Recently Pope Benedict XVI visited England. While there he addressed a rather large gathering of both religious and secular leaders at Westminster Hall. The leaders were from religion, politics, and academia. You can both watch and read his address here. What he said is important enough that I am going to pre-empt my next posting on “tight shoes” for one day. In a brief two minute period, he managed to condense Catholic (and frankly Orthodox) teaching on the relations of religion and the state, faith and reason, etc. in an admirable way. One can see why he was considered a good professor.
The other thing that he managed to convey, once again, in that brief two minute period is that the faith of the Apostles, properly taught, is neither American right-wing nor left-wing. I say this despite the fact that his speech was aimed at a British audience. But, a citizen of the United Kingdom could say exactly the same sentence about their political arguments and the Pope’s speech. In fact his speech contained items both to support each side and to call each side to attention. Below are a couple of selected quotes that I found most interesting. Please do read/listen to his full address. I could only hope that more American Catholics (and Orthodox) would listen and follow the statements of their bishops (or hierarchs) and their Pope (or Patriarchs).
The inadequacy of pragmatic, short-term solutions to complex social and ethical problems has been illustrated all too clearly by the recent global financial crisis. There is widespread agreement that the lack of a solid ethical foundation for economic activity has contributed to the grave difficulties now being experienced by millions of people throughout the world. Just as “every economic decision has a moral consequence” (Caritas in Veritate, 37), so too in the political field, the ethical dimension of policy has far-reaching consequences that no government can afford to ignore. …
The central question at issue, then, is this: where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation. According to this understanding, the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers – still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion – but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves. And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion. It is a two-way process. Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person. …
In this light, I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalization of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance. There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere. There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none. And there are those who argue – paradoxically with the intention of eliminating discrimination – that Christians in public roles should be required at times to act against their conscience. These are worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the legitimate role of religion in the public square. I would invite all of you, therefore, within your respective spheres of influence, to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life. …
The Pope had also given an address earlier that day at Westminster Abbey. That address was a clearly more overtly Christian address. And there he added a couple of paragraphs that, to me and to other bloggers, has seemed to add a good footnote to the above speech. That footnote explains the Pope’s reasoning and places his speech above on some very solid ground:
Our commitment to Christian unity is born of nothing less than our faith in Christ, in this Christ, risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father, who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. It is the reality of Christ’s person, his saving work and above all the historical fact of his resurrection, which is the content of … those creedal formulas. … The church’s unity, in a word, can never be other than a unity in the apostolic faith, in the faith entrusted to each new member of the Body of Christ.
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