Without Roots: Europe, Relativism, Christianity, Islam
Marcello Pera & Joseph Ratzinger. Published 2004 (2nd edition 2005)
Reviews
Pope and Senator: An Exchange of Ideas on a Failing Europe
Two aging intellectuals both try to come to grips with a world that they believe is crumbling around them. Their world is cultural Europe and they both worry deeply and articulately about the philosophical underpinnings of a continent that they see as persistently engaging in cheap optimismbut fallen into a dark mood and already disoriented and at a standstill.
There is something to blame for this, says Marcello Pera, who was the president of the Italian Senate until the last election and is the recently retired professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Pisa. The culprit, he says, is relativism. According to Mr. Pera, relativism has rendered Europe "defenceless when it is already acquiescent, and confused it when it is already reluctant to rise to the challenge."
Senator Pera engages in a dialogue with another philosophical heavyweight, one who shares many of his ideas, though not all of his conclusions. The other scholar is Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, who exchanged letters and essays with Mr. Pera while he held the job of Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope John Paul II.
"At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of it circulatory system that is endangering its life," writes Cardinal Ratzinger. "Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as if they were taking something away from our lives."
We may guess where the cardinal is going with this. But he is also going to the Roman Empire in its final days which "still functioned as a great historical frame work, but in practice it was already subsisting on models that were destined to fail. Its vital energy had been depleted."
It is worth mentioning that both writers are profoundly disturbed by the refusal of the European Union to place a word in the new constitution about Europe's Judeo-Christian rootsthough neither gloats over the constitution's eventual failure.
www.embassymag.ca/html/index.php?display=story&full_path=/2006/june/28/popebook/
Re-Christianising Europe against Islam and relativism
www.justbookreviews.net/Ratzinger_Pera.html
Marcello Pera & Joseph Ratzinger. Published 2004 (2nd edition 2005)
Reviews
Pope and Senator: An Exchange of Ideas on a Failing Europe
Two aging intellectuals both try to come to grips with a world that they believe is crumbling around them. Their world is cultural Europe and they both worry deeply and articulately about the philosophical underpinnings of a continent that they see as persistently engaging in cheap optimismbut fallen into a dark mood and already disoriented and at a standstill.
There is something to blame for this, says Marcello Pera, who was the president of the Italian Senate until the last election and is the recently retired professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Pisa. The culprit, he says, is relativism. According to Mr. Pera, relativism has rendered Europe "defenceless when it is already acquiescent, and confused it when it is already reluctant to rise to the challenge."
Senator Pera engages in a dialogue with another philosophical heavyweight, one who shares many of his ideas, though not all of his conclusions. The other scholar is Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, who exchanged letters and essays with Mr. Pera while he held the job of Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope John Paul II.
"At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of it circulatory system that is endangering its life," writes Cardinal Ratzinger. "Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as if they were taking something away from our lives."
We may guess where the cardinal is going with this. But he is also going to the Roman Empire in its final days which "still functioned as a great historical frame work, but in practice it was already subsisting on models that were destined to fail. Its vital energy had been depleted."
It is worth mentioning that both writers are profoundly disturbed by the refusal of the European Union to place a word in the new constitution about Europe's Judeo-Christian rootsthough neither gloats over the constitution's eventual failure.
www.embassymag.ca/html/index.php?display=story&full_path=/2006/june/28/popebook/
Re-Christianising Europe against Islam and relativism
www.justbookreviews.net/Ratzinger_Pera.html
