Pope to European Unbelievers: Live as Though God Exists

c. 2005 Religion News Service ROME _ In his first book to be published since he became leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI challenges non-believing Europeans of the 21st century to live as though God does exist. “Even he who does not succeed in finding the way to the acceptance of God […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

ROME _ In his first book to be published since he became leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI challenges non-believing Europeans of the 21st century to live as though God does exist.

“Even he who does not succeed in finding the way to the acceptance of God must try, however, to live and to address his life `veluti si Deus daretur,’ as if God were,” Benedict writes.


The book, titled “The Europe of Benedict in the Crisis of Cultures,” is a collection of three talks by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, before he was elected pope on April 19.

Laying out his views on the clash between religion and secularism in Europe, the new pontiff warns that carried to their logical extremes, the freedoms embodied in European secularism threaten church teaching on abortion, homosexuality and women’s ordination.

The Italian edition will appear on Tuesday (June 28), published by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Editions in English and other languages are planned in coming months.

Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope’s vicar of Rome and president of the Italian bishops conference, and Italian Senate President Marcello Pera, a self-proclaimed non-believer and admirer of Pope Benedict, spoke Tuesday (June 21) at a book launch party attended by the top ranks of church and state in Italy.

Pera, who wrote the introduction to the book, said he accepted the pope’s challenge to live as though God exists. “I am not a believer, but I recognize myself in the historic, civil, cultural and religious tradition of the Western Christian,” he said.

The Benedict of the book’s title is not the current pope but rather the 6th century saint who is the pope’s namesake and founder of the Benedictine order. Benedict was the author of the Rule which became a cornerstone of Western monasticism and helped to safeguard European culture in the Middle Ages.

The pope’s challenge to non-believers is contained in a key section of the 141-page book, in which he writes of the continuing opposition between Christianity and the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the 18th century philosophical movement that rejected traditional social, religious and political ideas.


The idea still exists in Europe, the pope says, “that only the radical culture of the Enlightenment, which has reached its full development in our time, can be constituent for the European identity.”

Benedict says this way of thinking allows different religious cultures to co-exist “on condition that and in the measure in which they respect the criteria of the Enlightenment culture and subordinate themselves to it.”

But, he says, the emphasis on freedom, which is basic to the Enlightenment, “inevitably carries contradictions” when it is badly defined or not defined at all. “A confused ideology of freedom leads to a dogmatism that shows itself to be ever more hostile to freedom,” the pope warns.

Benedict cites as an example “the case of the contrast between women’s freedom and the right to life of the unborn child.” He calls abortion “a little homicide” committed by adults.

“The concept of discrimination becomes ever wider and thus the prohibition against discrimination can transform itself more and more into a limitation of freedom of opinion and of religious freedom,” he says.

“Quite soon it will not be possible to affirm that homosexuality, as the Catholic Church teaches, constitutes an objective disorder in the structuring of human existence,” he writes. “And the fact that the church is convinced of not having the right to give priestly ordination to women will be considered by some from now on as irreconcilable with the spirit of the European Constitution.”


KRE/RB END POLK

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos of Benedict XVI.

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