Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts

So we had the March for Life in Ottawa yesterday, and a most beautiful day for it, it was—sunny, warm, all that. While crowd size estimates are approximate at best, the organizers think around 24 000 were in attendance. It does seem slightly bigger each year, but it’s hard to tell when you’re on the ground. It is, without question, the biggest demonstration that happens each year in Ottawa.

What’s the point of it? We meet, we listen to some speeches of varying quality, we process around downtown Ottawa holding signs, we return to Parliament Hill where there are more talks and some prayers, and that’s it, pretty much. The counter-protestors yell at us, strip their clothes off and rush the podium (yes, that happened again this year), and increasingly try to disrupt and interrupt the proceedings (kudos to the Ottawa police for their professional calm way of removing the disruptors).

So, what’s the point of it all? We know that the Canadian political system is not going to re-open the abortion debate as a matter of law any time soon. So it’s not for them, exactly. It certainly is an event for the young people who make up a very large percentage of the crowd. Consciousness raising and conscience formation are crucial in the long-term eradication of abortion from our society—since we cannot make abortion illegal, let’s try to make it unthinkable.

In this light, the women and men of Silent No More Awareness Campaign play, perhaps, one of the most important roles in the day, as they give their testimonies on the Hill after the march. The young men and women who remain for that event, where they hear story after story of the devastating harm done by legal abortions, cannot possibly go away thinking that it’s no big deal or an easy answer to a crisis pregnancy. I only wish that some of the counter-protestors would stay and at least listen to these people—real people, who really got into terrible situations and did turn to abortion to solve their problem, only to find it did no such thing.

My own sadness in the whole thing is the extent to which the two sides seem to talk past each other. Those of us in the pro-life movement firmly hold that a new human life begins at conception (that is a strictly scientific statement, by the way), and that every human life should be extended the protection of law (a statement grounded in the entire legal tradition of our society). One human being simply cannot kill another human being, except for very rigorously defined and long established exceptions—self-defence, soldiers at war.

In terms of the strict question of the morality of abortion, that is the beginning and the end of the matter. Once we establish the existence of a living human being (and there is no question of this from any point of view of science), the legal protections given human life apply, or ought to. ‘Everybody counts, or nobody counts’, as fictional detective Harry Bosch says when he tracks down the murderer of yet another obscure demimondaine over the objections of his superiors.

Well, that is the fundamental pro-life position, but of course the pro-choice (to use their own name for themselves) position simply refuses to engage that. They really seem to believe that we don’t really believe that, and that the whole thing is a bluff to hide our real intentions, which is the suppression and control of women.

“Our bodies, our choice,” is the chant they used yesterday, along with “Pro-life is a lie. You don’t care if women die!” But the choice is to kill another human being. I cannot use my body to do that, can I? Meanwhile, it is true that every pregnancy has its risks—there is no question of that. But many women also die because of complications from abortion, not to mention the long-term negative effects of abortion on many fronts, none of which are ever presented to the woman when she is considering the procedure (so much for informed consent!).

And many doctors, faced with a woman who is pregnant and who also has this or that health issue, are quick to pressure the woman to have an abortion. I know many women who have resisted that pressure, carried a healthy baby to term and successfully dealt with their other health issues. Too often doctors prescribe abortion, not because it is medically necessary, but because it simplifies their job.

Yes, there can be wrenching and difficult situations where there are no easy answers, and it is no service to the pro-life cause to ignore those. But in the hardest and worst of those scenarios, the basic truth remains: there are two human beings here, and both have to be considered, both have to be treated as human. Everybody counts, or nobody counts.

It just isn’t true that pro-lifers don’t care about women. We do care, and we know that abortion is no kind of a solution to the real problems and real sufferings that attend crisis pregnancies. What is needed are communities to surround all our suffering people in all situations with love, with concern, with support, with concrete help. For families to do that for their own members, and when that family network fails (which is tragically frequent in our day) for the larger community to pick up the slack. The great driver of abortion is family breakdown and social isolation and abandonment.

To say ‘You mustn’t kill you child!” and then give no help or support is not really pro-life, is it? But to say “I will support you as you kill your child!” is not really supporting the woman, either.

Anyhow, I don’t write about abortion much, not because I don’t care about it, but because I care very much, and it’s hard to write about it, frankly. But these are the thoughts that marched around in my brain as I marched around Ottawa, and listened, and prayed. Everybody counts, or nobody counts. And I believe everybody counts.

The Custodian of Human Dignity

The look I freely direct to the other is decisive for my own dignity, too. I can acquiesce in reducing the other to a thing that I use and destroy; but by the same token, I must accept the consequences of the way I use my eyes here.

These consequences will fall on my own head: “You will be measured by the measure with which you measure.” The way I look at the other is decisive for my own humanity. I can treat him quite simply like a thing, forgetting my dignity and his, that both he and I are made in the image and likeness of God. The other is the custodian of my own dignity…

How is it possible for a man to use his eyes in such a way that he perceives and respects the dignity of the other person and guarantees his own dignity? The drama of our times consists precisely in our incapacity to look at ourselves like this – and that is why we find it threatening to look at the other and must protect ourselves against this.

In reality, morality is always embedded in a wider religious context in which it ‘breathes’ and finds its proper environment. Outside this environment, morality cannot breathe: it weakens and then dies.

Joseph Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 69-70

Reflection – I was musing just the other day that it is a bit odd that I went from the first year and half of my blog being exclusively dedicated to the writings of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, to almost never having anything by the man on it. A careless reader would think I had grown tired or disenchanted of the man, which is anything but true.

So I thought I would remedy that with at least a couple of days of good old school ‘German Shepherd’ blogging. I have always recommended this book in particular as a good ‘starter’ book for anyone interested in the thought of Pope Benedict. It is topical, timely, weighty without being overly ponderous, and (best of all!) short.

This passage speaks to the heart of our alienation from one another today, the fracturing and fragmenting of humanity into at best little tribal alliances, at worst into sheer atomized units. To look at the other, to see that the other person is just that—a person—endowed with dignity, rights, humanity, someone with whom I can at least potentially enter into communion with—this is increasingly difficult in our secular, polarized world.

It has been the consistent argument of Ratzinger that to really maintain and live out the dignity of the human person, and indeed our own dignity, we have to locate this dignity in something greater than humanity itself. In other words, in a religious context. We are creatures worthy of being treated with dignity, with inalienable rights, because our being is from God, in the image of God, and destined for God.

It is no accident of history that the theory of intrinsic and inalienable human rights emerged in 16^th century Europe and was first posited by Dominican friars. They were motivated to draft this theory by the discovery of the New World and the dawning of the age of colonialism, the discovery of vast numbers of human beings who were outside the social order of Christendom, which prior to this had been seen as the necessary matrix of mutual obligation and just treatment.

De las Casas and others developed the theory of human rights directly from Christian theological principles. Sadly, the subsequent colonial history marked so tragically by exploitation, enslavement, and brutality shows that their theories were not adopted as principles of action, which speaks more to the weakness of Christian faith and practice in that era than anything else.

It is nonetheless the case that human dignity, human freedom, and human rights are best held firm, made intellectually viable and given vitality and freshness from a lively faith in a Creator God who is the author of life, and who has endowed human life in particular with a divine significance, vocation, and destiny.

Without this faith—and I believe this is what we are seeing happening in our society now—we see a gradual erosion of the very notion of rights in favor of the exercise of power in service of this or that agenda, lip service paid to rights such as the right to life, to assembly, to religious freedom or freedom of speech, which are quickly trampled if the person in question is inconvenient, costly, or is saying or doing something opposed to the prevailing mores.

Unless civil society is held in being and grounded by something Bigger than civil society, something that holds all human society and culture to judgment, something that makes possible the question ‘Is justice being administered justly?’ (this very question is meaningless in a strictly secular and materialistic world, where there is nothing higher than the law of the land), then the threat of tyranny and ultimately anomic anarchy is always upon us, as I believe it to be in our time.

But - and this where Ratzinger is very strong - the remedy is as near and immediate as how I treat you today, and how you treat me today, and the 'look' towards the other in which the dignity and worth of each person is fully and freely acknowledged. The problem is not 'out there' or 'up there' in places of power and influence, but is right and squarely with you and me and the choice to respect and reverence the other person in his or her otherness.

Sentimentality Leads to the Gas Chamber

According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply.

No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will.

The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation.

Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.

Address to Roman Curia, December 21, 2012

Reflection – This is a very tight, careful argument the Pope is making here. It needs to be read carefully and thought through. Essentially, his point is that many things come together into a single reality to maintain our human dignity and make it possible.

The modern idea of human freedom—that it means a rejection of human nature and the capacity to create oneself virtually ex nihilo—actually destroys human freedom. As Leonard Cohen says in his song Closing Time, “It looks like freedom but it feels like death.”

Once human being is not essentially a gift given, it becomes a commodity. If we are all free to make of ourselves whatever we will be, if humanity is nothing but a blank slate on which to cast our ideas and achievements, then the human person as person is something of little account, little value. It is a very short leap from there to talking of ‘lives not worth living,’ of Ubermensch and Untermensch.

It all seems very fine to speak of freedom in these terms. It seems kind and tolerant to say that everyone just gets to make anything whatsoever they want of their lives, and that the essence of happiness and freedom is to do just that. It is sentimental, but sentimentality leads to the gas chamber.

When the fundamental reality of the human person as made in God’s image and likeness, and of God the Creator fashioning us so, is lost, then the door is not just open to a radical devaluing of human life. In fact the door is closed and barred fast against any coherent picture of human dignity and the ineradicable value of the person.

To a large degree Western Civilization has been living off the capital of its Christian theology for some centuries now, while largely rejecting that theology. We seem to think that it is normal and natural for humanity to respect the dignity of persons. But it takes only a little knowledge of history to know that chattel slavery and child murder, tribal warfare and destruction of the weak has been the norm of humanity for most of its history. And it is to that norm we are returning, quickly, as our capital runs out. Not so much a fiscal cliff as a spiritual and moral one.

Our humanity is given to us, and given to us as a gift of being made in God’s image and likeness. Our male-female identity is at the heart of this ‘givenness’, both because we experience nowhere more deeply the determined nature of our humanity, and because it is only in this determined gendered humanity that the capacity to bring forth new human beings lies.

 

I said a few days ago, with great Chestertonian paradox, that freedom is perfected in slavery—only in committing our lives irrevocably to the other are we truly free. I now say, with equal paradox, that freedom only arises from slavery. It is only in experiencing our humanity as a gift we did not choose and cannot change that we enter into and preserve the dignity and freedom of our own person and that of others.

The Unlimited Evil of Fascism

In a rare move for me on this blog, today I'm posting a link to this brilliant post from Mark Shea. It is basically an e-mail from one of his readers, but it nails the whole question of our time right on the head.

He writes:

One critical error people make in contemplating fascism is to believe that fascism is about ideas, dogmas, or programmatic solutions to human problems. Fascism is none of those things. First and above all, fascism is a belief in the state as the supreme human achievement. Or, as the Party recently said, the state is the only thing we all belong to. This gives the fascist state a flexibility unknown to most totalitarian movements, notably socialism, which are bound by dogmatic commitments and the corresponding need to pretend that the dogmas are productive.

Put another way, the magical thinking of socialism is like fan fiction — it’s limited by a background story. So Pope John Paul II, when he was a cardinal in socialist Poland, could upbraid the socialist utopia for failing in its constitutional promise to respect religion. In contrast, the magical thinking of fascism is unlimited, which makes fascism a much more potent and insidious form of evil...

Go and read the rest, and maybe even pass it along - this is precisely what we are up against increasingly in our world.

Healing the Wound

[With legal abortion] one becomes blind to the right to life of another, the smallest and weakest person involved, one without a voice. The rights of some individuals are affirmed at the cost of the fundamental right to life of another individual. This is why every legalization of abortion implies the idea that law is based on power.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 62-3

Reflection – As I have said here before, abortion is one of the hardest topics to write about well. (It’s easy to write about it badly…). The evil at the heart of it is so monstrous that words fail to express it. At the same time, there is so much real pain and anguish surrounding every abortion—the horrible fears and truly tragic circumstances that so often drive women in crisis pregnancies to abort, the breakdown in relationships that an abortion both manifests and quickens, the emotional fallout of anger, hurt, guilt, depression that so many women (and some men) experience afterwards… abortion is a gaping open wound in our society.

I would argue that it is in fact the wound at the heart of our civilization, a wound that (I am convinced) will be the death of us if it is not staunched eventually. Ratzinger here in typical mild understatement puts his finger on it. Abortion means that in the end power is what counts in this world. An unborn human being is the most powerless creature—invisible, voiceless, largely immobile—and by virtue of that is denied protection under the law. Therefore, the possession of rights is linked to the possession of power.

The truth of the humanity of the unborn does not matter. The manifest goodness, obvious to everyone this side of serial killers, of respecting the right to life of a human being does not matter. The beauty that emerges when truth and goodness are honored is torn asunder. Abortion is an ugly evil lie, and the heart of that lie is that truth, goodness, and beauty are not the ultimate realities in this world.

Power is, instead. And from power, violence. And from violence, death. We say that love is stronger than death, and everyone wants to believe that. But with abortion, death has the last word, trumping whatever love was present in the situation. We sing, along with the Beatles and a thousand other sentimental songs, that ‘all you need is love,’ but apparently we also need to be able to kill at will the unborn children that arise from love’s embrace.

Abortion puts to death, not only the child, but all our sentimental notions about love and its supremacy. It is power, violence, and death that conquer all, not love. All the romantic songs begin to ring a bit hollow after a few decades of this.

And so what are we to do? Repent, of course. I realize that almost everyone who reads this is already pro-life by conviction. But, you know, the infection of power, violence, and death is a deep and insidious one. Pro-life people need to be vigilant about this. Do I disregard the powerless one, the disadvantaged one, the poor one? And don’t forget that poverty has a million faces and aspects beyond the obvious material one.

Do I gravitate to the powerful ones, the ones who can help me, the ones who have something to offer me? Do I despise, subtly perhaps, those who cannot or have not? Whenever we do this, our pro-life convictions are belied by our inner attitudes. We have to guard against this.

The ugly evil lie is that what makes a person valuable is their power, their ability, their strength. The beautiful radiant truth is that what makes a person valuable is the love of the Father poured out upon them from the moment of their creation. Let us strive to live in that love ourselves, and strive mightily to see each human being in our life today in the light of that love and that truth. It is the only way that the open, gaping, festering wound of abortion will be healed in our world.

Freedom is Not Free

Freedom entails the ability of the conscience to perceive the fundamental value of humanity, a value that concerns every individual.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 48

Reflection – Well we have one of those nifty one-liners here, virtually tweet-like in its succinctness (132 characters, to be precise), which says more than many a vast volume of verbiage could voice. (Alliteration is fun!)

It is a huge theme of Ratzinger’s that freedom, so crucial, so necessary to the human project, does not stand alone as its own thing, independent and secure. Freedom exists in a matrix of values and truths without which it cannot survive.

Freedom simply as ‘I will do as I please,’ is doomed to failure. Either some other person will come along and in their freedom rob, rape, or kill me, doing as they please and leaving me a wreck or a corpse, or I myself will get subsumed into the collectivist thinking of the herd, where ‘what I please’ to do just happens to line up precisely with the messages and agendae of Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Freedom has to be held secure by something else. And many people get this. ‘Freedom is not free!’ is a battle cry in some quarters, although (sadly) what is often meant by that is that we have to invade other countries and torture the people living in them so that we can continue to be brainwashed by Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Ahem. Sorry. My inner hippy radical speaking there. S’true, though!

Ratzinger is (as usual!) right on the money when he says that freedom is held secure by the perception of the fundamental value of humanity, and its application to the individual. If I do not treat you as the inestimable being of value that you are, if you do not treat, or at least attempt to treat, each person you meet as if they are a V.I.P., literally, to look on everyone as a ‘thou’ and not as an ‘it’, then your freedom and mine are on very shaky grounds.

Why is this? Well, the Pope and I have written extensively about this over the past year. Clicking on the ‘freedom’ tag at the bottom of this post will give you a fair bit to chew on with the subject. It’s really a matter of knowing what freedom is for, which is really tied to the question of what human life is for. What is it all about, anyhow?

When we reduce the human person to something less than human, when we objectify, use, discard, destroy people according to some calculus of value or other, we lose what freedom is for. Freedom is for loving, for communion, for a joyous entry into the community of man, the human family, an entry and a communion that here and now is marked by struggle and anguish, but nonetheless is the essence of human life and flourishing.

To descend to a sort of law of the jungle, an approach to humanity marked by calculation and use, makes communion possible. If I use you, I cannot be in communion with you. If I cannot be in communion with you, I am no longer free. Life is reduced to a bare level of use and abuse, and ultimately I am enslaved by my desires, by the pressures of the marketplace, and by the pressures of the mass media and its group-think.

In other words, respect for life is the bare minimum requirement of a free society. So… is Canada a free society? Is America? Is Europe?

The struggle for the right to life is at the very core of restoring, rebuilding, and securing the freedom of our nations, and our claim to be humane and civil societies.

Tag! You're (an) It!

Another form of power has become prominent…. Man is now capable of making men, of producing them in test tubes, so to speak. Man becomes a product, and this fundamentally alters man’s relationship to himself. He is no longer a gift of nature or of the Creator God: he is his own product. Man has climbed down in to the wellsprings of power, to the source of his very existence. The temptation now to construct the ‘correct’ man at last, the temptation to experiment with human beings, the temptation to see them as garbage and to get rid of them – this is not some fantastic notion of moralists inimical to progress.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 36

Reflection – Yesterday the Pope and I reflected together on the need for faith, on how human beings need to be open to what is bigger than ourselves, to what transcends our utilitarian practical capacities and knowledge. I went so far as to say that without faith, man becomes sub-human.

Today, we look at what this ‘sub-human’ life might look like in real world terms. Looks quite a bit like the world we live is, doesn’t it? It reminds me of the poem “For the Time Being” by W.H. Auden. A Christmas poem, he describes that moment in the stable at Bethlehem where “Everything become a Thou/And nothing was an It.” The intense personalization and communion-character of all reality touched by Incarnate God.

The modern world increasingly resembles a sort of anti-Bethlehem: a place where everyone becomes an It, and nobody is a Thou. Every human life is stripped of mystery and gift and wonder and awe and instead is evaluated on strict utilitarian socio-economic calculations.

We see this in the pre-natal diagnosis and aborting of disabled fetuses; we see this quite openly in the more radical strains of the euthanasia movement; we see this in the increasing and alarming tendency in psychiatry to pathologize any behaviors or thought patterns occurring outside a strictly defined norm.

This latter may be unfamiliar to people. I have a humorous example. When I was a seminarian, I discovered that priests and seminarians scored highly on the test diagnosing Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Now that sounds alarming—who wants a bunch of narcissistic priests, right?

But it turns out that the reason for this test result was that we answer yes to the question “Do you believe God has a plan for your life?” According to psychiatrists (so learned!) only narcissists believe that. That the same seminarians and priests would add that God has a plan for every human life, that each person He made is precious in his sight… well, that doesn’t come up on the test. So it’s not relevant. I guess.

Underneath all this, however, is precisely what Ratzinger is describing. Without a transcendent sense of things, without a sense of the mystery, wonder, awe, gift, marvel that human beings are, that life is—without all of that, we reduce humanity to one more ‘thing’, one more product, one more object of scientific study and technological manipulation.

This is what it looks like to live without faith, to live without a soul, as I put it yesterday. Everything is an It and nothing and no one is a Thou. This is why Down’s Syndrome children and bed-ridden elderly and hyper active boys and narcissistic priests (hee hee) are so important today. We have to reclaim the mystery, reclaim the wonder. We have to humble ourselves before one another and remember that there is something in each human person before which we can only bow low in reverence. We are not the masters here. And without a sense of God, of the Master of all, it may prove very hard to do that. Don’t you think?

Can You Be More Specific?

When the human person is no longer seen as standing under God’s protection and bearing God’s breath, then he begins to be viewed in a utilitarian fashion. It is then that the barbarity appears which tramples upon human dignity.

In the Beginning, 60

Reflection – Lily Tomlin, in a one woman Broadway show that was a big hit back in the 1980s (I misremember the name of it right now!) had a line I’ve always remembered. “I always wanted to be someone,” she said, “but I now realize I should have been more specific.”

Human dignity, human value, the precious gift of each human person as a ‘someone’ and not a ‘something’—this is something the whole wide world, or at least those of us in the post-Christian West, can easily get on board with. Of course every human being is precious and valuable and all that good stuff.

But why? Our behavior is not always so precious and valuable. Our ideas and desires are not so unique and fascinating: most people tend to fall into a fairly conformist mode of life and thought. We’re not all rock stars, fashion models, or Mensa members.

Without God’s protection and God’s breath, can we credibly uphold human dignity and specialness? Without God, who is this ‘someone’ who is supposed to be worth so much. What’s the specific that makes me someone you or anyone should care about?

In fact, the history of the last hundred years (and indeed deeper and broader human history) shows that outside of this sense of God’s love and inestimable valuing of each human person, there has been little if any sense of human dignity, human worth. The poor and wretched, in particular, have been accorded little value and no rights in much of the world, for much of the human story. It’s hardly self-evident, this human dignity and worth business.

Christianity did bring this into the world, admittedly not as quickly as one would have liked, and with a terrible uphill battle against precisely the barbarism Ratzinger describes in this passage. But it is a historical fact that the very notion of human rights flowing from our divine origin and destiny is wholly a product of Christian theology reflecting on the doctrines of creation and redemption.

Without God to protect us and hold us in his love, we are very vulnerable to all the forces of barbarism: exploitation, political repression, utilitarian calculation, and the unfettered killing of the weak and helpless who come out on the wrong side of the equation.

As God is increasingly thrown to the side of social structures or worse, thrown in the ‘dustbin of history’ as an irrelevant relic of past superstition, we must take here. Where are we to find a secure notion of human dignity and freedom? The state? Academia? Market forces? A vague trust in human goodness? Have any of these shown themselves to be reliable guardians of these values?

We have to ask ourselves these questions, and ask them of those who want to forge an entirely secular ethic. Barbarism looms before us; some would argue that a society where babies can be killed at the will of their mothers has already gotten there. And so we have to ask: without God, where does human dignity come from and where is it held secure?

For Democracy to Survive

“We are obliged to ask: must there not be a non-relativistic kernel in democracy too? For is not democracy ultimately constructed around human rights that are inviolable?.. We prefer today to speak of values rather than of truth, in order to avoid coming into conflict with the idea of tolerance and with democratic relativism. But such a terminological transposition will not allow us to evade the question I have just posed, since values derive their inviolability precisely from the fact that they are true and that they correspond to true requirements of human existence.” Values in a Time of Upheaval, p. 56.

Reflection – The problem of relativism looms large in Ratzinger’s writings. The section quoted above is from a lengthy discussion of the relationship of democracy, tolerance, and truth. In a secular democracy, can we make claims about the truth of good and evil, or absolute truth statements about reality? Does this not open us up to the danger of intolerance, the suppression of the rights of those who disagree with us? How can a secular and pluralistic society manage its affairs unless it excludes any truth claims from its legal and social structure? Many would answer these questions by insisting that a secular society must adhere to a position of strict relativism, confining all claims about truth to the private sphere.

These are indeed big questions at any time, but are especially pressing today, as courts and legislatures redefine the very meaning of marriage, human rights commissions define and re-define the limits of free speech, and the rights of human beings at the far ends of life (i.e. the unborn and the elderly) are alternately denied or debated. What are we free to say? To do? To think? What is the nature of freedom in the world, and what is its safeguard?

In this passage, Ratzinger points out that a democratic free society cannot safely commit itself to a strict moral relativism without endangering its own foundations.

The question is simple: do human beings have rights or don’t we? A strict relativist would have to say, “That depends.” But if we do not have rights which absolutely cannot be violated, then the very core of democracy is gutted.

Without a theory of inalienable rights, we are left with this: in some fashion, some entity in society, some arm of the state, determines what we do or do not have a right to do at any moment. If there are no inherent absolute rights that stand independent of social organization or government fiat, then we are essentially serfs of the state, exercising our freedoms only at the good pleasure and discretion of those controlling the levers of power.

This is a grim, even alarming prospect, yet we have to be clear. It is the strict logical implications of moral relativism at the level of mass society. A truly free society logically must rest on truth. If there is no truth, there is no freedom, since our freedoms can be denied at any moment by our betters. If there is no freedom, there is no democracy. Some kind of binding truth statements is necessary for a healthy democracy to survive.

Of course, this necessity of truth for freedom and democracy carries us into deep waters, difficult determinations. Yet without engaging these deep and difficult questions, we are in deeper waters yet. Indeed, we are profoundly vulnerable to tyrannies of the right or the left, to having any particular right we currently enjoy disposed of as soon as it becomes inconvenient to the achieving of this or that social good.

And this, in fact, is the situation of the modern world, insofar as it insists on a relativistic view of reality and morality.