Pastor's
Page
By
Fr. George Welzbacher
December
10, 2006
Daniel has
returned from the lions' den! Returned in triumph! Even The New York
Times, under present management scarcely to be considered a
friend of
the Church, conceded that the humble, gracious, smiling warmth that
Pope Benedict
displayed during his meetings with Turkish dignitaries, meetings
given lavish
front-page coverage in Turkey's national papers, and most strikingly
during his respectful visit to the Blue Mosque had won a surprising
degree of approval from the Turkish "man on the street." All this
despite, on the eve of his visit, such banner headlines in Islamist
papers as "Stay home! We don't want you here!" And in his number one
objective Pope Benedict scored a dramatic success, namely encouraging
Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew in his "unwavering journey" - the
patriarch's phrase - towards restoration of that full communion with
the
Bishops of Rome that had prevailed by and large during the first
thousand years of Christian history.
Thanks be to God that this
four-day visit so fraught with danger passed without major
incident! The elaborate security measures imposed by the Turkish
govenunent,
reinforced by the prayers of millions of the faithful, helped to bring
safely back to Rome a pope whose zeal and intelligence are sorely
needed at this critical hour in the history of the Church and in the
history of the West!
May I share with you the thoughtful commentary on
the pope's visit to Turkey that ran in The Wall Street Journal
in the
issue of December first. I reprint the article in its entirety here.
* * *
Western Civ 101: Benedict's
Seminar on Fundamentals
By Daniel Henninger
It is somehow appropriate that amid the confusions of the
U. S.
involvement with the sectarians of Iraq, Pope Benedict XVI, fresh from
his own "engagement"' with contemporary Islam at Regensburg, should
come
to Turkey, which has sought membership in the European Union for 20
years. The
theologian Mike Novak said recently of Benedict, "His role
is to represent Western Civilization." I'd say Benedict is more than up
to the task. What remains to discover is whether Western civilization
is still up to it.
We have been in this spot before, and won.
When
Stalin famously asked how many divisions the pope had, he assumed that
the brute force of military power would be everywhere decisive. That
belief led to a four-decade standoff between the Soviets' tank armies
and NATO. Finally in the 1980's, John Paul 11, the Polish pope, gave
intellectual hope and heft to anti-communist dissidents, and Ronald
Regan and his allies prevailed over Europe's marching pacifists and
installed Pershing missile batteries in Europe. By decade's end, the
long cold war with communism was dissipating. The pope's engagement
mattered.
One
may assume that in some Himalayan redoubt, history's
latest homicidal utopians, Osama bin Laden and
Ayman al-Zawahiri,
believe that coupling their ideology to Islamic sucide bombers-in New
York, London or Baghdad-is more than a match for the will of a morally
diminished West. Are they wrong? Benedict XVI has written with force
about a morally diminished Europe. So, like his predecessor, this pope
decided to engage in the greatest military and intellectual battle of
our age.
We all know how a few months ago at the University of
Regensburg Benedict made himself a central player in the post-9/11 era
by quoting the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus. Not
much noted at the time was Benedict's second quotation from Manuel II: "God is not
pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to
God's nature." Benedict's lecture at Regensburg mentioned
"reason" and
"rationality" repeatedly. He went so
far as to claim that the "rapprochement" between Biblical faith and
Greek philosophical inquiry [reason] was "of decisive importance" for
world history. "This
convergence," said Benedict, "created Europe and
remains the foundation of what can be rightly called Europe." Very
simply, he is talking about and defending what we call "the
West" - both the place and the classically liberal idea, which radical
Islam wants to blow up. Just as John Paul championed the jailed or
hiding dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, Benedict is seeking similar
protections for persecuted Christian minorities-indeed all
minorities-across the Islamic
world.
Starting in Turkey.
Arriving in Ankara, the pope immediately raised two
ideas from the wellsprings of the West. He said on his first day that
a just society requires freedom of religion, and on behalf of Turkey's
tiny Catholic community he raised the issue of property rights.
One might say the pope's counter-offensive-in the Islamic
world and
in
the West- is overdue. One might also say his chances of winning are a
long shot. Benedict's
appeals to Europe to rediscover strength inside
its religious tradition comes at a difficult moment. He admitted
as
much in a book-length interview 10 years ago ("Salt of the Earth: The
church at the End of the Millennium"). It is Islamic belief,
Cardinal Ratzinger said, that "the Western countries are no longer
capable of preaching message of morality, but have only know-how to
offer the
world. The Christian religion has abdicated."
Militant
Islam is on the
march, literally, with enormous moral self-confidence. By
contrast the
West, as Wilfred M. McClay, an historian at the University of
Tennessee, Chattanooga, aptly described it recently, is in "an era of
post-modem moral insouciance." With others Benedict
argues that this
moral insouciance is the West's greatest vulnerability. This, too,
ought to be part of "homeland security."
Every
nation in Europe has a
birth rate below replacement, optingfor material well- being over the
(relative) sacrifice of raising two or more children. (Of all
industrialized nations, only the U.S. birth rate exceeds replacement.)
Against this trend, Benedict has thrown what he's got: the traditional
Western notion of finding strength in the union of reason and
religious faith.
It
has become a hard sell. If the Vatican opposes
abortion or stem-cell research, the West's intellectual elites deem it
unfit to participate in any imaginable public forum. In the West
Christian evangelicals are feared by many as a threat equal to Islamic
extremists, and unfit to participate in our politics. The hottest
"religion" subject in the West now is atheism in the
person of Richard
Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion," who, Time magazine wrote this
month, is "riding the crest of an atheist literary wave." Our
obsessions seem to be off-subject.
I think the pope is right that the
West is engaged in a decisive intellectual competition with the ideas
of radical Islam. This won't end with the battle for Baghdad. Will
scientific agnosticism defend the West against militant Islam? With
what? In Europe, its intellectuals can barely mount an argued defense
against internal threats. Externally, as in Afghanistan, they won't
even fight.
Benedict XVI's evident intention is to engage the Islamic
world, particularly its religious and political leaders, in an intense
and long discussion of the religious, political and legal rights of
their resident minorities, in other words, the Western tradition. The
implications of this effort are obvious for achieving an acceptable
modus vivendi with global Islam.
How many divisions does this pope
have? Good question. At the moment, I'd say, not as many as the last
time.
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