"Without Roots": The Question of Europe's True Identity in an Age of Cultural Crisis

Europe . . . is on a collision course with its own history

Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, written by then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger and Marcello Pera, explores the origins of European culture in terms of its Catholic foundations; it does this with the objective of understanding the cultural and moral decline of the West, while at the same time proposing solutions for its rebirth. The book explains, step-by-step, how relativism has destroyed the West. One example of which can easily be seen, and which therefore is frequently cited in this book, is the West’s current relations with Islam, in both the political and cultural spheres. In an inane and dangerously backwards sense of public relations, the more the West is attacked by Islamic activists – be they attacks verbal, violent, or downright barbaric – the more the West feels the need to apologize for its past mistakes. This “self hatred” from which the West suffers results from the relativistic belief that one culture is neither better nor worse than another: merely different. Such an ideology ultimately becomes hypocritical and leads to self-destruction, for as Pera states in his letter to Ratzinger: “relativism, after teaching that all cultures and civilizations are equal, makes the contradictory insinuation that our culture and our civilization are worse than others.” As Ratzinger and Pera persuasively demonstrate, the intricate levels of civilization found complementarity when they were governed by the Truth inherent in the institution of the Catholic Church. Remove the Church, and culture has no direction. History caught a glimpse of this phenomena in the 1300’s, for when the seat of the papacy rested in Avignon, France, Rome descended into a cultural standstill. The same is happening now, except on a much broader scale, and with calculated deliberation. The battle waged by relativists to remove Catholicism from the culture – and more importantly, the willingness of Catholics to surrender to these attacks – has resulted in a Europe which is now suffering from terminal lethargy.

The Church is fundamental to the culture of Europe. The cultural decline which has resulted from Europeans' increasingly successful attempts of emancipating themselves from their Catholic roots has proven this. Once relativism took hold, once it became impossible to say that one thing is better than another, man became something that could be quantified, while ceasing to be something that could be valued. “Personhood” became an “empirical concept.” As a result of this breakdown, civilization lost its ability to behave responsibly, simply because there is no reason to be responsible towards something which has no value. The same arguments which claim that man will be free once he is rid of the imperialism of the Church and her morality are the same which have, in coming to their logical conclusion, made men valueless and expendable in the eyes of civilization. It is little wonder, then, that Europe has become “infected by a strange lack of desire for the future.”

The most unique character of this book is the fact that it shows two diverse and seemingly incompatible modes of thought – secularism and Catholicism – leading towards the same conclusion: that is, that Western civilization cannot continue to survive without the Catholic Church. Pera, a self-proclaimed agnostic and a secularist, has provided a natural law argument for the efficacy of the Church, not only asserting Her importance as a moral guide, but how indispensable She is as culturally stabilizing institution. He even goes so far as to challenge modern Catholics for their lack of courage and determination, asking: “Do they (Catholics) understand that what they are being called to defend is their identity?” Due to the unprecedented veracity of Pera’s words, Cardinal Ratzinger can only respond with agreement and elaboration. He speaks of the breakdown of a Europe that long ago had been defined by its cultural life and growth. The Church which had been the foundation for that culture is seen as something which is outdated, inaccessible, and irrelevant, and therefore feeble in its mission to communicate the Truth. The result of this breakdown is a West that has become “hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity.” However, as dreary as the future may seem, both Ratzinger and Pera believe that it is still possible to revive civilization, and they therefore propose the creation of a civil Christian religion; such a task would bridge the gap between secularists and Catholics by unifying them in a common end for the good, without compromising the integrity of the Church, and thereby giving “vital new energy to a dying antiquity.”

by A. Schneible

Disclaimer: this paper was submitted as an assignment basically at the same time I posted it here. I was just so eager to finally have something to contribute that I wanted to put it up right away. Therefore, if my Santa Croce professor does a google search and finds this: I didn't plagiarize, I promise!