The political thought of Pope Benedict XVI

Philip McDonagh

Issue 378, vol.95, Summer 2006

We do pay lip-service to “freedom”, to “democracy” – but at the same time we allow our freedoms to be eroded by the social fabric (i.e., commercial media can shape the values of our children); and we cede to economic necessity, the democratic right to decide the size of families…From where then today are we to draw ideals strong enough to be a bulwark against such threats ?

Thinkers who in the West today champion the cause of “civilisation”, too often envisage this as the task of imposing - by force of arms if necessary – the West’s successful, and even superior, form of civilisation on lesser breeds outside the pale. These advocates in many ways resemble ancient Romans; whereas the Pope would wish to promote a truly global equality.

There has always been the question of whether “might” is right; and so the Pope’s probing of such issues takes us all the way back to the Greeks : “The idea arose that besides the established law, which can be unjust, there ought to be a law derived from nature, from the very essence of man”. Else we will be left forever struggling with questions like “Who will be ruler, who will be slave? Whose life will be taken, whose spared?” – left, in other words, with moral relativism.

Any advance above and beyond this towards an objective moral law can happen only when norms are based on truth and justice : Aristotle posited an inter-relationship between the objective basis for mature human conduct and an objective model of a properly-functioning society. And Christianity also takes its stand on a rational perception of truth : “Christianity is not based on mythical images and vague notions that are ultimately justified by their political usefulness” (warned the then Cardinal Ratzinger”); “rather, it relates to…the rational analysis of reality”.

The Pope would hold that today’s world will never be able to find answers to the problems facing it, unless it first answers the question : what does it mean to be a human being ? If we can discover common ground here, then we can proceed to questions like those posed from the field of human re-engineering (e.g., “Is it without question the correct decision, to voyage as far as possible in the direction which modern genetics has opened up for us ?”), from economics, from military strategy.

In all this exploration, an important bridgehead to secular thinking is the now accepted perspective in European civilisation that law should be above power; that certain things can never be legitimised by law – that Human Rights have an objective character that no majority vote can take away. The rational nature of such a public-policy discourse means that religious people can take part without any so-called “theocratic” intent (with, at the same time, all participants ipso facto recognising that human reasoning is not confined to the experimentally verifiable gleanings of narrow disciplines). The exploration would serve to revivify that wide measure of agreement on moral issues (and Christian background in society and education) which at least initially survived the era of European church-state separation.

Philip McDonagh is Irish Ambassador to the Holy See