THE AMERICAN POPE:

The Event That Is Christianity: a review of Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith (James V. Schall, S.J., 05/14/08, First Principles)

Rowland’s chapter on “Modernity and the Politics of the West” is a must read. As the pope noted in Spe Salvi, his second encyclical, the history of the West can in many ways be conceived as a gigantic this-worldly effort to achieve the ends of Christianity by politics, issuing from a denial of any transcendent purpose to man or the world. “Ratzinger thus rejects all philosophies of history which would find in the historical process some dynamic outside the theo-drama of God’s offer of grace and the human response to this offer.” The effect of this understanding is to allow politics to be politics and not a substitute for metaphysics. There are the “things of Caesar,” a phrase that clearly implies that many other things, often the most important ones, are not of Caesar.

Rowland cites the following passage of Ratzinger in which he distinguishes between a healthy “secularity,” an understanding that the polity has a purpose, and “secularism,” a closed ideology. “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 thorough politics and leaves no public space for the Catholic and Christian vision, which thus risks becoming something purely private and essentially mutilated.” Ratzinger has admired the American founding as a reasonable example of a polity that did not conceive itself to be a religion or ideology, but understood that it must leave space for religion to live and flourish within the limited public order.

Rowland lists several core principles that Ratzinger uses to think of the state. These principles are worth citing in full as they make clear the ideas that Benedict has affirmed about the civil order.

1. The state is not itself the source of truth and morality.
2. The goal of the state cannot consist in a freedom without defined contents.
3. The State must receive from outside itself the essential measure of knowledge and truth with regard to what is good.
4. This outside cannot be “pure reason” however desirable in theory, because, in practice, such a pure rational evidential quality independent of history does not exist. Metaphysical and moral reason comes into action only in a historical context.
5. Christian faith has proved to be the most universal and rational religious culture.
6. The Church may not exert herself to become the state. . . .
7. The Church remains outside the state . . . (but) must exert herself with all her vigor so that in it there may shine forth the moral truth that it offers to the state and that ought to become evident to the citizens of the state.

This is an excellent summary of Benedict’s thought on the nature of the state and its proper relation to the Church. It indicates the limits and therefore the nature of both necessary realities.