Benedict's Challenge

In a generally insightful piece about the new Pope Benedict XVI ("The Last European Pope?" May 2), Joseph Bottum makes a glaring assertion for which he offers no evidence. He writes that the new pope will "stand somewhere to the left of his predecessor" on social and economic issues. According to Bottum, Benedict is "a Social Democrat, after all, from Germany, where they always thought they were going to find a way to split the difference between communism and capitalism."

When I mentioned this contention to a group of German friends who came to Rome for the pope's installation Mass, they burst out laughing, so absurd was the idea to them as Germans.

The first thing obvious to any serious reader of the former cardinal's writings on political and socioeconomic questions is his insistence that the Christian gospel not be reduced to a partisan agenda. This insistence, in fact, formed the gravamen of his argument against liberation theology and its attempt to baptize Marxist social analysis.

A second aspect of Benedict's thought is his critique of utopian/socialist economics, which shows him to be very much in line with John Paul II's writings. (As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger would have reviewed Centesimus Annus.) I offer this one example from his 1986 article in the journal Communio:

"A morality that believes itself able to dispense with the technical knowledge of economic laws is not morality but moralism. . . . A scientific approach that believes itself capable of managing without an ethos misunderstands the reality of man. . . . Today we need a maximum of specialized economic understanding, but also a maximum of ethos so that the specialized economic understanding may enter the service of the right goals."

Rev. Robert Sirico
President, Acton Institute
Grand Rapids, MI

Joseph Bottum writes that Western Europe has "aborted and contracepted its birthrate down toward demographic disaster."

This happens not to be true. In fact, abortion rates in the more secular western and northern countries of Europe are far lower than in the United States. The more heavily Catholic nations of eastern and southern Europe, on the other hand, experience much higher abortion rates than does America.

Contraception use is also much more widespread in the United States than it is in Europe. Just over 75 percent of American women use contraception in a given year, while only two-thirds of European women do. Whatever the cause of Europe's declining fertility, Bottum is factually wrong to blame any radical embrace of abortion and contraception, at least in Europe's secular west and north.

Further, Europe still has overtly Christian political parties, and those parties are more popular in Europe than would be conceivable in the United States.

And perhaps that is the problem. The Enlightenment that Bottum laments as a philosophical disaster for Christianity achieved its greatest acceptance in post-revolutionary America. Early in our republican history, Americans got the churches out of government--mostly because doing so was the only effective way to keep the government out of the churches. By creating a secular republic, America's Enlightenment revolutionaries gave Christianity its best opportunity to flourish in 1,500 years.