HIS LOST SHEEP:

Christendom's Return: Pope Benedict XVI espouses a muscular Christianity: Europe stands at an abyss, and only true belief can save it. (Christopher Dickey, Aug. 7, 2005, Newsweek)

[T]he Subiaco text—recently published in Italy as a book entitled "The Europe of Benedict: In the Crisis of Cultures"—could be considered something of a manifesto for the mission that many cardinals said they elected him to fulfill. Call it the re-Christianization of modern Europe. Conservative American Catholics, like Ratzinger biographer George Weigel, believe the mission is equally vital to the United States, which he fears could follow Europe's godless example. This is more than a debate about abortion and condoms, as these people tell it. They're literally talking about the future of civilization, or at least their own.

Consigning the Almighty to the sidelines of public life, Benedict said at Subiaco, fuels a rage that threatens all of Europe—not just among Christians angry at Europe's radical secularism, but also among the world's Muslims. "Muslims do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations," he declared, "but by the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations." The same is true for Jews, he said. "It is not the mention of God that offends those who belong to other religions, but rather the attempt to build the human community absolutely without God." Thus the violence of terrorism is fed less by the clash of civilizations or belief than by its lack, and the insult to God (and the founding mystery of the universe) that European disbelief represents.

If the only moral standards are supposed to be those calculated by governments and individuals, Ratzinger went on to say, then society is cut off from its Christian roots and loses its way.

The Pope certainly grasps the problem better than any of the pols.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2005 4:26 PM