The Church Is Under Siege. But Habermas, the Atheist, Is Coming to its Defense
And Cardinal Ratzinger is the one who summoned him. The philosopher of Frankfurt breaks through the battle line of the secularist attack. Other secularist intellectuals are also coming to Christianity's defense. Among Catholics, there are some who trust them - and others who don't
by Sandro Magister
ROMA – They're more convinced of it than ever in the Vatican. There is a systematic assault by secularism against Christianity underway, centered in Europe and with the Church of Rome as its main target.
In an interview with the newspaper "la Repubblica on November 19, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described it as follows:
"We are faced with an aggressive secularism, one that even shows intolerant characteristics sometimes. [...] In Sweden, a Protestant pastor who preached on homosexuality on the basis of a Scripture passage was jailed for a month. Secularism is no longer that element of neutrality which opens up areas of freedom for everyone. It is beginning to turn into an ideology that imposes itself through politics and leaves no public space for the Catholic and Christian vision, which thus risks becoming something purely private and essentially mutilated. We must defend religious freedom against the imposition of an ideology that presents itself as the only voice of rationality."
One month earlier, on October 18, Cardinal Renato Martino, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was even more blunt. Presenting a collection of all the diplomatic speeches of Pope John Paul II, he denounced the fact that the voice of the pope and of the Church "are deliberately made to disappear, submerged beneath the tumult and shouting orchestrated by powerful cultural, economic, and political lobbies, which are mostly motivated by prejudice against everything that is Christian."
In the judgment of the Vatican authorities, there are countless proofs of this secularist aggression. Cardinal Martino, who represented the Holy See at the United Nations for sixteen years, recalls "the attempt to eject the Vatican from the UN because the Church has always defended life and opposed abortion." As for the present situation, he added: "Just think of the carefree and cheerful manner in which these lobbies tenaciously promote the confusion of [sexual] roles in gender identity, ridicule marriage between man and woman, and attack life, which is made the object of the most extravagant experiments."
The omitted mention of Christian roots in the preamble of the new charter of the European Union – which John Paul II has personally lamented a number of times – is held to be another of these proofs.
And so is José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's secularist "revolución" in Spain, encompassing divorce, gays, embryos, abortion, and euthanasia. All under the banner of the motto: "If the majority says something, that is the truth."
And so are Italy's referendums to ease recourse to artificial fertilization and to permit the elimination of the "unfit" unborn.
And so is the rejection for the post of vice-president of the European Commission of Italian minister Rocco Buttiglione – a professor of philosophy and scholar of pope Karol Wojtyla's thought – for reason of his explicitly Catholic positions on homosexuality and marriage.
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But some within the Church do not agree with the alarming conclusions described above.
A commentary that made waves in Italy and the Vatican was published in the newspaper "la Repubblica" by professor Pietro Scoppola, an authoritative historian and a highly representative exponent of the progressivist intellectual current that has dominated Catholic circles for years, with a large following among priests and bishops.
Scoppola's commentary, which appeared on the front page of the newspaper "la Repubblica" on November 10, began as follows:
"The idea of an anti-Catholic offensive seems to me completely unrealistic and lacking any foundation."
And it continued by maintaining that the real threat for the Church is a different one:
"It is the initiative of some secularist exponents, aimed at exploiting Christianity, Catholicism, and the Church in the political field as an element of identity in the face of the threat of terrorism inspired by Islamic fundamentalism."
With this, Scoppola was referring above all to two prominent secularist Italian intellectuals, Marcello Pera and Giuliano Ferrara, who have come out strongly in defense of the Christian identity of Europe, in the face not only of the radical Islamist offensive, but also of that of scientific supremacy over life and man. Pera, a philosopher of science and a disciple of Karl Popper, has been president of the senate since 2001, elected by a conservative majority; while Ferrara, who is inspired by the philosophy of Leo Strauss and his thesis of a natural law capable of distinguishing rationally between good and evil, is the director of "Il Foglio," a combative niche newspaper owned by the family of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and widely read by both Catholic and non-Catholic anti-conformist intellectuals, in terms of the reigning leftist consensus.
"Avvenire," the newspaper owned by the Italian bishops' conference (CEI), which is presided over by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, has shown its appreciation for this defense of Christianity made by secularist intellectuals.
But this has been just one more reason for Scoppola and those of like mind to criticize the hierarchy of the Church. The interview with historian Alberto Melloni, which follows below, is a good example of this current of Catholic thought. According to them, today's convergence between the Church and the secularist exponents mentioned here, who say they admire Christianity even though they don't believe in it, makes the Church merely the chaplain of a civic religion which in reality has nothing Christian about it.
Scoppola did not hesitate to point out the "extreme and more culturally elaborate" form of the alliance between the Church and "devout atheists" in a notorious historical precedent synonymous with the worst clerico-fascism: l'Action Française of Charles Maurras, condemned by Pius XI in 1926.
This elicited a strong reaction from "Avvenire," written by the newspaper's director, Dino Boffo, who is very closely linked to Cardinal Ruini. Scoppola then counter-reacted, reiterating his accusation against the leadership of the Italian Church for selling "the Church's agreement with and moral legitimization of political forces in exchange for benefits and favors from these same forces."
With that, the clash taking place between the president of the CEI and the progressivist Catholic intelligentsia – analyzed in earlier articles on www.chiesa – reached one of its peaks.
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But is a shared appreciation of Christianity on the part of the Church and secularist thought, each for its own reasons, really so untoward?
And is it really so certain that such agreement is in response to interests of politics and power?
On at least two recent occasions, two leading exponents of the Church of Rome have shown that the meeting between the Christian faith and secularist thought is not a practical and opportunistic expedient, but is a strategic objective of the Church itself, at its highest levels, and not a recent one at that.
On November 18 two years ago, speaking to a gathering of all the Italian bishops, Cardinal Camillo Ruini invoked the Jewish philosopher Karl Löwith in support of the thesis according to which faith in the God-Man Jesus Christ is the first foundation of Western civilization's recognition of human dignity. Ruini read a passage from a book Löwith wrote in 1941, "From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolutionary Split in 19th Century Thought," warning that "with the weakening of Christianity, the idea of humanity has now also become problematic."
Last October 25, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger summoned to the field as his ally "the philosopher considered in the world of the German language as the purest secularist": Jürgen Habermas (in the photo), an exponent of the famous Frankfurt school.
Ratzinger is the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, while Ruini is the pope's vicar. Both identify as the great enemy of the Church and Western culture "naturalistic man," man who thinks of himself as part of nature and entrusts himself entirely to scientific omnipotence, from birth to procreation to death. Both wish to respond to this supreme challenge by intentionally wedding "fides et ratio," faith and secular thought.
Between the likes of Ratzinger and Habermas, naturally, the distance remains intact. Habermas defines himself as, and is, "a methodical atheist." But to read his most recent essay translated in Italy, "A Time of Transition," published by Feltrinelli and available in bookstores since mid-November, Christianity, and nothing else, is 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."
Habermas says he is "enchanted by the seriousness and consistency" of the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, the opposite of the feeble thinking that pervades current theology:
"Thomas represents a spiritual figure who was able to prove his authenticity with his own resources. That contemporary religious leadership lacks an equally solid terrain seems to me an incontrovertible truth. In the general leveling of society by the media everything seems to lose seriousness, even institutionalized Christianity. But theology would lose its identity if it sought to uncouple itself from the dogmatic nucleus of religion, and thus from the religious language in which the community's practices of prayer, confession, and faith are made concrete."
On relations with other civilizations, Habermas maintains that "recognizing our Judaeo-Christian roots more clearly not only does not impair intercultural understanding, it is what makes it possible."
He contests modern "unbridled subjectivity," which is destined to "clash against what is really absolute; that is, against the unconditional right of every creature to be respected in its bodiliness and recognized in its otherness, as 'an image of God'."
In commenting on "You shall have no gods but me," he writes:
"From a philosophical point of view, the first commandment expresses that 'leap forward' on the 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."
On the relationship between theology and philosophy, he observes:
"I don't resent it at all when I am accused of having inherited theological concepts. I am convinced that religious discourse contains within itself potentialities that have not yet been sufficiently explored by philosophy, insofar as they have not yet been translated into the language of public reason, which is presumed to be able to persuade anyone. Naturally, I am not talking about the neopagan project of those who want to 'build upon mythology.' Today, in the field of anti-rational postmodern criticism, these neopagan conceptual figures are back in fashion: a broad anti-Platonism carelessly spread by fashions inspired by late Heidegger and late Wittgenstein, in the sense of a definitive repudiation of the universalism that characterizes the premises of unconditional validity. I rebel against this regressive tendency of post-metaphysical thought."
He cautions against the anti-human consequences of a relativism without theology:
"The problem of how to bring salvation to those who suffer unjustly is perhaps the most important factor keeping discussion about God alive. If all the paradigms of seeing the world were equal, if the indifference so perversely widespread today took from the yes/no response of each individual's decision the seriousness that is proper to every claim of universal validity, then there must necessarily be the disappearance of the normative dimension that serves to identify the traits, seen as privations, of an unfortunate, deformed life unworthy of man."
And on the contribution of philosophy to the meeting between the Church and other religions, he says:
"In the dialogical dispute among competing religious visions there is a need for that 'culture of recognition' which draws its principles from the secularized world of the universalism of reason and law. In this matter, it is thus the philosophical spirit which provides the concepts instrumental in the political clarification of theology. But the political philosophy capable 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."
* * *
Cardinal Ratzinger made recourse to Habermas during a two-way public discussion on "History, politics, and religion" with yet another secularist intellectual, Ernesto Galli Della Loggia, a professor at the university of Perugia and an editorialist for "Corriere della Sera." And their conversation ranged over two millennia of history.
But the extraordinary room in which the two spoke was also a living part of history: it was in the Palazzo Colonna in the center of Rome, the former home of Giuliano Della Rovere, who under the Roman-imperial name of Julius II was the pontiff dedicated to the appreciation of ancient art and culture, of Michelangelo, of the encounter between the Church and Renaissance humanism.
Ratzinger spoke from the midst of Greek and Roman statues. Above his head was a grandiose fresco depicting the battle of Lepanto in 1571, waged successfully against the Ottoman forces with the protection of the Madonna of the Rosary, to whom a feast was afterward dedicated.
Before politics and its interests, on the agenda of Ratzinger, Ruini, and, moving higher, of John Paul II, there is the urgency of a great battle about man and for the sake of man. A battle to be waged together with all men of good will.
And the philosophers and sybils are welcome at the side of Jesus and the apostles. This is another ancient tradition of the Christian interpretation of history. Just read the "De Civitate Dei" of St. Augustine.
* * *
What follows is the point of view of a Catholic intellectual who does not share the sense of alarm at secularist aggression, and criticizes as harmful to the Church itself the defense of Christianity made by the "devout atheists."
"An old maneuver that has never been good for society or the Church"
An interview with Alberto Melloni
Alberto Melloni is a noted Church historian, one of the leading experts on the Second Vatican Council, about which he edited a monumental history published in several languages. But Alberto Melloni defines himself as a Catholic "in the back row of church." And in that distant spot he does not hide the disappointment with which he views the Catholic Church of today. He has just sent to the bookshelves, published by Einaudi, a little volume with an eloquent title: "Mother Church, Stepmother Church," which has been pilloried by the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference, "Avvenire," but reviewed very favorably by the prior of Bose, Enzo Bianchi, the guru of the progressivist Catholic intelligentsia. In it, Melloni censures the Church for abandoning Jesus and making itself instead the chaplain of another religion, not his, completely and solely civic, at the service of the potentates of the world.
Q: Professor Melloni, is there or is there not anti-Christian aggression taking place?
A: "Of course there is. But it is not the secularist kind that people in Italy and the rest of Europe chatter about. A real, harsh, bloody persecution, of which many Christians are victim, exists in various regions beyond Europe: these are the real persecuted people almost no one talks about. It's completely different in Europe. The persecution that so many Catholics complain about here doesn't deserve the name. It is only their problem of incomprehension, lack of communication, and difficulties in coming to terms with modern man. Calling all of this persecution is an offense for the Christians in Africa or Asia who are persecuted, and really killed."
Q: But what do these Catholics think they will obtain by playing the victim when they're not, as you put it?
A: "They're dreaming of a return to a lost form of Christianity, a political-religious symbiosis that would put the Church back at the center. And they quickly find political forces interested in this operation. There's nothing new in all this. The alliance between the reactionaries and the papists has made its fortunes before, in the 1800's, just as did the encounter between Catholicism and democracy which the moderate Catholics tried many decades ago. Today this dream is being reintroduced in a big way, on a European scale. The new Europe includes the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury, the patriarch of Romania, and the archbishop of Athens, and this is enough to feed the pretext of a new Christian Europe, forgetting that there are also the Muslims and the Jews, and thus causing great harm to the Church itself."
Q: What kind of harm?
A: "That of reducing it to Europe. It is incredible that so many Catholics and ecclesiastics are not annoyed at seeing persons outside the Church determine for them what the place of the Church within Europe should be. Christianity is not European or Western, but worldwide. We can have good Europeans and Westerners without inconveniencing the papacy and the Church. They know this in the Vatican, and in fact they are more prudent. Cardinal Angelo Sodano kept his distance from the campaign in defense of Rocco Buttiglione. He was careful not to bring the weight of the Church to bear on petty domestic quarrels."
Q: Sociologist of religion Danièle Hervieu-Léger maintains that Catholicism is now outside of contemporary culture. Do you agree?
A: "It is outside because it excludes itself. If the Church does nothing but churn out photocopies of the catechism and ban reflection on sensitive topics within itself, it won't go far. Let's take homosexual rights. Very different positions on this exist within the Christian world. But while the Anglicans, who are also Christians, discuss it openly and at the highest levels, within the Catholic Church discussion is not admitted. No item of news here goes by without an immediate declaration from the magisterium by way of condemnation. It's the same with sexual morality, the interruption of pregnancy, embryos, and also in the case of Islam. These are all, not external, but internal questions for the Church. But the Church does not permit the faithful to debate openly about how to apply the message of Jesus to these realities."
Q: John Paul II, in his speech to the Italian parliament, said that democracy becomes totalitarianism if it does not have an "ultimate truth" to guide it. What do you think?
A: "If the Church wants to speak to a disoriented society, it can offer only one 'ultimate truth': peace. Peace as the capacity for people who are different to coexist. The Church came to discover this truth after centuries, passing through intolerance and wars of religion. Now that pluralism has been affirmed in Europe, the Church should not look upon this as a threat, but as an enhancement that makes the faith even more beautiful."
Q: But the Church continues to say 'no' to a democracy that transforms into truth and law every desire of the majority.
A: "Democracy has its weaknesses; it doesn't work like a Jesuit seminary. The important thing is encounter and mediation. Just as it is wrong to reject every episcopal declaration as if it were an attack against secularism, so it is wrong to see everywhere an attack against the Church. Ideas evolve. Today, the Church no longer thinks about freedom of the press the way Gregory XVI, who demonized it, did, nor does it think about democracy the way Pius XII did. The Church is called to learn from the voice of the Spirit, which resonates within the heart of human existence."
Q: Does it also resonate within the heart of staunchly secularist non-believers, like Pera or Ferrara, who recently came to the defense of the Church?
A: "The Church should protect itself from them. They make it look like they're defending the Church, but in reality they're exploiting it for political purposes, without any respect for the content of the faith. Theirs is an old maneuver that has never been good for society or the Church. It wins the enthusiasm of the clerics, with consequences for which all Christians must pay, in terms of the loss of credibility: and when this happens, the so-called 'devout atheists' will already have abandoned them. The Christian faith does not need such apologists. It can defend itself by its own means, which are firmness and meekness."
Q: Does a philosopher like Jürgen Habermas, an atheist but a great admirer of Christian theology, also exploit the faith?
A: "It's different in Germany. German theology is not carried out only in the seminaries, as it is in Italy. It is taught in the state universities, and is a branch of learning in open dialogue with society, even though the Church hierarchy often disowns it and condemns its positions."
Q: The new charter of Europe does not mention "Christian roots." Was this a defeat for the Church?
A: "I don't believe that the pope, the curia, and the bishops were so very eager after all for that mention, which would have been more symbolic than anything else. At least in this the Holy See showed exemplary neutrality. In a Europe that no longer has Catholic political parties, the Church is more interested in keeping the citizens united than in dividing them into ranks by religious membership."
Q: And the surprise of the American elections?
A: "Thomas Friedman wrote in the 'New York Times' on November 4: 'We are not divided on what America does, but on what America is.' Woe to Europe if we also divide ourselves one from the other for reasons of religious identity. There are those within the Church who wish to do so. But fortunately the Church is too complex to move uniformly in this direction. A great Church of the people will not accept its own reduction to a political fringe movement; it will not accept throwing God onto the market to see how many votes he gets."
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Other articles on this topic from this website:
> From Madrid to Rome: The Secularist Offensive and the Church's Fears (4.10.2004)
> The Theologian, the Philosopher, and the Bishop. Three Lessons for the Church and the West (20.5.2004)
> Constantine 1700 Years Later: The Imperial Church of John Paul II (20.4.2004)
> The Church of the Opposition in Italy. The Rise, Activity, and Decline of the Progressivist Catholic Intelligentsia (13.4.2004)
> A Church of the Rich or a Church of the Poor? The Opposition to Cardinal Ruini (8.3.2004)
> It’s Secular Because It’s Christian: Europe Seeks its Identity Card (3.10.2003)
> If Europe Denies Itself: A Letter to Europeans from a European Muslim (30.9.2003)
> Exclusive Interview with Cardinal Camillo Ruini: “My Battle for Man” (16.12.2002)
> Solo un Uomo-Dio ci può salvare. Ruini chiama a testimone un ebreo (18.11.2002)
> Democracy under the Care of a Guardian. The Backward March of John Paul II (14.11.2002)
> Platone bocciato in politica. I vescovi gli preferiscono Popper (28.8.2002)
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English translation by Matthew Sherry:
> traduttore@hotmail.com
Go to the home page of
> www.chiesa.espressonline.it/english, to access the latest articles and links to other resources.
Sandro Magister’s e-mail address is
s.magister@espressoedit.it
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22.11.2004
