So we continue on our discussion of Desecularization book...Chapter 2 is written by George Weigel, who is Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington D.C. - and his blog tells us he is pretty important!
Peter Berger, in the previous chapter, mentioned the oscillation under John Paul II (JPII) between adaptation or resistance to the forces of modernity. George Weigel begins his chapter taking us back through the history of Catholic attitudes to modernity. Wiegel also points out the vastness of the Catholic Church – with over a billion adherents (15% of the world’s population) – 4300 bishops, 404,500 priests (no wonder you get some distinctly dodgy ones out of that number), and almost a million women in religious orders. The Vatican has full diplomatic relations with 166 states and often plays an important, behind the scenes role, in major diplomatic initiatives (according to Weigel).
Weigel argues in this chapter that the Catholic Church acts as a carrier for ‘a distinctive set of proposals for the right ordering of societies and indeed of international life.’ These proposals focus on ‘the human person, human community, human history, and human destiny, all understood in their relationship to God.’ For this reason the Catholic Church comes across as a bit of a misnomer in the secularized world because of its insistence of reading the whole of reality against that relationship – God is central to any thinking about what it is to be human. (Hence Benedict XVI’s outburst against rights agendas – and if we all have rights who decides between us when our rights conflict?).
Weigel is a JPII fan (and wrote his biography so I understand): he talks about his papacy in exalted terms: ‘a pontificate of greater intellectual significance for the Church and its address to the world than any other since the Reformation, in my judgement.’ So he discusses JPII’s engagement with the wider European intellectual culture and Karol Wojtyla’s role in expounding public truths which shouldn’t be dismissed as the ramblings of a sectarian old man.
Weigel focuses on JPII’s 1995 speech to the UN on human rights as the best example of this exposition. Interestingly, it is the very process of adaptation which is being focused on here. JPII argued strongly, against ‘militant Islamists’ and ‘East Asian autocrats’, that rights were not an example of Western Imperialism but part of the international, pan-global progress towards modernity – ‘one of the great dynamics of human history’. This sounds like anything you would find in the golden age scholarship of Victorian England. JPII argued for a universal moral law written on the human heart (language reminiscent of Jeremiah 31) as ‘that kind of “grammar” which is needed’ for a century of persuasion rather than another century of violent coercion.
Weigel explores this further by extrapolating the implications of JPII’s assertion on rights. If rights are not universal, then nor is human nature. If human nature is not universal, then there can be no common discourse and coercion is the only possible way forward.
(Personally I think there are a few alternative steps in this rather crude philosophical framework. ‘If there are no universal human rights’ is a totalizing statement which begs lots of questions – what are rights, how do these relate to what it means to be human, are they not contextualized, social norms and as such will be different dependent on the host culture? As a middle-class heterosexual white man do I have different rights than an underprivileged black gay woman? Have I got rights to limit my rights in order to maximize the rights of those who have less options? Have I got obligations to do this which override my rights? You just can’t base the argument on the existence of rights in the first place – that is to cave in to modernity completely.)
But JPII goes further in expounding the Catholic insight that there needs to be a moral norm at the heart of society to allow it to function appropriately and not collapse into fascism or communism: ‘unless freedom is tethered to certain basic truths about human beings, freedom becomes its own undoing, as liberty becomes mere license and politics descends into Hobbes’s war of all against all.’ There’s some interesting discussion to be had there about the recent collapse within the humanist communities over the demise of Dawkins’ website community. What is the moral compass or drive behind the secular agenda?
Weigel’s chapter peters out in a series of recapitulations of this central proposition – that Catholicism under JPII offers a post-Constantinian approach to political life – not grasping political power or trying to confront power. But rather engaging with power to highlight the centrality of a universal moral law – a kind of ‘common good’ argument, I suppose. Weigel clearly regards this as a new thing. I’m not so sure. Isn’t it what those who have been in less prestigious places have been arguing for many a year?
What this chapter does not do is to explore secularization or argue about how the Catholic Church can seek to desecularize the world. It offers a view of JPII’s pontificate and a validation of a Catholic worldview. But it doesn’t address the questions of declining hegemony, of internal fraction and external criticism which the RC Church is facing. But that may be because under JPII the Catholic Church seemed to be a much more stable entity than under Benedict XVI? Or does it just prove that JPII’s policy of aggiornamento was misguided in the first place?
Pete
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