26-October-2004 -- Catholic World News Brief
Rome, Oct. 26 (CWNews.com) - The European
community can recognize its Christian heritage without offending the Islamic
world, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger told an Italian group on October 25.
The prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith spoke at an
evening meeting of the Center for Political Orientation, an influential
discussion club in Rome, about the effort to include an explicit mention of
Christianity in the constitution of the European Union.
Asking whether European leaders had omitted a mention of Christianity in
order to avoid offending Muslims, Cardinal Ratzinger said that logic was
unpersuasive. On the contrary, he said, Muslims would naturally have expected
Europe to affirm its religious patrimony, and the absence of any mention of
religious faith tends to reinforce Islamic perceptions of Europe as a decadent
society. "What offends Islam is the lack of reference to God, the arrogance
of reason, which provokes fundamentalism," he said.
"Europe was founded not on a geography, but on a common faith," the
cardinal said. "We have to redefine what Europe is, and we cannot stop at
positivism." Speaking to a crowd of politicians, diplomats, and other
opinion leaders-- just four days before the scheduled signing of the new
European constitution-- he argued that European society is defined by two
criteria: the reliance on reason and the Christian faith.
While he acknowledged the development of secularism in the political life of
European nations, the cardinal observed that secularism is "a partial
ideology, because it cannot respond to the moral challenge" of contemporary
life. To illustrate his argument he gave the example of current debates over
bioethics, observing that the purely secular approach offers no way to resolve
disputes about the meaning and dignity of human life.
The German prelate observed that "man's power has grown in an
unimaginable way." Modern biological research, which has reached the point
of creating new human life, "could become a weapon more destructive than
all the traditional means of annihilation," he said. And a purely secular
society cannot find a way to avoid the attendant problems, he argued.
Cardinal Ratzinger went on to observe that Christianity is not simply a
European system of belief. "Europe is, certainly a fundamental source for
the development of Christianity," he said; but now Europe is
"marginalizing" the faith. Cardinal Ratzinger had caused a stir in the
European media in June, when he voiced his opinion that Turkey should not be
admitted into the European Union because it is an Islamic society. But his June
statement had sounded the same note that he repeated to his October audience in
Rome; in both cases he emphasized that a society without any religious
foundation is prey to fundamentalist zealots. "Only a reasoned religious
sense can moderate radical movements, and allow us to find an equilibrium in the
dialogue among cultures," he said.