ANALYSIS: The pontiff's lucid and prosaic address was not hugely surprising – but it did impress
THIS WAS “the” speech and it lived up to its billing. It was certainly worthy of the location.
Westminster Hall was, Pope Benedict recalled, “a building of unique significance in the civil and political history of the peoples of these islands”. He is fond of that phrase, “the peoples of these islands”. He used it twice in his very first address of this visit when he met Queen Elizabeth in Edinburgh on Thursday.
Westminster Hall had “such a profound influence on the development of participative government among the nations”, he said. The common law tradition evolved there, and its vision of the rights and duties of the state and the individual, and of the separation of powers, served “as the basis of legal systems in many parts of the world”.
Where better place, then, to address the role of religion in society? But there was another very good reason: St Thomas More, “admired by believers and non-believers alike, for the integrity with which he followed his conscience, even at the cost of displeasing the sovereign [Henry VIII] whose ‘good servant’ he was, because he chose to serve God first”. And pope, though Benedict XVI didn’t say so.
More’s dilemma, “the perennial question of the relationship between what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God” allowed Pope Benedict look at “the proper place of religion within the political process”, he said.
What followed was not hugely surprising but it did impress. It was lucid. It was delivered with a compelling conviction, and there were occasional prose flourishes, reminders of the writing style of his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est.
It was clever, too. Such as his line “the angels looking down on us from the magnificent ceiling of this ancient hall remind us of the long tradition from which British parliamentary democracy has evolved”. Was he implying that it evolved from Catholicism? And there was that tone. So moderate. Non-confrontational, in an Anglican sort of way. Even the vocabulary. No “aggressive” words, or mention of “secular”, or of “relativism”.
Perhaps this too was influenced by location and his observation that “this country’s parliamentary tradition owes much to the national instinct for moderation, to the desire to achieve a genuine balance between the legitimate claims of government and the rights of those subject to it”.
That too, it seems, is the Catholic way. “While couched in different language, Catholic social teaching has much in common with this approach,” he said.
Still, it would appear that, whatever about moral relativism, Pope Benedict does seem to agree with Taoiseach Brian Cowen that moderation has its limitations: for if moderation should be applied to all things, this must include moderation itself.