.....To state the matter quite simply: Tolerance has been absolutized, while truth has been relativized.....It has inevitably led to a decisive intolerance of the Catholic Church, for example, and not because she opposes tolerance, but because she refuses to accord it a higher status than truth.....People live in constant fear that any gesture or statement suggesting that one thing might be better than another is not only not tolerated, but met with scorn, derision and often severe reprisals. As Pera avers, “The adjective ‘better’ is forbidden.”....

DONALD DEMARCO, CATHOLIC EDUCATION RESOURCE CENTER

When Christ told his disciples that his teaching provided them with a liberating truth (“You will know the truth and the truth will set you free”), he was, at the same time, offering a blueprint for a liberal education.

In today’s post-modern world, the notion that truth leads to freedom is regarded as narrowly Catholic and intolerant of other religious views. The new blueprint in the post-modern world is that tolerance, not truth, leads to freedom. This is a crossroad and a crisis to which Pope Benedict XVI has given considerable thought and verbal expression.

When he was known to the world as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he produced a book, Truth and Tolerance that confronts this very issue of the place of truth in the post-modern world. He recognizes that so much importance is now attached to tolerance, that it has been separated from truth, which, in turn, has been relegated to the sphere of mere opinion.

To state the matter quite simply: Tolerance has been absolutized, while truth has been relativized.

Nonetheless, such a separation of tolerance from truth (or politics from philosophy) is preposterous, in the original meaning of the term. The Latin words prae (before) and posterius (after) relate to the absurd or “preposterous” practice of placing “before” that which should come “after,” like putting the cart before the horse.

Placing man first and God second is preposterous in the same way.

The preposterous maneuver, however, has a more sinister implication — it first eclipses what should be primary and then banishes it in the direction of oblivion. Thus, placing man first and God second soon leads to atheism; placing politics first and philosophy second leads to agnosticism, or the elimination of philosophy.

The distinguished Thomistic philosopher, Étienne Gilson, has made the comment that one of the essential features of Aquinas’ thinking was his ability to put things in their proper order.

In philosophy this is critical, for, as Gilson explains, if an idea is out of order it is “lost, not in the usual sense that it is not to be found where you expected it to be, but in the much more radical sense that it is no longer to be found anywhere.”

One of the more urgent problems in the modern world is the recovery of philosophy (and truth along with it) so that we understand how various realities relate to each other, whether they be God and man, philosophy and politics, the state and its citizens.

The reason, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, for the exaggerated importance given to tolerance and its promotion over truth, rests on the fact that we now live in a pluralistic world consisting of a wide diversity of values, customs and religious beliefs.

How, then, is it possible for people to live in harmony with each other and be tolerant toward each other’s differences?

If truth is invoked, it would presumably have the insidious effect of making one group appear superior to another and consequently intolerant. The answer to this problem has been the adoption of relativism and its concomitant removal of a philosophy that is anchored in truth.

Cardinal Ratzinger fully understands the dire consequences resulting from excising truth from politics and making relativism sovereign.

“Relativism,” he writes, “in certain aspects has become the real religion of modern man.” It represents, he goes on to say, “the most profound difficulty of our day.”

These austere words cannot be taken lightly, for Pope Benedict is a careful thinker and not given to hyperbole.

The experiment in trying to be tolerant in the absence of any regulatory truth has proven to be a failure. It has inevitably led to a decisive intolerance of the Catholic Church, for example, and not because she opposes tolerance, but because she refuses to accord it a higher status than truth.

In other words, the Church insists that all things be placed in their proper order. This is enough for the world to indict her for being “intolerant.”

Cardinal Ratzinger asks the pertinent question, “What meaning does belief then have, what positive meaning does religion have, if it cannot be connected with truth?”

A pagan philosopher answered this very question better than two millennia ago. Marcus Tullius Cicero, in the year 44 B.C., reasoned that religion without truth is merely superstition...“We should do ourselves and our countrymen a great deal of good,” he wrote in his treatise, On Divination, “if we were to root superstition out entirely.”

But the great statesman and philosopher, mindful of the human proclivity to throw the baby out with the bathwater, was quick to assert that he did “not want religion destroyed along with superstition.”

He urged the abolition of superstition, but the retention of religion. We do not need superstition, he proposed, but we do need religion.

The distinguishing factor, for Cicero, was natural science that revealed the truth of things.

“That there is some eternal Being,” he wrote, “who stands out above the rest, and that the human race ought to serve and admire him, is an admission that the beauty of the universe and the orderliness of the celestial bodies compels us to make. Therefore, just as religion, being associated with natural science, ought actually to be propagated, so every root of superstition ought to be weeded out.”

Simply stated, Cicero enjoined his fellow countrymen to use truth as a way of distinguishing religion from what he deemed not worth tolerating, namely superstition.

The 20th-century American philosopher Mortimer Adler reiterates Cicero’s position in his book, Truth in Religion: The Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truth.
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Donald DeMarco. "When Tolerance Trumps Truth." National Catholic Register. (February 17-23, 2008). This article is reprinted with permission from National Catholic Register. To subscribe to the National Catholic Register call 1-800-421-3230.