A Frosty Reception, Then Standing Ovation

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A Frosty Reception, Then Standing Ovation

[2010-09-15]

[Engleză]

On the eve of the Pope"s visit to England and Scotland, it is worth recalling that Joseph Ratzinger visited Cambridge 22 years ago to deliver a major address. As he began, the crowd was cold. His reputation had preceded him. As he spoke, the crowd listened. When he fell silent, the crowd burst into a long applause...

By Robert Moynihan

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Framing Benedict

The world"s media continue to frame Pope Benedict"s upcoming trip to England and Scotland -- the trip begins in just two days -- in the context of the sexual abuse scandal.

They are hammering, hammering, hammering on this point.

They are building a frame for the trip, and they think that frame will compel Benedict to change the focus of his remarks -- to change his message.

I know this, because I was just invited to speak on Sky News yesterday morning, and then on CNN International yesterday afternoon. The second segment focused entirely on the new allegations of abuse from Belgium, and whether Benedict will address the suffering of the victims and the prosecution of the perpetrators during his upcoming trip. There was no chance to speak of other issues.

But the entire West is in flames.

Western culture faces a general collapse of moral values, a loss of confidence in its own identity and historical purpose, a demographic winter which threatens to actually bring Western culture to a quiet, childless close.

Certainly, the sexual abuse crimes are horrible and shocking and must be addressed.

But the overall collapse of our Western moral universe must also be addressed, and even more urgently.

The fate of our culture hangs in the balance.

In this context, the media"s framing of Pope Benedict"s trip as a sort of side-show to the sexual abuse crisis is actually tragic.

Because we need to hear the whole Gospel preached at this crossroads in our history -- we, the British, the West, the world.

True, horrible crimes have been committed. Somehow "filth" ("sporcizia," as Benedict referred to it in his famous Subiaco speech in 2005, just before his election as Pope), has entered into the Church.

And Benedict has fought and is fighting to cleanse the Church.

But a certain "filth" has also entered into the public life of all the Western countries, of all the world, through a pervasive, almost "amoral" culture (I say this because "right" and "wrong" are not even questions for this culture, only "expedient" and "not expedient"). It has become a culture in which hedonism and consumption, not sacrifice and frugality, are praised, and this has led to the almost universal embrace of things which prior generations considered "wrong": contraception, abortion, pornography, greed (the motto of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street was "greed is good").

And so I hope that the "framing" of Benedict"s trip in terms of the sexual abuse scandal can be "un-framed," and that deeper and wider truths can bubble to the surface of the public discourse, despite the astonishing power of the mainstream media to set the terms of the debate.

Because I think Benedict"s voice needs to be heard.

And this framing that is underway is aimed at silencing him, in some fundamental way.

And if that succeeds, our culture, our world, will be the loser.

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Second Trip

This is not Benedict"s first trip to Great Britain.

He gave a lecture at Cambridge in 1988, 22 years ago, when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

How was his voice heard at that time?

Father Vincent Twomey, the leading Irish theologian, recalled that lecture in the latest issue of Inside the Vatican: "On his first visit to Britain, in January 1988, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger gave a public lecture in Cambridge hosted jointly by the Catholic Chaplaincy to the University and the University’s Faculty of Divinity. The lecture, entitled “Consumer Materialism and Christian Hope,” was about the threat of contemporary nihilism. He received a standing ovation. The Times said afterwards that "it may have been the best attended theological lecture ever given in Britain."”

Will Benedict"s four days in Scotland and England repeat this experience? Will the nation be moved by his words, and applaud them?

Some in the media certainly do not want that to happen.

And they may be able to ensure that it does not.

The way the media frames the Pope"s message will have much to do with determing the answer to that question.

But, if the Pope breaks out of this frame, his words may fall on ears which will receive them with gratitude, for they will carry the message of Christ, a message of meaning and of hope, which all of us need to hear.

============================================

CONSUMER MATERIALISM AND CHRISTIAN HOPE

Here is the complete text of that brilliant, and almost unknown, 1988 lecture at Cambridge University. It was published in 2002 by the Bishops of England and Wales as part of a collection of English-related Catholic talks and essays in a book titled “Teachers of Faith.”

It is a long lecture, and some may find it difficult to get through. But if you take it bit by bit, you will find nuggets of insight and truth which are quite startling. I was especially struck by the Pope"s analysis of drug use and of terrorism, phenomena which have only grown more important, and troubling, in the past two decades since this talk was given. There is also a profound discussion of the consequences of the doctrine of evolution.

The discussion of heaven, seen as a "phantom goal" by the secular humanist, is also remarkable for its clarity, directness and honesty.

The man revealed in this lecture is a man who knows what the doubts are; he understands how modern men and women can question all traditional religious beliefs. And he has an answer to these questions. An answer that should be heard.

By Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (1988)

In modern literature, the graphic arts, cinema and theatre, a predominantly gloomy picture of man is the fashion. What is sublime and noble is suspect from the start; it has to be yanked off its pedestal and seen for what it is. Morality is only hypocrisy, happiness no more than self-deception. Suspicion is the authentically moral stance; unmasking deception is its greatest achievement. Criticising society is a duty; indeed the dangers which threaten us cannot be shown with sufficient cruelty and violence.

It is true that this disposition towards the negative is not without limits. There is also a duty at the same time to optimism which cannot be offended without paying the price.

Should anyone, for example, venture the opinion that not everything in the spiritual development of modernity may be correct, that in some essential areas it may be necessary to return and reflect upon the common wisdom of the great cultures, obviously he has chosen the wrong kind of criticism. For he finds himself confronted all at once by a determined defence of the fundamental judgements of modernity, namely that the basic line of historical development is progress and thus the good lies in the future, nowhere else; and not all the delight in negativity may seriously call this into question.

The particular discord within modern social criticism clearly becomes manifest in the radically contradictory responses with which prevailing opinion reacted to the two events which were perceived last year as being the starkest moral challenges to our society.

The first was the misfortune of Chernobyl. Those who would be considered enlightened could not describe the danger of these events in terms drastic enough. They had to see a colossal menace looming over all living things and only the complete abandonment of atomic energy could be the right answer to it.

The other event was the rapid advance of the new viral disease, AIDS. There is no doubt that many more people will become sick and die from AIDS than have already died in the wake of Chernobyl, and that the danger posed by this new scourge of mankind stands nearer the door of each individual than does the peril presented by nuclear power plants. Nonetheless, whoever dares to say that mankind ought to refrain from that inordinate sexual licence which gives AIDS its effective power is put on the sidelines as a hopeless obscurantist because of his public attitude. Such an idea can only be deplored and passed over in silence by the enlightened of today.

From all of this, it is apparent that there are today permissible and forbidden types of social criticism. The permissible kind, however, goes no further than to the threshold of society’s fundamental judgements which may not be put into question.

The moral problems of our time -- an attempt at diagnosis

The topic which I have chosen certainly requires the kind of reflection which will not be intimidated by such a taboo.

To be sure, it would be an incorrect turn-around to view our society, and its moral situation all told, in shades of darkest grey alone. We should not allow ourselves to be influenced by the superficial duty to optimism imposed by certain trends. But even less should we succumb to the temptation to ignore the positive elements in the make-up of our time.

Naturally, it cannot be our purpose here to give an exhaustive account of the moral figure cast by our age. Our reflection intends to locate that which is supportive and healing, that basic guideline by which one can live through the present and thus unlock the door to the future.

We are inquiring about the characteristic elements of our time so we can learn what hinders access to the right way and what helps it.

And so, I am not speaking in this first part of my analysis about defects or virtues, which there have always been and probably always will be. We are dealing rather with the characteristic signs of our time.

On the negative side, two elements catch our eye, elements which do not belong to other epochs in the same way: terrorism and drugs. In a positive vein, there is a strong moral consciousness exerting its influence, a consciousness which focuses essentially upon values in the social sphere: freedom for the downtrodden, solidarity with the poor and the disadvantaged, peace and reconciliation.

The problem of drugs

Let us try to consider these phenomena with a closer look. I remember an argument which I had with several friends in Ernst Bloch’s home.The discussion had come by chance to the problem of drugs which then -- the late 1960s -- was first beginning to make its appearance.

Someone asked how it could be that this temptation should suddenly crop up and why, for example, it apparently did not arise in the Middle Ages. Everybody was agreed that it would not be sufficient to answer that the areas of cultivation then were just too far removed.

Phenomena like the appearance of drug abuse are not to be explained by such superficial circumstances.They originate from deeper needs or wants upon which depends the further problem of providing for them too.

And so I ventured the thesis that there was obviously not that spiritual emptiness then which one seeks to fill with drugs; or, in other words, the thirst of the heart, of the inner man, found an answer then which made drugs unnecessary.

I still remember the shocked indignation with which Mrs Bloch reacted to this suggested solution. From the vision of history which dialectical materialism had given, it was next to sacrilege for her to think that bygone ages might have been superior to our own in matters of more than little consequence. In the Middle Ages, which were a time of oppression and religious prejudices, it was impossible that the deprived masses lived happier lives of interior harmony than in our time which has already advanced some distance along the road of liberation.

The whole logic of "liberation" would thus collapse. How then is the process to be explained? The question remained without an answer that evening.

Considering that I do not subscribe to the worldview of materialism, I maintain that my thesis from that time on has been ever more vindicated. But it does have to be concretised.

In this regard, the thought of Ernst Bloch could ever offer a helpful start. For Bloch, the world of fact is evil. The hope principle means that man energetically opposes facts. He recognises himself as obliged to overcome the evil world of facts in order to create a better world.

I would say that drug abuse is a form of protest against facts.The one who resorts to drugs refuses to come to terms with the world of facts. He looks for a better world. Drugs are the result of despairing of a world which is experienced as a prison built of facts in which man cannot long endure.

Naturally many other things enter here as well: the search for adventure, going along with the crowd, what others do, the enterprise of pushers and so on. But the heart of it still is the revolt against a reality perceived as a prison.

The grand "trip" which people look for in drugs is a perversion of mysticism, the warping of the human desire for immortality, the "no" to the impossibility of overcoming the immanent, and the attempt to enfold the limits of one’s own being in the eternal.

The patient and humble adventure of asceticism, which, step by step, climbs nearer to the God who is coming down to meet man, finds itself replaced by the power of magic -- that is, the magic key of drugs -- the moral and religious path is set aside for that of technology.

Drugs are the pseudomysticism of a world which no longer believes but which cannot for all that shake off the yearning of the soul for paradise.

Drugs are therefore a warning signal with deep reverberations: they not only reveal the vacuum in our society which its instruments cannot remedy; they point to an interior longing in man which breaks out in perverted form if it does not find its true satisfaction.

Terrorism as a moral problem

The point of departure for terrorism is closely related to that of drugs. Here too we find initially a protest against the world as it is and the demand for a better one.

Terrorism is in its roots a kind of "moralism," to be sure a misdirected moralism which turns into a cruel parody of the true aims and methods of the moral person. It is no accident that terrorism has had its beginnings in the universities and among young people drawing fresh, heightened inspiration from religious thought, here again, in the context of modern theology.

Terrorism was, in the first instance, a religious enthusiasm diverted to earthly concerns, a messianic expectation translated into political fanaticism. Belief in the hereafter had been shattered or in any case had become irrelevant. The yardstick of other-worldly hope, however, was not given up. It was applied instead to the present world. God was no longer looked upon as one really acting in history; but, as in the past and indeed from the beginning, the fulfilment of his promises was still sought after.

"God has no other arms than our own" -- that meant that now the redemption of these promises can and must be taken care of by ourselves. Loathing for the spiritual and emotional emptiness in our society, longing for the wholly-other, the claim to an unconditional salvation without limits or restrictions -- this is the religious component, in a manner of speaking, within the phenomenon of terrorism.

It is this religious component which gave terrorism the momentum of a passion which goes to any length, which gave it its uncompromising stance and its pretence to the idealistic.

All this becomes quite dangerous based as it is upon the decisive worldliness of its messianic hope: the unconditional is required from what is contingent, the eternal from what is finite. This internal contradiction points out the real tragedy of the phenomenon in which the sublime vocation of human beings is transformed into an instrument of the great deception, the "big lie."

The lie within the promise of terrorism, however, was hidden from its average participant because of the alliance between religious expectation and the spirit of the modern intellectual. This consists first of all in the halting of all traditional norms of morality before the tribunal of positivist reason, getting to the bottom of them and proving them to be unfounded. Morality does not lie in present existence but in the future. Man has to fashion himself. The only moral value there is lies in the future of society when we will get everything we do not have now. Morality in the present consists in working for the sake of this future society.

The new standard of morality says, then: whatever serves the bringing about of this new society is moral. And what serves it can be determined by the scientific methods of political strategy, psychology, and sociology.

The "moral" becomes the "scientific": morality no longer has a "phantom" goal -- heaven -- but a realisable phenomenon, the new age. In this way the moral and the religious have become realistic and "scientific."

What more does one want? Is it any wonder that sincerely idealistic young people have felt themselves challenged by such promises? Only from this closer perspective can one see the devil’s foot upon the whole business and hear the sneer of Mephistopheles: "The future creates what is moral."

By this standard even murder can be "moral"; on the way to humanity even the inhuman has to serve.

This is basically the same logic which states that for "really top-notch scientific results" even embryos may sometimes be sacrificed.

And it is the same concept of freedom which lectures us that it ought to lie within the realm of woman’s personal choice to destroy a child who stands in the way of her self-fulfilment.

Thus, terrorism proceeds undiminished upon somewhat more sublime battlefields today with the full blessing of science and the enlightened spirit. True, the brutal terrorism of those who would change society has been condemned in western countries: it has too greatly threatened the habits of life in these societies and the immorality of its morality has become all too conspicuous. But a real prevention of its root causes has not yet taken place. One can even look at it in such a way as to remain untroubled by its outbreak in the faraway lands of the third world which lie at a safe remove from us.

And still, as before, it is practically immoral not to recommend the typical slogans for the third world, even if one might not gladly see them applied in one’s own circumstances. Partisanship for militant liberationist ideologies appears as a kind of moral compromise in the sense that one allows things to go well for oneself and would like to see nothing essential changed. The practice of terrorism, thank goodness, has been extensively reduced in Europe once more. Its spiritual foundations, however, have not been overturned, and, as long as this is so, it can erupt anew at any time.

The new turning towards morality and religion

And so the question comes to be framed in a positive way: what is the true converse to those spiritual foundations which we have outlined so briefly? Where exactly does the defect lie?

Before we get to the bottom of this question, however, we have to complete our stock-taking of present day society. We said that there were two outstanding negative phenomena, the advancement of drug abuse and the threat of terrorism, and that there was, on the other hand, a positive phenomenon as well, an intense, new desire for moral values like freedom, justice, and peace. Can an answer to the menace of our age possibly come forth from this?

First of all, we have to determine whether these values, out of all those on the horizon, are largely identical with the values which the champions of the movements of violence have proclaimed and hail as their goals. Abuse, of course, does not discredit the value as such.

What is new among numbers of young people today is that these goals are now projected upon the plane of concrete political and social action, and thus they are stripped of their irrational and violent character. Ideologies have been cast aside and so one can directly recognise what is good once more.

In point of fact, this may be welcomed as an element of hope: God’s profound message can be smothered and distorted in man. Nonetheless, it is constantly bursting forth anew, working a way out for itself.

Also pertinent in this context is the fact that a new yearning for recollection, for contemplation, for the truly sacred, indeed for contact with God, is becoming evident. To this extent energies have been coming forth which permit us to have hope.

But just as the source has to be tapped so that its waters do not simply ooze away, so the impulses of purification and order are required so that these energies come to have their true effect.

The new religious aspiration can easily be deflected into the esoteric. It can evaporate in sheer romanticism. There are two ever-present hurdles difficult for it to get over: it seems hard to take on the continuity of a permanent discipline, a straight way, which does not allow itself a detour from the primary road of the will and intellect for a quick gratification of one’s feelings.

Even harder than this appears the channelling of such desire into the communion of life of an "institution" of faith, in which religion as faith has become the way and the form of a community. Where this double hurdle is not overcome, though, religion degenerates into a pleasurable escape and exhibits no community and no moral power which obliges the individual. Reason and will quit its service; all that is left, then, is feeling, and that is too little.

Sursa: www.InSideTheVatican.com

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