Affirmative Orthodoxy

Here’s a nice article by John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter on how Benedict XVI spends his time not by simply denouncing the evils of the world, but by offering Christianity as a positive alternative, what Allen calls “affirmative orthodoxy”:

By “affirmative orthodoxy,” I mean a tenacious defense of the core elements of classic Catholic doctrine, but presented in a relentlessly positive key. Benedict appears convinced that the gap between the faith and contemporary secular culture, which Paul VI called “the drama of our time,” has its roots in Europe dating from the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, and the Enlightenment, with a resulting tendency to see Christianity as a largely negative system of prohibitions and controls. In effect, Benedict’s project is to reintroduce Christianity from the ground up, in terms of what it’s for rather than what it’s against.

This spirit of “affirmative orthodoxy” was clear in Benedict’s first encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est , in which the pope laid out a philosophical and spiritual basis for the church’s teaching on human love. His encouragement for the International Theological Commission to set aside the hypothesis of limbo offers another example. Without softening the traditional teaching that Christ’s grace, normally mediated through baptism, remains essential for salvation, Benedict nevertheless put the accent on hope.

The best concrete example of affirmative orthodoxy that Allen gives comes from a 2006 interview with German journalists before his trip to Bavaria:

Question: A month ago you were in Valencia for the World Meeting of Families. Anyone who was listening carefully, as we tried to do at Vatican Radio, noticed how you never mentioned the words “homosexual marriage,” you never spoke about abortion, or about contraception. Careful observers thought that was very interesting. Clearly your idea is to go around the world preaching the faith rather than as an “apostle of morality.” What are your comments?

Response: Obviously, yes. Actually I should say I had only two opportunities to speak for 20 minutes. And when you have so little time you can’t say everything you want to say about “no.” Firstly you have to know what we really want, right? Christianity, Catholicism, isn’t a collection of prohibitions: it’s a positive option. It’s very important that we look at it again because this idea has almost completely disappeared today. We’ve heard so much about what is not allowed that now it’s time to say: we have a positive idea to offer, that man and woman are made for each other, that the scale of sexuality, eros, agape, indicates the level of love and it’s in this way that marriage develops, first of all, as a joyful and blessing-filled encounter between a man and a woman, and then the family, that guarantees continuity among generations and through which generations are reconciled to each other and even cultures can meet. So, firstly it’s important to stress what we want. Secondly, we can also see why we don’t want something. I believe we need to see and reflect on the fact that it’s not a Catholic invention that man and woman are made for each other, so that humanity can go on living: all cultures know this. As far as abortion is concerned, it’s part of the fifth, not the sixth, commandment: “Thou shalt not kill!” We have to presume this is obvious and always stress that the human person begins in the mother’s womb and remains a human person until his or her last breath. The human person must always be respected as a human person. But all this is clearer if you say it first in a positive way.

On one hand, this should be obvious. More is accomplished when Christianity is presented as the prescription for society’s ills than when it is offered only as a litany of proscriptions. Sadly, however, many pulpits continue to preach “no” without a cogent “yes” to replace what is denied. And so when we would seek to denounce modern sexual laxity, we can instead advocate the better option of conjugal life. When we would simply denounce death, we can uphold life even in its most nascent stages as something worthy of cherishing. When we would denounce the sin and evil of the world, we can also proclaim the greater truth of the redeeming power of Christ.