Weigel on Benedict on Europe

Happy New Year to all!

To begin the year on a thoughtful note, George Weigel reflects on Pope Benedict's comments in Germany.

Weigel:

Europe is dying, and Benedict knows it. It is dying demographically, which is one root of its current fiscal and political mess. But self-destructive birthrates do not just happen, absent wars, plagues, and natural disasters; Europe’s self-destruction is a by-product of a deep spiritual malaise that has led to both demographic winter and cultural crisis. Thus Benedict XVI in Germany intended to be far more than Professor Ratzinger, teaching a needed lesson in cultural history. He was also the pastor, speaking to what he described to seminarians in Freiburg im Breisgau on September 24 as a “poverty in human relations and poverty in the religious sphere” in a country of great material abundance.

That abundance, he suggested, had corrupted the Church and weakened its evangelical edge: “The Church in Germany is superbly organized. But behind the structures, is there also a corresponding spiritual strength, the strength of faith in the living God? We must honestly admit that we have more than enough by way of structure but not enough by way of Spirit . . . [for] the real crisis facing the Church in the Western world is a crisis of faith.” And the only answer to that is evangelization: The Church in Germany and elsewhere in Europe must “resolutely . . . set aside her worldliness,” as Benedict put it the next day to a mixed group of clerical and lay Catholic activists, and take up once again the task of becoming a community that offers the “nourishment of love [in]concrete friendship with others and with the Lord” — an evangelical task that can only be accomplished by regular worship in the Sunday Eucharist (which some 7 percent of urban Germans attend).

The future of Europe, in other words, depends on whether Europe becomes, once again, a continent of saints. It may seem a quaint, even quixotic, notion. But as the pope put it to a large gathering of young people, it’s wrong to think of saints as “remote from the world, naïve and joyless,” men and women of impossibly great “ascetic and moral achievements . . . who could never be imitated in our own lives.” This is a wrongheaded view of sanctity, for “Christ is not so much interested in how often in our lives we stumble and fall, as in how often with his help we pick ourselves up again. He does not demand glittering achievements . . . but [rather] wants to make you his friends,” who can be holy “if we allow his grace to work in us.”

Benedict understands Europe's death spiral. Western civilization is under siege from the idolatry of material prosperity, from scientism, from simmering Marxism and fascism, from functional and confessional atheism, from resurgent Islam. Europe, brought to life by Christian spirituality over two millennia, is dying spiritually.

The Pope is right. Sanctity alone can save Europe, just as sanctity gave birth to it.