Joseph Ratzinger sure as hell made a big play for the job in St Peter's on Monday when he was allowed a party political broadcast uninterrupted by questions and uncluttered by rights of reply. It was a splendid presentation, full of spleen, dogmatism, intolerance and scorn, unadorned by spin. He will be an exhilarating pope, writes Vincent Browne
On Monday he seized on a quotation from Paul's Letter to the Ephesians, which in itself is splendid and dogmatic. Paul is urging the God-fearing people of Ephesus to reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and "become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ".
Then Paul says: "Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming." Cardinal Ratzinger thought the reference to being "blown here and there by every wind of teaching" topical.
He (the new Pope) said: "How many winds of teaching we have known in these last decades, how many ideologies, how many ways of thinking . . .
"The little vessel of thought of many Christians has often been rocked by these waves, hurled from one extreme to another; from Marxism to liberalism, to the point of libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. New sects are born every day and we see what St Paul says in terms of human trickery and cunning that tends to lead to error.
"To have a clear faith, according to the creed of the church, is often labelled as fundamentalism, while relativism, ie 'letting oneself be swept along by any wind or doctrine' seems to be the only up-to-date way to behave. A dictatorship of relativism is taking shape which recognises nothing as definite and for which the ultimate measure is simply one's own self and its desires."
This is great knockabout stuff, with the usual misrepresentation of the credo being attacked. But this is a man who has a mind and who speaks it and we will hear a lot of him.
His understanding (or rather his characterisation, which may not at all be the same thing) was crude. His suggestion is that relativism means that all points of view are equally valid and all moralities are also equally valid and all belief systems are equally true.
There are some people who believe this but they are off the wall. For instance, people who believe in the literal biblical account of creation are off the wall. People who believe in the genocidal hate-filled morality of some of the Old Testament are not just off the wall but dangerous as well. Not many people believe nowadays in the morality of slavery, not in its historical form anyway, although Jesus apparently thought it was okay so long as one treated slaves decently, but you could make an argument, well, a relativist argument, for that.
Modern relativism asserts morality, knowledge, beauty, is relative to a particular standpoint, such as a culture, social position, and the individual concerned (this too is a crude generalisation but not, I hope, tendentious).
One might have thought Joseph Ratzinger would find solace in relativism because of his attitude to the position of women in the Catholic Church.
Clearly he saw nothing wrong or absurd with 115 unelected, elderly males gathering in secret to elect from among themselves someone to take up one of the most culturally powerful offices in the world. He could not justify this on what might be termed non-relativist grounds, such as social contract grounds or even natural law grounds. He can do so only from the particular (relativist) standpoint of the Catholic Church.
But there is a general vibe to the speech which is unsettling: a scorn for all views that do not fit his Catholic mould. He and the late Pope John Paul II spoke often of the dignity of the individual but surely that dignity is founded in part (at least) on the individual's ability to act autonomously, to think autonomously, to wrestle with themselves on disparate ideas, to challenge vagueness of concept and language? Later on in that speech on Monday he quoted a passage from the Gospel of John (15.14) where Jesus is said to have said (almost certainly not the case): "You are my friends if you do what I command you." The Pope is likely to judge his friends by that criterion.
Having dismissed all modern thought, Cardinal Ratzinger offered the truth as he saw it. "We, instead, have another measure, the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism." He continued again quoting Paul: "Do the truth in love, as the fundamental formula of Christian existence." I have just one question about this: what on earth does it mean? Why do those who speak with such certainty on spiritual or religious truths talk in language that in any other context would be regarded as gobbledygook? I am sorry if this observation offends some people or seems disrespectful to the new Pope. I assume there is an intelligibility to this but, please, what is it?