In choosing the name Benedict, the Pope linked himself with Benedict XV, the pope who tried to halt the carnage of the Great War, and, in a much longer frame of reference, St Benedict of Nursia, whose rule is the basis of the entire Western monastic tradition which preserved Europe’s culture through the Dark Ages. The universities can no longer be trusted to perform this function since they have become both beacons of relativism and cash-and-carries. Whereas his predecessor identified Marxist materialism as the greatest threat to human freedom, Benedict is so concerned about the condition of contemporary Europe that in June he established a pontifical office to help re-evangelise it.
Secularism is at the heart of Benedict’s concerns. By this the Pope does not mean the delimitation of Church and State, the sacred and profane ”“ which is intrinsic to Christian culture as well as political society since the Reformation ”“ but the amnesiac eradication of one of the principal roots of Western civilisation and the deliberate marginalisation of all religion to the private sphere. In its stead has come a society that thinks its existential despairs can be ameliorated by limitless consumer goods, or worse, by a state that racks up fathomless amounts of debt so as to throw money at problems that may have no material resolution.
While truly sinister philosophies and technologies, all camouflaged with the rhetoric of choice and freedom, infiltrate how we regard and treat the old or sick, or play around with the building blocks of life itself, the public space is dominated by a culture several notches below that of the late Roman empire.
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(Telegraph) Michael Burleigh–The Pope deserves better from Britain
In choosing the name Benedict, the Pope linked himself with Benedict XV, the pope who tried to halt the carnage of the Great War, and, in a much longer frame of reference, St Benedict of Nursia, whose rule is the basis of the entire Western monastic tradition which preserved Europe’s culture through the Dark Ages. The universities can no longer be trusted to perform this function since they have become both beacons of relativism and cash-and-carries. Whereas his predecessor identified Marxist materialism as the greatest threat to human freedom, Benedict is so concerned about the condition of contemporary Europe that in June he established a pontifical office to help re-evangelise it.
Secularism is at the heart of Benedict’s concerns. By this the Pope does not mean the delimitation of Church and State, the sacred and profane ”“ which is intrinsic to Christian culture as well as political society since the Reformation ”“ but the amnesiac eradication of one of the principal roots of Western civilisation and the deliberate marginalisation of all religion to the private sphere. In its stead has come a society that thinks its existential despairs can be ameliorated by limitless consumer goods, or worse, by a state that racks up fathomless amounts of debt so as to throw money at problems that may have no material resolution.
While truly sinister philosophies and technologies, all camouflaged with the rhetoric of choice and freedom, infiltrate how we regard and treat the old or sick, or play around with the building blocks of life itself, the public space is dominated by a culture several notches below that of the late Roman empire.
Read it all.