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      VIRTUOUS LEADERSHIP AND CHRISTIAN HUMANISM: A PRELIMINARY THOUGHT

      Pierluca Azzaro

‘Humanity needs a profound cultural renewal; it needs to rediscover those virtues which can serve as the solid basis for building a brighter future for all. Our present crises – be they economic, food-related, environmental or social – are ultimately also moral crises, and all of them are interrelated. They require us to rethink the path which we are travelling together. Specifically, they call for a lifestyle marked by sobriety and solidarity, with new rules and forms of engagement, one which focuses confidently and courageously on strategies that actually work, while decisively rejecting those that have failed. Only in this way can the current crisis become an opportunity for discernment and new strategic planning’.¹

Ten years ago, Benedict XVI strongly exhorted humanity to rediscover the ethics of reasonable and shared virtue, on the basis of which the future could be planned anew. He did this specifically in his Message for the World Day of Peace, which that year he dedicated to respect and care for the creation and which had the significant title ‘If you Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect the Creation’. Indeed, the very close connection that exists between the protection of the creation and the safeguarding of justice and peace is a common theme that pervades the Magisterium of the Popes at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Benedict XVI himself, emphasised this: ‘Twenty years ago, Pope John Paul devoted his Message for the World Day of Peace to the theme: Peace with God the Creator, Peace with All of Creation». He emphasized our relationship, as God’s creatures, with the universe all around us. ‘In our day’, he wrote, ‘there is a growing awareness that world peace is threatened… also by a lack of due respect for nature’. He added that ‘ecological awareness, rather than being downplayed, needs to be helped to develop and mature, and find fitting expression in concrete programmes and initiatives’. Previous Popes had spoken of the relationship between human beings and the environment. In 1971, for example, on the eightieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s Encyclical Rerum Novarum, Paul VI pointed out that ‘by an ill-considered exploitation of nature (man) risks destroying it and becoming in his turn the victim of this degradation’. He added that ‘not only is the material environment becoming a permanent menace – pollution and refuse, new illnesses and absolute destructive capacity – but the human framework is no longer under man’s control, thus creating an environment for tomorrow which may well be intolerable. This is a wide-ranging social problem which concerns the entire human family’.²

More generally, the intellectual and human journey of Joseph Ratzinger has been marked by awareness that, in the history of humanity, the gravest crises and the most dramatic and inhuman regressions have always coincided with the obscuring of the ethics of authentic virtue: ethics of virtue that are based upon the harmonious and indissoluble unity of their constituent elements – faith and reason. His theological output on this subject has been as broad as it has been deep.³

I will confine myself here to citing a homily that Benedict XVI gave forty years ago, specifically on the eve of the first and historic elections for the European Parliament. A few weeks later European citizens chose their leadership, and indeed the homily had the significant title: ‘The Responsibility of Christians for Europe’. On that occasion, the then Archbishop of Munich and Freising, commenting on the readings of the day, emphasised that when Paul invited the Philippians to guide their public and private lifestyles by doing ‘whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise’ (Phil 4:9), he consciously used terms that belonged totally to Greek moral philosophy. And in doing this, Paul invited the Philippians to follow the wisdom of Greece, that is to say, to follow reason and act according to reason. It is evident that one is not dealing here, and paradoxically specifically in Paul, with a faith that in relation to reason declares itself superfluous in the context of a process where reason will progressively become completely self-sufficient. On the contrary, at the moment of its greatest purification, Greek reason was specifically a perception of what it did not possess to be truly, fully and lastingly itself. It was awareness of the support that it needed to remain truly human and reasonable, that is to say, directed towards good. This was required by the ethical parameters that could not be self-given for it to remain truly free: at its highest moment Greek reason – beyond all of its knowledge and power – had insight into what constituted its summit and completion – to perceive the eternal, to be sensitive to God. It is here, for Ratzinger, that should be sought the meaning of the mysterious episode narrated in Acts 16:6-10, which marks the beginning of the ethics of Christian virtue: the Macedonian, who appears himself in a dream to Paul and beseeches him to come to him to help him, represents the spirit of the Greek world, he represents reason. And with Paul, who sails for Greece, is the Spirit of Jesus Christ, of God made man, to answer this supplication, to ‘grasp the extended hand of reason’.⁴ This is the moment of the birth of what Ratzinger also defines as ‘humanism of the incarnation’ as an interior identity, as the ethos of Europe and then of the West. ‘What Paul brings to the Macedonians is, first of all, encounter with Him, true God of true God and, at the same time, true man, who suffered for us, who was crucified and buried; who rose again on the third day, and who brought with him human nature in the glory of God ‘to prepare a place for you’» (Jn 14:2). The figure of Jesus Christ is at the centre of European history and is the foundation of true humanism, of a new humanity. Because if God became man, then man acquires a dignity that is totally new. If, instead, man is only the product of a chance evolution, then his very humanity is an accident and thus, at a certain point,

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