Recent posts by RNA members

Happy Four Chaplains Day. Say, what? It was on this date in 1943 that four military chaplains -- a Catholic priest, two Protestants and a rabbi -- gave their lives to save others on a Navy ship that had been... Tammeus

In discussing secularization, it has become conventional to note that the concept refers to various processes, of which three are particularly prominent. First, the gradual delegitimation of natural and revealed religion’s truth-claims in the face of rational critique. We can call this intellectual secularization. Second, the process by which some states have constitutionally disengaged from their citizens’ religious beliefs and institutions. We can call this state secularization. Third, the increase across society of knowledge, activities, values, tastes, and activities which lack religious content, as well as the extent to which, increasingly, people involve themselves with these non-religious forms. We can call this social secularization.

It is, of course, open to question whether in fact the modern social order is undergoing such secularizations. Certainly much of the developing world is experiencing them unevenly and in some cases, such as Egypt today, inversely. This is the context of the current philosophical interest in state secularization, including this subtle and generous essay by Akeel Bilgrami.

Bilgrami enters the philosophic debate triggered by the challenges that uneven secularization pose to liberal-democratic legitimations of state secularization in particular. As John Rawls was early to grasp, we can no longer insist that only secular beliefs and values may engage public reason and hence (more to the point) state rationality. Charles Taylor recently advanced further into post-secularity by suggesting that the Western Church-State separation model has become obsolete. Religion is rather to be managed by a neutralist, but not necessarily secular, state, so as to be treated as just another element inside social “diversity.”

With the Indian case mainly in mind, Bilgrami resists Taylor’s argument that we should thus diminish state neutrality. He argues, however, for a negative concept of state neutrality. For him, the state needs to rank religious practices lower than the ideals and practices of its own “polity,” as he puts it, in cases where they are inconsistent with (i.e. negate) the state’s political ideals. These first-level ideals may vary from state to state, but it is clear that Bilgrami thinks of them in Rawlsian terms both as rights—to life, freedom of speech, and equal treatment under the law and so on, and as goods—like welfare provision, distributive justice, and cheap universal education.

I am in general agreement with Bilgrami’s argument. But I am puzzled by the turn it takes at the point when he squarely confronts the most obvious problem it poses. What about states and polities that don’t accept rights-based, liberal-democratic ideals and the rights and goods that they promise? In such states, there may be no legislative or administrative tension between Church and State, and the demand for neutrality need not get a look-in. The polity may be religious through and through. How might a state-neutralist of Bilgrami’s stripe persuade such a non-secular, non-liberal state to join his position?

The problem is all the sharper because, as has become standard in post-secular liberal arguments, Bilgrami wants to make his case without reference to intellectual secularism. He does so by distinguishing what he calls “atheism” from “secularism.” Atheism (a rather loaded term) denies religion’s propositional truth, while secularism is a “stance towards religion” taken in pursuit of non-religious ends, and which, as such, cannot be true or false. (Here Bilgrami is drawing a distinction similar to the one that Habermas posits between religion’s “validity claims” and its “truth content” [its morality and ethical sociability].) For Bilgrami, there are only “internal reasons” for pursuing secularism (i.e. reasons grounded in one’s own values) not external evidentiary ones. So revealed and natural religion’s falling out of propositional truth is discounted.

Because the secularism that underpins state neutrality is regarded just as a stance set into a particular cultural orientation, Bilgrami contends that mere philosophic argument cannot persuade its enemies of state neutrality’s virtues. That will only happen in history, which Bilgrami claims will follow a particular trajectory. In the future, he supposes, ostensibly unified religious polities will divide. Internal conflicts will erupt in them. They will then be exposed to secularist persuasion by outsiders who can successfully point out contradictions in the confessional polity’s values and legitimations. Appeals to atheism or positive secularism need not play a role in this process either.

Bilgrami calls this historical trajectory Hegelian because of its broadly dialectical progression. He also calls it humanist because it draws more and more people into the same liberal discursive field.

This is an ingenious philosophical prophecy. But the obvious problem with it is that history has not so far worked this way, and Bilgrami offers no good reasons for us to think that it will in the future either.

I can’t address the issues that Bilgrami’s turn to history raises in any depth, so I’ll content myself with three broad points, the first two of which displace philosophic discussion of state secularization by connecting it to capitalism, and thus implicitly to contemporary history’s actual motor. The third places the debate between Taylor and Bilgrami in a different historical trajectory than the one that Bilgrami himself offers, by offering a distant genealogy of Church/State relations.

1. The modern state has an indirect commitment to social secularization, independently of questions concerning diversity, law, and public policy. This is because, under normal conditions, contemporary states are committed to promoting national economic growth, and the conditions for globalized capitalist economic growth are also conditions that advance social secularization. Political philosophers tend to neglect this relationship and its implications when they discuss secularization since they are interested in constitutions, not political economies, and are often also under the thrall of idealized concepts like Habermas’s “public sphere” or Rawls’s “public reason.” But questions about how or whether public reason or constitutions should (in theory) accommodate “religion” are (in fact) largely overshadowed by this underlying material relationship between state and social secularization. Resistance to constitutional secularization in states like Iran is, or will be, undermined by its force, which, we can fairly confidently predict, will largely shape the future.

2. Modern states also nurture the truth protocols embedded in intellectual secularization when, for instance, they subsidize scientific research and technical education. States do this not so much because they want to encourage evidentially-based and scientific truth for its own sake, but, once again, because scientific discoveries and technical competence aid economic productivity and growth. Relations between science and religion are complex—one may even simultaneously be an “atheist” in Bilgrami’s sense and a practicing Christian for instance. Nonetheless there can be little doubt but that science has helped, and continues to help, de-legitimize religious truth as grounded either in nature or revelation. So in funding scientific research and education, states loosely bind themselves to intellectual secularization. Indeed thoroughgoing democratic liberalism, of the kind that Taylor and Bilgrami support, lapses in the education system, since, in certain disciplines, contemporary pedagogy insists on the scientific method. Pluralism and diversity do not apply there. That is the framework in which disciplines like biology and cosmology (the list is long) produce knowledge that encourages religious skepticism, and hence “atheism.” These disciplines too are routinely and properly supported by states, perhaps with most enthusiasm by those whose economies rely most on technical and scientific innovation. At any rate, this again implants a certain secularization into the modern capitalist state.

It is important to note that education’s commitment to science and technology need not appeal to the ethical value of truth and truthfulness as these were spelled out by Bernard Williams in his book of that name. There he argued that a commitment to truth grounded an ethics with the power to establish new associations and forms of sociability. The debate over state secularization also shies away from this attractive thesis.

3. History. Bilgrami’s appeal to history as the setting for state neutrality and its legitimation does not refer to the actual history of state secularization in any detail. This is especially to be regretted since the origins of Western exceptionalism, and hence of modern liberalism and state neutrality, are to be found in the deep history of Church/State relations.

“The West,” as the idea and force with which we are familiar, begins with Latin Christianity’s break with Byzantine Christianity. This was solidly in place by 1000 CE, mainly caused by a split over state organization. The Western empire was committed to dual sovereignty—sovereignty divided between the Pope and the Emperor—while the Eastern empire allowed its rulers authority over the Church. Of course, after about 1400, Western attempts to figure a way of dividing sovereignty between the Church and a territorial ruler violently broke down. New possibilities beckoned. These included: Church reform by accepting state sovereign authority (Martin Luther); attempts at republican theocracy (Jean Calvin’s Geneva); religious civil associationalism (Pietism after Philipp Jakob Spener, and then global evangelicalism); orthodox Erastian confessional state-organization, whether Protestant or Catholic (as in the Gallican mode). Within this array of Church/State relations, a distance between the Church and State had emerged by the seventeenth century. Civil society along with its elemental subjective component—what John Locke called “opinion”—became important social and political agents.

After the Treaty of Utrecht (1714), when the religious wars ended and a European balance of power was established, the conditions for stable religious “tolerance” emerged inside the machinery of the modern state. At this point, however, the Latin Continent was largely left to Catholicism, and the world’s oceans to Protestant Britain, condemning Protestant Northern Europe to a structural disadvantage whose bitter harvest the twentieth-century would reap. After Utrecht, commerce, finance capital, civil society, and private opinion all flourished, further marginalizing ecclesiastical institutions as powers. A century or so later, after the revolutions of 1848, the ideological machinery for securing national unity was largely transferred to nationalism.

This trajectory ends in the global system of state capitalism we know now, and whose only fully legitimated constitutional form is liberal democracy. But the triumph of democratic state capitalism has not fully met the expectations established by its own normative bases. In this situation, it becomes possible to hope not for more democracy and liberty, not for better and fairer capitalism, not for stronger states, but rather for a divided sovereignty along associationalist lines. That is, for a partial return of the Latin Christianity’s founding structure, for a new dual—or multiple—sovereignty.

Since the late-nineteenth century, that hope has, indeed, driven a minor political-theory lineage with both right and left inflections. On the right: Frederic William Maitland, John Neville Figgis, Otto von Gierke. On the left: the young Harold Laski, G.D.H. Cole, Paul Hirst, and Christian socialism à la R.H. Tawney. And Christian socialism is where Charles Taylor began his career, and which at least intermittently continues to guide it from afar, even (I’m willing to conjecture) when he is arguing the case for a post-secular liberal-democratic constitution as in the essay to which Bilgrami replies.

My brief and bold genealogy of Church/State relations places Bilgrami’s debate with Taylor in a different historical context than the one that Bilgrami supplies himself. It makes it clearer still that one of his differences with Taylor is over the sheer extent of state sovereignty in relation to religion. Taylor wishes to reduce democratic state sovereignty, Bilgrami to maintain it. As I said, I think he is right about that, especially in cases like India. But given the internal contradictions of democratic state capitalism, its failures to meet its own norms and purposes (e.g. equality of opportunity and participation, liberty, widely-based prosperity), I find myself also willing to imagine situations in which the state foregoes its monopolization of sovereignty, and accedes some of its power to associations. As far as I am concerned, these cannot, however, be religious associations, since the argument against religion’s validity claims has indeed been won.

From this perspective, the real challenge becomes: how to imagine and invent strong non-religious associations with substantive values and satisfying practices of life? Associations capable of taking back some state sovereignty, admittedly (as Bilgrami urges) in ways that don’t threaten state neutrality? One theoretical possibility would be for atheists (associating in the interests of truth) to take over the Churches’ rich and solid institutions from the inside, which might indeed herald a return to older conditions and styles of at least Christian ecclesiastical practice, in which belief was not a prerequisite for episcopal ordination. But that is just a politics of hope and imagination.

What do you know about the art that draws its inspiration from your religious tradition? I freely admit that I'm not well educated about Christian art, though I do enjoy wandering through the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City... Tammeus

(A Libyan Sufi man chants a hymn of praise to Prophet Mohammad in the Uthman Pasha madrassa in Tripoli. Picture taken January 16, 2012. REUTERS/Tom Heneghan)

Freed from Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year dictatorship, Libya’s Sufi Muslims find themselves under renewed pressure from violent Islamists who have been attacking them and their beliefs as heretical. The desecration of graves belonging to Sufi saints and sages in recent months have put the peaceful Sufis on the defensive, prompting some to post armed guards at their mosques and lodges to ward off hardline thugs.

But the birthday of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad, one of the highpoints in the Sufi calendar, is on Saturday and Libyan Sufis are determined to take their traditional processions through the streets to show they will not be cowed.

At a meeting of Sufi scholars to plan the celebrations, Sheikh Adl Al-Aref Al-Hadad said even being driven out of his zawiyah (Islamic school) late last year by Islamists known as Salafis would not deter him from marching. “I’m worried but I’m not afraid,” said Al-Hadad, whose Tripoli school was stormed by armed men who burned its library, destroyed office equipment and dug up graves of sages buried there. They turned the school into a Salafi mosque.

On January 13, extremists crashed a bulldozer through the walls of the old cemetery in the eastern city of Benghazi, destroyed its tombs and carried off 29 bodies of respected sages and scholars. They also demolished a nearby Sufi school.

Sheikh Khaled Mohammad Saidan, whose Dargut Pasha Mosque faces Tripoli’s port, said most Islamists in post-Gaddafi Libya disagreed with Sufis, but peacefully. “But there are no police around and you never know what some people might do,” he added.

Read the full story here.
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Released well after Roman Noon, here below is the text of Pope Benedict's telegram of condolences to Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap. of Philadelphia on last night's death at 88 of his predecessor, Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua:HAVING LEARNED WITH SADNESS OF THE DEATH OF CARDINAL ANTHONY BEVILACQUA, ARCHBISHOP EMERITUS OF PHILADELPHIA, I OFFER MY HEARTFELT CONDOLENCES TO YOU AND TO ALL THE FAITHFUL OF THE ARCHDIOCESE. I JOIN YOU IN COMMENDING THE LATE CARDINAL’S SOUL TO GOD, THE FATHER OF MERCIES, WITH GRATITUDE FOR HIS YEARS OF EPISCOPAL MINISTRY AMONG CHRIST’S FLOCK IN PHILADELPHIA, HIS LONGSTANDING COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE PASTORAL CARE OF IMMIGRANTS, AND HIS EXPERT CONTRIBUTION TO THE REVISION OF THE CHURCH’S LAW IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL. TO YOU, AND TO ALL THE CLERGY, RELIGIOUS AND LAITY OF THE CHURCH IN PHILADELPHIA, AND TO THE MEMBERS OF HIS FAMILY, I CORDIALLY IMPART MY APOSTOLIC BLESSING AS A PLEDGE OF CONSOLATION AND PEACE IN OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST.

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI
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I mentioned here yesterday that Mitt Romney tithes to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which he's a member. Well, The New York Times has put together this interesting graphic comparing, first, charitable giving by Romney, Newt... Tammeus

He was the ultimate man of the law. How bitter the irony, then, that his days would end under a cloud of court scrutiny.

At 9.15 tonight, Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua -- Seventh Archbishop of Philadelphia, founder of the Catholic world's first diocesan ministry dedicated to the pastoral care of migrants, arguably the father of modern canon law in the United States -- died in his sleep at his apartment at the city's St Charles Borromeo Seminary.

Retired since 2003, the cardinal was 88. He had been suffering from cancer and dementia over recent years.

Born in Brooklyn to Italian immigrants who would raise ten children, the future cardinal's grit, smarts and relentless work-ethic singled him out from an early age. Known as "Tough Tony" to his seminary students and "Bevy" among friends, his sense of discipline and prominent hatred of cheese often concealed a softer side, one that led him to night school in his 50s to study for a civil law degree in order to serve the needs of a new generation of migrants.

Ordained in 1949 and named chancellor of Brooklyn in 1976, Bevilacqua became an auxiliary to Bishop Francis Mugavero in 1980, was tapped to lead the diocese of Pittsburgh three years later, and in late 1987, was introduced as the successor to John Cardinal Krol as head of the 1.5 million-member Philadelphia church.

Blessed John Paul II elevated Bevilacqua to the College of Cardinals at the consistory of 28 June 1991, conferring on him the title of St Alphonsus on Via Merulana, the mother-church of the Redemptorists. Eight years earlier, his star had been set on its trajectory after the then-auxiliary spearheaded the American implementation of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, followed quickly by his successful mediation in the case of Mary Agnes Mansour, a Michigan nun who stoked the local hierarchy's protest by taking an appointment as head of a state agency. (Under the agreement, Mansour was released from her community and remained at the department's helm.)

For all the light of his seemingly omnipresent, fiercely energetic prime, significant shadows would come to envelop Bevilacqua's 15-year tenure over the decade following his retirement.

Over a five-year span, two Philadelphia grand juries would excoriate his administration's handling of allegations of clergy sex-abuse, the second of them indicting his longtime head of clergy personnel, Msgr William Lynn, whose trial on charges of conspiracy and child endangerment is scheduled to begin in March.

While neither panel would ultimately indict the cardinal, the 2011 grand jury indicated that it "reluctantly decided not to recommend charges" against him.

Saying it had "no doubt that his knowing and deliberate actions during his tenure as archbishop also endangered thousands of children in the Philadelphia archdiocese," the inquest declined an indictment in light of Bevilacqua's delicate health and "lacking" substantiation that the cardinal "was aware of all of the information that Msgr. Lynn received."

Not expected to any imminent extent, Bevilacqua's death comes a day after a city judge reaffirmed a ruling that deemed the cardinal as competent to testify at the combined trial for Lynn and three suspended or laicized clerics accused of abuse. Though he had been deposed by lawyers over two days last November in a session recorded at his seminary apartment, the bench's Monday ruling did not rule out calling Bevilacqua to testify in court.

His long-formidable physical and mental strength initially rocked by the double blow of retirement and the first grand jury -- before which he was summoned to testify a dozen times -- the famously high-profile prelate lived in isolation over his final decade, only appearing on occasion at diocesan events, and largely sealed off even from most of his longtime personal friends.

For a certain cherished few, though, the fold-up notes would still come in that inimitable flowing hand, even as it got shakier with time.

Eventually, these, too, would come to their end... and now, at the close of it all, it's hard to think of anything other than how the pain of what happened, both along the way and since, is just a tragedy all around.

* * *
According to reports, seminarians at the Overbrook house first learned of the cardinal's death by the tolling bell, summoning them to St Martin's Chapel to receive the news and for a communal recitation of the Rosary. As late reports burned up cellphones and the internet, a TV news helicopter hovered over St Charles' Faculty Wing as Bevilacqua's body was carried out and placed in a hearse, the auxiliary bishops and archdiocesan officials looking on. (Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap. is currently away from the archdiocese.)

Likely to include some delicate calls given the controversies of recent years, funeral arrangements are pending. Bevilacqua had, however, chosen his burial niche in the crypt of the Cathedral-Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul at the time of his retirement. And in the meanwhile, all of six weeks since the River City church bade an affectionate farewell to its most beloved of sons, it bears noting that no American see -- or, for that matter, Catholicism writ large on these shores -- has ever witnessed the sendoffs of two cardinals in so short a space of time.

As ever, more to come.

-30-

He was the ultimate man of the law. How bitter the irony, then, that his days would end under a cloud of court scrutiny.

At 9.15 tonight, Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua -- Seventh Archbishop of Philadelphia, founder of the Catholic world's first diocesan ministry dedicated to the pastoral care of migrants, arguably the father of modern canon law in the United States -- died in his sleep at his apartment at the city's St Charles Borromeo Seminary. He was 88, and had been suffering from cancer and dementia over recent years.

Born in Brooklyn to Italian immigrants who would raise ten children, the future cardinal's grit, smarts and relentless work-ethic singled him out from an early age. Known as "Tough Tony" to his seminary students and "Bevy" among friends, his sense of discipline and prominent hatred of cheese often concealed a softer side, one that led him to night school in his 50s to study for a civil law degree in order to serve the needs of a new generation of migrants.

Ordained in 1949 and named chancellor of Brooklyn in 1976, Bevilacqua became an auxiliary to Bishop Francis Mugavero in 1980, was tapped to lead the diocese of Pittsburgh three years later, and in late 1987, was introduced as the successor to John Cardinal Krol as head of the 1.5 million-member Philadelphia church.

Blessed John Paul II elevated Bevilacqua to the College of Cardinals at the consistory of 28 June 1991, conferring on him the title of St Alphonsus on Via Merulana, the mother-church of the Redemptorists. Eight years earlier, his star had been set on its trajectory after the then-auxiliary spearheaded the American implementation of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, followed quickly by his successful mediation in the case of Mary Agnes Mansour, a Michigan nun who stoked the local hierarchy's protest by taking an appointment as head of a state agency. (Under the agreement, Mansour was released from her community and remained at the department's helm.)

For all the light of his seemingly omnipresent, fiercely energetic prime, significant shadows would come to envelop Bevilacqua's tenure over the decade following his 2003 retirement. Over a five-year span, two Philadelphia grand juries would excoriate his administration's handling of allegations of clergy sex-abuse, the second of them indicting his longtime head of clergy personnel, Msgr William Lynn, whose trial on charges of conspiracy and child endangerment is scheduled to begin in March.

While neither panel would indict the cardinal, the 2011 grand jury indicated that it "reluctantly decided not to recommend charges" against him.

Saying it had "no doubt that his knowing and deliberate actions during his tenure as archbishop also endangered thousands of children in the Philadelphia archdiocese," the grand jury declined an indictment in light of Bevilacqua's delicate health and "lacking" substantiation that the cardinal "was aware of all of the information that Msgr. Lynn received."

Bevilacqua's death comes a day after a city judge reaffirmed a ruling that the cardinal was competent to testify at the combined trial for Lynn and three suspended or laicized clerics accused of abuse. Though he had been deposed by lawyers over two days last November in a session recorded at his seminary apartment, the bench's Monday ruling did not rule out calling Bevilacqua to testify in court.

His physical and mental health initially rocked by the double blow of retirement and the first grand jury -- before which he was subpoenaed to testify a dozen times -- the famously high-profile prelate lived in isolation over his final decade, only appearing on occasion at diocesan events, and largely closed off even from most of his longtime personal friends.

For a certain cherished few, though, the fold-up notes would still come in that inimitable flowing hand, even as it got shakier with time.

Eventually, these, too, would come to their end... and now, at the close of it all, it's hard to think of anything but how the pain of what happened, both along the way and since, is just a tragedy all around.

* * *
According to reports, seminarians at the Overbrook house first learned of the cardinal's death by the tolling bell, summoning them to St Martin's Chapel to receive the news and a communal recitation of the Rosary. As late reports burned up cellphones and the internet, a TV news helicopter hovered over St Charles' Faculty Wing as Bevilacqua's body was carried out and placed in a hearse, the auxiliary bishops and archdiocesan officials looking on. (Archbishop Charles Chaput OFM Cap. is currently away from the archdiocese.)

Likely to be a delicate matter given the controversies of recent years, funeral arrangements are pending. Bevilacqua had, however, chosen his burial niche in the crypt of the Cathedral-Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul at the time of his retirement. And in the meanwhile, all of six weeks since the River City bade an affectionate farewell to its favorite son, it bears noting that no American see has ever witnessed the sendoffs of two cardinals in so short a space of time.

As ever, more to come.

-30-

When I first launched The Seeker five years ago, I didn't expect to find answers or agreement. I intended to provide a forum to pose questions and spark conversation. In doing so, I hoped people would learn from each other....

Various histories and sociologies of religion and various theologies have informed the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence over the years. The Reynolds court cited the then fashionable racial theories of political scientist Francis Lieber to support its condemnation of polygamy. Justice Black spoke of the threat that Catholicism posed to the American polity. Liberal theologians have been enlisted to expand the reach of conscientious objector status and condemn the teaching of creation science (U.S. v. Seeger and McLean v. Arkansas). The Court in Hosanna-Tabor tells a story of “the church.”

The last sentence of the Court’s opinion in Hosanna-Tabor announces the dogma that binds the majority opinion. Affirming for the first time the constitutional status of the ministerial exception, the Chief Justice declares that “(t)he church must be free to choose those who will guide it on its way.” Not “persons” must be free to choose their own ministers, but “the church” must be free. What is “the church?” Christians mean different things at different times when they use the definite article in speaking of church—when they speak of “the church.” Sometimes they are referring to the church on the corner, or a particular church organization, such as the Presbyterian Church USA, one of any number of churches. (That is how the Court uses the phrase at various points, when referring to Hosanna-Tabor in particular, as on page 5, or when it refers specifically to the Church of England, as on page 7, and so on.) In legal and political contexts, “the church” may be opposed to “the state,” vaguely throwing a circle around all religiously motivated activity. The Court in Hosanna-Tabor is not speaking in these ways in its last sentence. The Court is speaking theologically, and dogmatically, as it does several pages earlier in describing the purpose of the ministerial exception: “The exception . . . ensures that the authority to select and control who will minister to the faithful—a matter ‘strictly eccle­siastical’—is the church’s alone.”

Theologically speaking, “the church” refers to what might be termed the mystical church—also known in Christian doctrine as the “body of Christ”—that is, the communion of all Christian believers across space and time, alive and dead, unified through apostolic succession. Christians have differed about how the visible church on earth should be governed and have related in different ways with political authorities. The Roman Catholic Church understands itself to be a universal church—that is, as embodying all Christians, on heaven and on earth. Protestants have had a range of theological readings of the church, derived in part from their new readings of the New Testament beginning in the sixteenth century, a range that is reflected in the range of ecclesiologies among American colonial proponents of religious freedom. But a distinguishing feature of the United States, arguably, is that after 1791, the unity of Christendom expressed as “the church,” whether in Roman Catholic or Protestant guise, no longer has legal personality. It is the people who are in charge.

Take Roger Williams, for example, the seventeenth-century founder of Rhode Island and colonial hero of many a current religious defender of the rights of churches in the United States. For Williams, the church was to be found, if at all, in those local few “gathered in his name,” without any bureaucratic superstructure. At the end of his life, Roger Williams, skeptical of Christian claims of biblical authority to found churches and of the hypocrisies of what he derided as Christendom, belonged to no church. One could even argue that it was Williams’ skepticism about organized religion rather than any desire to protect religious institutions that most presages constitutional religious disestablishment. Williams, pious Christian though he was, thought political life in a diverse community could be organized without reference to religion.

The majority opinion in the unanimous decision from the Court in the Hosanna-Tabor case affirming the constitutional status of the ministerial exception as a right of the church is supported by a curious mash-up of religious and political history. The villain of the piece is Henry VIII. Before the Act of Supremacy, we are told, the church in England had been free, at least since 1215, thanks to King John and Magna Carta. The church was free because King John had agreed that the church had the freedom of election to church offices. According to the Court, Henry VIII interrupted that freedom with his break from Rome. The church was not free again until the Puritans and the Quakers arrived in the New World. The freedom of the church, both in England during the time between King John and King Henry, and after 1607 in the English colonies, but particularly since ratification of the First Amendment, can be summed up, as the Court describes it, in the capacity of the church to select its own ministers, free of political interference.

Profound differences in Roman Catholic, Reformation, and Anabaptist ecclesiologies and understandings of the freedom of Christians are finessed in this breezy historical account. Slipping back and forth between “religious organization,” “religious institution,” “religious group,” and “church,” as well as posing the relationship of each to an also homogenized and ahistorical “state,” the Court manages to avoid the enormously fraught issue of what “the church” is and who speaks in its name at various times and in various places. King John, Henry VIII, James Madison, and William Penn, members of very different churches, are all understood to be speaking of the same special freedom for “the church” to select its own ministers.

Church history stops then for the Chief Justice in 1791. After the truncated account of English church history, what is most striking in his opinion is the entire lack of acknowledgment of the remarkable changes to the churches that occurred in the American colonies. Disestablishment, division, revivalism, populism, and immigration profoundly changed American religion. After 1791, official Americans, when speaking of American religion, arguably can no longer descriptively—or constitutionally—speak, as the Court does, of “the church” and its rights. The church had been disestablished.

Precedent for the majority’s reading of the rights of the church is also found in what are known as the church property cases, a set of US cases that address disputes over future ownership and use of churches when their congregations have a split in doctrine. This is a complex line of cases but one difficulty with using the church property cases as establishing the right of “the church” to choose its ministers is that, by definition in such cases, there are at least two groups of people who lay claim to a right to define who is a minister and to choose their own minister. In each case, after the courts decided the issue, one group did not get to select its own minister or it had to abandon the church in question and found its own new congregation in order to do so. In each case, the Court sided with what it took to be the hierarchy.

The Court concludes this section of its decision with an announcement of the rule that “‘the First Amendment commits [resolution of the property cases] exclusive­ly to the highest ecclesiastical tribunals’ of the Church.” Citing its decision in Serbian Eastern Orthodox Diocese for United States and Canada v. Milivojevich, a dispute over control of the American-Canadian Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Court explains that the First Amendment “permit[s] hierarchical religious organi­zations to establish their own rules and regulations for internal discipline and government, and to create tribu­nals for adjudicating disputes over these matters.”

Evidence for the Court’s transcendent ecclesiology, that is, its theory of the church and of church governance, can also be found in the way it distinguishes Smith—the peyote case. Smith held that the free exercise clause of the First Amendment does not provide a constitutional exemption for religiously motivated persons from laws of general application because secular laws fall equally on the religious and the non-religious. The alternative, as Justice Scalia explained in his decision for the majority in Smith, is that each person would be a law unto his own. The Smith rule does not apply in Hosanna-Tabor, the Chief Justice explains, because, the issue is not one of the right of religious individuals to a special exemption from neutral laws—a right defended by many as being founded in the respect accorded to individual conscience in liberal legal theory—but of the right of “the church” itself:

It is true that the ADA’s prohibition on retaliation, like Oregon’s prohibition on peyote use, is a valid and neutral law of general applicability. But a church’s selection of its ministers is unlike an individual’s ingestion of peyote. Smith involved government regulation of only outward physical acts. The present case, in contrast, concerns government interference with an internal church decision that affects the faith and mission of the church itself.

It is worth looking at this paragraph very closely. What the Court says is that while the free exercise clause of the First Amendment provides no constitutional exemption from laws of general application for individual believers who engage in “physical acts” consistent with their religious beliefs—what many Christians term sacraments—the establishment clause provides an exemption for “the church” from such laws because by interfering with church governance the Court is interfering with “the faith and mission of the church itself.”

Here the Court speaks of the doctrinal priority of “the church,” and presumably, therefore, of its current earthly would-be representatives. Acknowledging that the ADA would seem to be a law of general application from which religious actors would not be exempt, Roberts explains that Smith concerned the constitutional status of “only outward physical acts.” The Court here seems to be saying that, as Douglas Laycock, representing Hosanna-Tabor, did at oral argument (see my previous post), that “the church” is prior to the sacraments because the church forms the consciences of individuals. Preserving the hierarchical discipline and right to autonomy of the church is structural to the US Constitution evident in the priority which disestablishment (read as a rejection of Henry VIII’s rejection of the Pope in the Act of Supremacy) has to free exercise in the ordering of the religion clauses in the First Amendment itself, while acts performed in obedience to the religious conscience of the individual must bow to secular law.

By reading its version of church history into the First Amendment, the Court is enabled to give priority to the rights of some Christians through its evocation of “the church.” But that history also enables a denial of rights to other Christians as well as to non-Christians. Freedom from hierarchical church discipline arguably accorded to American Christians by the religion clauses is disregarded in favor of a strong assertion of the rights of the church.

Most significantly, though, in the current moment, is that there is arguably no analogy to “the church” in its mystical sense outside Christianity. While other religious communities speak of the body of the faithful in various ways, the Court’s opinion would seem to suggest that its doctrine is tightly and very specifically bound to a history of the Christian church and its assertions of its rights in the context of a particular reading of English history.

Founded in its reading of English church history, the constitutional right articulated by a unanimous court in this decision is “the freedom of a religious organization to select its ministers.” While the Court acknowledges that it might occasionally prove difficult to decide who qualifies as a minister for these purposes, it nowhere mentions the difficulties of determining what a religious organization is. Justice Alito’s concurring opinion, evincing a careful concern for the Christian exclusivism of the majority opinion, begins the project of expanding the discussion beyond the church. “Minister,” Alito states, is a term that is mostly limited to the Protestant churches. His solution to this problem is to define minister functionally and universally, assuming that such a role can be found in all religious traditions—and beyond.

Alito, with the EEOC, sees the rights of religious organizations with respect to ideological control of their members as similar to that of all other voluntary associations, a right founded in the freedom of association expressed in the First Amendment, not in the rights of religion: “Religious groups are the archetype of associations formed for expressive purposes, and their fundamental rights surely include the freedom to choose who is qualified to serve as a voice for their faith.” This turn to the voluntariness of American religious life corresponds much more closely to what disestablished religion looks like in the United States today and to how most Americans understand their relationship to religious communities, one not of top-down hierarchy but one of bottom-up participation. It is also rooted in another reading of the history the Majority tells, one that tells a story of the freedom of Christians, and eventually of non-Christians as well. It is an understanding that sees Ms. Perich as the possessor of rights, not “the church.”

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Drawing as ever from this Sunday's readings, B16's food for thought at today's Angelus....
Dear brothers and sisters!

This Sunday's Gospel (Mk 1.21 to 28) presents us with Jesus, on the Sabbath day, as he preached at the synagogue at Capernaum, the small town where Peter and his brother Andrew lived on the lake of Galilee. In his teaching, which arouses the wonder of the people, following the liberation of "a man with an unclean spirit" (v. 23), who recognizes in Jesus as the "saint of God," that is, the Messiah. In a short time, his fame spread throughout the region, which he travels announcing the Kingdom of God and healing the sick of all kinds: word and deed. St. John Chrysostom observes how the Lord "alternates [his] speech for the benefit of those who listen, moving on from wonders to words and again passing from the teaching of his doctrine to miracles" (Hom. on Matthew 25, 1: PG 57, 328).

The word that Jesus speaks to men immediately opens access to the will of the Father and the truth about themselves. It was not so, however, for the scribes, who struggled to interpret the Holy Scriptures with countless reflections. Furthermore, to the efficacy of the word, Jesus united the signs of deliverance from evil. St. Athanasius observes that "commanding and driving out demons is not human but divine work ', in fact, the Lord "distanced men from all diseases and infirmities. Who, seeing his power ... still doubted that he was the Son, the Wisdom and Power of God? " (Oratio de Incarnatione Verbi 18:19: PG 25, 128 BC.129 B). Divine authority is not a force of nature. It is the power of the love of God who created the Universe and, in becoming incarnate in His only begotten Son, in coming down to our humanity, heals the world corrupted by sin. Romano Guardini writes: "The whole life of Jesus is a translation of power in humility ... Here is the sovereignty that lowers itself to the form of a servant" (Power, Brescia 1999, 141,142).

For man, authority often means possession, power, control, success. For God, however, authority means service, humility, love; it means entering into the logic of Jesus who stoops to wash the disciples' feet (cf. Jn 13.5), who seeks the true good of man, who heals wounds, who is capable of a love so great as to give up his life, because he is Love. In one of her Letters, Saint Catherine of Siena writes: "We must see and know, in truth, with the light of faith, that God is the supreme and eternal Love, and desires nothing else but our good."-30-

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It might be another 23 days 'til the Scarlet Bowl -- that is, B16's induction of 22 new members into his "Senate" -- but given today's onomastico of the archbishop of New York, it seems fitting to mark St Timothy's Day by debuting the elevated arms of the soon-to-be Cardinal Dolan.

On his impending reception of the red hat, the Tenth Archbishop of the place the Vatican views as the "Capital of the World" will become the eighth occupant of St Patrick's Cathedral to join the Sacred College in the footsteps of John McCloskey -- the first cardinal created across the Atlantic -- who received his biretta in Fifth Avenue's Downtown predecessor in 1875.

For purposes of context, Canada's first ecclesial "prince," Archbishop Elzear-Alexandre de Taschereau of Quebec, was elevated in 1886, and Latin America's founding cardinal, Rio de Janiero's Joaquim Arcoverde de Albuquerque Cavalcanti, got his galero in 1905.

Speaking of history, the Stateside church reaches a very significant milestone at next month's Consistory -- come the elevation of Dolan and Cardinal-designate Edwin O'Brien of Baltimore, the Bronx and the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, the number of all-time cardinals from these shores will stand at 51.

Given O'Brien's precedence on Benedict's biglietto of nominees -- which puts him in line to receive his red hat first -- he technically enjoys the distinction of becoming the 50th American cardinal. There is, however, a quintessentially Roman flip-side: as the successor of Foley is likely to be made a cardinal-deacon by virtue of his Vatican post, as a residential archbishop, Dolan will enjoy the higher rank of a cardinal-priest... at least, for the next decade.

While each member of the College carries equal responsibilities and privileges, cardinal-deacons may seek to enter the presbyteral class after ten years. From the US, Cardinals Avery Dulles, William Levada, "His Foleyness," Raymond Burke and Francis Stafford were likewise elevated into the diaconal rank over recent years; the latter was bumped up in 2008 after passing the 10th anniversary of his elevation.

As if the USCCB president didn't already have enough to celebrate these days, Dolan turns 62 on February 6th. The cardinal-designate is currently in the Holy Land on a pre-elevation retreat with a group of New York priests.

* * *To weightier matters, the leitmotif of Dolan's Red Dawn has found itself colored by an unexpected thread in the wake of last Friday's Obama administration move to mandate coverage of contraceptives in benefit plans over the religious-freedom objections of a broad spectrum of Catholic leadership, joined by that of other faith-based groups.

Of course, the Gotham prelate quickly took the lead in voicing a reaction he later described as "terribly let down, disappointed and disturbed." Asked earlier this week by a Big Apple TV outlet whether the move had roiled the already-turbulent waters between the bishops and the White House, as perhaps only he could, Dolan shot back that "You bet we got a disagreement."

The question came in the context of a Tuesday night lecture sponsored by Fordham University's Law School, its planned venue swapped for a hall at Lincoln Center in light of a heavier than anticipated crowd.

Given his pre-consistory schedule, the cardinal-designate's talk on "Law and the Gospel of Life" is likely to be the lone major speech of Dolan's transition into the College. Along those lines -- and especially given the heightened interest thanks to both the red hat and conscience battle -- you'd think that a high-profile Northeastern Jesuit university would have the resources and gumption to somehow share the event with a wider audience in ways beyond a bare-bones press release.

Yet as, for whatever reason, a touch of savvy seems to have eluded the Rose Hill mix, here's Dolan's prepared text:


Along the way, before heading to Washington for Monday's March for Life, the cardinal-designate tied a pressing state of poverty into the pro-life equation, launching a diocesan-wide food drive during his Sunday Mass at St Patrick's.

“I just challenge everybody: Put another chair at your table and feed somebody who’s hungry,” Dolan said.

In an earlier aside, though, noting the food baskets that had been brought up during his cathedral liturgy, the cardinal-to-be couldn't help but remark that "I’ve been distracted by that can of chili all during Mass."

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Akeel Bilgrami’s article, “Secularism: Its Content and Context,” is an important and welcome contribution on a topic that has acquired momentum with the renaissance of the public role of religions, in democratic and non-democratic societies alike. Bilgrami clarifies in a penetrating and lucid way, three fundamental ideas on secularism: first, that it is “a stance to be taken about religion”; second, that it is not an indication of the form of government or the liberal nature of a regime; and third, that the context is a crucial factor in issues concerning the relationship between politics and religion. The first two arguments are intertwined and pertain to the identity and function of secularism, while the latter brings us directly to the role of religion in the public sphere, a theme that has become pivotal in contemporary democratic theory. Since I have no strong disagreement with Bilgrami’s arguments, what I would like to do in what follows is propose some specifications and exemplifications that may enrich or complete them.

Let us begin with secularism, which rather than “a stance,” I would suggest we call an ideology or, to paraphrase Michael Freeden’s definition of ideology, a way of simplifying a complex social reality whose kernel would otherwise escape the understanding of the many. In simplifying complexity, ideology is a practical guide for “converting the inevitable variety of options into a monolithic certainty which is the unavoidable feature of a political decision, and which is the basis of the forging of a political identity.” In simplifying complexity, secularism worked and still works as a practical guide for making decisions at the state level. This helps us to see why secularism cannot be identified with the liberal nature of politics or a form of government. Indeed, it pertains to the affirmation of the authority of the state, prior to and autonomously from any form of government. It is crucial to keep sovereignty separate from government to better grasp the difference among secular projects. Countries in which the state has never won the competition with the church over the regulation and control of individual behavior are forced into a stronger politics of secularism. This fact is primed to condition the tenor of politics, even in those countries that have embraced constitutional democracy.

Bilgrami rightly argues, for instance, that the ideals that motivated the political regime that Atatürk imposed on Turkey defined an authoritarian regime, although secularist in character. Secularism can, of course, open the state to a liberal transformation of the nature of its political regime, but to make this possible other kinds of vindication are needed that endow individual actors with prerogatives that limit the power of the state—beginning in the eighteenth century, this is what the bills of rights and constitutional revolutions have done.

What does a secular state need in order to be more liberal or for its politics to acquire a liberal nature—namely, respect for individual freedom against political and religious authority? This question brings me to the last issue in relation to which I would like to propose some additional comments on Bilgrami’s article that pertain to religious pluralism as an unavoidable condition for making secularism of a liberal nature, even when the government is formally democratic. The argument I would like to propose is the following: a mono-religious society, which has the chance to produce a secularist project has less or weaker chances to produce a liberal society, even when and if it embraces a democratic form of government. In mono-religious societies, secularism is destined to be more radical than in pluralist societies even when the state is democratic, because in these societies the risk of theocratic temptation is stronger. The issue of pluralism is sensitive above all in a constitutional democracy, whose public sphere and civil society is naturally open to host ideas and opinions of any kind.

I would like to strengthen my comment with reference to an empirical case that I have discussed in greater detail elsewhere. It pertains to a constitutional democracy in a society that is mono-religious, and in which Bilgrami’s two features of secularism—the ideas of the separation of church and state and that the state maintains a neutral equidistance from different religions within a plural society—are difficult to attain.

During the Parliamentary debates on issues of artificial insemination in Italy two years ago, the Speaker of the Italian Low Chamber, Mr. Gianfranco Fini felt the need to specify something that might seem redundant in a constitutional liberal democracy. He declared that “the Parliament should not pass laws that are inspired by religious precepts.” Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, a prominent Catholic theologian very active in Italian public debate, replied immediately:

The issues on which Catholics intend to be active in politics are not definable as ‘religious precepts’ because they pertain to fundamental rights that are written in human nature, demonstrable by reason, and endorsed by the Italian constitution. Catholics are in the right position for actively participating in the public and parliamentary debate against abortion and euthanasia and to protect family.

As this brief exchange shows, the Italian Parliament and the Roman Catholic Church are presently engaged in a political confrontation that is radical because it involves sovereignty—of civil and of canonical law. The confrontation involves more or less an explicit ideological battle between secularism and theocracy. Yet contrary to older confrontations between the state and the church for the acquisition of supreme authority over human actions (the external domain of behavior), in contemporary constitutional democracies the conflict over the control of civil authority is performed in deliberative style, through the posture of reasoning and the language of rights. This dialogic transformation of politics has opened the public sphere to religious citizens in a new way. At the same time, it also poses a new set of potentially serious problems for constitutional democracy, particularly in societies that have a predominant religion.

In his answer to the Speaker of the House, Monsignor Sgreccia adopted a style of reasoning that John Rawls’ revisited public reason and Jürgen Habermas’ post-secular democracy would consider legitimate. Indeed, while publicly proclaiming principles that he derived from his comprehensive doctrine, Monsignor Sgreccia made an effort to reach out to non-religious citizens by arguing that those principles can also be accepted by them because they are in agreement with the principles of public reason contained in the Italian constitution although expressed not in the form of public reason (like constitutional rights) but in the philosophical language of natural rights, according to the Thomistic tradition. Endorsing this discursive style would seem to be a secure passport for citizens with comprehensive doctrines to actively participate in the public sphere of deliberation.

Hence, Habermas has argued that in post-secular democratic society religious citizens have the right to participate in public discourse with their own principles and convictions. In fact, Habermas is even more generous than Rawls and thinks that the limits on individual liberty that Rawls’ injunction of translation of “private” reasons into “public” reasons contemplates is still too demanding and, moreover, unequal, since it demands more of religious citizens than non-religious ones. In Habermas’ view, thus, Monsignor Sgreccia should be allowed even to claim publicly that the law of the Italian state should be consistent with his “religious precepts” without bothering to engage in any sort of stylistic translation. Indeed, as an ordinary citizen who participates in public opinion formation but not lawmaking, Monsignor Sgreccia should not be asked, not even in the name of what Rawls would call an informal or moral “duty of civility,” to rephrase his religious arguments so as to make them in agreement with the language of civil rights. The question is that Sgreccia’s argument was direct and strong enough to reach the parliament and the Catholic representatives whom all political parties include. In any event, the Italian Parliament produced a very restrictive legislation on the individual choice to procreate through artificial insemination. “Deliberation” in the public sphere was easily translated into the law; the vision of the Catholic majority was able to impose itself over all the citizens, thus violating both the principle of equal rights and secularism. A mono-religious democratic society can easily be subjected to what liberal theorists called the “tyranny of the majority.”

This example shows that liberal democratic theories of public reason, although in different ways, are tailored to and on a philosophical reflection of the liberal societies that are the home of practiced religious pluralism. However, they are—Habermas’ more so than Rawls’—hardly suitable and safe if extended or applied to liberal societies in which one religion enjoys a strong majority and pluralism is only predicated in the constitution but is not a lived experience in society. In relation to the place of religion in the public sphere, I would suggest that along with Rawls’ distinction between liberal societies and despotic societies (whether decent or not) we make also a distinction within liberal societies, among those in which religious pluralism is both a juridical and a social reality, and those in which religious pluralism is protected by the law but is not a social reality or an ethical culture that inspires the public reasoning of ordinary citizens.

This Hegelian distinction/relation between the juridical and the ethical level is important and meant to suggest two ideas: first that we must regard the norm (of constitutional democracy) always in its porous relationship to the actual cultural life of the society, and democracy always as both a set of principles and procedures and an actualization that is contextually specific; and second, that in mono-religious societies—and democratic societies in particular, in which the state’s equidistance is a precept that does not receive the support coming from the practice of religious pluralism—the state cannot avoid adopting a more secularist politics.

In conclusion, I would like to strengthen Bilgrami’s appeal to the relevance of the context when issues of state/religion relationship are at stake. In matters that have a direct impact on the individual freedom of religion and social peace such as the presence of religion in the public sphere, political theorists should pay close attention to the ethical context and the historical tradition of a given society without deducing practical conclusions from an ideal conception of democracy and liberalism. This pragmatic suggestion of going back and forth from the ideal norm to the context is an admission of the fact that a political practice that is liberal in a pluralistic religious environment may turn to be anti-liberal in a mono-religious society. Pluralism is the essential condition within which we should situate the discourse of the role of religions in the public sphere and the issue of secularism. Without pluralism (as a social fact or as an actual plurality of religions, not only a formal declaration of rights) a constitutional democracy has a weaker liberal nature and may generate decisions that are not more liberal or tolerant than those made in a non-constitutional democracy (or in a decent illiberal society, to paraphrase Rawls).

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Keeping with the Vatican's longtime custom on today's feast of the patron of writers and journalists, St Francis de Sales, this Roman Noon brings the release of Pope Benedict's message for the church's 46th World Communications Day, this year's B16-picked focus on the need for silence in effective communications work alongside that of words.

In this relentless age of digital media, suffice it to say, making space for the former can often feel like the greatest challenge of all.

While the pontiff's reflection on the topic rolled out this morning -- and the next Day's theme is always announced on the preceding 29 September feast of the Archangels -- this year's World Communications Day doesn't actually occur until May 20th: always the Sunday before Pentecost, now celebrated in most of the global church as the transferred solemnity of the Ascension.

Moreover, "that the varied apostolates of the church with respect to the media of social communication may be strengthened effectively," a call for an observance on their role to be held "each year in every diocese of the world" was the lone initiative of its kind to be agreed upon by the Fathers of Vatican II, as sketched out in the Council's decree on the media, Inter Mirifica (par. 18).

Here below, the Pope's WCD fulltext.

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SILENCE AND WORD: PATH OF EVANGELIZATION

MESSAGE OF POPE BENEDICT XVI
FOR THE 46th WORLD COMMUNICATIONS DAY
24 JANUARY 2012

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

As we draw near to World Communications Day 2012, I would like to share with you some reflections concerning an aspect of the human process of communication which, despite its importance, is often overlooked and which, at the present time, it would seem especially necessary to recall. It concerns the relationship between silence and word: two aspects of communication which need to be kept in balance, to alternate and to be integrated with one another if authentic dialogue and deep closeness between people are to be achieved. When word and silence become mutually exclusive, communication breaks down, either because it gives rise to confusion or because, on the contrary, it creates an atmosphere of coldness; when they complement one another, however, communication acquires value and meaning.

Silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist. In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested. In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible. It is often in silence, for example, that we observe the most authentic communication taking place between people who are in love: gestures, facial expressions and body language are signs by which they reveal themselves to each other. Joy, anxiety, and suffering can all be communicated in silence – indeed it provides them with a particularly powerful mode of expression. Silence, then, gives rise to even more active communication, requiring sensitivity and a capacity to listen that often makes manifest the true measure and nature of the relationships involved. When messages and information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary. Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages; this makes it possible to share thoughtful and relevant opinions, giving rise to an authentic body of shared knowledge. For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.

The process of communication nowadays is largely fuelled by questions in search of answers. Search engines and social networks have become the starting point of communication for many people who are seeking advice, ideas, information and answers. In our time, the internet is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers – indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions, then silence is a precious commodity that enables us to exercise proper discernment in the face of the surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive. Amid the complexity and diversity of the world of communications, however, many people find themselves confronted with the ultimate questions of human existence: Who am I? What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? It is important to affirm those who ask these questions, and to open up the possibility of a profound dialogue, by means of words and interchange, but also through the call to silent reflection, something that is often more eloquent than a hasty answer and permits seekers to reach into the depths of their being and open themselves to the path towards knowledge that God has inscribed in human hearts.

Ultimately, this constant flow of questions demonstrates the restlessness of human beings, ceaselessly searching for truths, of greater or lesser import, that can offer meaning and hope to their lives. Men and women cannot rest content with a superficial and unquestioning exchange of skeptical opinions and experiences of life – all of us are in search of truth and we share this profound yearning today more than ever: "When people exchange information, they are already sharing themselves, their view of the world, their hopes, their ideals" (Message for the 2011 World Day of Communications).

Attention should be paid to the various types of websites, applications and social networks which can help people today to find time for reflection and authentic questioning, as well as making space for silence and occasions for prayer, meditation or sharing of the word of God. In concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible, profound thoughts can be communicated, as long as those taking part in the conversation do not neglect to cultivate their own inner lives. It is hardly surprising that different religious traditions consider solitude and silence as privileged states which help people to rediscover themselves and that Truth which gives meaning to all things. The God of biblical revelation speaks also without words: "As the Cross of Christ demonstrates, God also speaks by his silence. The silence of God, the experience of the distance of the almighty Father, is a decisive stage in the earthly journey of the Son of God, the incarnate Word …. God’s silence prolongs his earlier words. In these moments of darkness, he speaks through the mystery of his silence" (Verbum Domini, 21). The eloquence of God’s love, lived to the point of the supreme gift, speaks in the silence of the Cross. After Christ’s death there is a great silence over the earth, and on Holy Saturday, when "the King sleeps and God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages" (cf. Office of Readings, Holy Saturday), God’s voice resounds, filled with love for humanity.

If God speaks to us even in silence, we in turn discover in silence the possibility of speaking with God and about God. "We need that silence which becomes contemplation, which introduces us into God’s silence and brings us to the point where the Word, the redeeming Word, is born" (Homily, Eucharistic Celebration with Members of the International Theological Commission, 6 October 2006). In speaking of God’s grandeur, our language will always prove inadequate and must make space for silent contemplation. Out of such contemplation springs forth, with all its inner power, the urgent sense of mission, the compelling obligation "to communicate that which we have seen and heard" so that all may be in communion with God (1 Jn 1:3). Silent contemplation immerses us in the source of that Love who directs us towards our neighbours so that we may feel their suffering and offer them the light of Christ, his message of life and his saving gift of the fullness of love.

In silent contemplation, then, the eternal Word, through whom the world was created, becomes ever more powerfully present and we become aware of the plan of salvation that God is accomplishing throughout our history by word and deed. As the Second Vatican Council reminds us, divine revelation is fulfilled by "deeds and words having an inner unity: the deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them" (Dei Verbum, 2). This plan of salvation culminates in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the mediator and the fullness of all revelation. He has made known to us the true face of God the Father and by his Cross and Resurrection has brought us from the slavery of sin and death to the freedom of the children of God. The fundamental question of the meaning of human existence finds in the mystery of Christ an answer capable of bringing peace to the restless human heart. The Church’s mission springs from this mystery; and it is this mystery which impels Christians to become heralds of hope and salvation, witnesses of that love which promotes human dignity and builds justice and peace.

Word and silence: learning to communicate is learning to listen and contemplate as well as speak. This is especially important for those engaged in the task of evangelization: both silence and word are essential elements, integral to the Church’s work of communication for the sake of a renewed proclamation of Christ in today’s world. To Mary, whose silence "listens to the Word and causes it to blossom" (Private Prayer at the Holy House, Loreto, 1 September 2007), I entrust all the work of evangelization which the Church undertakes through the means of social communication.

From the Vatican, 24 January 2012, Feast of Saint Francis de Sales

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

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