The Journal got it right. They agree with me! Pope Benedict – Great man, great mind
They reflect his theological focus on the interplay between reason and faith, or between Athens and Jerusalem in the Western philosophical tradition. Rather than foes, he saw each as a necessary check on the other. This was the message of his 2006 address at the University of Regensburg, which was widely misinterpreted as an attack on Islam.
The irony is that Pope Benedict’s most pointed criticisms were reserved for a West that was abandoning the transcendent moral truths its civilization was founded on. In his last sermon before becoming pope, he warned about “a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” Sound relevant today?
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Yet for all his respect for tradition, Pope Benedict was not pining for a return to medieval society. He was a champion of the Second Vatican Council who recognized the secularizing trends in the West long before he moved to Rome. The modern church, he said, might have to become smaller to remain faithful, and operate as a “creative minority” by offering a society a window to what life looks like when it is lived by Christian principle.
The pope was fascinated by America, introducing himself on a 2008 visit to the White House as a friend of “this vast pluralistic society.” Unlike French secularism, for example, America’s was rooted in the self-evident truths of its Declaration of Independence, not on indifference or hostility to the very idea of truth.
Above all, he believed in the necessity of honest dialogue, which requires religion to be open to reasoned debate. So it was with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, an atheist who admired Pope Benedict for his defense of European civilization. “I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger,” she told one of our writers before she died.
Even those with irreconcilable claims to truth can have a fruitful dialogue if they are willing to address differences honestly. When Rabbi Jacob Neusner wrote a book explaining why he, if he had been a first-century Jew, would not have followed Jesus, Pope Benedict famously answered him in his own book—the fruit of a long personal and intellectual friendship between the two men.
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Pope Benedict had a tough act to follow when, much against his will, he was chosen in 2005 to succeed his friend and collaborator Pope John Paul II. But Pope Benedict left his own mark in profound writings, which will be instructive and influential for people of faith or reason for centuries to come.
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