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The French daily Le Monde of 2 May published some significant extracts of a debate between the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the Italian atheist philosopher Paolo Flores d’Arcais. (The contents of the debate were also reprinted in early May by the Italian bimonthly review MicroMega). That debate, which had been held in Rome on 21 September 2000, was only made available to the European public at large after the election of Benedict XVI. This fact is useful for better understanding the personality of the Pope and his very original, benevolent but also demanding way of entering into debate with a philosopher who does not share his faith and declares his support for a rationalistic and secular mode of thought. Far from being discouraged by the gap between their respective convictions, Joseph Ratzinger welcomed the different position adopted by the atheist philosopher, analysed it, and took its legitimate requests into due account, while at the same time clearly espousing the Christian position. This willingness to listen, this respect for his interlocutor, Cardinal Ratzinger has never ceased to express, thus prolonging a tradition that goes back to the dawn of Christianity and whose nature it is as well to understand. In fact, as Paul VI forcefully pointed out in his first encyclical, Ecclesiam suam, dialogue is not any old kind of dialectical procedure aimed at persuading the interlocutor. It is aimed, on the contrary, at ensuring that the exchange enrich and transform the person who participates in it, making him perceive some aspects of his thought hitherto unnoticed. Is it not worth mentioning here the way in which a great European contemporary, Hans Urs von Balthasar, as far back as 1952, had warned against the notion of a fortress-Church, turned in on herself and her own convictions, and thus incapable of communicating to others the reasons for her self-immurement? The Church has always embraced the risks of history, and in every period has welcomed the provocation of new currents of thought that obliged her to deepen her knowledge of herself, and the same goes for our period. Balthasar himself also observed that, with the development of human sciences, the Church needed to “recover the divine power of discernment of minds, which ought to suggest to the Christian what position it ought to adopt to the difficult questions that are being posed in a new way”. This is a clear reminder of the primacy of conscience in the definition reconfirmed by Vatican Council II. So, openness to the opinions of others does not mean betraying one’s own convictions. Balthasar was very far from welcoming the attempts to secularise the Church, which by extenuating or watering down the Christian message, in the name of a dialogue that was an end in itself, ended up by its complete neutralization. And this risk is still present in Europe today. With the passion for truth that even an atheist philosopher recognized in him, Cardinal Ratzinger said, and Benedict XVI will not fail to repeat, that in the Church theological divergences are not equivalent to philosophic disagreements.
