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Pope Benedict Xvi and the Church's Teaching on Faith

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Pope Benedict Xvi and the Church's Teaching on Faith POPE BENEDICT XVI AND THE CHURCH’S TEACHING ON FAITH AND REASON Fr Paul Kelly My remit is to talk about faith and reason, which is a favourite theme of Pope Benedict and which was very much there in his recent visit. I shall quote from the Pope’s address in Westminster Hall and try to link this with the theme of faith and reason in Catholic tradition, refrerring also to Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on faith and reason (Fides et Ratio) and the teaching of the First Vatican Council in 1870 on faith and reason. In recent months there has been a lot of publicity about MPs expenses. The upshot was that, whereas a number of MPs did not actually break the law, they nevertheless returned money they had claimed. There was a general feeling that what was not against the law was still wrong. There has been a similar situation with the banks. While it may not have been against the law for banks to behave stupidly and selfishly, what they did was seen to be wrong. This shows that the law of the land is not enough to regulate social behaviour. We need some kind of objective moral norms or rules to which all can adhere. As Pope Benedict himself said in Westminster Hall concerning the banking crisis: “There is widespread agreement that the lack of a solid ethcal foundation for economic activity has contributed to the grace difficulties now being experienced by millions of people throughout the world.” Whereas laws are based on a social consensus, ethical norms need a firmer basis because the social consensus changes. (Ultimately of course laws must take account of ethical norms.) Religion is needed, not to supply the moral norms, but to help in the process. That really is Pope Benedict’s point and is an aspect of the Church’s teaching on faith and reason. An example of this happening was the abolition of the slave trade by the British Parliament in 1807, which was preceded by a discussion that went on in Parliament for over twenty years of the moral principles involved and which had the effect of raising the level of moral consciousness of the issue. Some people, like William Wilberforce, were motivated by religious faith. Others like William Pitt or Henry Dundas were not strongly religious and were probably motivated more 1 by personal connections. Thus Pitt was a friend of Wilberforce and Henry Dundas had nailed his colours to Pitt’s mast and went drinking with him. When Pope Benedict says that society needs religion to establish its moral foundations, he does not mean that somehow the whole message of the Christian Gospel has to be taken on board by non-Catholics and secularists or that it must prevail in civil society. It has always been the teaching of the Church that questions of right and wrong are not necessarily based on Scripture and Revelation, but simply on the faculty of reason and that objective moral norms are accessible to reason. Pope Benedict puts it this way: “The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation.” This means that people of different beliefs can sit down and reason together – that’s all the Pope is asking for – he simply suggests that religion has something to say about morality and society which can be valuable for everybody. Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Fides et Ratio, lays out for modern thinkers the Church’s view on the relationship between faith and reason and is itself a reaching out to the secular world. Pope Benedict has also recenly appointed Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella to head a department in the Church whose main business is to establish a dialogue with modern secularism. I might add the Pope Benedict and his predecessor have been accumstomed to dialogue with non-believers. John Paul was a “card-carrying” philosopher, much influenced by the ideas of the Jewish philosopher, Edmund Husserl. Pope Benedict has co-authored a book with Jurgen Habermas, a left-leaning and non- believing philosopher and sociologist. The Church has already profoundly influenced the development of civil society in all kinds of ways. I will choose just one little known example that is very apt in view of the setting in Westminster Hall. The Order of Preachers (Dominicans) was founded by St Dominic in the early 13th century. Subsequently, the order developed as an extremely effective international organisation with a system of chapters and general chapters and so forth. That organsational development influenced the subsequent development of representative institutions in Western Europe. The origins of our democracy lie somewhere in there. At the same time, reason can influence faith – as the Pope says this is a two- way thing. Reason can guard against religious fundamentalism. Pope Benedict says: “Distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion.” Events in the secular world can also have an influence on the Church. One good example of that must be modern discoveries and senstivity about the issue of child abuse. In that instance the Church has needed civil secular society to help clean up its act. Pope Benedict acknowledged as much on his recent visit to Portugal. At the same time, Pope Benedict also suggested that the Church, having learnt many 2 lessons in this regard, is in a position to help the state in the matter of child protection. Ethical norms have not always been fashionable outside of religious circles. What we see as atheistical secularism today in the West (which I would say is an aberration from true secularism) is a combination of atheism or agnosticism and the utilitarian philosphy of the nineteenth century - “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” – of which the main exponents were Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In the last century, Richard Mervyn Hare (1919-2003), Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, argued that norms really are relative – it depends on what you want. Hare was influenced by the logical postivism of A.J. Ayer, another Oxford philospher, who would argue that the only objective truths are facts; and values (on which moral norms are based) are merely relative. Where Pope Benedict refers to the “dictatorship of relativism”, he means a situation in which people do not recognise any objective moral norms other than “if you are comfortable with it, do it” and where further discussion is thereby ruled out. This indeed is the main problem with relativism – it limits the discussion – it limits the use of reason. As such it is also a form of laziness. This also affects Catholics. I wonder how many people have even read Pope John Paul’s encyclical on faith and reason or have even heard of this aspect of the Church’s teaching. And relativism means also that there is no such thing as objective truth. One of the aims of Pope John Paul’s encyclical, Fides et Ratio, is to affirm the existence of objective truth accessible to reason alone. As Pope Benedict points out, ultimately relativism will lead to the disintegration of society because there is no common basis for anything. This will lead to dictatorship of some kind. I think that the 17th century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who was almost certainly an atheist and possibly a relativist, reached that conclusion when he argued that the only hope for civil society was the construction of monstrous dictatorial power which would be strong enough to control and protect everybody and which he called the Great Leviathan. Pope Benedict commented on 20th century totalitarian ideologies as things which happen when we ignore the role of reason. He says: “This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and thre world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue for the good of our civilization.” Needless to say, in Catholic social teaching, there has always been an insistence on objective moral norms; but this insistence is not only in Catholic teaching or the teaching of other religions. For example, Philippa Foot (1920- 2010), another Oxford philosopher argued against moral relativism and for the objectivity of moral norms. Now Philippa Foot was not a religious believer but had, for example, very pertinent things to say about the wrongness of abortion. Clearly there can and must be a dialogue between religion and secularism where the common ground is reason. We do not agree with many of the religious 3 beliefs of Bhuddists or Hndus or Muslims or the non-religious beliefs of humanists; but we can all reason together. One area where this needs to happen is abortion. In big moral issues, people occupy entrenched positions on both sides. What needs to happen is some kind of discussion based purely on reason and logic, not on religious or indeed athiestical beliefs.And where there are philosphers like Philippa Foot around, we could have that dialogue. Sadly, in the case of abortion, there seems to have been little dialogue on the basis of reason alone – or maybe religious believers have been increasingly excluded from the debate. One cannot fail to notice that both politicans and political commentators are more interested in sound bites rather than the investigation of substantial ideas. As a church we should not fall into the same trap but persist in reasoned argument. The intellectual level of moral debate is not high.
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