Monday 7 July 2008

 

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Liz Anderson

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Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI

An assault upon relativism

Tracey Rowland
OUP, 214pp, £12.99,
Edward Norman
Tuesday, 8th April 2008

The materialist humanists are winning — or have, perhaps, already won — the battle for possession of the moral conscience of the modern western world. The issues involved should have been brought into focus by public debate over the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, but in reality all the debate has done is to demonstrate how little understanding there is, how insensitive the modern world has become to attitudes to human life that posit the existence of external standards of judgment or of non-material values.

The materialist humanists are winning — or have, perhaps, already won — the battle for possession of the moral conscience of the modern western world. The issues involved should have been brought into focus by public debate over the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, but in reality all the debate has done is to demonstrate how little understanding there is, how insensitive the modern world has become to attitudes to human life that posit the existence of external standards of judgment or of non-material values. The Catholic Church is now conventionally referred to as a kind of obscurantist block to enlightenment and progressive advance; the Anglicans in general seem silent on the major issues, either out of internal incoherence or a disinclination to become enveloped in controversy — and actually acquiesce in the various projects of the secular humanists through the governmental ‘ethical’ committees to which they have access. Modern morality is utilitarian: the highest good that can be imagined is calculated according to what men and women, and ‘expert opinion’, most judge conducive to material welfare and security. It is emphatically the ends which justify the means.

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