Prodigal Continent
Without Roots
by Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera
Perseus Books Group, 2006
(135 pages, $22.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Robert Hart
We know the story of the Prodigal Son, and its message of repentance and forgiveness. The opening of the story focuses on the beginning of his fall, the waste of his inheritance, by which he is known forever. Prodigality in this case was about extravagance, and the satisfaction of lusts.
It seems that another kind of prodigality can take hold of people, just as wasteful and disrespectful of a father’s labor. It is the throwing away of a valuable inheritance in return for nothing at all, as if it were, itself, spent on the husks that the swine did eat rather than on something alluring. This kind of prodigality is the waste and ruin of modern Europe.
Without Roots is a public conversation between Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (the year before his elevation to the papacy) and Marcello Pera, president of the Italian Senate. On May 12, 2004, Pera addressed the Lateranese Pontifical University, and the next day Ratzinger addressed the Italian Senate.
These talks coincided so well that the president was moved to write to the cardinal, who replied. These two talks and two letters are the substance of this book.
Relativistically Correct
In the opening chapter, the talk by Pera, we hear the voice of a prophet rather than of a politician (secularist though he claims to be), arguing that Europe has abandoned a culture centered on the faith of Christianity and urging Europe to turn back from the twin problems that he diagnoses as (in his own terms) Relativism and Political Correctness.
Relativism—whether that of contextualists, deconstructionists, or theologians (all of whom he criticizes)—makes Europe weak and vulnerable to a long-established enemy, a reinvigorated and radical Islam that seeks to conquer the West partly by the use of terrorism and partly by replacing the current population with its own children. The latter is a task that Europeans make all the easier by refusing to have children, not even enough to replace the current generation.
Because Relativists cannot take a stand, Relativism expresses itself through a Political Correctness that makes it impossible to compare ideas and argue for the superiority of one’s own. Relativistic Europeans cannot, for example, weigh democracy against sharia. Today, he writes,
the West is paralyzed twice over. It is paralyzed because it does not believe there are good reasons to say that it is better than Islam. And it is paralyzed because it believes that, if such reasons exist, then the West would have to fight Islam.
Robert Hart is rector of St. Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Anglican Catholic Church Original Province). He also contributes regularly to the blog The Continuum. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
29.4—July/August 2016
on Noticing That Modern Science Has Rendered Atheism Irrational by Harry Biltz
32.2—March/April 2019
Finding Him Again Through the Patriarchal Group by Anthony Esolen
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
