The Radical in Rome

By Dr. Anthony Esolen
All through the week since the elevation to the pa­pacy of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, I have listened with a mixture of bemusement and exasperation to the chatter of western journalists. They call Pope Benedict a "hard-liner" - exactly what we who are committed to the word of Jesus Christ are commanded to be, not diverging in the least from His commandments, lest they be called least in the king­dom of Heaven.
Now of course I know quite well that being a "hard-liner" for a western journalist means oppos­ing the pansexualism that western journalists have thoughtlessly accepted, along with many other as­sumptions of the over-schooled urban elite. It means that Benedict XVI will not budge on those matters dear to such an urbanite's heart, or to some region rather to the south thereof. The reader can supply the list: Benedict will not "liberalize" Church teachings regarding divorce, abortion, sodomy, contraception, fornication, adultery, and women priests. In other words, in his faithful adherence both to the natural law and to what he reads as the express commands of Christ and His apostle Paul, Benedict is called an op­ponent of freedom. It never occurs to them to consid­er that it is they, in their championing of the sexually unmoored individual, who are opponents of freedom, not only moral freedom but political freedom too.
How so? I am reading a book by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism, and Politics. It is a collection of essays and letters that treat, from differ­ent perspectives, the political and ecclesiological ques­tions of our day. To read it (and that means to walk with heavy boots through a muddy translation of the original German and Latin) is to engage a mind mar-velously subtle and penetrating, able on every page to flash out insights, to make connections that are not at all obvious, but that welcome pondering. Let me introduce you to one line of reasoning that the reader discovers throughout the essays; it is a line of reason­ing that should endear Benedict to the true patriots at Patrick Henry College.
The foundation of modern democracy, he says, can
historically be traced back to the Enlightenment, and, further, to the flourishing of ancient Athens; but its deep moral underpinnings reside in Christianity. For the Christian vision not only provides the State with a moral compass it cannot provide of itself- a ground for trusting that reasoning embraces moral reasoning, that moral reasoning can lead us to the good and the true; it provides the State with a vision of the State's perfection, not in this world, but in the next, according to the ordaining wisdom of God. At the same time, the true Christian understands that salvation is not to be gained here in this life; specifically, the State will not provide our salvation. That understanding relieves the State of a devastating burden. Paradoxically, says Benedict, it allows the State to be a legitimate State. The Christian vision, and it alone, allows us to work within the sphere of what is necessarily imperfect, ac­cepting it, even cherishing it.
Jesus Himself instructs us in this separation: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, but render unto God what is God's." His saying ought not to be con­strued as recommending that the faithful retreat from the world. What Jesus says uproots both the Roman adulation of the State and the Jewish trust in a kind of theopolitical salvation: "This equation of the State's claim on man with the sacral claim of the univer­sal divine will itself was cut in two." In this regard, Benedict duly notes that Paul and Peter recommend for Christians a sane and holy modus vivendi: they are to obey authorities, who have their legitimate sphere of activity, given them by God Himself; yet they are never to capitulate to the idolatry that the Romans exacted to prop up their State. The prophet Jeremiah, too, inveighed against a confusion of faith and politics that in his time would have reduced faith and de­stroyed any hope for rational political action:

Jeremiah sees himself faced with theopolitical behavior that he wishes to replace with national politics for reasons of theologi­cal responsibility. The theopolitics of his opponents consists of their being convinced of an absolute guarantee on the part of God for the Temple, for Jerusalem, for the continued existence of the house of David, and they treat this guarantee as a political and military factor even though from the point of view of rational politics there is nothing to indicate this kind of security. Jeremiah in contrast demands rational politics which in conduct with regard to Babylon would be guided by the actual conditions of power and the possibilities that flow from these; it is precisely this that he sees as an expression of faith in God and of the responsibility to be shown before God.

The crucial mistake is to look to the State for what only God will bring, and only in His good time; or, with liberation theologians (whose errors Benedict ex­poses carefully and relentlessly), to see the State as the embodiment of the promised Kingdom of God. Chris­tianity is our guard. When we abandon it - or the foreshadowings of it that God has written upon the hu­man heart, the law that used to be called "conscience"
— then the State resumes its old and tyrannical place as object of worship. Benedict therefore reads the twen­tieth century as a resurgency of statist idolatry, nor does it particularly matter, says he, whether the idola­try calls itself Fascism, or Nazism, or, we might add, the modern welfare democracy, a symbiosis of sexual irresponsibility and State aggrandizement: "Anyone who looks more closely and does not let himself be blinded by phrases will discover sufficient similari­ties between the disaster of that time [that is, Hitlerian Germany] and the forces that today proclaim as salva­tion revolution in itself, the denial of order in itself." What such idolatry rests upon is a theology of works
- political works, but always human works; and such a theology, says Benedict, is expressly rejected by the New Testament, by the gospel of grace.
The Radical in Rome, then, places strict limits upon the authority of the State, among other reasons to safeguard its very existence, lest it destroy itself in growing into a tyranny. In a similar fashion he renounces the idea of the Church as a kind of State, amenable to human manipulation. Benedict's ecclesi-ology is based on the reality of martyrdom: the Church is never to be considered as an institution, much less a human institution, but as a Body whose witness of community is always a witness of those particular per­sons into whose keeping the gospel was entrusted, and who died for the truth they received. We do not make the Church, he insists. We make the State, but we are given the Church, as we are given the gospel. Those, then, who argue that the Church could change its teachings regarding, let us say, homosexual relations, are arguing that the Church is a human institution, like a State, with a constitution that may be amended
at our pleasure. Indeed, they conceive of the Church not as a State whose foundation is the natural law, but as a modern State, the provider of this-worldly salva­tion for all; a tyranny whose other names include The Cultural Revolution and The Third Reich.
Here my Protestant brothers and sisters may be wondering what Benedict believes about their com­munions, and how they fit in his vision of the Church. Of course since Benedict is Roman Catholic he ac­cepts the teaching that the mystical Body of Christ, the Body that includes all believers (even some who did not quite know that they were believers, but whom Christ has mysteriously called anyway, for He has sheep whereof His shepherds themselves do not know), is embodied in a particular way by means of apostolic succession. But he rejects, vehemently, any attempts by misguided ecumenists on all sides to alter or squeeze what they are given as truth, to come up with some "ecumenical" agreement that will be mod­erately acceptable and moderately unacceptable to everyone, and then to coerce the believers of the com­munions involved to accept the compromise. This too he sees as tyranny - and recommends that Protestants reject it!
Instead, just as in the realm of politics he advises us to wait for our salvation from the Providence of God, so in the realm of ecumenism Benedict repeats the wisdom of the reformer Melanchthon: that we will enjoy unity again ubi et quando visum est Deo, where and when it shall please God. In the meantime, the real work of ecumenism is done not by theology, but by love and gratitude. First, says he, we should appreciate how great is what we share: we read the Bible as God's holy word; we confess three Persons in one God, and Jesus Christ as true God and true Man; we practice baptism; we believe in the forgiveness of sins; we share "the fundamental form of Christian prayer and the essential ethical instruction of the Ten Commandments read in the light of the New Testa­ment." We could go on for a long time listing what we have in common; but Benedict goes so far as to urge us to appreciate where we differ. For once the "poison of hostility" has been drawn out, we can thank God for those differences, not that the Truth can ever be many, but that our very diversity, our being apart, can be used by God to make us one again. Benedict confesses how deeply Protestantism and Catholicism in Germany have relied upon one another, indeed have learned from one another. Perhaps an example from our own country is apropos here. How greatly have my Catholic friends benefited from the unswerving de­votion among Evangelicals to the literal Word of God, in the face of so many delusive modernisms! And, if I may presume, how greatly have my Evangelical friends benefited from the stalwart defense of life that has been mounted by the Catholic church, and by its abiding confidence that the Word of God is written on the human heart, in the natural law?
That would be an ecumenism of love and gratitude, as I have said; but more depends upon it than our good will towards our fellow Christians. The survival of Europe itself, and perhaps of the Europe known as the United States, is at stake. For Benedict sees the imminent collapse of the west, and has taken the name of Benedict to recall all of us to a solemn and ancient ideal. Fifteen hundred years ago, the Roman state was exhausted, and yet whatever was decent and noble in it
was preserved - not by senators, but by men in small communities, the monks, who gathered to work and pray. Can we really look at our last century and insist that the Vandals have not already arrived? Or can we turn on the television and insist that they have not set themselves up as our rulers? It is time, he thinks, for a renewal of that monastic ideal, in the form always of communities - communities, I would say, like Patrick Henry College.
The old patriot of Virginia and our new radical in Rome, you see, have hearts for many of the same things. Long live the memory of the former, and may God grant the latter many days to come!

Dr. Esolen is a professor of literature at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. He has pub­lished several books and translations and is a contrib­uting editor to Touchstone Magazine