Cardinal George responds.

Commonweal's piece by William D. Wood misrepresents what I said at the University of Chicago on April 30 ("Back to Christendom," June 17). Mr. Wood places my words in a political context that isn't mine and wasn't referenced in what I said. A few examples will illustrate Wood's caricature of my remarks.

Wood identifies me with President George W. Bush's comments on the Yalta treaty, remarks I haven't heard or read. The Yalta treaty was seen by Pope John Paul II and many in Eastern Europe as an agreement that bought peace for the West at the cost of Eastern Europe's freedom. It doesn't follow that this was the consequence intended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time. Agreements have unintended consequences John Paul II often said publicly that the consequences of the Yalta agreement had to be undone, and he lived to see them undone. Does that make him a 1952 Republican?

Wood has me implying "that the problem of secularization is best solved by making the political order itself less secular." I neither implied that nor believe it. Except in officially atheistic states, secularization is a cultural phenomenon. In a free state with limited government, cultural tendencies work themselves out without becoming political. Where government institutions control all areas of human experience, both personal freedom and religious freedom are threatened and a political solution becomes necessary to restore them. In other words, "solving" the challenge of secularization shouldn't involve the political order when the political order is limited to the properly political. The history of the last two centuries, however, has shown the political trying to absorb the religious more often than vice versa.

Wood distorts my perhaps too elliptical comments about Versailles and the end of the First World War President Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into the war by characterizing it to the American people as a crusade for democracy, a "war to end all wars." No matter what Wilson intended, the end of the war left Central and Eastern Europe destabilized and its people prey to various forms of totalitarianism. Benedict XV wanted to achieve a negotiated peace that might have made a more ordered, peaceful development of national self-determination possible. He was distrusted on all sides and his peace plan rejected.

One can note this without asserting that the destruction of the last remnants of a desiccated Christendom, the loss of meaning and the secularization of society could be "solved" by an imaginary restoration of any former political system. In other words, decrying the results of Versailles doesn't imply a desire to restore a pre-World War I order. Just as Yalta has been undone without restoring a pre-World War II order, Versailles is now being undone without bringing Europe back to 1913. The states that came out of the 1919 treaty--Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the Middle Eastern states carved out of the Ottoman Empire with names all too familiar--are now gone or destabilized, but the empires that spawned them are also gone and no one wants them restored. I said nothing about "the forces of darkness" or "secular governments driven by the wanton pursuit of democracy ... arrayed against the forces of light." A new Europe is now being organized politically, economically, and culturally. In a new situation, the challenge is to find a social and political order that will protect human dignity and foster religious freedom. I believe Pope Benedict XVI wants to help create such an order, because it promises a stable peace.

Wood says: "Like Pope Benedict XVI, George believes that contemporary democratic societies are awash in relativism. Indeed, George seems to believe that secularism is the same thing as relativism." I can't speak for the pope, but I don't believe that at all. I didn't "conflate secularism with relativism." In fact, I didn't mention relativism. There is no necessary logical connection between secularism and relativism, anymore than there is a necessary logical connection between freedom and relativism. It wouldn't surprise me to discover moral relativism in Communist China. Closer to home, atheist Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy claims that democratic secularism is possible only with her brand of moral absolutism. Wood elaborates these points because doctoral students know these things; but so do others, and Wood should refrain from putting thoughts in the minds and words in the mouths of imaginary opponents in order to score rhetorical points.

That my few remarks didn't imply in any way "a nostalgia for Christendom" was well enough understood by others at a conference dedicated to exploring what philosophy can learn from tradition. The papacy is a two-thousand-year-old institution that has undergone numerous changes and still persists because. Catholics believe, it is an actor not just in human history but in salvation history. It will undergo more changes in the future, as various social orders and states, even our own, come and go. Speaking to the change of popes, I intended only to comment on how a man like Benedict XVI, who has written on the theology of history and who shares Pope John Paul's conviction that personal freedom is in danger when it is played off against moral truths, might want to position the church at this historic turning point in the Western Europe he loves so well.

The pope doesn't believe that "contemporary democratic societies" must be "secular" in the sense of antireligious, whether officially or unofficially. Commonweal didn't use to believe that either. Nor do I. I do believe, however, that the political and legal processes of even democratic states can be used to suppress human freedom and that this suppression is made easier by the weakening of a religious ethos in the culture and by the erosion of moral standards predicated on an eternal destiny for all human beings. That belief becomes, in Wood's piece, a conviction that secularism be opposed by the use of political force. That's not what I said or implied at the University of Chicago.

CARDINAL FRANCIS GEORGE, OMI 

Chicago, Ill.