Do Many Go To Hell?

Do Many Go To Hell?

by John Young

The currently prevalent view among Catholics seems to be that if hell is not quite empty, it is very sparsely populated. In examining the question we need to be careful to base our conclusions on objective grounds, not on subjective motives. Yet this is difficult, for the thought of eternal suffering is so appalling that we tend to feel it is too dreadful to be really happening to anyone.

A person can discount the danger of damnation because he doesn't want to feel worried or uncomfortable at the thought of going to hell. He knows that an uneasiness would enter his spiritual life if he really faced up to the peril of losing his soul and suffering for ever and ever. This applies particularly to someone who falls into serious sin. Even after being forgiven in confession, he may fear a further lapse. The desire to feel undisturbed may be a powerful psychological factor in his belief that scarcely anyone goes to hell.

Another motive for discounting hell can arise from knowing that a loved one died while apparently in a state of mortal sin. A parent worried about the fate of a son or daughter killed instantly in an accident after having given away the practice of the Faith will crave the consolation of believing the child is saved. Or if it is clear that a spouse or child or close friend is leading a life in defiance of God's laws, and seems to be doing it culpably, one would be agonised at the thought that the person may be headed straight for eternal misery. In such cases there is a strong psychological urge to tell oneself that God is too merciful to allow people to go to hell.

A third motive for discounting the danger of eternal loss is due to the current outlook of our society. With its materialism, its hedonism, its limited, earthly perspective, the society in which we are immersed is incapable of understanding even temporal punishment for sin. Eternal punishment is so far beyond its ken that it is stunned at the notion. But society has an influence on all of us. In this matter unless we are on our guard, it will so color our thinking that the doctrine of hell will seem unreal, even preposterous. Our faith may cause us to accept the doctrine, while the cultural pressure prompts us to decide that no one, or scarcely anyone, is ever lost.

These various influences can motivate us very strongly, but it is important to see that they are motives, not reasonable grounds for the conclusion. To the extent that a person is influenced by them he is biased. The fact that I may feel more secure if I dismiss the possibility of spending eternity in hell is no reason whatever for dismissing it, however strong the motivation may be. Likewise with the other motives: concern for those we love and the coloring of our outlook by a materialistic society. If we love the truth we should be willing to look at the question objectively.

Looking At The Evidence

Turning to Scripture, we find the doctrine of eternal damnation to be one of the most persistent themes in the New Testament, especially in the teaching of Christ himself. The Old Testament has little about life after death, but even there grim warnings are given of retribution for sin. The book of Daniel predicts: "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt."¹

Our Lord declares: " . . . whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin."² He tells us that on the Last Day many will remind him they had done mighty works in his name, but he will say to them: "I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers."³ He warns his disciples: " . . . fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell."⁴ He declares that it is better " . . . to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire."⁵ He adds that in hell ". . . their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched."⁶ The parable of the net holding good and bad fish ends with the statement that the angels will separate the evil from the good "and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth."⁷ The same fate for the wicked is given in the parable of the tares and the wheat.⁸

In Christ's graphic description of the Last Judgment he tells us the sentence he will pronounce on the wicked: "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."⁹

The everlasting choices are a principal theme of St. John's Gospel. "Unless a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God."¹⁰ Those who follow Christ "shall not perish forever."¹¹

The Apostles repeated the teaching about hell. St. John does so very graphically in the Apocalypse, as when he says: " . . . the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever."¹² St. Paul teaches that those who do not obey the Gospel will be condemned by Jesus when he comes again. "They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord."¹³ St. Jude speaks of people "for whom the nether gloom of darkness has been reserved forever."¹⁴

To reject hell is to reject one of Scripture's clearest doctrines. It is also a rejection of the infallible teaching of the Church. As the Fourth Lateran Council expressed it, all will rise at the end of time and receive "according as their works were good or bad, either perpetual punishment with the devil or eternal glory with Christ."¹⁵ This teaching is guaranteed not only by the extraordinary magisterium but also by the ordinary universal magisterium, for it has been constantly proclaimed. But attempts are made to destroy its force.

Father Richard McBrien, in his notorious book Catholicism, says: "Neither Jesus, nor the Church after him, ever stated that persons actually go to hell or are there now. He — as does the Church — restricts himself to the possibility."¹⁶

Some Angels Definitively In Hell

That statement manifests a tragic blindness which is only too common nowadays. Scripture and the Church warn us insistently and urgently of the danger of eternal damnation. Jesus returns to it time after time, emphasizing it with grim imagery. Yet Father McBrien and others can talk as if it were vague possibility. They have read the words, but have ignored the force of the words. The passionate warnings of our loving Redeemer are treated in a way the Church and her saints and doctors and ordinary faithful have never treated them: as though, for practical purposes, hardly relevant.

It is conveniently forgotten, too, that Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium teach definitively that some of the angels sinned and will be in hell forever. It's more than a possibility for them!

Alleged private revelations must be viewed with caution, but some are undoubtedly authentic, as the apparitions of Our Lady at Fatima. A combination of factors remove all reasonable doubt, including the balance and holiness of the three children, the stupendous miracle of the sun, the Church's strong approval. The children were given a horrifying vision of hell. Lucia dos Santos describes the great sea of fire shown them by Our Lady. "Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised up in the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear."¹⁷

Rejection of hell is heresy. Nor is it possible that hell is inhabited only by the fallen angels, with no human souls there. Were that so, Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium would be speaking hypothetically, without intending to say that anyone actually is lost. Now a person who puts forward that interpretation is making words mean what he wants them to mean, remaining blind to their obvious meaning and rejecting the sense in which they have always been understood. Such a person is defying the sensus fidelium.

What of the claim that we have never been told any particular individual is in hell? Even that is going too far, for Christ's words about Judas may mean he is in hell. He is called "the son of perdition"¹⁸ and Jesus says: "It would have been better for that man if he had not been born."¹⁹ Perhaps there is no implication that he is lost; on the other hand that may well be the implication.

The Narrow Gate

Does Scripture indicate there are many souls in hell? People who answer negatively often ignore texts, which suggest otherwise. Our Lord tells us: "The gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few."²⁰

When the possibility that many are lost is put forward, the retort is sometimes made that when Jesus was asked whether only a few are saved, he refused to answer; and the people who make this retort often give the impression that Jesus' omission to answer indicated disagreement with the idea that only a few are saved. They seem to forget what he said. His response was: "Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able."²¹ He went on to speak of his judgment on those who would be thrust out of the kingdom of God. Certainly he does not say only a few will be saved; but he doesn't deny it either.

It would be rash to interpret the reference to "the few" as telling us definitely that not many are saved. Jesus may be stating that few follow the right way of life. But his words, together with the force and frequency of his warnings about hell, surely suggest that many are lost rather than few.

Let us approach the question from another angle. Suppose I overheard a conversation about myself, with somebody saying: "One thing we can be certain of is that John Young will never commit a mortal sin." Having overcome my astonishment at this strange statement, I would probably take it as a hopelessly misguided compliment. Then suppose the speaker continued: "No one can sin mortally who hasn't got the necessary knowledge and freedom of will. But John Young hasn't." Instead of a compliment the speaker's view turns out to be an insult. He regards me as, in a sense, subhuman; as lacking the knowledge and will power necessary to be responsible for my actions.

In fact I have got those capacities, and am therefore quite capable of sinning mortally. Am I to see other people as so far inferior to me that they can't do so? I think I have enough experience of human nature to be able to say confidently that most people are responsible for their actions and capable of grave sin.

Take the question of contraception. Most Catholics who go to Mass know the Church condemns contraception as a grave sin. If such a Catholic nevertheless uses contraceptives are we to suppose he lacks the freedom of will requisite for mortal sin? Or are we to say he lacks clear knowledge that what he is doing is gravely wrong? If we answer yes, we are expressing a poor opinion of his understanding and/or freedom of will. Of course we can't judge individuals and should not try to. But when one considers that a large percentage of married couples regarded as good Catholics practice contraception, the only way of avoiding the conclusion that they are in a state of mortal sin is to say they lack the required knowledge or will power. Surely this cannot be asserted with any confidence.

God does not leave people without help. He enlightens the mind and strengthens the will. As the Pope says in Veritatis Splendor: "Keeping God's law in particular situations can be difficult, extremely difficult, but it is never impossible. This is the constant teaching of the Church's tradition, and was expressed by the Council of Trent . . ."²² His quote from Trent includes the well known statement: "God does not command the impossible, but in commanding he admonishes you to do what you can and to pray for what you cannot, and he gives his aid to enable you."²³

Viewing the situation more generally, there are numerous people acting in gravely immoral ways who appear to have the knowledge and will power, especially when the help of God's grace is taken into account, to be responsible for their conduct. In other words, it seems many people are in a state of mortal sin. This conclusion will be resisted by those who deny that individual acts are mortal sins, confining mortal sin to the exercise of a fundamental option, which rejects God. But that view is against Catholic teaching, as Pope John Paul II has made clear. In Veritatis Splendor, quoting what he had said previously in Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, he says: "For mortal sin exists also when a person knowingly and willingly, for whatever reason, chooses something gravely disordered. In fact, such a choice already includes contempt for the divine law, a rejection of God's love for humanity and the whole of creation: the person turns away from God and loses charity."²⁴

What of a deathbed conversion? Surely God may move people in a state of mortal sin to repentance when they are dying. True, he may, but there is no sound reason for assuming that a person who has deliberately rejected God by remaining in a state of mortal sin will be converted just before dying. Indeed, such persons sometimes resist all pleas to have a priest before they die; they seem to have lost all desire to repent.

Facing Reality

The opinion that few or none go to hell can be due to a failure to appreciate God's greatness. Our understanding of him falls infinitely short of the reality. He does not merely have existence, truth, goodness, beauty; he is these, in one infinite, eternal act which is his very essence. He is so far above us that even in heaven, when we see him face to face, we will not fully understand him, for he can never be totally grasped by any created or creatable intellect — not even by the human intellect of the Son. That is the being we offend when we sin. To commit a mortal sin is to deliberately oppose Subsistent Goodness in a grave matter. There is something infinite about mortal sin; not in the sense that it would be an infinite act (our acts are only finite), but in the sense that it insults an infinite being. The greatness of the offense must be seen in relation to the greatness of the one offended. Once we grasp this, it becomes less difficult to see that even one mortal sin deserves hell.

But if our God is too small, tending to be a glorified human father rather than what God really is, hell may seem an impossibility. What loving human father would allow his child to suffer eternally? Or what offense against a human father, or against any finite being, could deserve a fate so horrific?

An associated hindrance to seeing how hell could ever be just is the failure to realize that a lost soul puts himself there, in the sense that what he becomes by his own free will leaves no option for him except hell. It is the natural consequence of his choice, the only state he is fit for. And even in hell, theologians teach, God's mercy may ensure that the damned suffer less than they deserve.²⁵

If faith makes some one accept hell, but it is alien to presuppositions he holds, or his outlook is distorted by motives such as those mentioned at the beginning of this article, he may compromise by deciding that scarcely anyone is lost. The danger to human beings becomes little more than academic, and the reality of fallen angels is felt as an embarrassment one should not think about. But the position is different if we put aside all bias, so far as we can, and do our best to view things in the light of God's greatness, our own dignity as intelligent, free beings, and the enormity of mortal sin.

Is it reasonable, then, to conclude that a great many people go to hell? Is this a well-founded conclusion, based on the undeniable prevalence of objective mortal sins and a consideration of human intelligence and freedom, together with the truth that God offers the grace to avoid sin? I think we should say it is not unlikely that many are lost. We should definitely not hold the opinion that few are lost.

The objection may be given that it is better not to weigh the question at all; that no good can be achieved by doing so. I disagree. We should strive to reach the truth, even though we can't settle the question definitively. To ignore it, or to assume the danger is slight, is to diminish an important motive for avoiding sin: the danger of damnation. The realization that many may be on the way to eternal misery will also stimulate us to help convert sinners by example, words, prayer and penance. This is strikingly evident in the short life of Jacinta Marto, who showed such an heroic spirit of penance. One of the reasons Lucia gave for it was that Jacinta "had looked upon hell, and had seen the ruin of souls who fall therein."²⁶

The need to teach the doctrine of hell, and for priests to preach about it, is also clearer if we understand that many people may well be lost. In teaching about hell we will be following Christ's example, for he returned constantly to this theme. We will also be imitating Our Lady at Fatima, who showed those little children the vision of hell, and who gave us the prayer to say at the end of each decade of the rosary, in which we ask to be saved from hell.

On the other hand, we must avoid generating a morbid fear of hell or an obsession with it. It is not a fate that can overwhelm us against our will; any who go there have chosen evil deliberately. The doctrine should be seen in the light of God's greatness and our dignity as free beings. He is so great that hell is a just punishment for rebelling against him; our dignity as responsible beings is so great that we can deserve that fate.

http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=4275

Notes

1. Dan. 12:2.

2. Mark 3:29.

3. Matt 7:23.

4. Ibid., 10:28.

5. Mark 9:43.

6. Ibid., 9:48.

7. Matt 13:50.

8. Ibid., 13:42.

9. Ibid., 25:41.

10. John 3:3.

11. Ibid., 10:28.

12. Apoc. 20:10.

13. II Thess 1:9.

14. Jude v. 13.

15. DS 813.

16. Catholicism, Minneapolis, 1980, Winston Press, p. 1152; italics original.

17. Fatima in Lucia's Own Words, Fatima, Portugal, 1976, Postulation Centre, p. 108.

18. John 17:12.

19. Matt. 26:24.

20. Ibid., 7:13, 14.

21. Luke 13:24.

22. Veritatis Splendor, n. 102.

23. DS 1536.

24. Veritatis Splendor, n. 70.

25. See St. Thomas, Summa Theol., Supp., 99, 2, ad 1.

26. Fatima in Lucia's Own Words, p. 109.

Mr. John Young, B.Th., is associated with The Cardinal Newman Catechist Centre in Merrylands, N.S.W., Australia. He has taught philosophy in three seminaries, and is the author of an introduction to philosophy, Reasoning Things Out, published in the United States by Stella Maris Books, Fort Worth, Texas. Mr. Young writes on philosophical and religious topics for Australian publications. His last article in HPR appeared in the October 1993 issue.

© Catholic Polls, Inc. 1995.

This item 4275 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org

SHOULD CHRISTIANITY STILL HAVE A VOICE IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE?

Rt Rev Philip Egan, Bishop of Portsmouth

For full article see: http://www.portsmouthdiocese.org.uk/bishop/docs/BoP-140306-talk.pdf

Thank you for inviting me to speak tonight. The topic is ‘Irrelevant? Should Christianity still have a voice in the public square?’ So three points. First, a note on secularism and the demise of Christianity in Britain; then, some points from Pope Benedict XVI; finally, the Church’s role in strengthening Britain’s Christian patrimony.

1. Secularism and the Demise of Christianity

Hardly a day goes by without mention in the British press of an apparent collision between Christianity and today’s so-called ‘secular culture.’ Recent examples include the Pentecostalist couple from Derby who were told they could not foster children because of their negative views on homosexuality, a ban upheld by the High Court.1 Then there was the community nurse from Somerset who, feeling sorry for an elderly patient, offered to pray for her, for which she was suspended for failing to demonstrate a professional commitment to equality and diversity.2 Again, there was the Catholic girl from Kent who was barred from wearing a crucifix at school.3 And some local councils regularly replace the word ‘Christmas’ with ‘The Holiday Season’ and one year, an Oxford council-funded charity referred to Christmas as the ‘Winter Light Festival.’

In Britain, a secular culture is now in the ascendant, although the terms secular, secularism and secularisation are ill-defined. Indeed, secularism is more an attitude or atmosphere than a fully worked-out system of thought. Yet essentially, secularism means a concern with the saeculum, the world, this world rather than the next. It is about living, at least in public, without religion and its ‘sacred canopy.’5 Secularism has a political dimension: the principle that Church and State, religion and politics, must be strictly separated. In other words, to protect the equality of every citizen in a pluralist society, politicians and policy makers adopt a neutral attitude towards religious groups and personal life-style choices, as long as behaviour remains within the law. Religion - beliefs about the meaning of life, the morally good, God and life after death - are ring- fenced as matters of private opinion. There are, however, two forms of this. Hard-line secularists, such as the National Secular Society, seek systematically to exclude any religious expression from the public square; as Alasdair Campbell once said, “We don’t do God.”  Soft-core secularists, on the other hand, happily wish each other ‘Merry Christmas.’ They tolerate Britain’s Christian traditions, as long as those who practice those traditions do not expect any privileges or discriminate against the rights of others.

Secularism is now so dominant in Britain, being religious is deemed exceptional.7 Yet essentially, perhaps surprisingly, secularism is a Christian heresy. It is a deconstructed version of Christian morality, a set of second-order Christian values shorn from their theological moorings, a form of post-Christian ethics that thrives because its values continue to derive their vitality from the Christian patrimony still embedded in British culture. If religion is defined as belief in a deity, with a moral code based on that belief, and a theology that interprets it, then secularism is a reversed religion. Its core belief is doubt; its moral code is a way of life as if God does not exist; its theology is about being human. It even has its own theological terms such as equality, diversity, freedom, respect, tolerance, non-discrimination, multiculturalism, social cohesion, ethnic communities,        inclusivity,      quality of life, sustainable development and environmentalism. All these values are derived from fundamental Christian values. Thus, the secular concern for tolerance comes from the biblical ‘love of neighbour’ but, disconnected from Christian practice and belief, it has become a soft value, free- wheeling, expanded with new meaning, now permitting what formerly was unlawful.

Secularism in Britain has been accompanied by secularisation, that is, the decline of Christianity and the emergence of a post-Christian culture. In the 2011 National Census, the number of those who self-identify as Christian is now just 59% of the population (3 in 5). This is a decline from 71% in 2001; by 2018, Christians will be in a minority8. 1 in 4 people (25% of the population) now say they have no religion, up from 14% in 2001. Incidentally, Muslims are next largest religious group, rapidly growing at 4.8% (up from 3% in 2001), then in order Hindus, Sikhs and Jews. Most Christians belong to the Anglican Church. Catholics number 5M or 8%.

Sociologists explain this data variously. The classic view, called the ‘secularisation paradigm,’9 is that since the Middle Ages, Christianity in Britain has been in continuous decline, as measured by the numbers of people attending Sunday worship. Less than 1 in 10 now attend church regularly, defined as once a month. Callum Brown, in his The Death of Christian Britain, argues that a catastrophic collapse in church membership occurred in 1970s, after the ‘60s with their far-reaching cultural, social and sexual revolutions: youth-culture, the music of the Beatles (1962), the contraceptive pill, the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality (1967), the women’s liberation movement (1968), easier divorce, and so on.10 The ‘Swinging Sixties’ rep- represented the collapse of the traditional family, a sexual revolution that ushered in new gender roles for women, who in a family uphold religious traditions and moral values. Other sociologists, such as Grace Davie,11 agree with this but argue that while Christian practice has declined, Christian beliefs still remain, even if increasingly unconventional. These beliefs surface on public occasions, at royal weddings, at baptisms and funerals, especially the funeral of a child. Such flowerings of religious sentiment show the Brits to be ‘unchurched’ but not necessarily non-believers. They believe but they do not belong.

On the other hand, Graeme Smith claims that church-going is not the best nor the only measure of religiosity.12 Secularism, he says, is essentially Christian, though for him it is not a heresy but an entirely legitimate version of Christianity. It may be true that most people in 21C Britain do not go to church and do not believe in conventional Christian doctrines, but they do still believe in Christian ethics. Britain is a Christian ethics society and it is this that makes our culture Christian. Ethics is today’s issue as seen in recent debates about child-abuse, gay marriage and assisted suicide.

At the heart of secularism is relativism. In 2005, in a homily at Mass to the cardinals who had come to Rome to elect the new pope, the then Cardinal Ratzinger, said:

“Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labelled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude [appropriate to] modern times. Yet [in this] we are building a dictatorship of relativism that recognizes nothing as definitive, and whose ultimate goal consists solely in one's own ego and desires.

We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism.”

Relativism is the philosophy that sees truth as relative. Because truth has no fixed foundation or referent, then what is true for one may not be true for another. It leads to liberalism. Liberalism is the philosophy that goodness has no fixed foundation or referent and so virtues and values are determined by personal preference. The spectre of dictatorship arises when the State stands back from truth and goodness in order either to enforce one group’s truth-claims over another’s or to impose a permissive neutrality before mutually exclusive truth-claims. In this way, what is right becomes what is legal. It was precisely this behind the recent debate about the redefinition of marriage. If marriage can be redefined as a union of two people of the same sex, why not sibling marriage? Why not polygamous marriages? Why not inter-species marriage? Benedict spoke of a growing totalitarianism in European secular societies. Truth is not relative, he argued; its foundation is in right reason and the natural law, and this is confirmed by divine revelation in Jesus Christ. What has happened in the modern European context is that a loss of faith has dissolved the foundations of ethics.

          

An egregious example of this is the new concept of equality. In its 2013 document Religion or Belief and the Workplace the Equalities and Human Rights Commission failed entirely to differentiate between religion and religious communities on the one hand, and personal life-style choices on the other.15 Consequently, vegetarianism, environmentalism and even wearing a beard are equated with classic religions such as Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. This is not only grossly disrespectful to the members of those religions, it expresses an absolutist or totalitarian view of equality: that equality means sameness rather than complementarity and difference. Every religion and every moral choice must be treated as absolutely identical rather than as different and complimentary. Consequently in the document the religion of a tiny minority, Druidism, is valued identically with the religion of the majority, Christianity and thus disproportionately. For the core of British culture is based not on Druidism, nor for that matter on an ethics of absolutist equality, but on Christianity, which values and respects complementarity and difference.

The British constitution and the British legal system was moulded over many centuries by Christianity and by the natural law. Today it is crafted by lawmakers and politicians, educators and health-care professionals, pressure-groups and media, business and commercial interests, for whom those common, traditional values have less traction. Christian values have now become post-Christian, secular values. Individuals lobby for what they deem to be economic, expedient, tolerant, liberal, respectful, non- discriminatory, inclusive and sustainable, but essentially that which enables them to create a life-style they believe to be true and good. Shorn from its moorings, the law is thus increasingly adrift. It expresses the will of the legislator, the will of the loudest and most powerful, the will of a policy unit or the will of the majority, and this relativism is State-enforced. As Michael Nazir-Ali has argued, public ethics are now determined either by focus groups or by an imposed, authoritarian utilitarianism which threatens to enslave people, to undermine traditional family life and moral values, to strangle the rights of Christians, and most egregiously to victimise the weak, the unborn child, the elderly and the dying.16 It used to be said that Britain is a free country. But, as Neil Addison asks, in ‘P-C’ Britain, can that be said anymore?

2. The ‘Triptych’ of Pope Benedict XVI

Let us now turn again to the writings of Pope Benedict XVI. In his Address to Politicians, Diplomats, Academics and Business Leaders at Westminster Hall given in September 2010 during his visit to Britain,18 he explored the place of religious belief  

within the political process and asked where a solid, ethical foundation for civil discourse might be found. The Catholic Tradition, he said, “maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation. According to this understanding, the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers ... but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles.”

Benedict rejects sectarianism and fundamentalism as “distortions of religion” since they confuse the right relationship between faith and reason. But, he continued,

“[w]ithout the corrective supplied by religion, ... reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person.”

This is why the “world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilisation.”

This point, that faith and reason need each other, was also made by Blessed John Paul II in his 1998 encyclical letter Fides et Ratio: “faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth”.

In a later part of the Address, Benedict spoke specifically about secularisation and the eclipse or marginalising of Christianity within contemporary secular culture. Religion should not be seen as a problem for legislators but as a vital contributor to the national conversation. Some “advocate that the voice of religion be silenced” he said

“or at least relegated to the purely private sphere. There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none. And there are those who argue – paradoxically with the intention of eliminating discrimination – that Christians in public roles should be required at times to act against their conscience. These are worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the legitimate role of religion in the public square.”

The 2010 Papal Visit provided a rich tapestry. After much initially adverse attention in the media and some noisy protests during the events, albeit from a tiny minority, there was widespread goodwill, with at times evident religious devotion on the surface. In his address to the bishops at Oscott College before his departure, Benedict spoke about the need to proclaim the gospel afresh in the “highly secularised environment” (sic) of contemporary Britain. He then went on to observe that in the course of the visit, he had become aware “how deep a thirst there is among the British people for the Good News of Jesus Christ.”  Indeed, at the General Audience the following week, he said he “could see how strong the Christian heritage still is and how active it still is in social life at every level. British hearts and British lives are open to the reality of God and there were numerous expressions of religious feeling that my Visit made even more visible.”

Britain in his estimation is ripe for evangelisation. In his homily at Mass in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, he spoke of the need to evangelise culture, “especially in our epoch in which a pervasive relativism threatens to cloud the unchangeable truth about the nature of the human being.” Summing up the Visit, Benedict said he had intended to engage with everyone in Britain in order to discuss the “true reality of man, his deepest needs, his ultimate destiny.” Indeed, “the visit had strengthened a deep conviction within me: the ancient nations of Europe have a Christian soul, which is one with the ‘genius’ and history of the respective peoples, and the Church [must] never stop working to keep this spiritual and cultural tradition ceaselessly alive.”

Benedict’s Address at Westminster Hall is often seen as forming a triptych with two other papers he gave: the lecture “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections” given at Regensburg in 2006 and his “Reflections on the Foundations of Law” given in 2011 in the Bundestag, Berlin.

In the Regensburg lecture, Benedict explored further the relationship of faith and reason within Western philosophy and theology. On the one hand, he criticises theologians who downplay the rational component of faith; faith without reason leads to fundamentalism. Indeed, when God is understood to be Himself capricious and not, as St. John insists in his Prologue, logos, faith without reason can lead to violence. On the other hand, Benedict also criticises post-Enlightenment philosophers, who reduce human reason to the empirically or mathematically demonstrable. Such positivism systematically excludes questions about human origin and destiny, ethics and religion, love and happiness, relegating these issues to the subjective realm:

“The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and subjective ‘conscience’ becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, ... ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter.”

This, he adds, is a dangerous state of affairs “as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.” This is why, Benedict concludes, theology rightly belongs in the university and in a dialogue of sciences, and not just as an historical discipline or one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, that is, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

The Bundestag address on the foundations of law completes the triptych. For most legal matters in society, Benedict notes, the support of the majority suffices, but not in fundamental issues to do with the dignity of man and humanity. In history, legal systems have almost always been based on religion and whilst Christianity has never proposed a juridical order based on revelation, it has always pointed to nature and right reason as authentic sources. In the last half century, however, the idea of natural law has collapsed outside Catholic discourse. For many contemporary philosophers, there is an unbridgeable gulf between an “is” and an “ought” and, in the light of a positivistic understanding of human reason, ethics and religion have been relegated to the subjective realm. This cuts law off from its classical sources. Consequently, in Europe, Benedict argues, where “concerted efforts [are made] to recognise only positivism as a common culture and a common basis for law-making, reducing all the other insights and values of our culture to the level of subculture, ... the result [is] that Europe vis-à-vis other world cultures is left in a state of culturelessness and at the same time extremist and radical movements emerge to fill the vacuum.”

On the other hand, he finds hope in the ecological movement. The young recognise that something is wrong in our human relationship with nature: that “matter is not just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives.” Moreover, there is also an ecology of man too.

“For man has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will. ... He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he respects his nature, listens to it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself.”

Benedict concludes by stating that there is “a Creator God who gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person, and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness.”

Indeed, the culture of Europe “arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law.”  In this triptych of papers, Pope Benedict has illuminated the role of the Church within a Western secular, pluralist culture and arguably bequeathed some practical proposals for the Church here in Britain. To return to the initial question, then, should Christianity still have a voice in the public square?

3. Vox Ecclesiae

In its two thousand year history, the Church has never before engaged with a secular culture. There will necessarily be an element of trial and error. Yet given Christ’s missionary mandate to “go and make disciples of all the nations” (Mt 28: 19), the Church’s prophetic mission is surely urgent today. In recent times, the Church has been calling its members to the work of new evangelisation, an evangelisation, in the words of Pope John Paul II, “new in its ardour, new in its methods and new in its expression.”23 Evangelisation is ever two-way, ad intra and ad extra, that is, Christians themselves being evangelized (ad intra), growing and deepening in faith, a life-long process, and at the same time, reaching out to others (ad extra) to propose to them the Person, values and teachings of Jesus Christ. Moreover, whilst evangelisation has as its proximate goal the individual disciple, its ultimate goal is to evangelise culture and its sectors, so that the Gospel of Christ might leaven the totality of human endeavour. As John Paul said: “the greatest challenge of our age comes from a growing separation between faith and reason, between the Gospel and culture,”24 with vast sectors of contemporary culture from politics and economics to medicine, the arts and the human sciences, at present almost entirely ‘unbaptised’.

The thesis here is that the Church must engage in a salvific, critical conversation with contemporary culture. Secularism is too flimsy a basis for British culture. It cannot guarantee human flourishing nor sustain long term the advances the British people have achieved, the great value placed on freedom of speech, freedom of political affiliation and respect for the rule of law, with a strong sense of the individual’s rights and duties and of the equality of all citizens before the law.25 Instead, secularism is producing a society without foundations, one that develops randomly on the hoof through pressure-groups, legal precedent and political expediency. Its ring-fencing of religion to the private domain, its dissolution of the ground of ethics and the basis of law, its amnesia of the past and intentional eclipse of its Christian origins, its relativism that fosters harmful ideologies and leads to the victimization of the weak, its positivistic reduction of human knowing to the empirically verifiable, its proven inability to support stable marriages and family life, its growing restriction on religious freedom, and its innate tendency towards greater surveillance and state- control, all suggest that the Church has a crucial and therapeutic ‘anthropological mission’ within 21C British society. The Church’s task is prophetic: to communicate  

the saving message of Jesus Christ as the ‘natural way of life’ and the authentic way to human happiness. The Church has to demonstrate how Christianity, not secularism, can offer individuals and the various sectors of contemporary culture a transformation of meaning and value that leads to human flourishing. In a word, Christianity proposes an authentic humanism, able to ground a free, democratic and pluralist society.

Christians must conduct the new evangelisation of Britain with a new ardour, with new methods and new expressions calibrated to contemporary need, and with a new expectation in prayer that God the Father will pour out afresh the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The first task is to demonstrate that spirituality and religion will never go away; the question of God lies naturally within man’s horizon and is raised spontaneously by human consciousness.26 The next task is to help people encounter God and through His gift of intellectual, moral and spiritual conversion, to enable them to become intentional disciples of Jesus Christ. In this respect, the personal holiness of Christians is key: that non-believers encounter credible witnesses, who put their faith into action not least in service of the poor. Another task is to develop an effective Catholic apologetics, able comprehensively to rebut popular myths about science, so that schoolchildren especially can appreciate the interaction of faith and reason, the complementarity of religion and science, and the redemptive role of religion within human living. This apologetics should also address today’s hot button issues about sex, authority and the dignity of human life.

Last but not least, the most important aspect of the new evangelisation will be to identify, retrieve and promote Britain’s Christian patrimony, its history, art and architecture, its music and literature, its liturgy, theology and ethics. This includes taking the theological buzz-words of secularism and driving them back to their foundational values in the Bible and the Christian Tradition. In tracing the soft-values of secularism back to their Christian roots and exposing the ideologies that subvert those values, it will be important to promote a greater knowledge of the Bible, which underpins so much of English literature, and the Bible stories that have inspired British culture and folklore. Moreover, it will also be important to promote a greater knowledge of the history of the Church in Britain, especially of the saints who helped to establish and develop the Christian character of these islands.

Conclusion

So to conclude. Christianity should indeed have a voice in the public square, for Britain has been moulded over many centuries by Christian faith. The argument here is that secularism is too fragile a basis for a free society and that the Gospel alone can offer an authentic humanism able to transform human living. Of course, given the enormous challenge of the Church’s mission in Britain, it might be tempting to yield to despondency. Yet Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14: 6) and even at this moment, the Holy Spirit is at work in people’s hearts wooing them towards His Church. It is my own conviction that it is not the ‘product’ that is defective but rather,

the ability of people in a busy, secular consumer-culture to hear its call. That is why today, standing within the great Catholic Tradition, if we are to communicate imaginatively the Person of Jesus Christ to the peoples of our lands and thus enable them to reach that true, genuine, lasting human happiness and fulfilment for which they long, we need to pray for great creativity. Indeed, may the Lord graciously hear and answer this prayer.