Pope Benedict: What tolerance is not
Pope Benedict has a brilliant way of stating the obvious, and making people see it maybe for the first time. “The world needs God!” the pope exclaimed at a Mass in Munich Sunday.
“But what God?” was his followup question. It was a continuation of the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ discourse.
In an instruction that could apply equally to biomedicine, geopolitics, cultural correctness and certainly science right now, Benedict said
“when we bring people only knowledge, ability, technical competence and tools, we bring them too little. All too quickly the mechanisms of violence take over: the capacity to destroy and to kill becomes the dominant way to gain power. … Reconciliation, and a shared commitment to justice and love, recede into the distance.
“People in Africa and Asia admire our scientific and technical prowess, but at the same time they are frightened by a form of rationality which totally excludes God from man’s vision, as if this were the highest form of reason, and one to be imposed on their cultures too. They do not see the real threat to their identity in the Christian faith, but in the contempt for God and the cynicism that considers mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom and that holds up utility as the supreme moral criterion for the future of scientific research.”
Christianity is not the threat, institutionalized cynicism is.
“This cynicism is not the kind of tolerance and cultural openness that the world’s peoples are looking for and that all of us want! The tolerance which we urgently need includes the fear of God, respect for what others hold sacred. … This sense of respect can be reborn in the Western world only if faith in God is reborn, if God become once more present to us and in us. We impose this faith upon no one. … Faith can develop only in freedom.
That’s when he asked
“what God?” And he answered that.Jesus, the Son of God incarnate. His ‘vengeance’ is the Cross: a ‘no’ to violence and a ‘love to the end.’ This is the God we need. We do not fail to show respect for other religions and cultures, profound respect for their faith, when we proclaim clearly and uncompromisingly the God Who counters violence with His own suffering; who in the face of the power of evil exalts his mercy, in order that evil may be limited and overcome.
Good to hear him define tolerance.