Benedict's Challenge

In a generally insightful piece about the new Pope Benedict XVI ("The Last European Pope?" May 2), Joseph Bottum makes a glaring assertion for which he offers no evidence. He writes that the new pope will "stand somewhere to the left of his predecessor" on social and economic issues. According to Bottum, Benedict is "a Social Democrat, after all, from Germany, where they always thought they were going to find a way to split the difference between communism and capitalism."

When I mentioned this contention to a group of German friends who came to Rome for the pope's installation Mass, they burst out laughing, so absurd was the idea to them as Germans.

The first thing obvious to any serious reader of the former cardinal's writings on political and socioeconomic questions is his insistence that the Christian gospel not be reduced to a partisan agenda. This insistence, in fact, formed the gravamen of his argument against liberation theology and its attempt to baptize Marxist social analysis.

A second aspect of Benedict's thought is his critique of utopian/socialist economics, which shows him to be very much in line with John Paul II's writings. (As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger would have reviewed Centesimus Annus.) I offer this one example from his 1986 article in the journal Communio:

"A morality that believes itself able to dispense with the technical knowledge of economic laws is not morality but moralism. . . . A scientific approach that believes itself capable of managing without an ethos misunderstands the reality of man. . . . Today we need a maximum of specialized economic understanding, but also a maximum of ethos so that the specialized economic understanding may enter the service of the right goals."

Rev. Robert Sirico
President, Acton Institute
Grand Rapids, MI

Joseph Bottum writes that Western Europe has "aborted and contracepted its birthrate down toward demographic disaster."

This happens not to be true. In fact, abortion rates in the more secular western and northern countries of Europe are far lower than in the United States. The more heavily Catholic nations of eastern and southern Europe, on the other hand, experience much higher abortion rates than does America.

Contraception use is also much more widespread in the United States than it is in Europe. Just over 75 percent of American women use contraception in a given year, while only two-thirds of European women do. Whatever the cause of Europe's declining fertility, Bottum is factually wrong to blame any radical embrace of abortion and contraception, at least in Europe's secular west and north.

Further, Europe still has overtly Christian political parties, and those parties are more popular in Europe than would be conceivable in the United States.

And perhaps that is the problem. The Enlightenment that Bottum laments as a philosophical disaster for Christianity achieved its greatest acceptance in post-revolutionary America. Early in our republican history, Americans got the churches out of government--mostly because doing so was the only effective way to keep the government out of the churches. By creating a secular republic, America's Enlightenment revolutionaries gave Christianity its best opportunity to flourish in 1,500 years.

American Christianity has always been an outsider to government. Congregations of the devout have often acted together to influence politics in the United States, but never in a manner that so tangled church and state that the inevitable failures of the latter bred popular resentment of the former.

But time and again in Europe, where Christian Democracy remains the continent's most influential political movement, the longstanding entanglement of church and state has led Europeans to reject both. Who can blame them? Most modern European states were born in cruel religious wars--which often resulted from resistance to Catholic tyranny.

A century ago, Europe was a devout and congregationally heterogeneous continent, planted thick with well-attended churches, much like the United States today. And then Europe suffered just about the worst hundred years in the history of mankind. Christianity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, proved worse than impotent when Europe's suffering millions cried out for help in the first half of the 20th century. Only in the closing years of that dreadful epoch, under John Paul II, did the Catholic Church offer Europe's oppressed millions the succor they required.

Despite the shockingly high rates of abortion and contraception in devout Eastern Europe, people in that part of the continent see the Catholic Church as a mighty force for good. People in the rest of Europe know only an older experience of neglect or worse from Christian authorities. Europeans had abandoned the Enlightenment generations before they abandoned organized Christianity, and the latter break was not a whimsical or nihilistic choice.

The challenge facing Pope Benedict XVI is not arguing with western Europeans to come back to his Church. It is demonstrating to them that his Church has become something better than the morally irrelevant institution their grandparents abandoned.

Can the new pope do that? Possibly. The Catholic Church is a better, holier institution now than formerly. But any pope who follows Bottum's reasoning will find his papacy ending as it began--with Christianity of the Latin Rite failing where it has the closest contact with Rome and flourishing where the pope is farthest away.

Scott Rogers
Alexandria, VA

Still a Stalinist

Gerard Baker makes a small error in describing the London Guardian's Richard Gott as an "ex-Stalinist" ("Despised and Successful," May 9). As far as I am aware, there is nothing "ex" about his Stalinism.

Gott was caught accepting pocket-money from the KGB only a few years ago, and his subsequent transfer of allegiance to the Iraqi Baath party has not required him to surrender any of his previous loyalties or affiliations.

Christopher Hitchens
Washington, DC

Attack of the Clones

Wesley J. Smith ("It Didn't Start with Dolly," May 2) is right: Mammalian cloning didn't start with Dolly, and it almost certainly won't stop short of cloning humans if we put our trust in scientific impossibility alone.

Consider the words of British scientist Dr. Alison Murdoch. When she applied for what became the United Kingdom's first license granted for research in human cloning by "nuclear transfer," Murdoch stated that "the majority of the NT-experts suggest that the major obstacle of the successful NT-procedure in human [ sic] is only technical and logistic."

If scientists develop more efficient ways to produce one-week-old cloned human embryos for stem cell harvesting, they will be producing embryos which can be placed in human or animal wombs (the usual time of implantation being at six days of development) to see how far they can develop. At that point, barriers to "reproductive" cloning will become mere matters of technique.

It would be nice to think that human cloning is impossible, but we do not have that luxury. All mammalian cloning was once deemed impossible. And far from policing its own ranks, the scientific establishment (through the National Academy of Sciences) is issuing guidelines for how to conduct human cloning research.

Legal limits on such abuses of biotechnology must come from the American people and our elected officials.

Richard M. Doerflinger
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
Washington, DC

Piano Man

Joe Queenan's "Pretty Bad Goods" (May 2) is, in most ways, right on the money (pun intended). I take exception, however, to Queenan's statement that Victor Borge "was a clownish though not especially funny musician--a defrocked concert pianist--who plied his trade by butchering the classics on national television, thus making high art seem stupid."

Borge was a superlative pianist (I wasn't aware that concert artists are ordained) who discovered that most of us "serious" musicians take what we do far too seriously. He did not make high art seem "stupid." He made high art seem human. He was especially funny, and other musicians loved him. Just watch the orchestra behind him in those videos Queenan derides.

As a teenager, I had the good fortune to see Borge perform live over 30 years ago, and I still remember his charm, wit, and musicality. Many years later, I saw him on TV doing his one-man rendition of a "newly discovered Mozart opera." It is still one of the funniest things I have ever seen, and probably ever will see.

Michael Shahani
Walnut Creek, CA

The Other Princeton

In "Civilization and Its Malcontents" (May 9), Joseph Epstein writes of Elaine Showalter: "She has also been described . . . as 'Camille Paglia with balls,' a description meant approbatively, or so at least Princeton must feel, for they print it on princetoninfo.com, a stark indication of the tone currently reigning in American universities."

In fact, princetoninfo.com is a website run by U.S. 1, a weekly newspaper for the Princeton, New Jersey, community. It is not affiliated with Princeton University.

Sara Mayeux
Princeton, NJ

Hu are You?

Because of a translation snafu, John J. Tkacik's "Hu, What, Wen, Where, and Why" (May 9) misstated the age of Chinese president Hu Jintao's father at the time of his death in 1978. Hu Jingzhi was in his late 50s when he passed away.