POPE BENEDICT has warned Europe against letting its Judeo-Christian heritage be reduced to a continental “subculture”, leaving a vacuum to be filled by extremism.
The German pontiff acknowledged “widespread disappointment” in the church, but urged Catholics to look beyond the negative and accept the church “as God’s most beautiful gift”.
In a historic speech to the Bundestag the Pope urged Europeans to leave the postmodern “windowless concrete bunker” they had fashioned for themselves and “embrace the true nature of man”.
“The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of equality of all before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of one’s responsibility for one’s actions,” he said.
“These are the criteria we are called to defend at this moment in our history.” European cultural memory was “an encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome”, he said, shaped by rationality.
“To ignore or dismiss this as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness,” he said.
The 84-year-old pontiff said the task Europe faced had parallels to Germany’s burgeoning ecological movement in the 1970s. Amid widespread laughter, and beaming smiles on the Green party benches, he insisted he was not canvassing for any political party.
“The importance of ecology is no longer disputed … but there is also an ecology of man: man, too has a nature that must be respected,” he said
“Man is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he listens to his nature, respects it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled.”
He urged political leaders not to pursue success or material gain but to grow a Solomon-like “listening heart”, to discern what is right and “keep power in tune with justice”.
“We Germans have seen how power became divorced from what was right … how a highly organised band of robbers were capable of threatening the whole world,” he said.
Shortly after 4.30pm the pontiff — white and frail — glided into the Bundestag chamber. For 10 long seconds there was perfect silence – then two minutes of enthusiastic applause. His 20-minute address ended in a two-minute standing ovation. Some 50 politicians from the Left Party were absent; those in attendance, wearing oversized red Aids ribbons, did not applaud.
Yesterday evening the Pope urged 60,000 worshippers at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium to stay with the church. “There is good and bad in the church, wheat and weeds, but anyone fixated on the negative misses the great, beautiful mystery of the church,” he said. “Dissatisfaction spreads when one’s own superficial and flawed vision of church, one’s own church dream, is not realised.”
On his arrival yesterday morning, Pope Benedict said he had come to “meet people and talk about God”, describing utilitarianism and individualism as “false paths to freedom”. “The man who feels a duty to truth and goodness will immediately agree that freedom develops only in responsibility to a greater good,” he said.
German president Christian Wulff welcomed the Pope to his homeland, a country “closely linked to Christian faith, and the struggle with faith”.
The president paid tribute to Catholics who resisted the “godless, criminal” Nazi regime, and to Catholics in Poland and East Germany who helped overcome European division.
Amid internal church struggles between liberals and conservatives, Mr Wulff urged the church “not to retreat into itself” but to address pressing contemporary questions. “Like how mercifully they treat fractures in people’s lives” – a nod to his failed marriage – “and how to deal with the fractures in its own history and with the misbehaviour of office-holders”.
Some 4,000 people protested in central Berlin yesterday against the visit.