By David Smith
Any non-Catholic who presumes to judge the Catholic Church stands a considerable risk of sticking his nose where it does not belong. I am not a Catholic, so I have no standing to criticize the Church’s internal decisions, or beliefs, or anything else internally Catholic. (Of course this does not really apply to bloggers, or any other media opinionators, but I like to try to follow it anyway.)
However, the actions of the Church in the world, and especially of its pope, reach far beyond the Church’s Magisterium. And the past few popes have cast giant shadows on us all.
John Paul II was a great voice, one may even say fighter, for human freedom and dignity. He had positive impacts in many areas, but nowhere more than in the struggle against totalitarian dictatorship. With his personal experience of both Nazism and Communism, he seemed immune to the modern disease of moral equivalency. Nor was he inclined to speak in the soothing voice of a diplomat from a neutral state trying to coax the great powers to play nice. He was a moral leader, and he knew that the fight against totalitarianism was first and foremost a moral fight.
In his trips to Poland, he insisted on meeting with the dissident anti-communists of the Solidarity movement. He consistently stood with them, and refused communist offers for the Church to function as the in-house opposition. The Polish regime refused to allow the meetings, of course, but JPII insisted…and prevailed. His visit played a crucial role in strengthening the real opposition, and in destroying communism in Europe.
With that as the background, we come to Benedict XVI’s recent visit to Cuba. Many in and outside the Church had urged Benedict to visit with the Cuban opposition forces, personified at the moment by the Ladies in White, a persecuted group of brave Catholic women whose husbands, sons and fathers are political prisoners of the brutal Castro regime. Benedict did not do so. There is no evidence that he ever tried.
The full story, and theories for his failure, are laid out in an excellent essay by George Weigel in National Review. Weigel is a Catholic, and well fitted to speculate on the reasons. I urge you to read it and decide for yourself whether this qualifies as appeasement.
It must be said that Benedict has displayed both courage and wisdom in many other contexts, including his engagement with Islam. Unlike other inter-faith outreach efforts that focus on Kumbayah evasiveness, his speech at Regensburg confronted the structural problem of modern Islam. Benedict took some nasty shots from the left for his temerity in speaking an unpleasant truth about Islam.
Benedict pointed out that in orthodox Islam, the Koran is read as prohibiting reasoned investigation or philosophical questioning of the meaning of scripture. This has been the case since the ninth century triumph of literalist Ash’arites over the rationalist Mu’tazalite school. (See the excellent book by Robert Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind; How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis.)
Where the Ash’arite mentality sometimes seems to have a foothold in some extreme Protestant Christian sects, the Catholic Church is a bulwark of the belief that both faith and reason are necessary for the righteous life. In fact, John Paul II’s 1988 encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) is a good read on this point.
