Acton Institute

Acton adjuct scholar Alejandro Chafuen argues that the new pope places the concept of freedom centrally to his thinking. And “with freedom comes an incalculability — and thus the world can never be reduced to mathematical logic,” writes Chafuen.

Wall Street Opinion Journal Kenneth L. Woodward

The great surprise of yesterday’s papal election is that the new pope is no surprise. As the long-time Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the best-known figure at the Vatican apart from John Paul II himself. In American political terms, his elevation to the papacy is much like a highly visible vice president replacing a president. Clearly, the conclave that elected him wanted continuity rather than change. That is the only surprise.

Like his predecessor, the new pope is a genuine intellectual. But where John Paul II was a professional philosopher, Benedict XVI is a theologian. And although the two men worked closely together, the differences showed.

Wall Street Opinion Journal BRIAN M. CARNEY Thursday, April 14, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

At Mass last Sunday, Amiens’s gothic cathedral, the largest in France, was virtually empty. Not just sparsely filled–it was, except for a handful of tourists, vacant. Mass was being conducted in a side chapel fit for the couple dozen worshipers who showed up for it (I among them).

Amiens is hardly the exception. Europe’s largest churches are often unused these days, reduced to monuments for tourists to admire. And there is a reason for this neglect. In “The Cube and the Cathedral,” George Weigel describes a European culture that has become not only increasingly secular but in many cases downright hostile to Christianity. The cathedral in his title is Notre Dame, now overshadowed in cultural importance by the Arc de la Defense, the ultramodernist “cube” that dominates an office complex outside Paris. “European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular,” Mr. Weigel writes. “That conviction and its public consequences are at the root of Europe’s contemporary crisis of civilizational morale.”

The Boston Globe By Mark Noll | April 10, 2005

No one would mistake John Paul II for an evangelical Protestant. But he contributed to a dramatic warming of relations between evangelicals and Catholics that may mark a turning point not only in American politics but in the history of Christianity.

DURING THE 1960 presidential campaign, leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals – including Harold John Ockenga of Boston’s historic Park Street Church – joined other Protestants in warning the nation about the danger of electing a Catholic, John F. Kennedy. Last year, the conservative evangelical spokesman Gary L. Bauer saw the matter very differently.

”When John F. Kennedy made his famous speech that the Vatican would not tell him what to do,” Bauer told USA Today, ”evangelicals and Southern Baptists breathed a sigh of relief. But today evangelicals and Southern Baptists are hoping that the Vatican will tell Catholic politicians what to do.”