The Pope and pluralism

The US tour by Pope Benedict XVI has generally been deemed a success. He appears to have cauterised the wounds opened by the paedophilia scandals, stepped around the booby-trap invitations to identify with the political right and, as a pastor, moved out of the shadow cast by his (sorry!) predecessor.

But, as Europe Day approaches, there are other questions to raise. Whether it is the day celebrated by the Council of Europe (May 5) or the European Union (May 9), the anniversary brings forward competing understandings of European identity. And Joseph Ratzinger's conception is as controversial, among Europeans, as any other.

He underlines the Christian roots of the continent - an identity that, for him, has implications for Europe's relationship to cultural relativism and Islam. Yet many European lawmakers would conceive of "Europeanisation" as a process that steers the Union away from the Christian identity so dear to the Pope.

In Malta the issue is salient, given the pledges made during the general election campaign. The legislature that will begin in 10 days may turn out to be, on civic issues, the most liberalising in many years. Will the debates on the "Europeanisation" of Malta see a culture war in which Joseph Ratzinger's ideas play a defining part?

Perhaps. But let us beware. The attempts to caricaturise the Pope's ideas on liberalism may come as much from the cultural right as from the left. A new edition of The Thought Of Pope Benedict XVI (Burns and Oates), by Aidan Nichols OP, shows that, as prefect and papal candidate, he criticised cultural relativism and attempts to glide over the Christian roots of Europe for a reason that may surprise some of his fans: Joseph Ratzinger warns against the "dictatorship of relativism" because it can undermine a certain kind of liberal, pluralist state.

As cardinal he was as capable as the most ardent secularist in raising hard-hitting questions about religious claims to absolute truth.

"If tolerance is one of the foundations of the modern age, then is not the claim to have recognised the essential truth an absolute piece of presumption that has to be rejected if the spiral of violence that runs through the history of religions is to be broken?"

To this question, Joseph Ratzinger's answer is twofold. First, he points out that polytheism and atheism have an equally violent historic record.

Second, he believes in a separation of religion and state that protects people from both. He accepts (because and not despite that he is Christian) that domination of the state by the Church would be tyranny. But he argues that removing any public role from the Church - its privatisation - would also lead to tyranny, since it would greatly ease the state's control over consciences.

According to Fr Nichols, for Joseph Ratzinger "no harm is done when political society is built up on the basis that 'all roads are mutually recognised as fragments of the effort toward that which is better'".

What he objects to is the extension of such relativism to matters of ethics (and religion). To him, the denial of moral absolutes threatens the quest for truly human freedom.

When scientists - rather than science - assert that nature is blind (he believes it is rational), then a far too narrow conception of reason is being prized. The accumulation of human wisdom is being ignored. And the single-minded pursuit of such a narrowly-defined reason can literally lead to self-destruction (as with the invention of the atomic bomb). The narrow definition of reason also invites the relativist backlash that loses faith in any kind of rational ethics. For Joseph Ratzinger this represents a threat to human freedom because it dissolves the distinction between good and evil. If any choice is good as long as someone affirms it, the status quo - with all its repressions - ends up being endorsed if not sanctified. Hardly progressive.

Far from seeing relativism as the precondition for freedom, he sees it as doing away with the necessity of truly coming to terms with people who are different. His emphasis on the Christian roots of Europe originates in a conviction that European liberalism (that is, one that still allows religions a public role) can only flourish if it is accompanied by certain civic virtues that, historically, Christianity has encouraged.

His doubts about Islam are based on a misunderstanding (which Fr Nichols shares) that Islamic Law, the Sharia, is in essence a social blueprint that blurs the separation of religion and polity. Actually, that is not what the Sharia was traditionally understood to be; if many Muslims today claim that the Sharia is a sort of communal acquis to which society "must return", they are no more reliable than the many Christians who claim that the Church must return to basing itself on "scripture alone".

This misunderstanding apart, Joseph Ratzinger's approach to culture is that each culture bears within it a universal aspect that should interest all others; at the same time, each culture should be capable of receiving gifts and insights from without. He places a special emphasis on the need for the cultures of Christianity and secularism to learn from each other.

The kernel of this conviction is a belief in public argument about ethical choices and, simultaneously, in political resolution of conflicts over such choices. To sweep ethical choices to the private sphere without public debate would be, for him, to undermine people's capacity to grow in their understanding of freedom.

To frame things in this way is to see, I believe, the challenge that the thought of Pope Benedict poses to Malta's current legal arrangements as they touch on issues like domestic partnerships and assisted fertilisation.

At a superficial level, our absence of law and regulation in such spheres might appear to preserve a polity in line with the values of the Pope. But, arguably, the absence might be exacerbating "the dictatorship of relativism": the pulverisation of ethical choices with public implications into merely private, personal cases, where, since there is no place for law, regulation or public reasoning and argument, anything goes.

Joseph Ratzinger's social diagnosis warns us against the complacencies of the right as well as of the left.

ranierfsadni@europe.com