Cardinal Ratzinger’s address, entitled The Spiritual Roots of Europe: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, traces the spiritual history of Europe from its roots in the twin Christian empires of Rome and Byzantium, through their respective northward retreats to continental Europe and Russia in the face of Muslim expansion, and to their ultimate secularization in the wake of the French Revolution. The French Revolution, according to the Cardinal, provided Europe with a new “spiritual framework” that isolated God within the “domain of sentiment, not of reason,” excluded Him from the “public sphere,” shattered “the ancient idea of Empire” and substituted the secular nation-states of Europe. Each of these secular states “considered itself the depository of a universal mission,” which led them to compete across the globe for colonies and culminated in the world wars of the twentieth century.
But Europe, “despite its enduring political and economic power, seems to be on the road to decline and fall.” Citing the historian Arnold Toynbee, the Cardinal ascribes Europe’s decline to its “abandonment of religion for the cult of technology, nationalism, and militarism,” that is, for the cult of “secularism.” Toynbee had suggested that the remedy was to reintroduce the “heritage of Western Christianity” through the “energy of creative minorities and exceptional individuals.”
Exploring whether such a “reintroduction” is possible, the Cardinal describes the differing views of church/state relations prevailing in the modern Latin and Germanic nations and in the United States. He mentions three challenges facing Europe – that of human dignity in the face of modern biotechnology; that of the definition of marriage and our understanding of the human person; and finally that of Christianity in the face of “multiculturalism” and Western “self-hatred.” He concludes:
Unless we embrace our own heritage of the sacred, we will not only deny the heritage of Europe, we will also fail in providing a service to others to which they are entitled. To the other cultures of the world, there is something deeply alien to the absolute secularism that is developing in the West. They are convinced that a world without God has no future. Multiculturalism itself thus demands that we return once again to ourselves. *** [W]e must agree with Toynbee that the fate of a society always depends upon its creative minorities. Christian believers should look upon themselves as just such a creative minority, and help Europe to reclaim what is best in its heritage and to thereby place itself at the service of all humankind.
(Column continues below)
Subscribe to our daily newsletter
This is not exactly the stuff of St. Augustine’s City of God, written in response to the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 A.D., a threat to Western civilization at least as severe as that faced by Europe today. But it is better than the secularist Professor Pera’s suggestion contained in his Letter to Joseph Ratzinger:
[I]t is my firm conviction that this work of renewal should be done by Christians and secularists together. What we need today is a civil religion that can instill its values throughout the long chain that goes from the individual to the family, groups, associations, and civil society without passing through the political parties, government programs, and force of states, and therefore without affecting the separation, in the temporal sphere, between the church and state. In Europe and in the West so enriched by Europe, such a religion would already be Christian by nature because the Western European tradition is Christian. What I am suggesting is therefore a non-denominational Christian religion. As I envision it, this religion would have more monasteries than central churches, more monks that articulate and communicate than church officials, more practitioners than preachers. [emphasis in original]