Vassar student engages in insightful papal visit

Rachel Wetz Guest Writer

Just two days after submitting my senior thesis on the scholarship of Pope Benedict XVI, I had the incredible honor and privilege of meeting the Pope himself onstage at the Youth Rally on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y on April 19. I took part in the beginning of the stage ceremony as a representative of Eastern European peoples during a tribute to the diversity of our country’s ethnic backgrounds.

It was a tremendous opportunity for me as a Catholic, but it was even more meaningful because the Holy Father’s philosophical thought has been integral to my intellectual engagement of my faith. I have spent a great deal of time trying to unpack the Catholic conception of faith and reason in his scholarship. Instead of a denial of reason itself, the Church teaches that both reason and faith interplay in a complementary relationship. This event held tremendous meaning for me as a student of theology and as a member of the Church because the substance of my reflections center around what the Pope says to the modern world.

I was particularly interested to hear what the touchstones of the Pope’s speech would be when he addressed the crowd. His carefully crafted speech dovetailed nicely off the themes he had laid before the United Nations the previous day on April 18, speaking to the consonant relationship of faith and reason. He articulated the nature of freedom and its sinister enemies: racism, poverty and those things that betray the integrity of human life. Without his usual professorial tone, he recounted his own youth under the Nazi regime, the first time he has done so publicly after his election as pontiff. The ideology of Nazism, he said, “banished God and thus became impervious to anything true and good.” He then named a second predator of authentic freedom: a moral relativism that distorts the truth and gives value to everything indiscriminately.

This is his hallmark challenge to modernity. Whereas “traditional” cultures have understood freedom as the active pursuit of goodness, relativistic societies reduce freedom to “license.” This in turn prevents societies from coming to a notion of the common good and leaves them merely struggling to balance individual preferences. To disrupt the cohesion of faith and reason construes freedom as license, pleasure-seeking and an untutored exercise of the will.

Benedict believes that authentic freedom is not self-serving but rather seeks the good above all else. Truth, then, is not an imposition, he says, but rather a privileged path to freedom.

On the whole, that Saturday was particularly moving, not only because I was able to meet Pope Benedict, but also because I was in solidarity with the 25,000 other people present.

Because of his visit to the United States, many have been given the opportunity to encounter the pope in a way they may have not been able to otherwise. His shy and sincere personality revealed a more complex figure than his reputation as a scholastic hard-liner would expose.

I am certain that the Pope’s journey to the United States has given those watching a more concise picture of the man and his message, and perhaps now we will lean in closer to engage the substance of that message. Pope Benedict XVI’s visit was as much an opportunity for him to encounter us as it was an opportunity for us to encounter him.