Cardinal Pell: It is impossible to understand the history of the West without Christianity

Cardinal George Pell is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. The post below refers to his remarks at the launch of the Institute of Public Affairs’ Foundations of Western Civilisation Program in Melbourne last week.


In 2002 an academic at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences spoke to a group of American tourists about the search for the cause of the success of the West all over the world. “Originally they thought the main reason was more powerful guns; then it was Western political systems, before considering the claims of the Western economic system. Finally, and I quote

“in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. . . . The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”

In the same year, Zhao Xiao, an official Chinese economist, wrote an article titled Market Economies With Churches and Market Economies Without Churches. “It made the obvious points that market economies promote efficiency, discourage laziness, force competition. They work and produce wealth. But, he pointed out, a market cannot discourage people from lying or causing harm and indeed may encourage people to be industrious in their efforts to harm others and pursue wealth by any means.

… Zhao writes: “These days Chinese people do not believe in anything. … A person who believes in nothing can only believe in himself. And self-belief implies that anything is possible – what do lies, cheating, harm and swindling matter?”

…. China today is not a democracy, but a militarily supported dictatorship where hundreds of millions do not participate in the increasing prosperity, and where a ruthless one child policy has been imposed for decades. When this policy was implemented in a society which prefers sons to daughters, and where modern technology now enables the sex of babies to be discovered before birth, the end result was the current sex ratio of 130 boys born for every 100 girls (the natural range is 103-06 boys for every 100 girls). By 2020 China will have 30 to 40 million more males than females 19 years or younger.

… China will also follow Russia, Japan and most of Europe into a demographic implosion, with growing numbers of old people and fewer and fewer young people to support them. But China (and indeed India) will do this long before a decent standard of living extends to all or even most of their populations.

…..The dark side of the Western tradition has to be acknowledged, ranging as it does from the revolutionary violence of the French Revolution through to the tyrannies of the twentieth century, Nazism and Communism. Pol Pot was trained by Parisian Stalinists and even Mao owed more to Stalin than to the example of any Oriental despot. But neither Nazism nor Communism should be listed as belonging to Western civilization, because they both hated the Judaeo-Christian God and substituted the law of the jungle for natural law. ...

My second and much happier qualification is to acknowledge gratefully the English speaking tradition of Western civilization to which I belong, the thought world of Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens; Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin; Adam Smith and John Henry Newman; Edmund Burke, William Wilberforce and the Westminster system of government; English common-law and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. We all have many reasons for gratitude.

….. The two traditional lodestars of God and human nature were rejected, with consequences we are still trying to deal with now. These are the major sources of Western discontent today.

…. This rejection of human nature is at the heart of radical versions of autonomy, individualism and secularism. The propaganda is all about freedom: freedom to choose our own values, and to make and remake ourselves as we please. The reality is a moral relativism that makes evil a question of one’s particular perspective or feelings, and a world where human beings become means to others’ ends. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), with its dim-witted brutes bred for slaves, is still some way away. But our willingness to entertain breeding humans for spare parts (only up to a certain stage for the moment) shows how cheap life has become, and how we threaten to lose our bearings….

We need to introduce our children to Western civilisation through the teaching of philosophy, history and English literature, in solid rather than debased forms; and edge them towards considering the big questions: is there truth? what is goodness? can we believe in beauty? Knowledge is indispensable but it is never enough by itself. We need to re-present God and the insights about how we should live, which come from recognising our shared human nature. Christians need to challenge intellectually the many agnostics of good will to face up to the absence of alternatives. Teaching the foundations of Western civilisation is not an intellectual or aesthetic luxury. It is essential to building strong communities and to ensuring that [we develop] just and decent societies.

….. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed in his Templeton Lecture in 1983: “if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century . . . I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God

….As Czeslaw Milosz has pointed out, “a true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death-the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”

Calls by some to reject all religions have been amplified in the wake of Islamist terrorism. But not all religions are the same. Different faiths produce very different societies, as the Chinese specialists with whom we began are now teaching us. ..The biggest mistake that radical secularists and others have made over the last two centuries is to believe that religion is merely “a secondary phenomenon, which has arisen from the exploitation of human credulity.” It is impossible to understand the history of the West, or why the West became what it is, without Christianity….”

The complete article may be found at: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0157.htm