Christianity is a scandalous religion, and the Catholic Church is the most scandalous part of it. The scandal resides in the Church’s belief that, through no special merit of her own, she has been given stewardship of the means of salvation in a way and to a degree unmatched by any other religious body on earth.
For a reasonably thoughtful and honest person, to accept that startling proposition must lead eventually to membership in the Catholic Church. To reject it leads just as certainly to the belief that Catholicism as a system is daft at best and dangerous at worst.
The basis of the Church's astonishing claim is clear and simple. To choose one text from among many, immediately after healing a cripple in the name of Jesus Christ, St. Peter in Acts 4.12 is quoted as saying this: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven…by which we must be saved.” If that is true, then everything else follows in due course.
For the hyper-tolerant, relativistic mentality of contemporary secularism that is intolerable. Here is a mentality delighted to put up with everything except what contradicts its own ideological prejudices. And it is this mentality that supplied the context for much of the negative reaction to Pope Benedict XVI's now-famous remarks at Regensburg last month — not the negative reaction on the part of Muslims, who were furious at what they imagined to be papal slights to the Prophet and the Koran, but reactions by certain secular intellectuals, who were furious with the pope for very different reasons.
Consider David Nirenberg, historian and professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and author of a book on “persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages.” Writing in the October 9 issue of the liberal weekly The New Republic, Dr. Nirenberg claims that at Regensburg Pope Benedict issued “a declaration of the ongoing and universal truth of Catholic dogma.”
As even a cursory reading of the pope's text makes clear, that is a major misreading of the pope's remarks. That Benedict XVI does indeed believe in the ongoing and universal truth of Catholic dogma undoubtedly is true, but it isn't what his Regensburg talk was about. Professor Nirenberg gets somewhat closer to the heart of what the pope actually said when he remarks that Benedict urged “a kind of conversion, or at least a convergence of all religions and cultures” toward a form of rational discourse and dialogue typical of the European Catholic tradition.
Set aside that loaded word “conversion.” The good professor is correct in saying that the pope at Regensburg called for inter-religious dialogue based upon reason — and that this reasoned approach has historically typified European Catholicism at its best. Is that a terrible thing to say?
As it happens, Baylor University social scientist Rodney Stark makes the same point in his interesting book The Victory of Reason (Random House). He presents a heavily-documented case that it was a series of “victories of reason” grounded in the fundamentally rational theology of Christianity that accounted for the intellectual, cultural, political, scientific, and commercial rise of the West during centuries in which other societies shaped by other religious beliefs stagnated.
But face it: even if secular intellectuals like Dr. Nirenberg could accept that idea, they would still see behind it — and angrily reject — the Church's belief in her irreducibly unique and necessary role in the redemptive plan of God. That's where the scandal comes in. It always will.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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