Papal Contributions to the Development of the Church's Missionary Spirit: From Ad Gentes to Evangelii Gaudium

Pope Benedict XVI versus the "Dictatorship of Relativism"

Benedict XVI, in his apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini mentioned the continued need for the new evangelization and a continuance of the missionary zeal promoted at the Second Vatican Council:

Pope John Paul II, taking up the prophetic words of Pope Paul VI in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, had in a variety of ways reminded the faithful of the need for a new missionary season for the entire people of God. At the dawn of the third millennium not only are there still many peoples who have not come to know the Good News, but also a great many Christians who need to have the word of God once more persuasively proclaimed to them, so that they can concretely experience the power of the Gospel. Many of our brothers and sisters are "baptized, but insufficiently evangelized." In a number of cases, nations once rich in faith and in vocations are losing their identity under the influence of a secularized culture. The need for a new evangelization, so deeply felt by my venerable Predecessor, must be valiantly reaffirmed, in the certainty that God's word is effective. The Church, sure of her Lord's fidelity, never tires of proclaiming the good news of the Gospel and invites all Christians to discover anew the attraction of following Christ.¹

There was a specific way, given his own circumstances, in which Benedict XVI attempted to pursue the new evangelization. In 2005 before the conclave that would elect him pope, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger preached a homily during which he stated:

Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and "swept along by every wind of teaching," looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.²

Benedict XVI was deeply concerned about the "dictatorship of relativism." This was a concern that was rooted in his awareness of the needs of the Church and a dissonance between the life of the Church and the life of his society. He wrote to the president of the Italian senate and professor of philosophy at the University of Pisa, Mar-cello Pera, the following reflections on relativism:

In recent years I find myself noting how the more relativism becomes the generally accepted way of thinking, the more it tends toward intolerance, thereby becoming a new dogmatism. Political correctness, whose constant pressures you have illuminated, seeks to establish the domain of a single way of thinking and speaking. Relativism creates the illusion that it has reached greater heights than the loftiest philosophical achievements of the past. It prescribes itself as the only way to think and speak—if, that is, one wishes to stay in fashion. Being faithful to traditional values and to the knowledge that upholds them is labeled intolerance, and relativism becomes the required norm.³

Benedict did not merely acknowledge this challenge for the life of the Church, he also attempted to work against it. In the spirit of Vatican II's posture of aggiornamento and the "opening of the Church's windows" to observe the world as typified in the perspectives of Gaudium et Spes, Benedict observed the needs of people in his culture and attempted to bridge the life of the Church with the life of contemporary, secular people. This was obviously Benedict's own unique contribution to John Paul II's call for a new evangelization. In his lecture, "The Spiritual Roots of Europe," offered on May 13, 2004, at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, Cardinal Ratzinger attempted to bring to the awareness of his listeners the need to acknowledge the Christian tradition as a foundational aspect of European culture that even bridged the diverse cultures of Eastern and Western Europeans:

The two worlds...