Pope Benedict XVI in modern society

One of Pope Benedict’s greatest concerns is how the Church relates to an increasingly hostile secular world today. Fr ANTHONY EGAN SJ explains.

Pope Benedict’s understanding of Church and state is complex. Some of his public statements give the impression that he has a grand project — the revival of Christian faith in Europe and so wishes to turn back the clock and establish a renewed Christendom. But I think this is a misreading. Rather, he is seeking to infuse secular democracy with Christian values.

A useful way of looking at Pope Benedict’s understanding of Church and state can be found in a (very cordial) debate he had in 2004 with the great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. This was later published as a short co-authored book, The Dialectics of Secularization.

In the debate, Habermas (an agnostic) argued for a secular state based on the rule of law. Although religion was important to society, Habermas insisted, it could not be the basis for a modern, pluralistic state. Religious beliefs in a (post)modern society are too varied and sometimes contradictory.

However, a secular legal system can be the basis for such a state. In fact, Habermas argued, the legitimacy of a state is based on its legality. This is the common ground for human solidarity, one that crosses the solidarities one finds within religions. But faith and theology still have an important role insofar as theology can be translated into a non-sectarian philosophy.

Benedict’s response is interesting. He concedes the need for theological ideas to be turned into appropriately secular language. Well he might — after all, Catholic social thought has done this (to varying degrees) since 1891. He was also in agreement that religion could exhibit many nasty “pathologies” of fundamentalism and violent extremism. But, he added, so could secular philosophies.

For Benedict, the challenge to the secular democratic state was to ground itself, and its laws, in what it is to be authentically human, to be truly respectful of persons.

And here, I suspect, is the crux of the problem. The Church’s understanding of the truly human is not 100% the same as the secular view, even though it approximates it in many respects.

But still modern scientific understandings of the human person sometimes differ from the Church’s. A clear example is the view that the human foetus is not fully human and therefore cannot be seen to have the same rights as a human being. In the abortion debate, therefore, secular and Catholic thinkers will inevitably be at odds.

Secular perceptions of personal autonomy and the meaning of suffering also differ from that of the Church, particularly as regards the right to end one’s life. Pain and suffering may have meaning for the religious person; it may not have the same meaning for those who do not share the Church’s understanding of faith. Similarly, the claim that only God has the right to decide on choosing to end one’s life falls on deaf ears to the secular person.

Why, a non-believer would ask, should I be bound by a religious belief which I don’t accept, rooted in an understanding of the person that science would question?

We live in a society where not all share the same beliefs (and where, let’s face it, not all Christians or Catholics agree with Church teachings). In such a society, to legislate in accordance with Church teaching would violate religious freedom, including the freedom of persons not to believe. This would undermine the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of many — and it undermines the principle of religious freedom espoused in the Vatican II document Dignitatis Humanae from 1965.

The Church’s claims to know the truth on human matters, and its desire to have a major voice in public debate, has been further damaged by its mishandling of the clergy child-abuse scandal. Failure to work within the laws of the state has been seen by many as arrogance and a sign that the Church can’t be trusted.

Painful as this is to us, it reminds us of the need for the Church to act with integrity: an integrity that the secular world sees as lacking, an integrity that we will have to work hard if we are to regain public confidence in us as a moral voice worth listening to.

The age of the Church laying down the law for society is over. In his debate with Habermas, Benedict seems to concede this somewhat. He may not like this, but deep down he knows, I suspect, that it’s true. Christendom is gone, and countries like Iran and the Taliban era in Afghanistan have thoroughly discredited the notion of faith-dominated states.

The challenge for the pope and the Church is to find a way of expressing our values to a secular world. We need to persuade rather than demand, to both believers and non-believers. Secular states may enact laws considered by the Church to be permissive and against the true nature of humanity. Sometimes the Church may try to persuade governments to repeal these.

Where this is not realistic, with convincing and charitable persuasion that a different view of humanity is possible, people may well choose, freely and autonomously, not to make use of the liberties that the state allows.

• Fr Anthony Egan is associated with the Jesuit Institute in Johannesburg.