The Pope’s visit may help rediscover that both Christians and secularists share a common language
Posted on September 5th 2010 in Weekly messages
The visit of Pope Benedict XVI has crept up on me, coming as it does straight after the summer holidays. The lazy days of summer make anything happening in September seems to belong to a different age. However, it is now less than two weeks before the Holy Father arrives in this country. What will he find and how will he be received? The intimations of mass demonstrations to be undertaken by secularists, Darwinists and others in parallel with the Pope’s visit looks to be widely off the mark. ‘Protest the Pope’, an amalgam of the discontented, will probably claim some moral victory but, as a group, will fizzle out in a few weeks once it lacks the oxygen of publicity.
My hopes are rather more positive. Pope Benedict will not gather the crowds that Pope John Paul II did when he came twenty-five years ago but, as a guest of the Queen in his capacity as a Head of State, he has the opportunity to speak to the nation in a formal manner which was denied to his predecessor whose visit was pastoral.
This different opportunity comes at a time when it is perceived by Christians that ‘religion’, and in this sense ‘organised religion’, is being marginalised in contemporary society. There have been instances in recent years of governmental opposition to Catholic schools, the work of catholic adoption agencies, and the nationalisation of the ethos of many Catholic charities through the weight of government grants. This view is true, but is not the full picture. What has been lost in contemporary debate is any comprehension of what used to be called ‘the preambles of faith’, the acceptance of those precious human qualities that could be discovered through the use of reason. Such qualities would be the immortality of the soul, the exercise of freedom, the role of conscience, the need for beauty, and the foundations of good and evil. None of these topics are necessarily religious in the narrow sense but part of the patrimony of humanity. This was the thrust of the Regensburg University Address given by Pope Benedict a few years ago. Unfortunately the arguments over one paragraph concerning Islam has blotted out in the minds of many people his insights on the role of reason, and the contribution of Greek philosophy to the world.
The loss of this middle ground is sorely felt because it makes dialogue so difficult. The secular minded might well treat the discussion of such subjects as a subterfuge for speaking about God, whilst the religiously minded so often seeks comfort in either Biblical fundamentalism or talk about attacks on the Church. So it is just here that Pope Benedict might make us all take notice, secular and religious alike. Two areas in particular might be on the Holy Father’s mind, judging from his previous publications, the care of the environment, and the cause of human development in the Third World and elsewhere. These two topics concern our common humanity and our common future and, even if secularist government and the Church come to them from different angles, both accept their importance. It is these areas that under his guidance might become new ‘preambles of faith’.
At heart the Christian faith is a relationship of love between God who comes close and, on our part, a loving response to just this. This dialogue is formalised in the Sacrament of Baptism, which involves entry into the community of like-minded believers, the Church. This dialogue continues sacramentally in the Eucharist and Reconciliation. To us, as Catholics, this all seems so obvious, but it does not look like that from the outside. Too often the secularist is expected to run, long before even he or she can walk. The preambles of faith, in traditional terms described as ‘philosophical anthropology’, and the reasoned dialogue that such thinking requires, is the place to begin. My hope is that on this state visit the Holy Father may stimulate just such a dialogue in every level of our society.