{"id":73,"date":"2010-09-20T14:53:35","date_gmt":"2010-09-20T14:53:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/benedict-in-britain.html"},"modified":"2010-09-20T14:53:35","modified_gmt":"2010-09-20T14:53:35","slug":"benedict-in-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/benedict-in-britain.html","title":{"rendered":"Benedict in Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"coracle.jpg\"Pace Douthat<\/a>,
\nbut this wasn’t more than a modest success for the pontiff. After all,
\nJPII never ran into opposition rallies, and 20k in London is a lot more
\nthan a handful of disgruntled picketers. Of course, had Benedict rowed
\nhis coracle across the Irish Sea, it would have been a lot worse.  <\/p>\n

The
\nbusiness to be conducted was fourfold: the usual appearances before the
\nlocal faithful and clergy; the new Benedictine tradition of “privately”
\nmeeting some abuse victims; the beatification of the Eminent Victorian
\nconvert, Cardinal Newman; and a Message. The message this time had to do
\nwith the role of religion–and specifically the pope’s version of
\nreligion–in public life. Unsurprisingly, Benedict would have more of
\nit.<\/p>\n

The fullest articulation came in his Friday address<\/a>
\nto Parliament, titled “Reason and Faith Need One Another.” The problem
\nwith merely secular democratic decision-making, according to the pope,
\nis lack of moral grounding: “If the moral principles underpinning the
\ndemocratic process are
\nthemselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then
\nthe fragility of the process becomes all too evident–herein lies the
\nreal challenge for democracy.” So religion is needed to help with the
\ndetermination.<\/p>\n


\nIt’s actually not all that clear that “religion” has the clear line on
\nmoral principles that Benedict would like. The Catholic Church is
\nanti-abortion and anti-death penalty, but whereas seven of the world’s
\n11 most religious countries (according to Gallup<\/a>) prohibit abortion<\/a>, nine of them have the death penalty<\/a>.
\nMeanwhile, eight of the 11 least religious countries have done away
\nwith the death penalty yet all embrace abortion rights. In the world as
\nit is, both religious and secular norms determine social consensus, but
\nneither according to the teachings of Catholicism.<\/p>\n

To be sure, Benedict has a way out of such moral confusion:<\/p>\n

The central question at issue, then, is this: where
\nis the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? The
\nCatholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right
\naction are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of
\nrevelation. According to this understanding, the role of religion in
\npolitical debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could
\nnot be known by non-believers–still less to propose concrete political
\nsolutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of
\nreligion–but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application
\nof reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This
\n“corrective” role of religion vis-\u00e0-vis reason is not always welcomed,
\nthough, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism
\nand fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems
\nthemselves. <\/span>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the old natural law dodge: Everyone has access via
\nreason to “objective” (true) moral principles, but only Our Church knows
\nhow to do moral reasoning properly, and we’re here to make sure you get
\nit right. Good Catholic boy that he is, Michael Sean Winters is not impressed<\/a>,
\nand neither am I. There’s moral reasoning and there’s moral reasoning.
\nTo claim a special ability–not based on revelation–to “correct” the
\nreasoning of democratic society at large in the absence of openness to the reasoning of the other side is nothing more than an
\nargument from authority. And these days, the moral authority of the
\nCatholic Church isn’t so robust.<\/p>\n

“By their fruits shall ye know them,” said Jesus, explaining in the
\nSermon on the Mount how to determine false prophets. It’s hard to
\nimagine Benedict delivering “Reason and Faith Need One Another” to the
\nIrish or Belgian or his own German parliament. With fewer victims, the
\nBrits could more easily look the other way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pace Douthat, but this wasn’t more than a modest success for the pontiff. After all, JPII never ran into opposition rallies, and 20k in London is a lot more than a handful of disgruntled picketers. Of course, had Benedict rowed his coracle across the Irish Sea, it would have been a lot worse.  The business…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nBenedict in Britain - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/benedict-in-britain.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Benedict in Britain - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Pace Douthat, but this wasn’t more than a modest success for the pontiff. After all, JPII never ran into opposition rallies, and 20k in London is a lot more than a handful of disgruntled picketers. Of course, had Benedict rowed his coracle across the Irish Sea, it would have been a lot worse.  The business…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/benedict-in-britain.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-09-20T14:53:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.spiritual-politics.org\/coracle.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Benedict in Britain - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/benedict-in-britain.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Benedict in Britain - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"Pace Douthat, but this wasn’t more than a modest success for the pontiff. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}