A typically informed and thoughtful piece by Robert Spencer punctures the great inflated balloon of jejune, knee-jerk 'liberal' horror which has encompassed the election of Pope Benedict XVI on account of his traditionalist views. Spencer crystallises a quite different perspective:

'In choosing Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has cast a vote for the survival of Europe and the West. “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” historian Bernard Lewis predicted not long ago; however, judging from the writings of the new Pope, he is not likely to be sanguine about this transition. For one thing, the new Pope seems to be aware of the grave danger Europeans face: he has called upon Europe to recover its Christian roots “if it truly wants to survive”...

'The new Pope has criticized Europe’s reluctance to acknowledge its Christian roots for fear of offending Islam’s rapidly growing and increasingly influential presence in European countries — a presence which, as historian Bat Ye’or demonstrates in her book Eurabia, has been actively encouraged and facilitated by European leaders for over three decades. “What offends Islam,” said Cardinal Ratzinger, “is the lack of reference to God, the arrogance of reason, which provokes fundamentalism.” He has criticized multiculturalism, “which is so constantly and passionately encouraged and supported,” because it “sometimes amounts to an abandonment and disavowal of what is our own.”

'He contrasts the modern-day resurgence of Islam with the enervation of Europe. In old Europe, he has said, “we are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one's own desires.” Islam, on the other hand, is anything but relativistic: “The rebirth of Islam is due in part to the new material richness acquired by Muslim countries, but mainly to the knowledge that it is able to offer a valid spiritual foundation for the life of its people, a foundation that seems to have escaped from the hands of old Europe.” '

Spencer has understood the crucial point which the new Pope, by this account, has also understood -- that the reason Europe is vulnerable to Islam is because of the vacuum in its own values caused by the all-out assault mounted by the forces of relativism for the past half-century. The Islamists have understood this very well; and they are not wrong when they call the west 'decadent'. For what they criticise -- and rightly so -- is the 'arrogance of reason' which has excluded the spiritual and worships instead the false gods of ego, selfishness and instant gratification.

What Spencer and the Pope have also understood is that it is only if Christianity manages to retake the lost continent of Europe and revive its abandoned faith that the moral relativism behnd whose banner Europe is marching steadily towards the cultural precipice will be defeated -- and with it the colonising ambitions of Islam to fill the void.

And this of course is the great paradox. For it is only if a muscular Christianity is thus revived that the values of the west -- the liberal values of freedom, tolerance, democracy -- will be saved from extinction under the twin onslaught from both within and without. In other words, it is only through the arch-traditionalism represented by the new Pope that the freedoms prized by those 'liberals' who denounce him will be preserved. It is the former head of the Papal Inquisition, no less, who ironically offers the best chance that western liberalism -- and the freedoms that have been so foolishly squandered and abused -- might survive.

Posted by melanie at April 20, 2005