“Politics must be a commitment to justice and must create the essential conditions for peace”. In fact, the “success” of every politician is subordinated to “the criterion of justice, the will to enforce the law, and the understanding of the law”. Benedict XVI delivered this speech during his visit to the Federal Parliament at the Reichstag building in Berlin. Recalling the biblical story narrated in the First Book of Kings in which the young Solomon asks God for “an understanding heart” and the ability to “distinguish right from wrong”, the Pope, referring to the experience of Nazism, remarked that “serving the law and combating the rule of injustice is and remains the primary task of all policymakers” and today “this task becomes all the more urgent”. Man, the Pontiff explained, “can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, so to speak, create human beings and exclude other human beings from being human beings”. For this reason, “Solomon’s request remains the decisive question facing politics and policymakers even today”. “In most of the matters to be regulated by the law, the majority criterion can be a sufficient criterion”, observed Benedict XVI; however, “in the fundamental questions of the law, in which man’s dignity and humanity are at stake, the majority principle is not sufficient”.
“In the law-making process – the Pope explained in his address to the Bundestag and Bundesrat – each person with responsibility has the duty to seek their own orientation criteria”. Yet the answer to “the question about what corresponds now to the law of truth”, that is, “what is right and can become existing law when dealing with fundamental anthropological issues” is “not at all evident” for a politician. Hence the Pope recalled that Christianity, “unlike other major religions”, has never “imposed a revealed law on state and society”, but has always pointed to “nature and reason as the true sources of the law – recalling the harmony between objective and subjective reason” which “actually presupposes that these two spheres are both rooted in God’s creative Reason”. And it is actually the “pre-Christian connection between the law and philosophy” that marks the beginning of the road which, “through the Christian Middle Ages”, leads to the “Declaration of Human Rights” and “to our German Fundamental Law”, Benedict XVI highlighted. Yet today “the idea of natural law” is regarded as “a peculiar Catholic doctrine, which is not worth discussing outside the Catholic world”. In the face of a “positivist conception of nature and reason, almost generally accepted today”, “the classical sources of knowledge of the ethos and of the law are disregarded”.
According to the Pope, “the positivist vision of the world” is “a great part of human knowledge” but this culture is not “sufficient to human beings in all their fullness”; if it “considers itself” as such, “it reduces man, it threatens his humanity”. Hence a glance at Europe “in which many circles tend to regard positivism as the only common culture and common foundation for the development of the law” and in doing so, they place Europe “in a condition of lack of culture vis-à-vis the other cultures of the world”, thus “giving rise to radical and extremist forces”. The positivist reason “cannot perceive anything beyond what is functional”: for Benedict XVI, it is like a reinforced concrete building “with no windows” that should “be re-opened wide”. Referring to the appearance of the ecological movement in the political life of Germany in the seventies, the Pope said – making clear that his was not propaganda – that “there exists also an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at pleasure. Man is not just a self-creating freedom”; he “does not create himself. He is spirit and will, but also nature, and his will is right when he listens to nature and respects it, when he accepts himself for what he is, and the fact that he is not self-created”.
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