The dictatorship of relativism

In terms of content, no one has to speculate about Benedict XVI's most important teaching concern. He told us, the day before his election, in his homily pro eligendo papa on April 18: the challenge to a "dictatorship of relativism" in the developed West.

Job number one of this pontificate, therefore, is the reassertion of objective truth in a culture often allergic to the very concept. The beating heart of his pontificate can be expressed in three core concepts: truth, freedom and love. Truth, as the pope sees it, is the doorway a human person must walk through in order to be really free, meaning free to realize one's full human potential; and love is both the ultimate aim of freedom, and the motive for which the church talks about truth and freedom in the first place.

Because Benedict has not yet issued any dramatic jeremiads about the crisis of secularization in Europe, some wonder if he's forgotten about it. Quite often, reporters ask me, "When is he going to do something about this whole secularization business?"

In fact, he's been doing quite a lot.

No one realizes better than Benedict XVI that many people have a hard time today taking the church seriously on matters such as truth and freedom, because the tendency is to see all that talk as a rhetorical smokescreen for maintaining power over peoples' lives. The tendency in secular circles is to see the church as a defensive, authoritarian structure, fearful of both modernity and of what men and women might do once they learn to think for themselves.

The church faces a tough sell on issues such as homosexuality, the family, abortion, stem cell research and euthanasia, in part because some people can't help thinking that the church is simply afraid of change and afraid of freedom.

Benedict understands that one can't break through such perceptions with finger-wagging and condemnation, which reinforce the prejudice rather than challenging it. The church must first seem a credible witness to love.

The effort of this first year has to some extent been to put the church's teaching in a new context. That was the thrust of Deus Caritas Est, his first encyclical, which surprised many people with its endorsement of eros, or human erotic love, and its overall positive tone. Writing without anathema or interdict, Benedict argued that no one is more committed to human love than the Christian, but that the church wants people to love so deeply and so eternally that it pushes them to a deeper kind of love, a lasting love, expressed in caritas.

To put Benedict's point in street language, it boils down to this: You may not like what we have to say, but at least give us credit for our motives. We're not talking about truth because we want to chain you down, but because we want to set you free. It's not a matter of love and joy versus a fussy, legalistic church. It's a question of two different visions of what real love is all about -- Baywatch, so to speak, versus the gospel. We too want happy, healthy, liberated people, we just have a different idea of how to get there.

"Benedict's Wager" is that by reframing the debate in this way, the church can get a new hearing in a cultural milieu in which many people long ago made up their minds. Whether that's the case remains to be seen, but judging from the reaction to Deus Caritas Est, he at least seems to have some people scratching their heads, reconsidering impressions of Catholic teaching they long regarded as settled.

As a footnote, for all the talk about Benedict as an Augustinian pessimist, he actually seems to believe there are still people out there who can be persuaded by unadorned argument -- if you think about it, a rather optimistic stance.

- By John L. Allen Jn. for the National Catholic Reporter