Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger - A Turning Point for Europe?: The Church in the Modern World: Assessment and Forecast

A Turning Point for Europe?

JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER

The Church in the Modern World:
Assessment and Forecast

Second Edition

Translated by
Brian McNeil, C.R.V

Foreword by James V. Schall, S.J.

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Original German edition:

Wendezeit fr Europa?
Diagnosen und Prognosen zur Lage von Kirche und Welt
1991 by Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln

Cover image:
iStockphoto / S. Greg Panosian

Cover design by: Roxanne Mei Lum

Text 1994 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
Foreword 2010 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN-978-1-58617-349-4
Library of Congress Control Number 2008941436
Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

PART ONE

Foundations and Fundamental Questions in
Relation to the Church and the Modern World

I. Breaking Down and Starting Out
Afresh: Faiths Answer to the Crisis of Values

1. The Moral Problems of Our Age
An Attempt at a Diagnosis

II.

III.

PART TWO

Assessment and Forecast

I.

II. EuropeHopes and Dangers
Preliminary Reflections:
Phenomenology of Todays Europe

3. Consequences for the Future Path
Conclusion: SpeyerA Mirror of
European History

III.

PREFACE

When one looks back at the history of our century, it is very easy to discern three great turning points that have affected initially and immediately the structure of life in Europe, but all three have also affected and continue to affect the history of the world as a whole. First, we must mention the transformation of the external and internal map of Europe that resulted from the First World War. It brought with it the collapse of the monarchies in central Europe, the end of Czarist Russia and the restructuring of the whole of Europe in keeping with the nationalist principlewhich, of course, on closer inspection proved externally impracticable and inherently insufficient as the foundation of a new order of peace. The Second World War was followed by the partition of Europe and of the world into two mutually opposed power blocs: the Marxist and the liberal capitalist. Now, at the end of the century, we have experienced the internal disintegration of Marxist ideology together with the structure of power it had created. The special characteristic of this third turning point is that it took place without a war and almost without any bloodshed, simply through the internal collapse of a system and its intellectual foundations, that is, through the powers of the spirit and not through military or political force. Herein lie both the hope and the special responsibility of this event, and we are still very far from meeting the challenge it poses.

Liberalism and Marxism were in agreement in refusing religion both the right and the capacity to shape public affairs and the common future of mankind. In the maturation process of the second half of [the twentieth] century, religion has been discovered anew as an ineradicable force both of individual and of social living. It has become clear that one cannot plan and shape the future of mankind while prescinding from religion. This process gives comfort to faith, but faith will not fail to recognize at the same time the dangers inherent in it, for the temptation is obvious on all sides to take in religion as an instrument to serve political ideas. In this situation it is an absolute obligation for the theologian and for the pastor of the Church to enter the dispute about the correct understanding of the present time and about the path into the future, in order both to clarify faiths own proper sphere and at the same time to fulfill his own share of responsibility at this hour. I have been invited with increasing frequency in recent years to speak on themes concerning the relationship of the Church and the world; most of these were formulated by those who issued the invitation, thus giving expression to questions perceived to be especially urgent at each particular place. I have collected in this little book the more important studies that arose in this manner. After the wide response they have found in audiences in a great variety of places, I venture to hope that they have something to say both to believers and to doubters and that they can help in meeting the challenges of the present hour in our history.

JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER
Rome, Easter 1991

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote Turning Point for Europe? in 1991 after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, almost two decades before the crisis of the world financial markets. Europe seemed to be prospering. It sought unification. In comparison to the United States, China, India, and Russia, let alone Latin America, however, it seemed politically and culturally passive and introspective, interested mostly in itself. It had withdrawn from the world and was content to enjoy its welfare and prosperity. If there were threats elsewhere in the world, they were not its concern. Europe manifested a classical Epicurean withdrawal-from-politics symptom so that the larger issues of world meaning would not bother its garden of peace.

True, there was the surprising rise of Islam, not seen since Lepanto, that seemed to press on Europes doorstep. It even took over many of its inner cities. But this presence was considered merely a matter of tolerance, not a political or even less a religious danger. Here Ratzinger has already written, almost prophetically: The Islam that is sure of itself has to a large extent a greater fascination for the Third World than a Christianity that is in a state of inner decay (170). Such blunt words are reminiscent of Nietzsche, a century earlier, who was scandalized by the tepid faith of the Christians in Europe. It is not surprising that Ratzinger often cites Nietzsche.

Ratzinger had long observed this movement toward European unification. Unlike much of Catholic critical thinking in the post Vatican II era, he was not principally a globalist. With his intellectual range, he was quite aware that the origins of most world problems did have, in one way or another, European roots. Scratch a world problem and more often than not a European thinker will be involved. He did not underestimate the importance of scholarship and insight.

John Paul II was more immediately concerned with Marxism and its aftermath. Indeed, no one can seriously imagine the sudden demise of Communism without the Polish pope. Europe could not think clearly about itself, its own mission, so long as the Soviet or Russian threat was at its doorstep. Once this military concern disappeared, if it did disappear, a peaceful Europe could, presumably, make contact with its own Christian and classical origins which had been in abeyance during the totalitarian era.

World War II seemed, at first sight, to indicate the need for a return to the Christian and philosophical roots rejected by the totalitarian regimes. Catholic thinkers like Jacques Maritain initially expected this return. The revival of Thomism that took place prior to World War II had connected European thought with its medieval Christian past. It seemed that this thought would be taken up again and continued when, after the War with its aberrations, empirical reasons to do so seemed evident. But this return never materialized. Vatican II, at first sight, did everything it could to accommodate itself to modernity, with the result that the Church was often presented as simply an ecclesial version of modernity.

What happened, however, was not a turn back to faith and the historic culture that founded it, but a more subtle and thorough secularization that proposed a religion and politics without either God or any reason other than a technological rationalism that had no foundation other than itself. Both John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI, recognized that the root problem was European before it was global, or perhaps philosophically it was a world problem because it was first an unresolved European problem.