Joseph Ratzinger has been visiting England of late. He’s having a lousy time, what with a fusillade of accusations pelting him at every turn. The professional bashers are having themselves a fine time and the piles of invective just keep on growing. Ratzinger seems to be spending most of his time apologizing to half the population of England for the inability of the priesthood to keep its pecker in its cassock. All the damage control in his arsenal—for damage control is clearly the purpose of his visit—cannot atone for child abuse. But amidst all his grovelling and mea culpa-ing he took some time to let fly with a particularly galling set of zingers, delivered during an address to assorted British bigwigs:
“I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalisation of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance. There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere. There are those who would argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none.”
The sheer cluelessness of his statements boggle the mind. How can this man bewail a secularized society, when that very secularization is the reason he’s able to visit England without being hanged, drawn, quartered, and his head displayed on a pikestaff? The English used to do that to people who traipsed around on the wrong side of whatever religion was fashionable at the time. But they don’t do it any more. They don’t do it to Catholics or Protestants or Hindus or Jews or Buddhists or Zoroastrians or agnostics or atheists. They don’t even do it to horny clerics who can’t keep their hands off kids or the higher-ups who cover it all up.
And that’s not because of any softening of heart on the part of the clerical authorities. What brought about the end of vicious religious persecution was the Enlightenment, that intellectual turning point that elevated free inquiry and the exercise of reason into a basic human right. Secularization, in other words. And some of the best and brightest of the Enlightened philosophers were Englishmen. Their influence soaked thinking in the British colonies across the Atlantic, so much so that the United States Constitution states the issue in no-nonsense, no-brainer clarity:
Congress shall make no laws touching religion, or to infringe the rights of conscience.
Only in a secularized society, one in which religion has been marginalized into a private matter, can religious tolerance flourish. When you get right down to it, the only people who are truly capable of practicing religious tolerance are those who are free of the straitjacket of monolithic religions and their monopolistic claims on truth and morality. Secular softening is a fundamental pre-requisite for religious plurality.
So Herr Ratzinger proposes to cut off his nose to spite his face. There’s probably not much else he can do. He heads up an organized religion during the final stages of religion’s long decline. The faiths themselves make this abundantly clear as the revelations keep piling up; these are nasty, decadent institutions indeed, mostly concerned with retaining their few remaining morsels of political power and protecting their own. They have no ghostly authority any more. They can’t order people whipped or tortured or jailed or executed. Excommunication is a meaningless punishment—does anybody care? They can excommunicate half the population of England if they want; it’s just words on paper. For that matter, they can beatify the remaining half if it amuses them; that’s also just words on paper.
That’s all it has ever been, just words on paper. And Joseph Ratzinger thinks we should go back to the ignorance of thinking otherwise.
He’s getting on and so I don’t suppose he’ll live long enough to see the inevitable conclusion. Sooner or later the Roman church will totter to its end. The Vatican, already three-quarters museum, will become only a tourist attraction with no more religious significance than the ruins at Delphi. And in time even interest in those musty relics will fade away. (The Liberace Museum in Las Vegas is closing, flat broke after years of no visitors. Sic Liberace, semper mundi.) Religions are human creations, and like all such creations they are born, they live for a while, then they die. The christian religion is clearly in its endgame, and has been ever since those 18th century philosophers declared its chokehold on the human mind to be null and void.
So it isn’t “marginalization” or “secularization” or even “relegation to the purely private sphere” that is sticking in Herr Ratzinger’s craw. It’s far more elemental than that, far more natural, and far more inevitable. Like all faiths throughout human history, the christian religion is dying out. But barring a global catastrophe, this time no new religion will arise to displace the old. We’ll be through with the whole sorry spectacle, once and for all.