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Italians on L’Opzione Benedetto

Our Italian reader Giuseppe Scalas very kindly translated two long articles from the Italian press concerning the Benedict Option. I present them to you below the jump, for those interested in reading what the BenOp looks like from abroad. I will have some commentary to follow the second one, a critical but helpful piece by […]
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Our Italian reader Giuseppe Scalas very kindly translated two long articles from the Italian press concerning the Benedict Option. I present them to you below the jump, for those interested in reading what the BenOp looks like from abroad. I will have some commentary to follow the second one, a critical but helpful piece by the Italian conservative philosopher Massimo Introvigne.

First, a page 3 story from Il Foglio, pictured above:

Are we ready for the Court?

 

By Mattia Ferraresi

“No, the sky is not falling — not yet, anyway — but with the Supreme Court ruling constitutionalizing same-sex marriage, the ground under our feet has shifted tectonically. Voting Republican and other failed culture war strategies are not going to save us now.”

This is what Rod Dreher, a conservative blogger and columnist, writes on “Time”. Rod Dreher in the last few years has gradually abandoned the classical Culture War tactics adopted by Christians on the public square, in the name of an alternative called the ‘Benedict Option’. The Supreme Court just confirmed the need to review the strategy on how to oppose the secularist wave. It’s maybe because in Dreher’s mind, and in the minds of the Christian intellectual circle he’s in conversation with since a few years, the reasoning about Benedict Option is work in progress, that it’s meaning is probably better grasped through the via negationis, that is, by finding out first and foremost what it is not. It is not religious quietism. It is not docility. It isn’t a white flag waved in front of the rainbow flag army.

It is not the return to the fortress of non-negotiable values or a Family Day run uphill [Family day is a great rally taking place in Italy against SSM and the Gender Theory and pro-family]. It is not a retreat from a world erupting the fiery stones of secularization. Neither it is a reactionary impulse face to the defeat of the Christian worldview nor a regrouping into Indian reserves, pockets of resistance against mainstream thoughts calling themselves out of the battle. Nor it is – as it is obvious – negotiating the conditions of surrender.

Talking with Dreher one finds out that this is not even a monastic option, in the strict Benedictine meaning of the word, a call to divine contemplation in well-entrenched cloisters whence, in the future, God willing, a new reconstruction of the vandalized west could begin.

The TAC columnist is not looking after a people of tonsured clerics, secluded from the world. Dreher also says that Cardinal Camillo Ruini, interviewed by Matteo Matzuzzi in those pages, has misunderstood his proposal. Ruini said: “Rod Dreher seems to be mixing up very different instances. Benedict of Norcia retired from the world not because he was desperate of conversion, but because he sought only God and he was convinced the best way for him to find Him was monastic life. His was an intuition or, better, a vocation which has been a very fecund and decisive one for the history of our civilization”.

The answer: “There is neither desperation nor pessimism in my reflection. I’m not after a consolatory utopia, a place where we can lick our wounds and comfort each other, but a place, actually many places, where we could be ourselves, retrieve the true Faith. I’m not necessarily envisaging a West constellated of lay monasteries, but community experience allowing first and foremost to ourselves to regain our Faith”.

No contradiction, then, with the quaerere Deum which, alone, was the motivation pushing the saint from Norcia to rebuild Europe from monasteries, as another Benedict, Joseph Ratzinger, reminded us in his 2008 speech at the Collège des Bernardins: “They didn’t mean to create a culture, or to preserve a culture from the past. […] In the chaos of times when nothing seemed to endure, they were after the only essential thing: to seek what is always worthy and permanent, to seek Life itself. They were looking for God. From the less important things, they wanted to move on to the essential, to what, alone, is really relevant and reliable”.

Dreher’s main reference is that last page, at the same time ambiguous and prophetical, of After Virtue, the foundational work of Alasdair McIntyre. In that page the American philosopher draws a parallel, though an imperfect one, between the moral conditions of Europe and North America on one side, and of the Roman Empire in its decline towards the Dark Ages on the other and he points, in a necessarily vague way, to the need for a remedy.

“What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”

Dreher’s ambitious project is to figure out or retrace reasonable forms – social, educational, charitable, etc.. – into which this new awareness could materialize and flourish. The Benedict Option is an appeal to what he calls “small-o orthodox Christians”, that is, those Christians who haven’t given up the possibility that their faith can be lived authentically, to be distinguished from the big-o Orthodox Christians, to which Dreher belongs, and from those cultural Christians who are leaving Churches and denominations in droves.

He grew up in a Francophile but Methodist environment. He left [Mainline] Protestantism because it was “boring, conformist, moralistic oriented and drenched in social conventions”, whereas Catholicism had that radicalism he was looking after. He grew disaffected with the Church of Rome when he dealt as a reported with the first wave of child abuse scandals among the American clergy, and converted to Orthodoxy in 2006.

His detractors like to paint him as a gloomy prophet of doom, growling ancient liturgical formulas against a heretical world from his ideological lair, but he really is a mild-mannered man, with a nuance of Chestertonian humor. Someone who prefers, as an argument, the joy of being Christian, rather than the aggressions of mainstream thinking against tradition.

Not that he isn’t aware of the relevance of the battle. He set out to work on a Benedict Option book, after having coined the category in 2013 [Actually long before that — RD], when Indiana reformed its religious liberty law.

“I started receiving phone calls and emails from friends and readers. ‘We have to do something,’ they said. And I agree. We need to do something but, before that, we have to acknowledge that the Christian model for political engagement has failed. I was for a long time a very politically engaged Catholic, but I realize that, in the name of politic,s we have forgot culture, underplaying the essence of the Christian proposal. Benedict XVI talked about creative minorities, a concept going arm-in-arm with Benedict Option. If I had to summarize the existential impact of my proposal, it would be this: live counterculturally”.

Which is very different from the religious Right “Culture War”, that war that even the most obstinate organizer of marches must admit being lost. Faced with the mighty advance of an unchristian anthropological vision, Dreher says, small-o orthodox have to “take a step back with respct to the individualist culture in which we are immersed”. Fight the lordship of the individual, with his desires, his titanic ability to redefine himself and social structures, his liberal tendency to censure what doesn’t conform to his principles.

“Ten years ago the historian of Christianity Robert Louis Wilken said that there is nothing more important than remembering who we are. It’s more because of the crisis of our Christian conscience than because of the aggressions of secularization that in Europe and the US people, especially young people, is leaving Christianity”, he says.

Another thing Benedict Option is not: a political project. Michael Hanby, professor at the John Paul II Institute in Washington and the mind that did much of the theological work underpinning the Benedict Option wrote that “the synthesis can’t be a political one, like that the civic project of American Christianity could be revitalized by old botchy coalitions or by a new front. We should rather conceive it mainly as bearing witness”.

Dreher adds: “Bearing witness is the only meaningful form of evangelism in this historical moment. Ratzinger used to say that the Church’s best weapons are her saints and her art. A really true an beautiful summary. We have to be a light for a world who has embraced darkness.”

In some way, Benedict Option is a very American product. The messianic project of the Pilgrim Fathers (Stanley Hauerwas defined it “the project of modernity”, the single instance in the West of a State that hasn’t to define itself on the background of a pre-existing Christian identity, but that creates it anew) aspired to a reconciliation between modernity and Christianity, and even American Catholics have pursued – and still pursue – the dream of “forgetting about the difference between a good Christian and a good American”, an enlace between the logic of Revelation and the liberal order with which Catholic Europe hasn’t had the opportunity of falling in love. The Jesuit John Courtney Murray, a major personality of 20th century American Catholicism, theorized the perfect compatibility between liberal democracy and Christianity.

A dangerous marriage that has created generations to whom God, says Dreher, “is just the butler of the American Dream. The diabolical religious genius of America has reduced God to anything. McIntyre said that if men don’t have a common idea about something beyond themselves, the only criteria left is ‘I feel it’, the feeling. But feeling is always wavering and undebatable, you can’t discuss about it. This sentimental factor is a common element to a large part of American religiosity”. The people who believed to jump, with a messianic leap, the chasm between Christianity and modernity, is experiencing in a very short time the conflict between Church and State that has been unraveling in Europe during a couple of centuries”.

Dreher remarks that the sudden awareness that the stronghold is under attack reflects itself in a deep generational rift across Christians. “The older ones are typically Murrayite. They are still looking for a way to make Christian life and American life compatible, while the younger ones who are not lapsed are much tougher and disillusioned about the American way of life promise. It was a promise with a veneer of theology, but under that there was only Enlightenment and secularization”. Only Catholics have been left to watch the fortress, as Flannery O’Connor, a Southern author cherished by Dreher would say, and he quotes: “you have to press upon the times at least as much as the times press upon you”

But the [fundamentalist] Protestants’ withdrawal out of politics has nothing in common with the Benedict Option. Also because, as Hanby notices, there isn’t an “out” where to withdraw. The liberal order has occupied the full existing political and conceptual space, even the remote parts of it and, somehow, also Amish and similar groups are included, framed, and legitimated within the same order, although in the box of opponents to modernity. The existence of community living according to an alternative order with respect to the one regulating the ordinary civic life is permitted by a decree of the State. It’s a concession, not a revolution.

The only inviolate spaces are those of conscience, of the “eschatological orientation” (Benedict XVI) of Christian life, experienced in its essential elements at the personal and community level, at the point of projecting, God willing, its consequences on everything else, but almost as a side effect of such orientation, an involuntary outcome. Just like Benedict’s method.

In more essential terms this is about, says Dreher, to propose a remedy against “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”, a coinage of the sociologist of religions Christian Smith to describe the prevalent attitude among a youth which is de facto post-Christian, but still formally anchored to some sort of religious code. “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” postulates the existence of a god looking at Men from afar and ordering them to be good, to feel good, to be happy and not to annoy their neighbours. A sort of Great Analyst that has humanity laying in the couch and prescribing it yoga sessions. Is a consolatory god that doesn’t upset the social order, not a Comforter who came to bring a sword.

“Being Christian means being radical – says Dreher – and this doesn’t fit with the way of life of 21st Century America, where the remnants of Christianity have been swept away by society, or they have been reduced to spiritual assistance for those seeking psychological comfort. But face to those changes, we need to think about a new way to rediscover, and therefore re-communicated, such radicality”.

Here is a follow-up essay by Massimo Introvigne, an important conservative Italian philosopher, who is somewhat skeptical of L’Opzione Benedetto. I’ll have some commentary after his piece:

The Benedict Option is more than welcome, as long as it’s Benedict XVI (along with Francis)

Abandoning the battlefield (including the political one) to create spaces of
formation, education and schooling to survive? It won’t work, says Introvigne.
In this way the winner will be the “Lord of the World”.
Massimo Introvigne | July 5 2015 06:18
I’m now in the US, where the debate about the Rod Dreher’s proposal, the Benedict Option, is thriving (‘Il Foglio’ deserves the credit for introducing it in Italy). Dreher’s position has to be well understood: it’s not a ‘religious choice’, calling for Christians to withdraw into sacristies. It doesn’t require to take no interest into the great anthropological and moral questions. But it posits
that it’s possible to take good care of them only with a long march, starting from education and small communities, as opposed to a direct confrontation, which would only bring about defeat.

The Culture War – so Dreher thinks – has been valiantly fought but is over and, as the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, the Christians have lost it. In Italy this could be seen as supporting the decision of those who have chosen not to attend the great rally on the 20th of June in Piazza San Giovanni and also some high-ranking clerics are thinking in the same way.

But this is not Dreher’s fault. Therefore I’d like to look at his theory without reference, at least at first, to the Italian situation.

By reading it with the sociologist’s eyes, I think that Dreher’s strategy could be appealing and seem completely reasonable: also because it has a succesful historical precedent. It was adopted by Islamic fundamentalism, when faced with political and military defeat. In the Eighties, after the murder of Sadat (1918-1981) in Egypt (1981) and the military coup in Turkey (1980) the Middle East military dictatorship defeated Islamic fundamentalism through repression and police. Many of its leaders were hanged.

While a minority reacted through terrorism, the best advised leadership of political Islam, at least in Egypt and Turkey, proposed an implicit agreement to the domineering secularism of the ruling military régimes. The agreement sounded more or less like this: you govern the State in a more or less secularized way, through laws we hate. In return for it, you silently let us create some Islamized spaces, micro-societies where ourselves and our children would live according to interpretation of the Koran.
This pact was broken in the 21st Century – although in Egypt, face to the inability of the militaryrulers to control terrorism, someone is thinking about bringing it back – but it lived for decades.

The secular régimes survived, almost undisturbed, for many years. In the meantime, the fundamentalists’ Islamized micro-societies have grown and prospered.

I’m quite sure that Dreher doesn’t thinks about the Muslim Brotherhood or the Turkish political Islam before the time’s of Erdogan’s electoral victories, but an objective similarity is there.

All is well, then? Not exactly, and for two reasons. The first one is that Western relativism is much more sophisticated and intrinsically evil than the crude barracks mentality – sometimes sprinkled in Masonic sauce – of some Middle Eastern dictatorship. It’s not by pure change that Pope Francis has compared more than once the dictatorship of the Western pensée unique with the Antichrist’s rule in the old Robert Hugh Benson’s (1871-1914) novel “Lord of the World”.

This means that, contrary to some Middle Eastern general, the western “lords of the world” will sense the danger – actually they have already sensed it, and – St. Benedict or not – they will ruthlessly smite the alternative redoubts where people lives and educates in contradiction to the pensée unique.
The first signs are already visible in Northern Europe, where fundamentalist and conservative Protestants are trying to do just what Dreher suggests: they are not playing the political game, they don’t dispute in a militant way the laws against life and family, but they try to live peacefully, to build themselves and others within separate and protected communities and schools.

I have recently interviewed the administrators of two of those Protestant communities. In one case – a Swedish school – the inspections have remarked that the quality of teaching is excellent, but they have threatened the school with closure if the school uniform will continue to be different for boys (trousers) and girls (skirt), which is against the gender ideology, which is mandatorily taught, both in theory and practice, in all Swedish schools, both in State and non-State schools. I

In the other instance, in Germany, the fact that children are sometimes corrected with corporal punishments – we’re not talking about some sort of abominable violence here, but about some mild spanking – has caused the removal of children from their parents and their assignment in foster care to “normal” families. In a series of raids, German policemen in battle array stormed the communities
and took away the children.

It can be objected we are talking about “sects”: but here what’s relevant is the principle at work. And, by any means, for some secularists anybody teaching
something different from what the powers that be happen to like is a “sect”.

Let’s not delude ourselves. In politically correct Europe there will be no tolerance for islands of alternative life. Same in the US. The first signs are visible also there, with Christian bakers forced to bake cakes for homosexual “marriages” and pastors sued for refusing to “marry” people of the same sex.
A second reason why I’m doubtful about Dreher’s proposal is that, should “lords of the world” ever underwrite some sort of implicit pact to leave the “Benedict islands” alone, those pacts are never underwritten without some mental reservations. The ruling secularists feigned tolerance for the Islamized spaces but, at the same time, put in place many small tactics to do away with them.
As mentioned, in our countries those tactics are much more sophisticated and, at the same time, somehow more brutal. The Islamists didn’t plan to stay in their Islamized Indian reserves for ever. Someday, they would come out to rise to power. It has worked and – with some turbulence – it still works in Turkey. It worked in Egypt for a very short time. There, the Muslim Brotherhood first gained then lost the power. But the strategy was clear. The pact was there, but nobody had subscribed it in good faith.
This is, ultimately, the question to ask Dreher. Spaces of freedom of formation, education and schooling, to do what? Just in order to survive? It won’t work. The police will come to our schools and take away our children, possibly fabricating abuses and pedophile priests. And, should this not happen, the pressure from the outside will become more and more suffocating, until death.

Let’s listen to Pope Francis: let’s re-read “Lord of the World” and we will know that, as the Pontiff said, “human sacrifices” await us. Or, like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Turkish political Islam, should we think to silently grow a space for us, to be transformed one day into a political project for political hegemony? In this second case, the further question to be asked is if, starting
from those growing spaces, it would be possible to imagine a recapture of a society that, in the meantime, would have morally fallen into pieces.

From any standpoint, a pact that requires a withdrawal from the battle in the political and public opinion field against socially destructive practices such as homosexual “marriage” and adoptions, seems to push the “good ones”
underwriting it into a mousetrap without exit. And also without much cheese.

On the contrary, cheese can be found somewhere else. Not just a survey, but the results of the referendums held a few years ago in the US have shown that in Mississippi 86% of citizens are against homosexual “marriage” and in Georgia, the state of Atlanta, one of the great American techno-megacities, home of that Coca-Cola who has celebrated enthusiastically the Supreme Court decision, 76%.

Surveys are less reliable than electoral results, but a recent national survey in Italy, four days after the great rally in Piazza San Giovanni, shows that 85% of Italians are against homosexual adoptions. That is to say that, at least implicitly, the oppose the Cirinnà bill that, in practice, legalizes adoption. Before saying that the resistants, Christian or not, have become a tiny minority, I would suggest to repeat the counting.
Is the Benedict Option completely wrong, then? No, if first of all integrates St. Benedict with Benedict XVI and then Benedict XVI with Pope Francis. Also Benedict XVI, at least for Europe, had in mind a minority Catholicism drawing its strengths from culture and education but which wasn’t against fighting in the public square, where possible, as in Italy after the 2007 Family Day.

And, before declaring a battle lost, it fought it. As an example, just think about its intervention in the Lautsi case, that is, in the decision of the European Human Rights Court to forbid the showing of the Crucifix in Italian classrooms, which was reversed in appeal mostly thanks to the activism of the Holy See.
Certainly, to fight battles there’s a need for people willing to abide to the Church’s call saying that “a different world is possible”. We need more of them. And here’s where Benedict XVI should be integrated with Pope Francis, who recalled the great lesson of Pope Ratzinger about the dominion of Technocracy and of the ruling élites and the need to resist in his Encyclical Laudato Si. Misled by the debate on climate change, many have overlooked the fact that this was the heart of the Encyclical.

But how to resist against Technocracy? Pope Francis proposes two ways: rediscovering God’s love starting from the first truths of the Faith, and rediscovering beauty. This is what Dreher’s “Benedictine” community are for: they are more than welcome. But then, to repeat Pope’s Francis most frequent word, we shall “go outside” from those communities to play the match and try to win it.

Avoiding to buy from the ruling élites the idea that there’s not a match anymore because the game has been called over and we only need to accept defeat. Pope Francis often says that “time is superior to space”. We aren’t mice in a maze designed for us by the ruling élites, but men and women free to create our own future. We just need to believe it. Time is not over.

A few things here.

First, this is exactly the kind of constructive criticism we need as we consider what the Benedict Option should mean for us. I’m grateful to Prof. Introvigne for it.

Second, this is an opportunity for me to clarify something: the Benedict Option does not preclude political activism. It only makes that activism a secondary priority, behind cultural rebuilding within Christian communities. I do not advocate quietism, or a total withdrawal from politics like the Christian Fundamentalists did in the first half of the 20th century. I believe that would be dangerous.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I am a conservative and registered Independent who has lots of problems with the Republican Party. On balance, I probably have more in common with the Democrats on economics and foreign policy. But we can afford ourselves no illusions that the Democrats will protect, or even respect, our First Amendment freedoms of speech and religion when they contradict liberal orthodoxy on sex and sexuality. The Republicans may be fair-weather friends, but they are the only political friends orthodox believers have. Until the day comes when there is no meaningful distinction between them and the Democrats, we have to keep fighting for our right to be left alone.

(Besides which, there are plenty other political and civic issues on which we should be engaged.)

A central impetus to the Benedict Option is the fact that even if we win political battles, we stand to lose our children to the faith in the face of the overwhelming power of secularism, consumerism, and other facets of post-Christian modernity. I don’t know enough about the situation in Europe to say, but far too many American Christians have assumed that political and legal activism was sufficient to sustain our communities. We have been extremely naive about the power of culture to undermine our religious commitments and communities. This must change.

This is why I continue to say that even if same-sex marriage were not an issue, we would still need the Benedict Option. Studies show that young adults are falling away from Christianity in enormous numbers. Studies also show that the Christianity of those who still profess the faith in many ways has very little to do with the faith as we know it historically and Scripturally. I have had too many conversations to count with college professors at Catholic and Evangelical schools who tell me that their students are shockingly ignorant of basic Christian teaching — this, even if they have gone through parochial or private religious schooling. This massive failure is not the fault of liberals, LGBT activists, the media, or anybody other than us Christians. And it’s not going to be reversed solely by more rigorous catechesis, either.

Introvigne points out that in Italy, there are still huge numbers of Italians who hold to the traditional teaching, and hundreds of thousands of them turned out to protest recently. Good for them! I would not have expected that, but am encouraged by it — to a point. It is worth nothing, though, that 51 percent of Italians favor same-sex marriage, though much higher numbers oppose same-sex adoption. More relevant to the US discussion, Introvigne is completely misreading the data on US opposition to gay marriage.

For one, Mississippi is probably the most socially conservative state in the nation, hardly representative of national trends. For another, public opinion has dramatically swung since those votes of some years ago, and there is little reason to think it will swing back in a more conservative direction anytime soon. Even here in Louisiana, also a very socially conservative state, opposition to same-sex marriage is a minority position among voters under the age of 50. What’s more, the kind of people who oppose same-sex marriage are not those who are the de facto power holders in America, in terms of those running corporations, the media, academia, and other powerful institutions.

We orthodox Christians have to be realistic about what can be accomplished through politics under current conditions. We are likely to keep losing, in the long run. If we put all our eggs in the politics basket, what are we going to do when the state smashes them?

The strongest point Introvigne makes is one I’ve heard from time to time among conservative critics of the Benedict Option: that the idea we can establish our own enclaves and institutions is naive, because the state won’t leave us alone. They certainly have a point, though we have more freedom under the US Constitution to do this than many (most?) Europeans do — and we should use it (Prof. Kingsfield explains how that might work). What I would say to Introvigne et alia is this: After we lose the political and legal battles, and the state and/or their corporate allies crush our institutions, what then? 

After all, we still have the obligation to live as faithful Christians. How will we be resilient? How will we still worship, and teach our children, and our grandchildren, what it means to be truly Christian, and the necessity of resistance, even in the face of persecution. Even in the face of death, if it comes to that? How do we build up a commitment to Jesus Christ and to the fellowship of believers that can withstand the worst of what the state and post-Christian society can throw at us?

At some point, the Maginot Line-like defenses fail, and you don’t have enough troops or firepower to resist the army that wants to annihilate you. How do you live under occupation? How do you keep them from occupying the hearts and minds of your community, and your kids? And how do you most effectively undermine the new order?

The Benedict Option is not about building a neo-Amish Shire. It’s about developing the habits and customs that will enable us serve God and our communities faithfully, and to play a very long game under adverse conditions.

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