Buttiglione on Catholics and Politics

Here's an excerpt from a recent speech by Rocco Buttiglione, given a few months ago at the "Congress on Catholics and Public Life" (and here is a news story about the event, from The Tablet).

Catholics have the right to hold positions in the European Union. Are
we able to conceive of a form of prohibition of exercising public
office by Catholics because of their Catholicism? Because of the fact
that they take the position which the Church has? Some say that the
Catholic position on sexuality is aberrant and I do not want this to
become grounds for discrimination at the EU or in regard to holding
public office. But a catholic who says that perhaps it is possible
that homosexuality would be a sin can be discriminated against. I
found myself in a position in which I clearly had to decide with
respect to whether I would keep my position, between my faith (or if
not my faith at least the doctrine of my faith) or to accept being
discirmated against. For my faith I was able to sacrifice a seat in
the EU, which is not such an important thing. Ultimately, this is what
happened.

I don’t know if God would give me the courage to offer my head for
my faith, like St. Thomas More, I hope I am never in a position to
find out, but to the point of a seat at the commission, I can. But
there is a problem, it is a problem concerning the nature of
democratic institutions, because behind this we have the underlying
problem of liberalism and what it means to be liberal/free, and what
it means to have a liberal constitution or a liberal democracy in
Europe today. We have two visions, one which I consider to be
effectively liberal and the other, which I consider to be an
antiliberal perversion of liberalism. In the first vision, the State
does not have an efficacious vision as such, the State does not think
about producing the values which are necessary for civil life. The
State knows that values need to be produced by others: churches and
the culture; values are produced in the sphere of culture; and thus,
the State has a positive attitude before the sphere of culture, it
recognizes the role of churches in society and accepts the role they
exercize. The other vision is a more continental European vision, it
is the vision of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau thinks that the State
should produce its values, that we need a civil religion and the
revealed religions, revealed in quotations marks, must be subject to
this state religion. This was the beginning of classical
totalitarianism, because Marxism, Fascism and National Socialism were
the civil religions of the Europe of yesterday. And today, what is
happening? What is happening is that there is a section on the left in
Europe with the tendency to affirm a new civil religion, a new
religion that affirms that it is not permitted to have strong ethical
convictions, and that democracy must base itself on relativism, and
that relativism means that there is no distinction between good and
bad. I think that this is wrong, I think that our democracy needs a
different foundation and that foundation is the Christian notion of
freedom, Christian and also liberal with respect to freedom, which
means that I have the right to think that you are wrong and at the
same time I am ready to give my life so that you may have the right to
be wrong, because if you have what is good not through your own
freedom, but imposed from without, this would not have moral value, it
would have moral disvalue.

Respect for the human person and his rights is the basis of an
authentic democracy. Cultural relativism is not an adequate foundation
for democracy. I would like to quote two very important authors who
hold this point of view. The first is a great expert on
totalitarianism, Benito Musolini. Benito Musilini wrote that fascism
is the polital expression of the most modern currents of contemporary
philosophy, that is to say, of relativism. Because if there is not an
objective truth that we must respect, then each individual will have
the right to utilize whatever power he has: physical power,
intellectual power, the power to manipulate through media
communications, in order to impose on others his vision of the
world. And this is not exactly what we consider to be democracy, this
is the beginning of totalitarianism. . . .

Rick