In a prophetic 1988 essay entitled "Breaking Down and Starting Out Afresh: Faith's Answer to the Crisis of Values," Cardinal Ratzinger labeled terrorism one of the "most characteristic signs of our times."
The terrorism he described, however, was much more than just fundamental Islamic jihadists crashing planes into high-rise buildings in Manhattan or driving bomb-laden cars into crowded markets in Baghdad and Jerusalem.
Instead, Ratzinger identified terrorism as the belief in man's self-sufficiency, the idea that we can solve our problems on our own without God's help. In its core, terrorism is, he said, "the criterion of heavenly expectation applied to the present world" where trust in God's saving action is replaced by unlimited confidence in man's ability to bring about his own unconditional salvation through "the promise of a new humanity."
This would of course explain the "coarse terrorism" of those who, like Osama Bin Laden, aim to change society through violence and win salvation by establishing an eternal Islamic kingdom on Earth at the expense of those who don't share their zeal for a universal Muslim state.
But it also explains a more "elevated" form of terrorism — one that thrives in the West. Seemingly boundless technological advancement has allowed modern man to claim that he no longer needs the outdated and childish concept of religion or God, and that science has made him Absolute. He feels that he can replace the imaginary heaven promised by God with a phenomenon within his power to control – a future age constructed by his effort and genius in which all difficulties will eventually be solved and suffering become a thing of the past.
The problem is that the morality accompanying this ideology ends up justifying exactly the same type of violence and murder of "traditional" terrorism. If, for instance, all that matters is the establishment of an ideal future, whether it be in society or on the individual level, it should come as no surprise that the sacrifice of embryos for "genuinely high-quality scientific results," or the abortion of children who stand in the way of a woman's freedom of "self-realization," should not only be condoned but actively pursued.
What therefore starts out as a denial of the need for God and the assertion of life at any price actually results in the greatest act of universal terrorism, what C.S. Lewis called "the abolition of man." Ironically enough, it is precisely an unlimited and unrestrained lust for life that ends up devaluing life, because when life loses its seal of the sacred there is nothing to prevent it being thrown away when it no longer pleases or is useful. The terrorism of modern materialism and scientism ends up making man little more than a means to an end, an object without dignity to be used, manipulated and eventually discarded in the goal of creating an earthly utopia. "If man chooses to treat himself as raw material," Lewis warned in 1943, "raw material he will be."
This is exactly the point that Benedict XVI made once again in his February 12 address to the International Congress on Natural Law. Drawing attention to the fact that scientific progress has allowed us to more profoundly grasp the rational structure of the universe, the Pope warned that refusal to recognize the underlying source of that rationality, of the ethical message contained in the very act of existence has "done violence to human nature" and "reduced the human being to an object of experimentation."
"I feel the duty to affirm yet again that not all that is scientifically possible is also ethically licit," the Pope stated. "It is not blind trust in technology… but the recognition of the law inscribed in our nature… of the norms written by the Creator in the human being… that is the true guarantee of freedom and dignity."
Nineteen years after he first labeled this disregard for natural law the true terrorism of our age, Benedict XVI's message remains clear: if we choose to ignore God and try to construct a society without Him, we will only succeed in surrendering our own humanity.
Br. Sameer Advani, of the Legionaries of Christ, studies for the priesthood in Rome.
