Sorry to bang on about it

I know some of the recent entries have contained little other than criticism of the theological tide washing over us at the moment, one the media are all too happy to surf upon, with wall-to-wall coverage on BBC News, a channel run by a publicly-funded organisation let's not forget.

But yet again I've been stirred to write on something the Pope said in last night's vigil, which was preparation for today's beatification ceremony of Cardinal Newman in Birmingham. The following is a direct, word for word transcription of what he said;

"At the end of his life, Newman would describe his life’s work as a struggle against the growing tendency to view religion as a purely private and subjective matter, a question of personal opinion. Here is the first lesson we can learn from his life: in our day, when an intellectual and moral relativism threatens to sap the very foundations of our society, Newman reminds us that, as men and women made in the image and likeness of God, we were created to know the truth, to find in that truth our ultimate freedom and the fulfilment of our deepest human aspirations."

I've got very serious problems with this part of his speech in particular. Firstly, the idea that intellectual relativism and moral relativism are somehow the same thing is bizarre to me. Just because I had a different education, and share different mores and cultural influences to those proclaimed by the Catholic Church, does not mean that I am incapable of establishing a firm moral code, for example, which is one of the implications I took from this passage, whether that was his intent or not. His fundamental problem with this relativism, as he describes it, seems to be that my morality will therefore likely be different from his absolutist morality, and no such freedoms are permitted within the 'truth' handed down by, and from, the Church. Surely, the 'ultimate freedom' he speaks of is only possible when I am free to make up my own mind? How can his peculiar absolutism ever, ever be freer than this matter of personal choice which he, and Cardinal Newman, even in the 19th century, found so threatening?

That's one of the Church's fundamental problems - people with the freedom to choose for themselves may reject the values and beliefs the Church works so hard to inculcate into them. Reason enough to reject the teachings in the first place, if they leave no room for doubt, no room for question, no room for even the possibility that they could be wrong. I just, frankly, didn't think the Pope would be quite so open about his Church's rejection of such (what I see as) open-mindedness.

Sorry, probably a bit dry this one! I'll get back to the matters in hand, namely Albion's excellent point at Carlisle yesterday, in due course.