Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures - 4
Europe and the exclusion of God
Date: January 16, 2007
Time: 9:31pm est

Pseudo-moralism, affirms the Pope, is actually an obstacle to genuine moral renewal. He then observes that in the same way, a reduction of Christianity to a vague and watered down conception of "Gospel values" is equally deleterious to the full thriving of Christianity. And from this observation about Christianity he then transitions into a consideration of Europe and "the foundations on which Europe rests."

We can say that while Europe once was the Christian continent, it was also the birthplace of that new scientific rationality which has given us both enormous possibilities and enormous menaces. In the wake of this form of rationality, Europe has developed a culture that, in a manner hitherto unknown to mankind, excludes God from public awareness (pp. 29-30).

Benedict speaks of Europe's exclusion of God from the public square as if it were one of the most salient features of European culture today. It results, says the Pope, from a cultural ethos that reduces the notion of "rational" to the level of the functional and the experimentally demonstrable . "Since morality [in the current secular European worldview] belongs to a different sphere altogether," notes Benedict, "it disappears as a specific category; but since we do after all need some kind of morality, it has to be discovered anew in some other way." Here we have another prescient insight from the Holy Father: the human person is necessarily, and cross-culturally, a moral animal. By his very nature, the human person tends toward the identification of certain specific norms by which to conduct his living in society. In other words, the human person always seeks or establishes for himself some kind of "north" which is the indicator of "right" behavior. Whether what is 'right' is indicated by some notion of 'good' or 'utility' or 'moral calculus' or 'conformity with a majority'-human life is little intelligible absent some notion of 'right behavior' no matter how disparate those individual accounts of 'right behavior' may be. And when a long established moral order or worldview erodes (as appears to have happened, by and large, in Europe) then peoples and societies will tend necessarily to replace it with something else-or rediscover it.

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