Retired pope addressed ‘crisis of reason,’ speaker says
Kenneth Howell speaks on Feb. 27 at Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Parish in Indianapolis on how Pope Benedict XVI sought to address a “crisis of reason” in Western culture. Howell, resident theologian and director of pastor care for The Coming Home Network International, previously taught courses on Catholicism in the religion department at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Ill. (Photo by Sean Gallagher)
By Sean Gallagher
On the night before then- Pope Benedict XVI became the first pontiff in nearly 600 years to resign the papacy, Catholics filled Priori Hall at Our Lady of the Most Holy Parish in Indianapolis to hear how Benedict sought to renew a “culture of reason” in the West.
Addressing this topic was Kenneth Howell, resident theologian and director of pastoral care for The Coming Home Network International, based in Zanesville, Ohio, which gives support to Christians, especially ministers, who seek to enter in full communion with the Church.
Howell, who previously taught Catholicism in the religion department at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Ill., served as a Presbyterian minister for 18 years before being received into the full communion of the Church in 1996 at St. Charles Borromeo Church in Bloomington.
His presentation was part of Holy Rosary’s 13th annual “Spaghetti and Spirituality” Lenten speaker series.
Howell spoke at the start about how he watched a live broadcast of the Ash Wednesday Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict on Feb. 13 at St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, the last public liturgy of the retired pontiff.
“I began to cry because I began to realize the wonderful gift that this man has been to the Church during these times,” Howell said.
Howell noted that in his nearly eight years of ministry as bishop of Rome, Pope Benedict sought to bolster the faith of Christians around the world by first restoring a culture of reason, which the pontiff argued had been weakened over the past several centuries.
This priority of the retired pope was highlighted especially, Howell said, in a speech he gave in 2006 in Germany at the University of Regensburg.
“We have trouble today not just in telling people about the Catholic faith, but even in reasoning with them about the Catholic faith because they don’t know how to use reason,” Howell said. “They’ve got the ability. It’s innate to them. But they haven’t developed it.”
Howell brought popular notions related to abortion as examples of conversation topics that Catholics might have with friends, relatives or co-workers that are hindered by a lack of the use of reason.
For example, he addressed the idea of believing that abortion is wrong, but that one should not impose such a view on other people.
“It’s not that those things are against the Catholic faith,” said Howell of this and other examples. “It’s not that they’re against any other kind of Christian faith. What’s wrong with those statements is that they make no logical sense.”
Howell went on to explain how, from the earliest times of the Church, it has sought to use reason to investigate the meaning of the Gospel and to proclaim it to others.
“The ancient Christian thinkers did not reject what was valuable and necessary from Greek and Roman philosophy,” he said. “In other words, they weren’t what we would call today fundamentalists.
“The early Church fathers saw that God was a rational being and that if God gave us reason and evidence in the physical world, we should use that to glorify God. … They made it acceptable and even an obligation to use our minds and our reason to find truth.”
Howell went on to say that this perspective on the purpose of the mind is not shared by many in higher education today.
“If you worked in universities as long as I did, you would know that at least half of the faculty doesn’t believe that your mind is for finding truth,” he said. “And they’re passing that on to the young people.”
This crisis of reason, Howell argued, is rooted in late medieval philosophies and theologies that were taken up by some leaders of the Protestant Reformation.
One of these is voluntarism, a way of thinking about God that focuses far more on his will than on his reason—a notion that Pope Benedict addressed in his Regensburg speech.
“This is what Benedict is bringing up in this lecture,” Howell said. “Is God this pure will, who even if he commanded you to commit idolatry, it would be the right thing to do? Even if he commanded you to kill in his name, it would be the right thing to do?
“Benedict places over this the Catholic idea that, in God, God’s will and God’s reason are one. God cannot act against his reason. So God would not command that which is immoral because it would be against his own nature to do so.”
The separation of faith from reason, Howell argued, eventually led to the widely held view that religion is merely subjective and has no objective content. It also resulted in moral relativism and the “dictatorship of relativism” that Pope Benedict spoke about in his homily during the pre-conclave Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome in 2005.
Howell said that the current effects of the crisis of reason include power overriding reason, utility trumping truth, hedonism and self-aggrandizement prevailing over goodness, and ugliness dominating beauty.
“The abandonment of beauty will lead people away from God,” Howell said. “The embrace of beauty will lead people to God. There’s three transcendentals that, in God, are all one—truth, goodness and beauty. And Benedict knows this. And so he wants us to return to this culture.”
Near the end of his presentation, Howell gave some practical suggestions to help Catholics restore a culture of reason in society today. They included the study of logic and classical and scholastic philosophy in Catholic schools, and the setting up of forums for discussions with other Christians and non-believers and forums for the arts.
“It was the beauty of the Church [that drew me in],” said Howell of his conversion. “But as long as people are only accustomed to ugliness, they will never see that beauty.” †
