Posted on 01/24/2006 7:00:16 AM PST by NYer
In his Christmas address to the Roman Curia on true and false interpretations of Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI asked why the Church had had such a difficult time opening a dialogue with “the modern age.” His answers are provocative — and turn some of the conventional accounts of modern history inside out. America Was Different Ponder This on Left and Right
A Bad Start
The pope suggested that “Catholicism-and-modernity” got off to a bad start when the Galileo trial opened a fissure between the Church and natural science. Immanuel Kant’s philosophical attempt to define “religion within pure reason” then seemed to eliminate any notion of a divine revelation to which the Church was accountable. The most dramatic breach came after 1789, when the French Revolution proposed — and bloodily enforced — an “image of the state and of man...intended to crowd out the Church and faith.”
A liberalism with no room for God was not a liberalism with which the Church could co-exist. And how could there be a dialogue with science when science “claimed to embrace, with its knowledge, the totality of reality to its outermost borders,” a claim that made the “hypothesis of God” unnecessary? European ideas and European politics thus led to a reaction under Pius IX: what Benedict called “a harsh and radical condemnation of this spirit of the modern age.” Yet Pius’s broadsides were no less “drastic” than the rejection of Christianity by those who most self-consciously embodied the spirit of the “modern age.”
There were other currents at work in modernity, however, and they eventually made their presence felt. Here, Benedict is worth a longish quote:“It was becoming clear that the American Revolution had offered a model of the modern state that was different from that theorized by the radical tendencies that had emerged from the second phase of the French Revolution. Natural sciences began...to reflect (on) their own limits, imposed by their own method which, while achieving great things, was nevertheless not able to comprehend the totality of reality. Thus both sides began...to open up to each other. In the period between the two world wars and even more after the Second World War, Catholic statesmen had shown that a modern lay state which is not neutral with respect to values can exist (by) tapping into the great ethical fonts of Christianity. Catholic social doctrine...became an important model between radical liberalism and the Marxist theory of the state. Natural sciences...realized ever more clearly that (their scientific) method was not comprehensive of the totality of reality and thus opened again their doors to God, knowing that reality is greater than what a naturalistic (scientific) method can embrace.”
Several points are worth teasing out of this trenchant analysis.
(1) The harshness of the 19th-century confrontation between Catholicism and “modernity” was, so to speak, bilateral. Powerful forces in European culture and politics aimed at nothing less than the eradication of Christianity, or, at the very least, tethering the Church to an all-powerful state. As Benedict concedes, Pius IX’s language was the language of condemnation; but there was, in truth, a lot that needed condemning (as Anglican historian Owen Chadwick made clear in A History of the Popes 1830-1914, and as another British scholar, Michael Burleigh, will underscore in his forthcoming Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War.)
(2) The American Revolution, which institutionally separated Church and state while affirming the transcendent origins of the “truths” on which democratic politics had to be based, was an entirely different matter than its French counterpart. Thus “1776” helped compel the development of doctrine that eventually led to Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom (a point that might be pondered, not only by Lefebvrists, but by Communio contributors convinced that America is, at bottom, an ill-founded republic).
(3) Catholicism and science can have a mutually beneficial dialogue when the Church remembers that it’s not in the geology business and science remembers that the scientific method can’t measure, much less account for, all-there-is — which is, I take it, the central point at issue in the current round of the Darwin wars.
Incredible man, this Pope!
Professors in academia are always revising history, or only telling a part of it in order to advance their views. They make me so mad sometimes, that I don't know how I restrain myself from punching them out. Their hate for Christianity and conservatives is so profound, that they stuff it down our throats on a daily basis. I hope that Pope Benedict will bring the order that the Church needs, and bring us back to Orthodoxy.
I don't think that the perceived view of the Church condemning science will ever be able to be erased. Too bad.
Great article, NYer!
As I recall it, Joseph Ratzinger was a founder of, and frequent contributor to, Communio.
Mr. Weigel perhaps is thinking of his own critics here, as he has been described by Tracy Rowland, among others of the Communio group in this country (and elsewhere, Ms Rowland is in Australia), as a "Whig Thomist", a term applied to Weigel, Neuhaus and Novak.
One cannot suppress a grin upon recalling Dr. Johnson's aphorism that the Devil was the first Whig.
Later in his life, Jefferson admitted to Adams that he had been wrong.
I feel so blessed to have been able to grow up here in America. And, to me, the Founding Fathers are a gift like no other.
When did this happen?
I was wondering the same thing.
One thing going for the US culture vis a vis science is that there is a stronger tradition to keep science a private affair. This being said, I do not see any particular humility in the way science preceives itself in the US.
If the pope speaks of condemnation of scientism coming from the worldwide Catholic Church, then he is of course correct, but I don't see any particular link to Catholicism in the US, which, if anything has a tradition of particularly appalling selectivity regarding the teaching of the Church.
What's even funnier, Pope Benedict only had one sentence referring to America in the Christmas address Weigel cites: "It was becoming clear that the American Revolution had offered a model of the modern state that was different from that theorized by the radical tendencies that had emerged from the second phase of the French Revolution."
That Weigel teases out a four-sentence interpretation just to bash the Communio school is lazy, and perhaps even a bit slimy.
If the professor knew about it, how 'secret' could it be? The Vatican is really lousy at keeping these 'secrets'. Every anti-Catholic seems to know all about them.
Such an assertion without any supporting evidence is useless. Glad to hear that you and your fellow students were able to publicly demonstrate that the professor was making an empty assertion without any reliable evidence.
It was our pleasure =P
That's putting it very gently. There is need to recognize that, in the modern world at least, when science and religion have collided science has not come off the loser. The condemnation of Galileo was a tragedy for him, but only a slight check to science; it was Catholicism that suffered lasting harm.
Natural sciences began...to reflect (on) their own limits, imposed by their own method which, while achieving great things, was nevertheless not able to comprehend the totality of reality.
Galileo surely never doubted this.
It was becoming clear that the American Revolution had offered a model of the modern state that was different from that theorized by the radical tendencies that had emerged from the second phase of the French Revolution.
Not the least of the differences was that the American model worked.
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