Catholic Transcript Online

The awesome brilliance and spectacular vision of Pope Benedict XVI are dramatically evident in an essay in the January issue of First Things. The piece is slated for publication this month in a volume entitled Without Roots. The subject is "Europe and Its Discontents."

Beginning with a theological overview of Europe as really a cultural and historical concept rather than simply a geographical one (whose location was forged during the Carolingian Empire, only to be modified by forces like the "shift of the Roman Empire to Byzantium," the French Revolution, Protestantism and Socialism) the Holy Father addresses the present and tomorrow with two questions: "Amid the major upheavals of our day, is there a European identity that has a future and to which we can commit whole-heartedly?"

One deciding element, he argues, is "the unconditionality" with which human dignity and human rights must be safeguarded as values that take precedence over any state jurisdiction. This means constant reference to the Creator, who alone can establish values that are grounded in the essence of humankind and are consequently inviolable. The true guarantee of freedom and of human greatness, Pope Benedict explains, is "the existence of values that cannot be modified by anyone." Threats to such values today include cloning, the storing of human fetuses for "research" or organ harvesting, and genetic manipulation.

Another element crucial to solid European identity is marriage and the family. Monogamous marriage is by nature a base structure for the relationship between men and women as well as the nucleus for the state. Yet this element, discovered within the Biblical faith, in which it was conceived and forged, provided Europe with "its special physiognomy" and "its special humanity" "because the form of fidelity and the sacrifice that it entails must always be regained through great efforts and suffering." Europe, the Holy Father stresses, would no longer be Europe were marriage and family to vanish or be radically altered – as is beginning to occur in various ways.

Finally, there is the element of religion. The future of Europe cannot be divorced from its religious foundations. One facet of this element is respect for that which is held sacred by various religious groups, especially respect for God. "When this respect is violated in a society," Benedict writes, "something essential is lost." He adds that within Europe today this principle is fortunately protected by law as regards the faith of Israel and of Islam, but not as regards faith in Jesus Christ. (Here the Pope senses "a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure.")

The Holy Father concludes with a plea to embrace anew our "heritage of the sacred." This certainly applies to all the Western world. In the view of other cultures, he warns, "there is something deeply alien about the absolute secularism" in the West. They know that a world without God lacks a future. Arnold Toynbee was right when he said that the fate of a society is always dependent on its creative minorities – faithful Christians reclaiming the best in their heritage in order to better serve all humankind.