George Weigel in today's Wall Street Journal:
"St. Benedict was born in 480, in a small Umbrian village. In 529, as a monastic town was being built for Benedict and his monks on the brow of Monte Cassino, Plato's Academy closed in Athens. The timing nicely illustrated a conviction of the late John Paul II: "In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences." As a great embodiment of classical culture shut its doors, the "academy of Christianity," as the new pope once called it, was being established.
And a good thing, too. The Roman empire was in rapid decline, beset by wars, economic dislocation, and social disorder. The civilizational achievement represented by Plato's Academy could have been lost; classical culture might have gone the way of the Mayans. That it didn't had a lot to do with Benedict. His monks not only preserved crucial elements of the civilization of Athens and Rome during the Dark Ages; they transformed that civilization by infusing a biblical understanding of the human -- person, community, origins and destiny -- into the classical culture they preserved for future generations in their scriptoria and libraries.
The result of that fusion of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome was what we know as "Europe," or, more broadly, "the West." It was a colossal, indeed world-historical achievement. And the achievement was entirely consistent with what Pope Benedict XVI remembered in a recent interview as "a Benedictine motto: Succisa virescit -- pruned, it grows again." Thanks to St. Benedict and Western monasticism, the demise of classical civilization was the occasion for a new beginning -- and, eventually, a nobler civilizational accomplishment.
***
He once called himself a "donkey," a "draft animal" who had been called to a work not of his choosing. Yet when Joseph Ratzinger stepped out onto the loggia of St. Peter's to begin a work he never sought, I couldn't help think of the conclusion of Alasdair MacIntyre's penetrating study of the moral confusions of the West, "After Virtue." In a time when willfulness and relativism had led to a frigid and joyless cultural climate, MacIntyre wrote, the world was not waiting for Godot, "but for another -- doubtless very different -- St. Benedict." The world now has a new Benedict. We can be sure that he will challenge us all to the noble human adventure that has no better name than sanctity."
For the full essay, click here.
Here is a link to Amy's piece, Church in Tension, which will later appear in the print edition of Commonweal: Click here.
Our colleague Steve Bainbridge has posted an essay at TechCentralStation, focusing on (among other things) the "missionary work" before the new Pope.
Rick
Notre Dame philosopher John O'Callaghan has posted some thoughts about Nietzsche and the coverage of Pope Benedict's election, and also about truth, freedom, abortion, and Josef Pieper. John's post is detailed and eloquent; I cannot do it justice here. I thought this passage of Cardinal Ratzinger's, which John quotes, was particularly challenging:
“Ye shall be as gods." This promise is quite clearly behind modernity's radical demand for freedom. . . . [T]he implicit goal of all of modernity's struggles for freedom is to be at last like a god who depends on nothing and no one, and whose own freedom is not restricted by that of another. Once we glimpse this hidden theological core of the radical will to freedom, we can also discern the fundamental error which still spreads its influence even where such radical conclusions are not directly willed or are even rejected. To be totally free, without the competing freedom of others, without a "from" and a "for"-this desire presupposes not an image of God, but an idol. The primal error of such a radicalized will to freedom lies in the idea of a divinity conceived as a pure egoism. The god thought of in this way is not a God, but an idol. Indeed, it is the image of what the Christian tradition would call the devil-the anti-God-because it harbors exactly the radical antithesis to the real God. The real God is by his very nature entirely being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being-with (Holy Spirit). Man, for his part, is God's image precisely insofar as the "from," "with," and "for" constitute the fundamental anthropological pattern. Whenever there is an attempt to free ourselves from this pattern, we are not on our way to divinity, but to dehumanization, to the destruction of being itself through the destruction of the truth. The Jacobin variant of the idea of liberation (let us call the radicalisms of modernity by this name) is a rebellion against man's very being, a rebellion against truth, which consequently leads man-as Sartre penetratingly saw-into a self-contradictory existence which we call hell.
Rick
Here is a story, from the BBC, about the latest ruling in the Charlotte Wyatt case:
A severely brain-damaged baby should be allowed to die if she stops breathing, a High Court judge has ruled.
The parents of 18-month-old Charlotte Wyatt have lost their legal battle to overturn a court order allowing doctors not to resuscitate her. . . .
Passing the ruling [Judge] Hedley said: "I am quite clear that it would not be in Charlotte's best interests to die in the course of futile aggressive treatment."
He said that if she should stop breathing all treatment, except intubation and ventilation, would be in Charlotte's best interests, "but nothing further".
I'm not an expert in these matters, but it seems to me that this case might be different, in morally significant ways, from the Schiavo case. On the one hand, I'm troubled by the apparent equation, in this news account, between "intubation" (which I assume refers to ANH?) and "ventilation"; on the other hand, it strikes me that to refrain from "aggressive futile treatment" is more like "letting die" than was the ending of nutrition and hydration in Schiavo. Again, I'm not an expert here, so I'd welcome reactions or corrections.
Rick
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Thanks for Rick for the link to Lisa Schiltz's essay, "Why Larry Summers Should Have Had the Pope Review his Draft: THe Implications of John Paul II's Teaching for Gender Balance at Caholic Universities." The essay is much broader than the title suggests - addressing the role of women both within the family and in the workplace (and in the public sphere generally) and I greatly enjoyed reading it.
While there is much that has come out of Rome in recent years that has been upsetting to women, there is, particularly in Mulieris Dignitatem, a recognition of feminine "genius" that has been given too little attention. Professor Schiltz does a nice job exploring Pope John Paul II's statements about women and of the societal obligation to make it possible for women to respond to their callings both within the family and within the public sphere.
She does acknolwedge that "If there were no social evils left to be addressed in this world, clearly, John Paul's preference would be that every mother would choose to dedicate herself full time to child-raising, because no call to make the world a better place in any other way would ever be as compelling. But we're not there yet; John Paul recognized that, and I think that is why he consistently called upon society to make it more feasible for women who are mothers to fully respond to all of the aspects of theri 'complicated calling,' both with repsect to their families, and in the public sphere."
OME,
April 21 - Pope Benedict XVI is known to be conservative on social
issues, and no one expects his Roman Catholic Church to soften its
opposition to birth control. Still, a rising number of Catholics, in
the Vatican and outside, are urging the new pope to revisit what was
probably his predecessor's most divisive position - his opposition to
condom use in the fight against AIDS.
