Rowan!

You know, I was on the phone the other day with our good friend Todd and I was marveling at the length of his posts (same goes for Shea). These two, especially, put me to shame given the substance and quality of what they do... May I one day be as diligent....

But Catholic Sensibility, in its goodness, has posted a speech by The Great Rowan Williams (archbishop of Canterbury and primate of all England) at, of all places, a convention of the Sant'Egidio -- which is, basically, the Italian church's progressive answer to the LC/RC and The Work.

As that rare group of organized ecclesiastical progressives who haven't cast themselves off the reservation (e.g. Call to Action, Pseudo-Catholics for a Free Choice, the more heated VOTFers, et al.), Sant'Egidio gets just as much respect -- if not more, in some quarters -- than their more conservative counterparts.... The head of the group, the legendary Andrea Ricciardi (a contributor to L'Osservatore Romano) is known around Rome as "cardinale laico," i.e. a "lay cardinal."

But to the great Archbishop Williams -- who should really be asked to speak at next month's "New Bishop School" in Rome.....

Lord Acton, the great English Catholic historian and political theorist of the nineteenth century, said that the separation of Church and state was the foundation of all political liberty. It sounds like an extravagant or eccentric claim, but it deserves to be taken seriously. The Christian Church from the beginning has believed that it exists as a community witnessing to a future yet to be fully realised. It speaks of the gift of God’s Spirit as an arrabon, a pledge and foretaste of things to come (II Cor.5.5, Eph.1.14). Its sacraments announce and make present what we believe the world will be when God’s will is fully done. But although it thus points to, and indeed embodies the future, it recognises that it is set in a world where what has been promised is not yet realised. In the greatest classical work of theological reflection on human political life, Augustine’s City of God, we are warned against thinking that God’s future has arrived, against the danger of thinking that our hopes and longings can be satisfied here and now with what this world has to offer....

Further on, he adds his voice to the heated question of the cultural heritage of the Continent:

Europe’s distinctive identity, then, is a ‘liberal’ identity, in the broadest meaning of the word: a political identity which assumes that argument and negotiation, plural claims adjudicated by law, suspicion of ‘positivist’ notions of political power, are all natural, necessary features of a viable and legitimate communal life in society. But the crucial point for the Christian is the conviction that this ‘liberal’ identity is threatened if it does not have, or is unaware of, that perpetual partner which reminds it that it is under a higher judgement. Unless the liberal state is engaged in a continuing dialogue with the religious community, it loses its essential liberalism. It becomes simply dogmatically secular, insisting that religious faith be publicly invisible; or it becomes chaotically pluralist, with no proper account of its legitimacy except a positivist one (the state is the agency that happens to have the monopoly of force).

The Christian sense of what matters about European identity, then, is not about some mythical unity between the faith and the historic culture of Europe, a ‘Christendom’ picture. Nor is it to insist that what is now politically defined as Europe cannot expand beyond the boundaries of what were once the Christian nations of the continent. It is to argue that the bold experiment of a political life that is not sanctioned by comprehensive religious power, a political life that is not held to be in some way sacred, should continue to leave space for the voice of its critical partner, the community of faith, to be heard. This means a willingness on the state’s part both to safeguard religious liberty (and not to assume that the state can legislate for the religious community) and to enter into some sorts of partnership with the community of faith. It should be willing to entertain collaboration in education, social care and community regeneration, allowing its own goals to be questioned and informed by the agenda of faith, without submitting to any kind of religious tyranny. That is, in the argument and negotiation of public life, the voice of communities of faith can be heard without anxiety or fear of a takeover by religious zealots.

As Rowan and Ratzi both speak seven or eight languages, we should sit them both down at a table for a public exchange on Christian Europe, Tradition and other questions of divergence. Hey, then-Cardinal Ratzinger once went onstage and debated an atheist. And he had Oriana in a couple weeks back, right? Well, Rowan's the smartest conversation partner anyone could ask for; just to mentally process the rapid-fire statements from both of them would exhaust lesser minds.

It'd be an event for the ages -- dare we say a red-letter moment in the modern ecumenical movement?

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