on the subject (ibid., 21).

And once again, a further step is needed. We ourselves are brought into conversation with God by the word of God. The God who speaks in the Bible teaches us how to speak with him ourselves. Particularly in the book of Psalms, he gives us the words with which we can address him, with which we can bring our life, with all its highpoints and lowpoints, into conversation with him, so that life itself thereby becomes a movement towards him. The psalms also contain frequent instructions about how they should be sung and accompanied by instruments. For prayer that issues from the word of God, speech is not enough: music is required. Two chants from the Christian liturgy come from biblical texts in which they are placed on the lips of angels: the Gloria, which is sung by the angels at the birth of Jesus, and the Sanctus, which according to Isaiah 6 is the cry of the seraphim who stand directly before God. Christian worship is therefore an invitation to sing with the angels, and thus to lead the word to its highest destination. Once again, Jean Leclercq says on this subject: “The monks had to find melodies which translate into music the acceptance by redeemed man of the mysteries that he celebrates. The few surviving capitula from Cluny thus show the Christological symbols of the individual modes” (cf. ibid. p. 229).

For Benedict, the words of the Psalm: coram angelis psallam Tibi, Domine – in the presence of the angels, I will sing your praise (cf. 138:1) – are the decisive rule governing the prayer and chant of the monks. What this expresses is the awareness that in communal prayer one is singing in the presence of the entire heavenly court, and is thereby measured according to the very highest standards: that one is praying and singing in such a way as to harmonize with the music of the noble spirits who were considered the originators of the harmony of the cosmos, the music of the spheres. From this perspective one can understand the seriousness of a remark by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who used an expression from the Platonic tradition handed down by Augustine, to pass judgement on the poor singing of monks, which for him was evidently very far from being a mishap of only minor importance. He describes the confusion resulting from a poorly executed chant as a falling into the “zone of dissimilarity” – the regio dissimilitudinis. Augustine had borrowed this phrase from Platonic philosophy, in order to designate his condition prior to conversion (cf. Confessions, VII, 10.16): man, who is created in God’s likeness, falls in his godforsakenness into the “zone of dissimilarity” – into a remoteness from God, in which he no longer reflects him, and so has become dissimilar not only to God, but to himself, to what being human truly is. Bernard is certainly putting it strongly when he uses this phrase, which indicates man’s falling away from himself, to describe bad singing by monks. But it shows how seriously he viewed the matter. It shows that the culture of singing is also the culture of being, and that the monks have to pray and sing in a manner commensurate with the grandeur of the word handed down to them, with its claim on true beauty. This intrinsic requirement of speaking with God and singing of him with words he himself has given, is what gave rise to the great tradition of Western music. It was not a form of private “creativity”, in which the individual leaves a memorial to himself and makes self-representation his essential criterion. Rather it is about vigilantly recognizing with the “ears of the heart” the inner laws of the music of creation, the archetypes of music that the Creator built into his world and into men, and thus discovering music that is worthy of God, and at the same time truly worthy of man, music whose worthiness resounds in purity.

In order to understand to some degree the culture of the word, which developed deep within Western monasticism from the search for God, we need to touch at least briefly on the particular character of the book, or rather books, in which the monks encountered this word. The Bible, considered from a purely historical and literary perspective, is not simply a book, but a collection of literary texts which were redacted over the course of more than a thousand years, and in which the inner unity of the individual books is not immediately apparent. On the contrary, there are visible tensions between them. This is already the case within the Bible of Israel, which we Christians call the Old Testament. It is only rectified when we as Christians link the New Testament writings as, so to speak, a hermeneutical key with the Bible of Israel, and so understand the latter as the journey towards Christ. With good reason, the New Testament generally designates the Bible not as “the Scripture” but as “the Scriptures”, which, when taken together, are naturally then regarded as the one word of God to us. But the use of this plural makes it quite clear that the word of God only comes to us through the human word and through human words, that God only speaks to us through the humanity of human agents, through their words and their history. This means again that the divine element in the word and in the words is not self-evident. To say this in a modern way: the unity of the biblical books and the divine character of their words cannot be grasped by purely historical methods. The historical element is seen in the multiplicity and the humanity. From this perspective one can understand the formulation of a medieval couplet that at first sight appears rather disconcerting: littera gesta docet – quid credas allegoria … (cf. Augustine of Dacia, Rotulus pugillaris, I). The letter indicates the facts; what you have to believe is indicated by allegory, that is to say, by Christological and pneumatological exegesis.

We may put it even more simply: Scripture requires exegesis, and it requires the context of the community in which it came to birth and in which it is lived. This is where its unity is to be found, and here too its unifying meaning is opened up. To put it yet another way: there are dimensions of meaning in the word and in words which only come to light within the living community of this history-generating word. Through the growing realization of the different layers of meaning, the word is not devalued, but in fact appears in its full grandeur and dignity. Therefore the Catechism of the Catholic Church can rightly say that Christianity does not simply represent a religion of the book in the classical sense (cf. par. 108). It perceives in the words the Word, the Logos itself, which spreads its mystery through this multiplicity and the reality of a human history. This particular structure of the Bible issues a constantly new challenge to every generation. It excludes by its nature everything that today is known as fundamentalism. In effect, the word of God can never simply be equated with the letter of the text. To attain to it involves a transcending and a process of understanding, led by the inner movement of the whole and hence it also has to become a process of living. Only within the dynamic unity of the whole are the many books one book. The Word of God and his action in the world are revealed only in the word and history of human beings.

The whole drama of this topic is illuminated in the writings of Saint Paul. What is meant by the transcending of the letter and understanding it solely from the perspective of the whole, he forcefully expressed as follows: “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6). And he continues: “Where the Spirit is … there is freedom (cf. 2 Cor 3:17). But one can only understand the greatness and breadth of this vision of the biblical word if one listens closely to Paul and then discovers that this liberating Spirit has a name, and hence that freedom has an inner criterion: “The Lord is the Spirit. Where the Spirit is … there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17). The liberating Spirit is not simply the exegete’s own idea, the exegete’s own vision. The Spirit is Christ, and Christ is the Lord who shows us the way. 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 the individual and the community and brings about a new, higher obligation than that of the letter: 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.

Thus far in our consideration of the “school of God’s service”, as Benedict describes monasticism, we have examined only its orientation towards the word – towards the “ora”. Indeed, this is the starting point that sets the direction for the entire monastic life. But our consideration would remain incomplete if we did not also at least briefly glance at the second component of monasticism, indicated by the “labora”. In the Greek world, manual labour was considered something for slaves. Only the wise man, the one who is truly free, devotes himself to the things of the spirit; he views manual labour as somehow beneath him, and leaves it to people who are not suited to this higher existence in the world of the spirit. The Jewish tradition was quite different: all the great rabbis practised at the same time some form of handcraft. Paul, who as a Rabbi and then as a preacher of the Gospel to the Gentile world was also a tent-maker and earned his living with the work of his own hands, is no exception here, but stands within the common tradition of the rabbinate. Monasticism took up this tradition; manual work is a constitutive element of Christian monasticism. In his Regula, Saint Benedict does not speak specifically about schools, although in practice, he presupposes teaching and learning, as we have seen. However, in one chapter of his Rule, he does speak explicitly about work (cf. Chap. 48). And so does Augustine, who dedicated a book of his own to monastic work. Christians, who thus continued in the tradition previously established by Judaism, must have felt further vindicated by Jesus’s saying in Saint John’s Gospel, in defence of his activity on the Sabbath: “My Father is working still, and I am working” (5:17). The Graeco-Roman world did not have a creator God; according to its vision, the highest divinity could not, as it were, dirty his hands in the business of creating matter. The “making” of the world was the work of the Demiurge, a lower deity. The Christian God is different: he, the one, real and only God, is also the Creator. God is working; he continues working in and on human history. In Christ, he enters personally into the laborious work of history. “My Father is working still, and I am working.” God himself is the Creator of the world, and creation is not yet finished. God works, ergázetai! Thus human work was now seen as a special form of human resemblance to God, as a way in which man can and may share in God’s activity as creator of the world. Monasticism involves not only a culture of the word, but also a culture of work, without which the emergence of Europe, its ethos and its influence on the world would be unthinkable. Naturally, this ethos had to include the idea that human work and shaping of history is understood as sharing in the work of the Creator, and must be evaluated in those terms. Where such evaluation is lacking, where man arrogates to himself the status of god-like creator, his shaping of the world can quickly turn into destruction of the world.

We set out from the premise that the basic attitude of monks in the face of the collapse of the old order and its certainties was quaerere Deum – setting out in search of God. We could describe this as the truly philosophical attitude: looking beyond the penultimate, and setting out in search of the ultimate and the true. By becoming a monk, a man set out on a broad and noble path, but he had already found the direction he needed: the word of the Bible, in which he heard God himself speaking. Now he had to try to understand him, so as to be able to approach him. So the monastic journey is indeed a journey into the inner world of the received word, even if an infinite distance is involved. Within the monks’ seeking there is already contained, in some respects, a finding. Therefore, if such seeking is to be possible at all, there has to be an initial spur, which not only arouses the will to seek, but also makes it possible to believe that the way is concealed within this word, or rather: that in this word, God himself has set out towards men, and hence men can come to God through it. To put it another way: there must be proclamation, which speaks to man and so creates conviction, which in turn can become life. If a way is to be opened up into the heart of the biblical word as God’s word, this word must first of all be proclaimed outwardly. The classic formulation of the Christian faith’s intrinsic need to make itself communicable to others, is a phrase from the First Letter of Peter, which in medieval theology was regarded as the biblical basis for the work of theologians: “Always have your answer ready for people who ask you the reason (the logos) for the hope that you all have” (3:15). (The Logos, the reason for hope must become apo-logía; it must become a response). In fact, Christians of the nascent Church did not regard their missionary proclamation as propaganda, designed to enlarge their particular group, but as an inner necessity, consequent upon the nature of their faith: the God in whom they believed was the God of all people, the one, true God, who had revealed himself in the history of Israel and ultimately in his Son, thereby supplying the answer which was of concern to everyone and for which all people, in their innermost hearts, are waiting. The universality of God, and of reason open towards him, is what gave them the motivation—indeed, the obligation—to proclaim the message. They saw their faith as belonging, not to cultural custom that differs from one people to another, but to the domain of truth, which concerns all people equally.

The fundamental structure of Christian proclamation “outwards” – towards searching and questioning mankind – is seen in Saint Paul’s address at the Areopagus. We should remember that the Areopagus was not a form of academy at which the most illustrious minds would meet for discussion of lofty matters, but a court of justice, which was competent in matters of religion and ought to have opposed the import of foreign religions. This is exactly what Paul is reproached for: “he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities” (Acts 17:18). To this, Paul responds: I have found an altar of yours with this inscription: ‘to an unknown god’. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you (17:23). Paul is not proclaiming unknown gods. He is proclaiming him whom men do not know and yet do know – the unknown-known; the one they are seeking, whom ultimately they know already, and who yet remains the unknown and unrecognizable. The deepest layer of human thinking and feeling somehow knows that he must exist, that at the beginning of all things, there must be not irrationality, but creative Reason – not blind chance, but freedom. Yet even though all men somehow know this, as Paul expressly says in the Letter to the Romans (1:21), this knowledge remains unreal: a God who is merely imagined and invented is not God at all. If he does not reveal himself, we cannot gain access to him. The novelty of Christian proclamation is that it can now say to all peoples: he has revealed himself. He personally. And now the way to him is open. 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. Naturally, the humility of reason is always needed, in order to accept it: man’s humility, which responds to God’s humility.

Our present situation differs in many respects from the one that Paul encountered in Athens, yet despite the difference, the two situations also have much in common. Our cities are no longer filled with altars and with images of multiple deities. God has truly become for many the great unknown. But just as in the past, when behind the many images of God the question concerning the unknown God was hidden and present, so too the present absence of God is silently besieged by the question concerning him. 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. What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture. Thank you.







© Copyright 2008 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Reason is the need for the Infinite...

As I was doing some research for another project, I stumbled on an interesting article, "My Catholic Faith Pushes Me to Obama," by Kari Lundgren.

In her article, Kari provides a quick sketch of her college experience "as a conservative Catholic single-issue voter":

I quickly joined Students for Life, the campus pro-life group, and began spending Saturday mornings with 6 am mass and an hour drive to Pittsburgh to pray in front of the abortion clinic. That first year I was a bus captain on the trip to Washington, D.C. for the March for Life, as well as head of the Students for Life Prayer Team. I was interviewed on the conservative Catholic TV station EWTN as a young pro-life leader.

...I also volunteered at the local crisis pregnancy center, where we offered free pregnancy tests, infant formula, children's clothing, and other services to help women who were pregnant and needed extra support. I went to daily mass and weekly confession, as I had since high school. I marched in the occasional local abortion protest. I read theology in my free time.

I was, in other words, the perfect Steubenville Catholic student: devoted to my prayer life, diligent in my studies, involved in student life, and passionate about the pro-life cause.

Later, Lundgren experienced a kind of conversion:

...While I prayed for an end to abortion and the conversion of souls, I also saw the depressed ex-steel town in which the university resided, and I felt a disconnect between the spiritual fervency on campus and the poverty surrounding it. I was ashamed to have the money to be a full-time student when the neighborhoods next door to the university were filled with dilapidated houses and people forced out of work when the steel mills closed. Big questions started plaguing me: Was it really enough to make these people observant Catholics, as the general thinking on campus went? Were all of their socioeconomic problems really caused by the fact that they used birth control? Would overturning Roe v. Wade really be enough to solve the poverty, under-education, and chronic unemployment rampant in the town and the world?

These questions led her to reject what we might quickly (if inaccurately) refer to the "Steubenville solution." She found "better" answers to her questions in the rhetoric of the political left.

There are, as of this writing, 168 comments following her article. The commenters split rather cleanly into two camps: Catholics who disapprove of Lundgren's conversion on the one hand and on the other hand, supporters of Obama who cheer her on. Meanwhile, not one person posed the questions that most interest me:

Why, as an undergraduate, did she do all the things she describes herself doing? And why does proclaim the views that she now proclaims?

I am particularly curious about why she was so ardently pro-life as a college student. Because we can work very hard at many righteous and important tasks, but if we lack adequate reasons for doing them, they will eventually exhaust and paralyze us. Do we do them because we feel our efforts will make a positive impact and thus give our lives meaning? Do we do them in order to appear morally or religiously consistent in the eyes of our neighbors? Do we wish to please an authority? Or do we do them in order to find self-fulfillment?

It is the task of educators to propose a positive hypothesis that explains the meaning of everything. The Church provides just such a hypothesis, one that accounts for the questions that Lundgren asks. This hypothesis does not include the explanations that Lundgren lists in her article (that the answer to poverty is to make the unemployed into "ardent Catholics," that socioeconomic problems are caused by people using birth control, that overturning Roe v. Wade is all that is needed" to solve the poverty, under-education, and chronic unemployment rampant in the town and the world"). So, where did she get these inadequate answers to her questions? Why do they remain the only reasons she can give for the Catholic concern for the sanctity of life?

These questions are troubling, especially in light of Lundgren's assertion:

I went to daily Mass and weekly confession, as I had since high school. I marched in the occasional local abortion protest. I read theology in my free time.

In all those daily homilies, in her encounters with priests in the confessional, in the theology she read, did she never encounter reasons other than the ones she listed as the "Catholic" (and unsatisfying) response to poverty and injustice? It is possible. And the fact that it is possible should give us pause.

We can train young people to engage in "correct" behaviors without ever providing them with an education that will adequately give meaning to the whole of life. We can avoid probing their motives when we find ourselves approving of their behavior.

So, now my second question: why does Lundgren write her article? In her opening paragraph, she says, "I'm writing this for my sisters and brothers who still are those kinds of Catholic voters" (that is: "conservative Catholic single-issue voters"). Does she really hope to convince anyone who might disagree with her? In the whole of her article, she never addresses whether there exist Catholic voters who appreciate being called "single-issue" voters (it's actually perceived as an epithet by most ardently pro-life Catholics). And what steps does she take to speak with them about their true concern, that is, the destruction of innocent life?

The assertion that better services for the poor and marginalized will reduce the number of abortions has not been documented with evidence. I can imagine that some anecdotal evidence exists, but there is no hard data to support this claim. It remains on the level of pure speculation and supposition. In fact, abortion cuts across socioeconomic class. It is not merely the desperate choice of the impoverished.

The most intelligent and succint argument in response to the charge that pro-life Catholics are "single-issue" voters appeared in The Herald Star, our local newspaper, in a letter to the editor by Patrick Lee, professor of bioethics at (coincidence?) Franciscan University:

To the editor:

Some suggest pro-lifers should consider life as just one issue among others and not engage in single-issue voting.

But this makes no sense. The differences between the two presidential tickets on taxes, health care, etc., concern means to the same ends (neither side advocates solving such problems by killing poor or sick people). By contrast, the difference between them on abortion is a difference about basic ends.

At stake in this debate is the principle of the fundamental equal dignity of every human being, regardless of inessential differences, the same principle at stake in the 19th century regarding slavery. It was intrinsically unjust to reduce black human beings to the status of mere things for use. Likewise, it is inherently unjust to reduce unborn human beings to the status of mere inconvenient burdens that can be ripped to pieces or disposed of in trash cans.

It is unjust to vote for, or promote, a pro-abortion candidate if another candidate who is not worse on fundamental life issues, is an option - even if that candidate is inferior on other issues. This violates the basic moral principle of the Golden Rule - do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If a candidate was in favor of killing professors, I would expect my fellow citizens to vote against him even if his positions on health care or economics were superior to those of his rival candidate. Likewise, it is unjust to vote for those who promote killing unborn human beings - indeed, energetically, even to the point of advocating the clearly barbarous practices of partial-birth abortion and killing babies born alive from botched abortions (as Obama has done) - when their rivals do not.

Some object that Obama does not actually endorse abortion because he promises to work to decrease there number. But this argument is fallacious. Obama has consistently supported funding for abortions, and his governmental health care plan would mandate such funding. Since in political office, Obama has done everything he could possibly do to assist the abortion industry, and has even proclaimed his defense of the alleged right to abortion a priority in his presidency.

If a politician in the 19th century took an analogous position on slavery, his claim that he is "pro-choice" would not fly. Imagine a candidate saying, "I do not endorse slavery. Rather, I am pro-choice. But I have been a consistent champion of the right to slavery for the last 10 years. And I will make defense of that fundamental right a priority in my presidency. Of course, I hope fewer people will feel the need to resort to that choice, and so as president I will introduce measures aimed at keeping slavery safe, legal and rare. But, to ensure that slavery remains an option for white men who should, after all, control their own property, I am in favor of funding slavery for those poor whites who cannot afford it." (Patrick Lee, Steubenville)

Lundgren should be crafting an argument to respond to Lee's position, not working to knock down straw men she herself has invented.

So, I'm still left with a question. Why did she write her article? I suspect, in the end, it was for the same reason she went to daily Mass and worked so ardently to put an end to abortion while in college. Perhaps she has a strong desire for justice? If so, she could begin her quest by accurately understanding and representing the Catholic understanding of social justice and the sanctity of life. This exercise would represent a great step toward justice.

Or, perhaps she has other reasons.

the words we use are secular words

01-03-2007 - Traces, n. 3

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Editorial

The Pope’s Challenge and Our Responsibility

Some time ago, the well-known editor of an Italian daily informed a large audience that it was quite some time that something had changed in what they, the journalists (and, along with them, intellectuals and opinion leaders), call “Catholicism.” As a clear sign of this rather recent phenomenon of change in the Church, he noted that for the first time a Pope, in an encyclical letter, had used the word “Event” to describe the nature and originality of the Christian fact. He saw this as a warning light. Now, there is nothing new in the concept of Christianity as an historical event–it pertains to the whole of Church history – but the use of this word particularly aroused this editor’s curiosity.

To tell the truth, Benedict XVI’s use of certain words is astounding many people–just read the authoritative writers published in this issue of Traces: Riotta, Allam, Reale, Borgna, Albacete and Lenoci – and is worrying others who hear him. The Pope is speaking of the heart, of love, of reason, of education, of dialogue. He is speaking of “secular” matters, instead of concerning himself with faith and religion, which is, after all, his field of competence. Instead, he dares to use the words that thinkers and ideologies hostile to Christianity claim as their own, and on questions into which Christians, not to mention the Pope, have no right to poke their noses; these are the words of modernity, which interest modern man.

By excluding the Church from the use of these terms and from the debate on the questions linked to them, they want to present the Church as an antique curiosity that can have nothing useful to say about present-day life – but they are wrong, because the Church has always addressed herself to what interests man of all ages, to that which the Pope called the “heart.”

In taking up the challenge of modernity and, as it were, throwing it back, Benedict XVI has used those forbidden words but, above all, he has re-examined them and re-proposed them in their original meaning. He has thrown out a loftier and more loving challenge, and we Christians are the first at whom the challenge is aimed. Look at your own experience and see if the meaning of those words is more open and deeper in light of a familiarity of life with Christ. It is a challenge to love man’s freedom to the end, as Christ did, entrusting yourself to this freedom in order to see if the most important message that can reach us is true – that there is something that survives amidst all this confusion, that life is not empty, that there is a Father who wanted you and is waiting for you, and that what you love will not be lost.

What a responsibility – and what a change – for Christians, immersed like everyone else in a world that has erased certain words from its dictionary, declaring them impossible to live. To take up the Pope’s challenge doesn’t mean merely to repeat his words, it means above all to document the truth of those words – what is the essence of Christianity. “Christ gives flesh and blood to concepts–an unheard-of realism” (Deus Caritas Est); it means to demonstrate that it is possible to live like this, because if men don’t see, they don’t believe it. They can be attracted only by a change that they see in the lives of men like themselves. So our responsibility before the world is called “witness.”

Dialogue in crisis

Lately I've been reading a bit on martyrdom, the blood witness of Christianity. I've reviewed the simple martyrdom described in Corneille's Polyeucte and the martyrdom described in Bernanos's "Dialogues of the Carmelites" characterized by the anguish, the fear of Christ in Gethsemane. Balthasar sees the legend of Cordula as a sign for our own days. In our age, perhaps, it is the fear, the terror of being the object of hatred for Christ's sake, which strikes our heart more than the death itself. But both kinds of martyrdoms are characterized by a love for Him who died for us, and therefore also joy. Christian martyrdom is thus always an encounter between Christ and the disciple.

«The theoretical quality that distinguishes the humanism of the Christian from every other, in actual fact, enters the sphere of dialogue only as a borderline phenomenon, a readiness for the Ernstfall [crisis, the moment of witness].

And now a strange thing happens: it is precisely the readiness, beyond the dialogue, to go much further with one's brother than one can go even in the dialogue that opens the Christian heart to the best possible and longest dialogue. The Christian allows himself to be involved more than anyone else because his partner, perhaps his opponent, is, like himself, someone who is also borne in the crucified Heart. For reasons of prudence he can adjourn a dialogue [i.e. in dying], but he cannot finally break it off. For in the Cross the dividing wall that separates the speakers at the moment has already been torn down (Eph. 2:14) — not by talking, but through the most lonely suffering.»

The Moment of Christian Witness, 124.
I added a line break after the first sentence quoted

I cannot read this passage without being reminded of Charles Péguy, who by remembering and praying a prayer he learned at the parish school suddenly became Christian — despite having lived as a socialist and having married a woman with no sympathy for Christianity. Faithful both to his wife and family and to the Church, he lived and died just within the portal of the Church.

The Ernstfall, the crisis, becomes a vanishing point that gives depth to dialogue, imparts to it a certainty that death is not the end of the discussion. At some point dialogue comes to an end, but the desire for dialogue, the love that impels us to dialogue — remains.

It's hard to read this book without thinking over and over of Flannery O'Connor (in his afterward, Balthasar notes that some complained of its sarcasm). As the Misfit said: "She would have been a good woman... if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

The roots of dialogue

«What we have in common with the other is not to be sought so much in ideology as in the other's native structure, in those human needs, in those original criteria, in which he or she is human like us. Openness to dialogue, therefore, means the ability to take as a starting point those problems to which the other's ideology or our Christianity proposes solutions, because what is common to different ideologies is the humanity of the men and women who carry these ideologies as banners of hope or as an answer.»

~ Fr. Giussani, The Journey to Truth Is an Experience, p 132