Benedict XVI
The election of Pope Benedict XVI seems, to many people, to indicate a deepening estrangement of the Catholic Church from modern secular culture in the West. It is a common perception that thinkers like Cardinal Ratzinger oppose this culture root and branch and are inclined to denounce it as a “culture of death” or a “dictatorship of relativism.” And many self-appointed spokesmen for modern secular culture return the compliment and brand the church as antimodern, reactionary, and so on.
But this polar opposition doesn’t really stand up to examination. There was perhaps a time when the Catholic Church was totally against “modernity”; that was the period of Pius IX, fulminating in his “Syllabus of Errors” against democracy, human rights, liberalism, and all the rest. This is not the stance of the contemporary Catholic Church, which is one of the bulwarks of democracy and human rights in the world, of redistribution of income and development to the most deprived, and of peaceful resolution of disputes and dialogue. So what is the fuss really about? It’s about different readings of the complex interrelationship of this church to the Western world, which used to be its home and is now becoming almost a marginal element in a church exploding globally southward.
Everyone really agrees that there are great goods and also rather frightening flaws in this modern culture: freedom, human rights, democracy, the right to be different, and great movements for peace and human welfare on a global scale (such as Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières). On the other hand are a drive to control; a purely instrumental and destructive stance toward nature and human life, toward poor, marginalized populations and victims of the savage side of capitalism; disorientation and a felt lack of meaning; a trivialization of freedom in consumer choice; and a confused hedonism.
How do all these relate? How can we understand this bewildering mixture? One view is that they can be almost surgically separated. We can fight the bad features with a disciplined rejection of them, grounded in long-cherished goods of the past: sexual restraint, family values, opposition to certain modes of technological control (e.g., cloning), and the like. Following this understanding, the church ought to stand for this rejection, and to do this it has to speak with one voice, which means that it has to speak with authority and cannot tolerate a multiplicity of voices within its ranks.
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