john paul II " "
“Europe in the crisis of cultures” is the subject of the address that the dean of the College of Cardinals, Joseph Ratzinger, recently gave at the Benedictine Abbey of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco (Rome) on the occasion of the award of the “St. Benedict Prize” promoted by the Life and Family Foundation in Subiaco and presented to Cardinal Ratzinger himself. John Paul II’s appeal to the Christian roots of Europe was taken up and developed in the cardinal’s address. “…Europe that at one time, we may say, was the Christian continent, was also the starting point of the new scientific rationalism that gave us great opportunities and posed to us equally great threats. Christianity of course did not start out from Europe, and therefore cannot even be classified as a European religion, the religion of the European cultural sphere. But it is precisely in Europe that it received its historically most effective cultural and intellectual stamp, and thus remains interwoven in a quite special way with Europe. On the other hand, it is also true that this Europe, ever since the Renaissance, and in its most complete form ever since the Enlightenment, has developed this scientific rationalism, which not only led, in the great age of exploration, to the geographic unity of the world, and to the meeting of continents and cultures, but which now, far more profoundly, thanks to the technological culture made possible by science, leaves its mark on the whole world, indeed in a certain sense homogenises it. And in the wake of this form of rationalism, Europe has developed a culture that, in a way hitherto unknown to humanity, excludes God from public knowledge, either by entirely repudiating it, or by judging its existence as indemonstrable, uncertain, and therefore belonging to the field of subjective choices, something in any case irrelevant for public life. This purely utilitarian rationalism has led to a subversion of the moral conscience equally unprecedented for the cultures that had hitherto existed, since it maintains that what is rational is only what can be empirically proved. Since morality belongs to a wholly different sphere, it, as a category, disappears and has to be re-traced in another way, insofar as it has to be admitted that morality is in some way needed. In a world based on calculation, it is the calculation of the consequences that determines what ought to be considered moral or not. And thus the category of good disappears, as was clearly predicted by Kant. Nothing per se is good or bad: everything depends on the consequences that an action is likely to cause. Though Christianity has found its most effective form in Europe, it has to be admitted that a culture has been developed in Europe that represents the most radical contradiction not only of Christianity itself, but also of the religious and moral traditions of humanity as a whole. From this it can be grasped that Europe is experiencing a kind of “test of tensile stress”; from this we may also grasp the radical nature of the tensions to which our continent is being subjected and to which it must respond. But it is especially here that the responsibility we Europeans have to assume at this historic moment emerges: in the debate over the definition of Europe, over its new political form, what is at stake is not some nostalgic ‘rearguard’ battle of history, but a great responsibility for the humanity of our time…”.
