Pope Benedict's insistence that human intelligence must embrace much more than rationalism ignored by cynical media, writes JOHN WATERS
WE TEND to think about Pope Benedict’s visit as happening “over there”, but really it’s happening here as well, or, to put it another way, we are part of the cultural territory the pope is coming to address. For, really, he is visiting not so much a faith community as the centre of a culture: the anglophone culture, of which we are very much part, which nowadays defines a worldview that stands in direct confrontation to the Christian view of reality.
It seems that every media report about the pope’s visit manages to mention child abuse, homosexuality, Hitler Youth, God’s Rottweiler giving offence to Islam, women priests and condoms in Africa. Because of his reputation as a “dogmatist” and “conservative” who opposes the freedoms demanded by modern society, the pope has become a convenient target for all kinds of anti-religious sentiment. This was inevitable.
More ominous is that these themes – which emanate from a overwhelmingly secular-atheistic and hostile media – are being promoted to the exclusion of other, equally valid, and perhaps more important, perspectives from which the pope’s visit might be contemplated.
The underlying drama of the visit relates to a fundamental clash of ideas, the core of which is not really where we are constantly being told it is. Really, the “battle” is between the Anglo-Saxon idea of “rationality” and Pope Benedict’s insistence that reason embraces also the heart and the spirit.
Although the centre-of-gravity of anglophone culture has latterly moved to America, the roots of its thinking are in Britain, in the previously-monolithic Protestantism that generated the appetites of the British empire. It is not, for example, a coincidence that the most vigorous attacks on faith in recent times have been written by Englishmen – for example, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, which seek to define reason as embracing only that which can be proved.
His beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman will surely provoke the pope to address these matters in a new and dramatic way. The theme for his UK visit is Cor ad cor loquitur – “Heart speaks unto heart”, the words Cardinal Newman borrowed from St Francis de Sales for his coat of arms. The phrase asserts an idea of human communication that is utterly unlike the head-to-head, adversarial, media-generated conversation that surrounds us all the time, in which objective demonstrability is the constant watchword. Newman insisted that the essence of the human being is not to be located in the mind, but at the core of the lived experience of total reality, centred on the heart. Benedict, likewise, seeks the restoration to western culture of an integrated concept of reason. His insistence that human intelligence must embrace much more than rationalism, as well as his core message about the reintegration of faith and reason, have been largely lost in the flurry of dishonesty that attends media presentations of his interventions.
Because the medium is implicated in the message, it is inevitable that the message will be distorted. Even as the pope strives to remind the world that the route to rediscovering the authentic experience of being human is to look intensely at reality and reconnect with the pure wisdom of the heart, his every word must ride a gauntlet of cynicism and pseudo-rationalism that constantly seeks to distort his meanings and direct attention elsewhere.
Still, he persists. Last December, on the Feast of the Annunciation, the Holy Father journeyed across the city of Rome to the Piazza di Spagna, where he spoke pointedly of “the city” and contrasted the loving example of the Blessed Virgin with the persistent drumbeat of negativity in the news media. By “the city”, he indicated much more than the source of prevailing difficulties in the economic realm. He was, deeper down, invoking the total man-made reality which, for all its beauty and usefulness, contains many traps for human longing. The city becomes home to us but also makes us lose our capacity to look deeply. “People become bodies and these bodies lose their soul, they become things, faceless objects that can be exchanged and consumed.”
At the heart of the city is the voicebox of the collective conversation. The mass media “always tend to make us feel like ‘spectators’, as if evil concerned only others and certain things could never happen to us”.
But, he insisted, we are all participants, whose behaviour influences the lives of everyone else. We complain of the pollution that makes parts of the city difficult to breathe in.
“Yet there is another kind of contamination, less perceptible to the senses, but equally dangerous. It is the pollution of the spirit; it makes us smile less, makes our faces gloomier, less likely to greet each other or look each other in the eye.”
In the media culture in which such messages are received, repackaged and handed on, attention will be drawn to the extent to which the institution headed by Pope Benedict has itself contributed to the gloom and pollution. But is this enough to justify us in dismissing such warnings from one who has looked into modern reality with such diligence and attention?