The Lecture La Sapienza Refused to Hear

This morning I finally sat down to read the lecture Pope Benedict XVI planned to give at La Sapienza University in Rome, and I was absolutely stunned. As you may know, the university invited the Holy Father to speak on January 17 to celebrate the inauguration of the new academic year, but the Pope canceled his visit after students and faculty - including 67 professors - protested against it. (Angelo Matera wrote a fabulous article about the incident for the National Catholic Register which can be found here: "The Death of Irony.")

Remember Regensburg? The Sapienza protest was hardly different. It certainly lacked the violence generated by the Pope's speech at Regensburg, but it was spawned by the same kind of ignorance. The "academics" at La Sapienza, like the Islamic fundamentalists who spoke out against the Pope in 2006, misquoted the Holy Father, using "his" remarks (which were not, in fact, his) out of context as justification for their protest. Ironically, the lecture the Pope planned to deliver at La Sapienza, like the one he gave at Regensburg, was meant to be a caution against the dangers of relativism.

Radical Islam and Western secularism both call faith and reason mutually exclusive. If we allow either or both of these ideologies to occupy a higher place in than Christian wisdom in the public sphere - and one might argue that they already do - we may as well bid goodbye to Western civilization as we know it. As the Pope said in a homily in 2005:

"Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude [acceptable] to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."

In his conclusion to the Sapienza lecture, the Pope elaborated on the dangers that relativism poses to the modern world:

"... [T]he danger of falling into inhumanity is never simply overcome - as we see in the panorama of contemporary history! Today the danger of the Western world - to speak only of this context - is that man, precisely in the consideration of the grandeur of his knowledge and power, might give up before the question of truth. And that means at the same time that reason, in the end, bows to the pressure of interests and the charm of utility, constrained to recognize it as the ultimate criterion."

The Holy Father went on to point out the dangers that relativism poses to the university specifically:

"The danger exists that philosophy, no longer feeling itself capable of its true task, might degenerate into positivism; that theology, with its message addressed to reason, might become confined to the private sphere of a group more or less sizable. If, however, reason - solicitous of its presumed purity - becomes deaf to the great message that comes from the Christian faith and its wisdom, it will wither like a tree whose roots no longer reach the waters that give it life. It will lose courage for the truth and thus it will not become greater but less."

The same thing, the Pope said, will happen to European culture if it continues to become increasingly secular and to "cut itself off from the roots by which it lives" - the roots of Christian wisdom.

Finally, the Holy Father returned to a question he posed at the beginning of his address: "what does the Pope have to do with, or to say to the university?" I can only hope that his answer embarrassed the "academics" at La Sapienza enough to teach them some humility and help them re-discover the path to true wisdom:

"Surely [the Pope] must not attempt to impose the faith on others in an authoritarian way, since it can only be bestowed in freedom. Beyond his office as Shepherd of the Church, and on the basis of the intrinsic nature of this pastoral office, there is his duty to keep the sensitivity to truth alive; to continually invite reason to seek out the true, the good, God, and on this path, to urge it to glimpse the helpful lights that shine forth in the history of the Christian faith, and in this way to perceive Jesus Christ as the Light that illuminates history and helps us to find the way to the future."

You can read the full text of the Holy Father's planned address on Zenit. (Thanks, Angela.) As usual, the Pope is right on target. It's too bad that those who need to hear him the most are also the ones doing all they can to tune him out.

Addressing the conditioned relativist: Part One

Public speaking is one of those classes I thought I could avoid. Since I’ve decided to get my Bachelors of Science in Nursing, this is no longer the case. On short notice I took up the project to write a five to seven minute persuasive speech against moral relativism (it was less fun than I imagined). If anyone was going to, it had to be a Parousian. This is my first direct attempt at bringing Catholicism to contemporary culture through the classroom. I give the speech (a modified version of the following) next Tuesday; pray for open minds and hearts.
(Note: the funny single-liners are “transition statements” required for class.)

What is the number one export of the United States? What is it that this country supplies in monumental quantities to the rest of the world? Ideas. However, because most people in the United States grow up with these ideas, and they are so immersed in their own culture, they may not realize how much these certain thought trends affect their way of thinking. I am thinking of a particular idea for which the United States is well known: moral relativism. In brief, moral relativism is a philosophy that denies moral absolutes and claims morality changes with the times, is subjective to thoughts and feelings, and is dependent on individuals.

The contemporary philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote, “The issue of moral relativism is merely the single most important issue of our age, for no society in all of human history has ever survived without rejecting this philosophy… There has never been a society of relativists.” Because moral relativism is such a pressing issue, especially in our country, I am going look at two of the popular arguments for this philosophy based on cultural relativism and freedom with emphasis on promoting its counterpart, absolutism – or the acceptance of moral absolutes.

To exemplify cultural relativism, let’s briefly consider a particular practice in the ancient Aztec culture.

For the Aztecs, human sacrifice was an integral part of their culture and beliefs. The question is… can we as outsiders objectively say whether or not this practice was immoral? Do we have any foundation to genuinely condemn this practice which took innocent lives? Note: I am specifically speaking of judging the action, not the people because their culpability for their actions is another matter entirely.

Some may believe that the Aztecs had the right to kill innocent victims because of their cultural understanding, but I would venture to bet that most believe that this practice should be abolished. The belief that we cannot comment on another culture’s morality is the basic tenet of cultural relativism. Like discovering different properties of chemicals, anthropologists and sociologists have discovered that moral values differ by culture. Some have concluded that this means there is no foundation for a binding system of morals. Relating back to the Aztecs then, human sacrifice would be morally right for them but considered morally wrong in our contemporary culture. Under the banner of cultural relativism, what is wrong in one culture can be considered right in another one. Morality becomes more associated with when and where you happen to be than the intrinsic value of a human person. Thus, according to cultural relativism, one of the failures of the Nazis wasn’t that they killed Jews, but they tried to bring it to other people who were equally justified by culture on their moral stance against these actions.

Besides my appeal to the moral conscience with examples, the argument for cultural relativism is fundamentally flawed. First, it assumes that morality is defined by what a culture teaches, or their values. Thus, your moral rightness is determined by your ability to always and unconditionally obey these culturally determined values. This argument is presupposing moral relativism to prove moral relativism.

So should rightness be determined solely by strict adherence to generally accepted norms of a given society, or is there sometimes a moral obligation to disobey certain values if those values can be deemed unjust? A moral relativist cannot point at Muslim terrorists and claim what they’re doing is wrong because they’re operating under their cultural influence, and thus it really is right. Nor can he look at those reformers who fought for equal rights for slaves and women as good because they went against the widely accepted cultural values of their day. All moral reform would have to be considered intrinsically evil.

To those who claim that another culture’s values cannot be deemed better or worse, but only different – this is an example of the linguistic confusion between objective true values and subjective value opinions which paralyzes cultural relativism. Analogously, we can distinguish between the objective truth that genetics influence the development of personality and the subjective opinion about to what extent genetics determine personality. Changing your opinion about how genetics influence behavior doesn’t change the reality or actually affect the way genetics and behavior is related. Just because one culture has opinions about what is right and another disagrees does not change the reality behind the debate. In fact without objective true values there would be no debate. We may never have complete knowledge of these things, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t have an adequate understanding of the moral law and that some moral systems are either more or less adequate than others.

In giving the cultural relativism argument people tend to point out differences, but cultures generally have more commonalities than differences. They may emphasize certain values over others, such as the Japanese emphasize community, whereas Americans emphasize individuality. However, there is no society that hates love and loves hatred; no society that prizes betrayal, selfishness, cowardice and despises honesty, courage, and justice. Such a society would devour itself.