With America’s eyes:

Pope Benedict’s American journey – a media success, as emphasized by practically all media in the USA – has another aspect, by no means secondary, also for our old continent, bearing in mind that Joseph Ratzinger’s thought cannot be exhausted in one speech but is constructed (so to say) page after page, meeting after meeting. So the days spent by Pope Benedict in America can be read against the light of his previous teachings, his address in Subiaco, on the day before the death of John Paul II, his lecture in Regensburg, or the words he pronounced in Turkey. The key theme is always the profound link between faith and reason, between freedom and truth. So, ever since his first speech on American soil, his address to President Bush during the welcoming ceremony at the White House (on 16 April), Pope Benedict emphasized the fact that “from the dawn of the Republic, America’s quest for freedom has been guided by the conviction that the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the Creator. The framers of this nation’s founding documents drew upon this conviction, when they proclaimed the ‘self-evident truth’ that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights grounded in the laws of nature and of nature’s God”. Europe, according to Benedict XVI, was the Christian continent par excellence , but it developed a scientific rationality, and, today, just this rationality is giving rise “to a culture that, in a way hitherto unknown to humanity, excludes God from the public conscience, either by totally disavowing him, or by judging his existence non-demonstrable, uncertain, and therefore belonging to the sphere of subjective choices, something however that is irrelevant for public life”. In Europe, in substance, “a culture has been developed that forms the most radical contradiction ever, not only of Christianity, but of the religious and moral traditions of humanity. From this one can understand that Europe is experiencing a real tug of war ; from this one can also understand the radical nature of the tensions that out continent is having to confront”. The Pope’s message is clear: “overcoming any separation between faith and life, opposing the false gospels of freedom and happiness”, and “rejecting the false dichotomy between faith and political life, because, as affirmed by Vatican Council II, ‘no human activity, not even temporal things, can be removed from God’s dominion'”. So it is with America’s eyes that Benedict XVI speaks of Europe; he thus sees in American Catholics an important dynamic for European Catholics, to arouse them, so to say, from their torpor. Of course American religiosity also consists of a phenomenon that we could call religious fluidity, i.e. the capacity to regenerate oneself religiously that one survey has put at 44 percent; that’s the percentage of American citizens over the age of 18 who have transferred from one religion to another or have abandoned disbelief for a faith. But the Pope of the old continent likes the model of an America whose democracy was born from a positive concept of secularism “because this new people was composed of communities and individuals who had fled from state churches and wanted to have a non-confessional, secular state that would open possibilities for all confessions, for all forms of religious practice”. The state, explained the Pope, “had to be non-confessional precisely out of love for religion in its authenticity, which can only be experienced in freedom”. This is a fundamental and positive model, “worthy of being kept in mind also in Europe”. And, therefore, it is just in this healthy secularism that gave rise to American democracy that Pope Benedict inserts his way of conceiving the relation between faith and politics.