The media tribunal is always unfair. While the whole world was praying over the coffin of the greatest footballer inand all the time, “King” Pelé, the funeral of former Pope Benedict XVI was relegated to the shadows. Not quite, of course. But far too much if we consider not only the importance for the faithful of this unobtrusive and discreet pope, but more generally his intellectual heritage and his reflection on our civilization. A reflection that goes far beyond believers alone and that should challenge us all.
I remember his visit to Paris in 2008, in the sumptuous and freshly restored nave of the Collège des Bernardins. The intellectual world was in turmoil. All of Paris, which thinks and writes, left and right, politics and the arts, not to mention two former presidents, had come to hear the message of this philosopher pope.
“Does this place still evoke something for us or do we only encounter a world that is now gone? asked the little white-haired man in a French that would make our entire political class pale. In a few words, the question was posed. This pope who dreamed of being a monk reminded the learned assembly that these monasteries were the places where for several centuries European culture was formed, drawing on Greek and Latin sources carefully transmitted by the monks. Long before the universities, it was from the ferment of culture born in these monasteries, which were also teaching institutions and libraries, that western humanist music, painting, literature and philosophy arose.
It is moreover in the manner of these monks that Joseph Ratzinger sought reconciliation between tradition and modernity by denouncing the two quirks of our time: the triumphant “subjective arbitrariness” of today, which justifies the the most unreasonable choices, and the “fundamentalist fanaticism”, which is making a curious comeback these days. It is by transmission subject to the argument — this courteous and reasoned exchange without which there is no debate and which it would be good to rediscover one day — that was born this culture of which we are the heirs.
John Paul II, whose faithful servant Joseph Ratzinger was for a long time, was a political pope, a brilliant actor on the great stage of the world. He even contributed to the fall of communism. His successor will rather have been a teacher. This lover of France and its intellectual life was the author of 86 books and 471 articles. The brightest minds wanted to debate with him, as did his compatriot, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Benedict XVI should also soon join the circle that could not be more restricted of the 33 doctors of the Church, where he will sit in the company of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine.
This pope saw no contradiction between faith and reason. He rejoiced in the discoveries of science when they put an end to superstitions and made it possible to return religion to its true mission. But he was also worried about a world where there would only be science and from which all transcendence would be excluded.
He was also a man of writing lost in the contemporary media jungle. That’s probably why he’s had so many bad trials. From the first months of his reign, he was the first to dare to lift the veil on the pedophilia scandals, break the culture of silence and refer the culprits to human justice. History will have to recognize it one day.
Shortly before his trip to Turkey in 2006, which I had the chance to follow, he dared to ask the question of Islam’s relationship to violence. It took a great deal of bad faith and never having opened a newspaper not to see that this question arose and still arises urgently. By lifting the ban on the Latin Mass, he sought to reconcile the Church’s history after Vatican II with its history. A story that does not only have dark sides, as a particularly virulent childish anticlericalism in Quebec would have us believe.
Will Benedict XVI have been the first pope of the end of Christianity? This civilization whose Christian philosopher Chantal Delsol (The end of Christianity, Éditions du Cerf) announces to us with regret, but without catastrophism, the replacement by a new paganism which, under cover of societal changes and ecological faith, seeks to dislodge human life from the pedestal on which Christianity had erected it. Where will he have been the first to trace the path of what the very secular Bérénice Levet calls the “courage of civilizational dissidence” in an enthralling book which calls for the upsurge of a civilization of knowledge and intelligence which cannot be reduced to values (The Courage of DissentThe Observatory)?
More than anyone, Benedict XVI will have been aware of the stakes of the decline of our civilization. At a time of the return of ideologies where the temptation to headlong is great, his legacy is more than topical. In a world that has never dreamed so much of a liquid and unattached man, if there was one phrase to remember from him, it might be this: “The absence of ties and the arbitrary are not freedom, but its destruction. »