I know that I am not alone in holding this intention, nor am I alone, as a Catholic, in experiencing a special spiritual bond with St. Peter's successor as he visits my country. I anticipate a special week. Our Holy Father's presence here among us should usher in a period of attentiveness to the Holy Spirit and a reorientation of our lives toward Christ and his Church.
A recent headline conveys an important part of this reorientation: Pope and Bush to Discuss Faith and Reason.
In my last post, I wrote:
"If America is to have a future of freedom and justice, then we must embrace justice as the end toward which our freedom is ordered."
What is meant by justice?
I defer to Pope Benedict XVI who, in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), teaches:
"Justice is both the aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics. Politics is more than a mere mechanism for defining the rules of public life: its origin and its goal are found in justice, which by its very nature has to do with ethics. The State must inevitably face the question of how justice can be achieved here and now. But this presupposes an even more radical question: what is justice? The problem is one of practical reason; but if reason is to be exercised properly, it must undergo constant purification, since it can never be completely free of the danger of a certain ethical blindness caused by the dazzling effect of power and special interests. Here politics and faith meet. Faith by its specific nature is an encounter with the living God an encounter opening up new horizons extending beyond the sphere of reason. But it is also a purifying force for reason itself. From God's standpoint, faith liberates reason from its blind spots and therefore helps it to be ever more fully itself. Faith enables reason to do its work more effectively and to see its proper object more clearly. This is where Catholic social doctrine has its place: it has no intention of giving the Church power over the State. Even less is it an attempt to impose on those who do not share the faith ways of thinking and modes of conduct proper to faith. Its aim is simply to help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just."
We will not arrive upon a definition of justice without faith and reason together.
Those of us who are working to advance a Culture of Life have been accused of seeking to impose religion, of working toward the ultimate subordination of the State to the "church," a sort of all-encompassing metaphor for the religious establishment. In reality we must work toward the subordination of freedom to justice.
And this is a political matter indeed. As Pope Benedict states further:
"The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice. She has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper. A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church. Yet the promotion of justice through efforts to bring about openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good is something which concerns the Church deeply."
To develop this point, I refer you to words from a lecture that touched my life deeply when, on the eve of the death of Pope John Paul II, then Cardinal Ratzinger received the St. Benedict Award for the Promotion of Life and the Family in Europe. The lecture was given in the Convent of Saint Scholastica in Subiaco, Italy. It is entitled "Europe's Crisis of Culture," and I recommend it to you with a sense of urgency:
"The attempt, carried to the extreme, to manage human affairs while disdaining God completely leads us increasingly to the edge of the abyss, to an ever greater isolation from reality. We must reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: even one who does not succeed in finding the way of accepting God, should, nevertheless, seek to live and direct his life 'veluti si Deus daretur,' as if God existed. This is the advice Pascal gave to his friends who did not believe. In this way, no one is limited in his freedom, but all our affairs find the support and criterion of which they are in urgent need."
(The Essential Pope Benedict XVI
, pp. 335)We cannot manage human affairs without faith and reason.
Welcome, Pope Benedict XVI, to the United States of America!