Benedict XVI—soul brother of VFR?

Discussing the disastrous ecumenical opening to Islam pursued by John Paul II, a writer who calls himself “Spengler” writes in Asia Times:

As the late pope’s adviser, Cardinal Ratzinger shares responsibility for past Vatican policies, but his tone has changed during the past six months. He opposed Turkey’s entry into the European Union. Last week he published a tract titled Werte in Zeiten des Umbruchs (“Values in Times of Upheaval”), calling for Europe to return to its core Christian values. He denounced Europe’s “incomprehensible self-hatred”, adding that if Europe wants to survive, “it must consciously seek to rediscover its own soul.” [Emphasis added.] He wrote, “Multiculturalism cannot survive without common constants, without taking one’s own culture as a point of departure.”

Leaving aside the former Cardinal Ratzinger’s misunderstanding of multiculturalism (the fact is that multiculturalism sees society as a collection of “equal” cultures, with no culture being seen as privileged, therefore, by definition, multiculturalism rejects taking the Western host culture as the point of departure, and therefore multiculturalism cannot be reformed in the way Ratzinger imagines), I’m struck by his statement that the only way Europe can resist Islamization is by rediscovering its own, Christian, soul. This has been a constant theme of mine. For example, in November 2004, discussing Robert Spencer’s call for America to defend itself as a “secular” society vis à vis Islam, I wrote:

Spencer has it exactly wrong. If we want our society to have the strength to resist Islam, then we must rediscover and restore our own historical and spiritual roots as a distinct people and civilization. That includes our religious roots, faith, and character. Secular liberalism cannot be the answer to a civilizational disaster that was created by secular liberalism.

Similarly, I wrote in October 2002:

… If our decadence continues, we die anyway, with or without the Muslim problem. So we have to change. We have to rediscover our identity and tradition and morality as a Western Christian or Judeo-Christian society. We have to stop being decadent inside ourselves, and we have to stop being open to the whole world entering us from outside, including Muslims. The two phenomena, the decadence and the open borders, are closely related, they’re both manifestations of liberal freedom and equality taken to their logical endpoint. So, if we repented and changed and became morally and culturally sound within and without, we would no longer be demographically threatened either in terms of birth rate or immigration.

Finally, here is the concluding paragraph of my 2003 booklet, Erasing America:

Which returns us to the question with which we began: Is our culture facing the threat of destruction, or has it, in essence, already been destroyed? Whatever our answer to that question may ultimately be, and whatever form our resistance to the destruction may ultimately take, this much is clear: If we Westerners are to have any chance of surviving the nihilism that is dissolving us from within and the demographic invasion that is swamping us from without, it can only happen through a rediscovery of our spiritual, cultural, and ethnic roots—through a reawakening of our particular identity as heirs of a particular people and a particular civilization.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 22, 2005 12:45 PM | Send