Relativism

 

Benedict’s pertinent insights
EDITORIAL
12:00AM JANUARY 3, 2023


Addressing his fellow cardinals after the death of Pope John Paul II in April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger warned that the “dictatorship of relativism” was too often regarded as “the only attitude that can cope with modern times”. Within the church, he said, it meant letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, while having “a clear faith based on the creed of the church is often labelled as fundamentalism”. He was elected as the 265th pope the following day, taking the name Benedict after the father of Western monasticism in the 4th and 5th centuries to show his wish to help revive Western tradition and civilisation.

A “peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological” was taking hold, he wrote in 2006 in Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, co-authored with Italian Senate president Marcello Pera. In recent years, he wrote, the more relativism becomes the generally accepted way of thinking, the more it tends toward intolerance. “Political correctness seeks to establish the domain of a single way of thinking and speaking,” he wrote. “I think it is vital that we oppose this imposition of a new pseudo-enlightenment, which threatens freedom of thought as well as freedom of religion.”

In Australia around the same time, many people, religious or not, were becoming disturbed about the emergence of the ideological tendencies noted by Benedict. Those ideologies have become driving factors behind cancel culture, gender fluidity and increasingly woke school curriculums. In secondary English, for example, classic novels were no longer being taught for their literary value but were presented to students as “texts” to be analysed through political, environmental and gender prisms, alongside other texts ranging from advertisements to cartoons. Concerned parents, when they inquired, were told it was “all relative”. It wasn’t and isn’t.

praiseworthy manner, the West does strive to be open in full to the comprehension of external values, but it no longer loves itself,” he said. “It sees in its own history what is disgraceful and destructive, while it no longer seems able to perceive what is great and pure. In order to survive, Europe needs a new, critical and humble acceptance of itself; but only if it really wishes to survive. The multiculturalism now being encouraged and fostered with such passion comes across at times as mostly an abandonment and denial of what is one’s own, a sort of flight from self.”

He sought to reassert Western cultural identity when he addressed parliament in his native Germany in 2011. “The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law,” he said. The three-way encounter had shaped the inner identity of Europe and shaped cultural memory. “To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness.” There and in an address at Westminster Hall in London he asserted the value of the voice of Christianity in the public square. The faith, he said, “gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions”. It is those criteria “that we are called to defend at this moment in our history”. His insights remain pertinent to political and social debates across the world, including in Australia.