I give you an other [bad] example. I tell my children to wear glows because it is cold,but in school the teacher says that it is OK to not wear them because it is not so cold outside.
Relativism. You say it’s cold, the teacher says it’s not as cold as it was.
the belief that truth is in the eye of the beholder. Relativism insists that morality, cultures, and beliefs are all of equal value, meaning, and worth. It asserts that what is true for one person might not be true for another, and each person can decide for himself what is true, good, and right. Popular expressions of relativism include comments such as, “This is true for me–and so I believe it” and “What’s right for you might not be right for me.”
In his homily at the Mass preceding the conclave that quickly elected him Pope Benedict XVI, then-Cardinal Ratzinger said that “relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching,’ looks like the only attitude [acceptable] to today’s standards.” He warned: “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
In Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, then-Cardinal Ratzinger addresses relativistic assaults on truth and meaning. He is especially critical of the commonly held belief that truth cannot be known–or, if it can, it can only be “true” for certain people, not for everyone-I think this is a philosophy especially prevalent in Scandinavian countries? He writes that “to lay claim to truth for one religion’s particular expressions of faith appears today, not merely presumptuous, but an indication of insufficient enlightenment.” And he adds that this relativism “is the most profound difficulty of our age.”
In a fitting turn of phrase, he describes this as “the dogma of relativism”–a dogma that despises the Judeo-Christian tradition. A dogmatic dislike of orthodox Christianity is, of course, prevalent in Western culture. As Benedict XVI points out at length, it poses many challenges, especially when it comes to proclaiming the Gospel. It’s one thing to argue that Christianity it true when the culture accepts that truth can be known; it’s another matter altogether when many people believe (often absolutely) that absolute truth is about as real as Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.
Increasingly, those who proclaim the truth of Jesus Christ and His Church are fitted with tidy labels in an attempt to dismiss them from the public square. The Holy Father observes that “the belief that there is indeed truth, valid and binding truth, within history itself, in the person of Jesus Christ and in the faith of the Church, is referred to as fundamentalism.” He states, “The Christian has to resist this ideology” of false equality, relativism, and bigotry.
Moral relativism is certainly not limited to the non-Catholic realm. Many within the Catholic Church have fallen prey to the seductive call of relativism. This has led to a serious crisis among certain moral theologians who have embraced the separation between will and act, resulting in a morality essentially free of the reality of sin, shot through with “sincerity” and coated in talk of “complexity.”
In turn, some Catholics have concluded that “freedom” involves choosing for oneself what is true or false. Pope John Paul II addressed this misreading of truth and morality in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”), where he stated:
This view of freedom leads to a serious distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. . . . In this way, any reference to common values and to a truth absolutely binding on everyone is lost, and social life ventures on to the shifting sands of complete relativism. At that point, everything is negotiable, everything is open to bargaining: even the first of the fundamental rights, the right to life. (par 20)
In Dominus Iesus (“On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church”), the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made special mention of the challenge of relativism. It did not provide easy answers, but instead insisted that the only real cure was the clear and unwavering proclamation of the Gospel: “As a remedy for this relativistic mentality, which is becoming ever more common, it is necessary above all to reassert the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ” (par 5).
In a world filled with doubt about the existence of truth, the Church and her members must continually introduce the seeking and the lost to the One who is “the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (Jn 14:6). And Pope Benedict XVI will undoubtedly be leading the way in confronting the dictatorship of relativism with the freedom of Truth.
