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By Christopher Dickey
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On the day before Pope John Paul II died last April, as the faithful and the curious gathered in St. Peter's Square awaiting word of his fate, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was speaking in the village of Subiaco inthe mountains outside Rome. Priests, monks and nuns listened in the chill air ofan austere Gothic convent as he told them, "Europe has developed a culture that, in a manner unknown before now to humanity, excludes God from the public conscience." Attempts to manage human affairs while "disdaining God completely," he said, have led us "to the edge of the abyss."
At the time, little attention was paid to Ratzinger's remarks. But in the months since he succeeded John Paul to become Pope Benedict XVI, the full text of his address at Subiaco has come to be seen by some as a sort of manifesto for the re-Christianization of modern Europe. American theologian Michael Novak regards the new pontiff's teachings outlined there as having an impact "on family life, on morality, on confidence in the future," possibly even on the stability of a continent shaken by terrorism. Conservative American Catholics like Ratzinger biographer George Weigel believe the mission is equally vital to the United States, where Europe's godless example "could well be replicated," he says. This is more than a debate about abortion and condoms, as these people see it. They're literally talking about the future of civilization--or civilizations.
In Pope Benedict's words at Subiaco: "Muslims do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations, but by the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations." The same is true for religious 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." If the only moral standards are supposed to be those calculated by governments and individuals, Ratzinger argued, then society loses its way.
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Vatican scholars who've studied Benedict's approach see him walking a careful line between asserting moral authority and mixing it up in national politics. But outsiders have found that a distinction hard to discern. His first formal state visit to Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi came at a very sensitive moment. Only days before, Italy's cardinals had campaigned successfully against liberalizing the country's policies on human-fertility practices. They asked the public to abstain, thus annulling any result. Ciampi had made a point, himself, of voting. Now, as Ciampi received Benedict, the pontiff insisted on the church's duty to take a stand. It must concern itself with "the family founded on marriage" and the "defense of human life from conception to its natural end," he said. Ciampi, clearly taken aback, tried to assert the "necessary distinction" between church and state.
"What you saw in Italy was in a sense the first skirmish in what will be a much broader cultural conflict," says Vatican commentator John Allen. "This is going to be a robust and no-holds-barred papacy that makes the argument that there are certain objective truths about the human person that have to have consequences in public policy and civil law." But there are also some apparent political calculations. In Spain, where there was no chance the church could defeat the government's legalization of same-sex marriage, Pope Benedict never put his personal prestige on the line to support the local bishops' campaign against the law.
Benedict is wise to pick his battles. The 78-year-old Bavarian-born pontiff, who was the Vatican's guardian of doctrinal purity for 23 years, is at heart more a retiring intellectual than a rousing campaigner. He knows what he's up against. As the journal of theology Concilium wrote last year, the roots of Christian culture in Europe are tangled around some very ugly history, including centuries of religious wars and, more recently, the Holocaust: "Even though full-blown Nazism was an atheistic and anti-Christian ideology, the fact remains that European nations, East and West, colluded in the destruction of their Jewish citizenry." Given such history, it's not altogether surprising that, as Concilium put it, "Christianity is for most Europeans a part of Europe's distant past and not much more."
It's telling that the final draft of the European constitution left God out of its preamble. According to the most recent European Values Study, just 21 percent of Europeans say religion is very important to them. A Gallup poll last year found that on average only about 15 percent of Europe's people attend a place of worship once a week, compared with 44 percent of Americans.
Moreover, as the church under Benedict tries to assert itself in the midst of raging political debates over specific questions like stem-cell research, abortion, the role of religion in education, gay marriage--even the teaching of evolution--some of those who claim to embrace Benedict's teachings already risk caricaturing them. After the horrific bombings in London on July 7, for instance, one of Benedict's aides released a statement saying the attacks were "against Christianity." The phrase was quickly corrected to "against humanity." Benedict himself spoke to reporters to make clear he thought the intent of the terrorists "was far more general."
Yet the new pontiff is also a man of great patience. He had gone to Subiaco to receive an award and to speak about Saint Benedict of Nurcia, who founded his monastic order there in the sixth century. Ratzinger has argued that in the bleak European landscape of faithlessness today, as in the Dark Ages, "the Church herself must form cells" to wait for the light--and work toward it for centuries--just as the Benedictines did.
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