Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: domenico pacitti contro Papa Ratzinger e Pera a justbookreviews.net

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Re-Christianising Europe against Islam and relativism
Domenico Pacitti reviews a new Italian alliance for possession of the
soul of Europe
Senza radici: Europa, relativismo, cristianesimo, islam [Without Roots:
Europe, Relativism, Christianity, Islam] by Marcello Pera & Joseph
Ratzinger. Published 2004 (2nd edition 2005) by Arnaldo Mondadori,
Milan, 134 pages, €7.70, ISBN 88 04 54474 0.
The authors are worried about a spiritual and cultural malady in the
West which has led to the omission of specific references to Christian
roots in the EU Constitution Preamble. A discourse by each and an
exchange of letters together provide diagnoses and suggested remedies.
Marcello Pera (lower left) is president of the Italian Senate, a member
of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia Party and a recently retired
professor of philosophy of science at the University of Pisa who
rejects the incursion of relativist theories within his subject. His
political and academic interests turn out to be linked by the defence
of absolute power and an intolerance of submissiveness due to
relativism.
Pera warns that there is a war in course against the West which should
not be misinterpreted as acts of terrorism by a few fanatics and that
Europeans do not understand this because paralysis due to endemic
relativism has adversely affected their mentality.
According to Pera, contextualists, deconstructionists and theological
relativists have paralysed Europeans by destroying their belief in
absolute values: Ludwig Wittgenstein has reconstrued meaning as use,
Jacques Derrida has eliminated extratextual reality, while John Hick is
among theologians who have tried to revise traditional Christology
fundamentals.
Suitable references to Christian roots would have been a first step
towards recovering absolute values, says Pera, a self-described
culturally Christian non-believer who complains of anti-Christian
prejudices in Europe. He suggests that Europe should now adopt a civil
religion based on Christianity since all good-living people share
roughly the same moral principles.
Unaffected by relativism, Pera sees no problem either in expressing his
evaluative judgement that Western culture is flatly superior to Islamic
or even in arranging these and other cultures in a hierarchical scale
of preferences "from best to worst". Backing up his position with
an ingenuously hamfisted application of the is/ought distinction in
moral philosophy (the West, he says, has made "the colossal error" of
deriving ought from is), Pera wonders why this should occasion
"self-censorship, prohibition and linguistic handcuffs".
Pera is especially enthusiastic about exporting Western institutions
and values to other countries and cannot understand those who label
this "premature, unilateral and violent" or "an act of
intellectual arrogance or cultural hegemony through the use of force,
arms, politics, economics or propaganda".
Pera's reasoning requires little comment beyond the observation that
believers and non-believers alike could well find themselves thanking
God that the EU is there to restrain him.
Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican's powerful Sacred
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and a leading theologian
before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, forms the other half of this
interesting new alliance for the restoration of absolute values to
Europe.
Ratzinger shares Pera's concerns over relativism, which he condemns
as "a new enlightenment" and a "dictatorship" which has
cancelled certainty and replaced it with egoism and desire. But he
proceeds more subtly, inducing the reader to perceive Europe's
"deep identity" and spiritual development within a historical
summary.
Identifying Europe as a cultural concept, Ratzinger traces its origins
through Herodotus to Mediterranean countries linked culturally,
politically and economically until Islam produced the first important
split in the "continent" in the seventh century.
He maps further splits and developments through the Carolingian era and
the fall of Byzantium to the French revolution which marked the final
collapse of a spiritual framework "without which Europe could not
have been formed". For the first time ever the state is understood in
purely secular terms and founded upon the rationality of its citizens,
while the sense of divine mission is lost.
Nowhere does Ratzinger mention the immense harm caused by the Roman
Catholic Church through history, for example by the cruel stranglehold
which it exerted on people's lives in eighteenth-century France at
dechristianisation or by the perverse and enduring corruption of the
mentality of an entire nation and its institutions, as in the case of
Italy.
Nor does he ever betray the slightest emotion. Ratzinger advances
steadily and inscrutably through history like a Panzer crossing enemy
terrain, unflinchingly recording his Church's losses and gradual
collapse.
Ratzinger sketches three models which arose following the French
revolution: mainly Latin countries where religion and state are held
distinct; Germanic countries with a liberal Protestant state; and the
special case of the United States. There, he says, a rigid dogma of
separation built on a Christian-Protestant consensus is linked to the
deep sense of a worldwide religious mission and there it may be more
clearly perceived than in Europe that the nation's religious and
moral bases come from Christianity.
Our present problem in Europe, says Ratzinger, is a decline of moral
conscience based on inviolable values which could lead to the
self-destruction of the European conscience. He cites the rising
success of Islam, which is able to offer a valid spiritual basis
lacking in Europe. And now, to make matters worse, Europe is denying
its religious and moral foundations.
Christianity, Ratzinger admits, is crumbling and failing to reach
people: it demands a way of life which places excessive limits on
freedom and is seen as having been superseded by science and out of
step with the modern age. This, he says, is partly the Church's own
fault for having wasted too much time debating details. Indicatively,
this partial fault is as much as Ratzinger is prepared to blame on the
Church.
Regarding future prospects, Ratzinger reflects on Oswald Spengler's
theory of the rise and fall of cultures and civilisations as they move
cyclically and inexorably from birth to maturity and death, comparing
Arnold Toynbee's idea that real progress is in terms of
"spiritualisation". But he avoids expressing final judgements, just
as he expressly precludes any discussion of US politics and the concept
of a just war from his account on the grounds that he is a theologian.
In reply to Pera's civil religion proposal, Ratzinger draws on
Toynbee's "creative minorities" principle in order to encourage
Christians with the necessary conviction, vitality and persuasive force
to move in that direction. But he dismisses the idea that this could be
accomplished by means of an elected commission and raises the problem
of the Roman Catholic universality principle being incompatible with a
state Church system.
The Church, Ratzinger concludes, must now address key questions on the
nature of Revelation and its role in human history. It must discuss
with philosophers and scientists whether matter can create reason,
whether pure chance can produce meaning and whether reason, freedom and
goodness may not already be part of the principles that compose
reality.
One still pictures Ratzinger as Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff's
Inquisitor, overconcerned with absolute power and about as far from the
people as from Christ, surveying the world's poor and underprivileged
through the lead squares of the Vatican's lattice windows. It is not
revelation but revolution that is needed.

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Allego altro gratuito sfregio alla figura del bel Paese.... sempre
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Tratto da 
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 )
    Ant
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Ma non dire cazzate, mentecatto.
Finalmente qualcuno che dice la verità su questo schifo di papa e sul 
razzismo intollerante del vaticano! Il dramma è che è stato costretto a 
pubblicarlo all'estero perchè nel nostro "bel Paese" l'asservimento alla 
malavita vaticana ha ormai raggiunto livelli da dittatura cattotalebana.
A fanculo Razinger, Ruini e tutta la gerarchia schifo-cattolica.