SPIRITUAL LIFE
Scholar sees bleak future for Europe
By Rich Barlow | October 7, 2006
What could bring out 600 people, including a cardinal, on a beautiful fall night in the middle of the week? At St. Paul Church in Cambridge Wednesday, the draw was a leading Catholic intellectual with a pessimistic prognosis for the future of Europe and maybe the United States.
George Weigel may not be as famous as actor George Clooney, but as a senior fellow at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, a syndicated columnist, and a prolific author who wrote a popular biography of Pope John Paul II, he commands attention among the intelligentsia. (He's among the thinkers cited in a new book, ``The Theocons," on conservative Catholic intellectuals worried that secularism is rotting public morality.)
Weigel's talk, the first lecture this season sponsored by St. Paul's lay Committee on Spiritual and Public Concerns, was elaborately planned and regimented, down to the restroom guides available during the speech. The speaker was introduced by Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, who called Weigel a friend and a man ``whose love for the church and passion for democracy . . . shines in all of his works."
The most relevant of those works was ``The Cube and the Cathedral," Weigel's 2005 book that provided the basis of the talk he gave Wednesday on what he called Europe's ``civilizational crisis."
The continent that was ``the undisputed center of world civilization" 100 years ago had a cancerous 20th century, cursed by two world wars and the tyrannies of Hitler and the Soviet Union. Today, Weigel said, Europe is facing a pincer of a plummeting birth rate and an economic crisis that he says will inevitably follow, as too few workers struggle to support the healthcare and pension programs of an aging population.
How did Europe wind up this way?
The fate of nations is bound up in their cultures -- ``what men and women believe, cherish, work, and are prepared to die for" -- and European culture has become hostile to Christianity, Weigel argues. ``The God of the Bible came to be perceived as the enemy of human liberation," he declared, exemplified by the refusal in 2004, in the drafting of the proposed European constitution, to acknowledge Christianity as a major source of European civilization.
The best hope for reversing this secular slide, he argued, is for Europeans to shake their anti-religion attitudes and embrace Christian roots, because a humane culture is difficult to erect ``without understanding the meaning of `under God,' which means under judgment, which means answerable to transcendent" moral standards.
What does all this have to do with the United States, which, after all, is a profoundly religious nation? ``While our cultural circumstances are obviously quite different," Weigel said, ``they're not that different."
He cited what he called anti-Christian attitudes in Hollywood, a dearth of college philosophy professors willing to acknowledge absolute moral truths, and the suggestion by some that proclaiming Christian values in public debates threatens First Amendment protections.
This grim outlook isn't universally shared, even among conservatives. Columnist George F. Will has written that Europe's allergy to religion may be a perfectly rational response to centuries of religious wars and the ``political religions of fascism and communism." Other critics suggest that Weigel slights the secular impulses of the Enlightenment and its support for pluralism.
Jerome D. Maryon, president of the sponsoring committee, agreed with Weigel after the talk that ``too many Europeans who are keen on the Enlightenment slight the contributions of the church."
``The Enlightenment is a thin version of rationality," Maryon said. ``The church, which has committed horrendous sins through all the generations, nonetheless has a very thick sense of what rationality is."
For all his stature as a theocon, Weigel, in his talk and in answers to written questions from the audience afterward, opened paths for conciliation and dialogue with those who don't share his beliefs.
When one questioner challenged his assertion that Catholicism is the wellspring of democratic thought, citing the church's cozying up to totalitarian regimes in the past, Weigel called that entanglement a mistake. He said it took the church until the Second Vatican Council in 1965 to develop a distinctively Catholic defense of tolerance and pluralism.
Asked what could be done about the European demise he forecast, he cited a suggestion Pope Benedict XVI made in a book when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Ratzinger, Weigel said, called for a ``creative minority" of religious believers allied with those nonbelievers who agreed that there are universal moral imperatives. He hoped that such a coalition might reform public life. ``That's the most interesting suggestion along those lines that I've heard so far," Weigel said.
``It's very important," he insisted, ``for religious people not to concede to the secular world's attempts to push us to the margins of secular life."