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“The Europe of Benedict in the crisis of cultures” is the title of the book written by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and presented in Rome on 21 June. Here is a passage from the address given by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, who opened the meeting. The speakers also included the President of the Senate of the Italian Republic, Marcello Pera, author of the introduction to the book. Joseph Ratzinger has reflected deeply on Europe, and not only in this book. He has tackled the crucial problems of European culture, in relation to Christianity which received its historically most effective cultural and intellectual stamp in Europe and therefore remains interlinked in a special way with Europe itself. But it is just this link that is now under discussion today and risks being severed, not for accidental reasons, but due to the logic of rationality that seems to dominate in Europe: a rationality that the author calls scientific and functional. This is the current and apparently consummated form of the modern Enlightenment: it regards as rationally valid only what is experimentally proved, what is capable of being calculated. In practice, however, this Enlightenment is substantially defined through the rights of liberty, with individual liberty as the fundamental value that is the measure of all the other liberties and with the consequent exclusion of any possible discrimination to the detriment of anyone. In the framework of this form of rationality God does not exist, or at least cannot be ascertained, and hence any reference to God must be excluded from public life. Similarly the moral conscience as a category valid in itself is downgraded: but given that a system of morals is indispensable for life, it is in some way recovered, by making reference not to what is intrinsically good or evil, but only to the calculation of the consequences of our conduct, whether useful or damaging. So the real opposition, the possible clash of cultures, is not between the great religions, which in the end have always succeeded in living together, but between this purely scientific and functional rationality and the great historical cultures. In this perspective the author also tackles the question of the rejection of the Christian roots of the European Union: such a rationality claims in fact to be universal, i.e. valid for everyone, and complete in itself, in other words self-sufficient. As such it excludes any possibility of Christianity being in turn a decisive factor in the construction of contemporary Europe. Joseph Ratzinger is glad to recognise the values of present-day culture, such as religious freedom, human rights or democracy, but, apart from the practical difficulties of realizing them everywhere, he underlines its intrinsic limitations: it is a positivistic and anti-metaphysical culture, based on a limitation of reason that is useful and necessary in the empirical sciences, but that cannot be universalised, nor is it able to claim self-sufficiency. For it severs the roots humanity has in its memory and in the final analysis diminishes man himself, reducing him to a product of nature, and as such a being that is not free and that is susceptible of being treated like any other animal: in this way we arrive at a total reversal of the point of departure of this culture, namely, a vindication of man and his liberty.
