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Rome (Agenzia Fides) - We publish a contribution on the first encyclical of Benedict XVI “Deus caritas est” by Rev. Nicola Bux, docent at the Pugliese Faculty of Theology, Vice director of the Ecumenical Institute of Bari and Consultor to various Vatican Congregations. (Fides English translation from Italian)
“Forty years ago Hans Urs von Balthasar published Cordula oder der Ernstfall (tr.eng. Cordula or a serious case) in which he foresaw a system which from east to west would have made its pivot reason’s self-criticism of its own finiteness and the absolute character of freedom: “In the Middle Ages these two terms would have been a complete contradiction, because either the human person, who can measure his reasoning as finite, shares to some extent in infinite reason and truth, and therefore can have in his freedom a beginning of infiniteness, or the person, who declares seriously that reason is finite, would also have to admit (reason and will be two related aspects of the same spirit) the finiteness of freedom”(p 61-62). The great theologian then exposed four theories on which the system would be founded: essence which becomes the function of existence freely projected; freedom which exists only as inter-subjectivity; the cosmos which speculatively can be imagined only as self-communication of freedom; lastly, since the whole being is closed in a circle of ideas and reality, that a God out of this circle is superfluous. He concluded that the system “can now be experimentally manipulated without danger”(p 65).
Those theories led to the development of a system in the form of “dictatorship of relativism”, as Joseph Ratzinger denounced at the beginning of the conclave. In actual fact in 1998 John Paul II issued the encyclical Fides et ratio in which he affirmed “Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned. This has given rise to different forms of agnosticism and relativism which have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting sands of widespread scepticism. Recent times have seen the rise to prominence of various doctrines which tend to devalue even the truths which had been judged certain. A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today's most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth”(FR 5). On many sides people were resentful and even scandalised, something like the reaction to the last interventions of Ratzinger as cardinal; people said it was a clerical offence against the laity, who were on the defensive. The point is that on the “offensive” there were also lay people, believers and non in Italy and beyond. So we understand why professor Giulio Giorello published a pamphlet Di nessuna chiesa.La libertà del laico. Raffaello Cortina Editore, Milan 2005, calling on the laity to counter-attack. Which laity? Some commentators suggested that the lay person should redefine his identity.
Difficult? Taking the term in the broad sense, the recently published Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in answer to the question: what does God forbid when he says: “You will have no other God”? (art. 465) allows us to perceive some types: a secular person is a polytheist or an idolater, who deifies a creature, power, money, even the devil. The superstitious person who practices divination, witchcraft and spiritualism. The anti-religious person who tempts God or profanes the sacred or even sells and buys spiritual realities. The atheist who denies the existence of God, basing his conviction on a false understanding of human autonomy. - is this the secular person? - or is he finally the agnostic, for whom nothing can be known about God, and which includes indifferentism and practical atheism . These are some people who are on both sides of the fence, so to say, between the sacred and the profane, religion and philosophy. Yes, because for some the figure of the lay person, it is written somewhere, is involved more or less everywhere in the world and in the Church. We can say that a person is born secular. Rightly someone asked Giorello: is philosophy sufficient? (Filippo La Porta, Caro Giorello, la filosofia non basta, Corriere della Sera, 26 July 2005, p 35). Yes, because ‘love for sofia’ should sooner of later lead to the search for it: now what happens when we find it in God? Is this not the moment when the secular man ‘exists in the sacred”? John Paul II demonstrated in Fides et ratio the almost ineluctability of the encounter between faith and reason, because both move towards and reach the same truth; when this is denied we have an abnormal figure: the secular relativist. Or also when it is said that there are many truths. How can this be? Because of the principle of non-contradiction, would they not end up annulling each other? If it is recognised that man is fallible, making a scientific presupposition precisely of this assumption, then we should humbly doubt that relativism is an equivalence of values but a competition even without wanting to impose. Let no one say competition does not imply a sentiment of superiority: otherwise how could one compete. Every vision of life implicates being considered ‘absolute’ and able to save, unless otherwise perceived. The absoluteness of the Christian faith - and in their own way of the other religions - lies in the idea and the person of the saviour. Why worry then? Admitting human fallibility means going back to Genesis; pluralism does not belong to modernity, if anything to the present day; tolerance may be modern, but in their time all religions have been tolerant otherwise they would not have survived.
Therefore, instead of writing a secular catechism and defining oneself in the negative, it would be better to admit that man is a being by nature open to change: ideas, religions, decisions. This evidence cannot be denied. Is life not a drama ? Equivalence of values leads to becoming nihilist, it leads to indifference, immorality, homicide and suicide. This can all be avoided with the commandment “thou shall have no other God”.
All that remains is to understand who is the secular man: an attempt, in the light of the encyclical Deus caritas est, to ‘examine’ the opinions in circulation with the desire to humbly point to clerics impatient to get involved in things of the world, some of them aporia: perhaps they could better discern whether they are helping - as it should be - the lay person to “ecclesialise” the world, in the most etymological and patristic sense re-launched by Balthasar, or if instead they are helping, perhaps unawares, secularism which tolerates lay people and clerics attracted only by the spirit, therefore functional for the “the Church’s pneumatic dissolution”, as it was vividly said by Giuliano Ferrara (R.Casadei, Papa della ragione, Tempi, 29 April 2005, p 11). (Don Nicola Bux) (Agenzia Fides 16/2/2006, righe 75, parole 1.110)
