secular horizon could not generate. Pope Benedict XVI has referred to the
relationship between religion and political reason as a two-way process:
religious faith needs reason to preserve it from sectarianism and fundamen-
talism; reason needs Christian faith to purify it from ideological closure. That
is why he suggests‘that the world of reason and the world of faith—the world
of secular rationality and the world of religious belief—need one another
and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue,
for the good of our civilization’.^38 In practical terms, Christians should accept
religious freedom for all as well as the secularity and emancipation of earthly
fields of action, but they should also speak out in order to defend Christian
values‘through an open, public, rational discourse in the public sphere of
civil society’.^39
Christian Faith and Cultural CrisisThis public defence of Christian values becomes all the more urgent because of
the cultural crisis that the Western world has manoeuvred itself into.‘Cultural’
comprises the set of elements that shape our common life in societies, includ-
ing a core of shared values, which permit the moral regeneration of societies.
Somehow our Western societies seem to have derailed and are incapable of
getting the train back on track. The crisis of capitalism has become manifest in
its apparent unwillingness (not impossibility) to harness thefinancial markets
to the needs of the real economy; there is growing unemployment and a lack of
work ethos. The crisis of politics cannot be overseen when governments seem
incapable of solving or even reducing public debt, and they refuse to make
unpopular but necessary decisions. And the moral crisis has spread in the
‘civilization of death’, with its multiple negations of human life, marriage, and
family. As Russell Hittinger has pointed out, Catholic social teaching was not
prepared for the possibility that the rule of law, enshrined inPacem in terris
and the documents of the Second Vatican Council, could also mean‘state
neutrality on the ontological grounds of rights’, or even prohibition for the
state (under pretext of rights language) to adopt a Christian anthropology.
John Paul II, in his encyclicalEvangelium vitae, views the development of
Western political reality as a history of‘betrayal’. He uses very strong language
throughout:‘conspiracy’, poisoning of the culture of rights, violation of the
principles of the constitution which were their boast, and so on.^40
(^38) Benedict XVI, Address to the Representatives of British Society, cf. http://www.vatican.va/
holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2010/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe20100917
societa-civile_en.html.
(^39) Casanova,Public, 223. (^40) Hittinger,Introduction, 32.
210 Martin Schlag