Our friend MB recommends the following address given by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury at San Anselmo University: 'Benedict and the Future of Europe.'

Much of what he writes concerning communal life and the need for a more humane economy is good. The biggest objection I would have would be to his discussion of cultural diversity. Culturally diverse Christian polities in Europe? Wonderful. Cultural diversity within a political community? Problematic.

The community envisaged by the Rule is therefore not in any way a unit dominated by individual will, however strongly the injunctions may be phrased about surrendering to authority. That authority attempts to be, not representative in the modern sense, but at least systematically attentive to the diversity of character and experience within the community. Most significantly, perhaps, the community's discipline does not assume that there is a 'natural' order of precedence established by the world outside which dictates the degree to which you are taken seriously in the community. Seniority is a matter determined within the monastery (chapter 63), primarily related to the date of entry, except as the abbot may determine. It is, we could say, the scope of your involvement in the community's life that defines your standing, not any external criterion such as wealth or social status or education, or even chronological age. Put the other way around, no-one's voice in the community is automatically dismissed or minimised because of the lack of wealth, status and so on. The community is one in which the 'currency' of exchange is not restricted by social or historic accident; commitment to the community is the ground upon which the right to be heard is based.

Once again, how does all this relate to the questions we might want to put to our continent and its culture at the present time? The first point is obviously about the valuation of diversity in the Rule. It is not anything remotely resembling the rather passive pluralism, which seems to be the default position of many kinds of post modernity. There is a clear and unambiguous assumption that there is such a thing as a common good and that therefore each distinct diverse perspective is open to challenge; Benedictine obedience is to do with this, not with some generalised submission of one person's will to the power of another. But there is an equally unambiguous refusal of any sort of competitive struggle for the dominance of one individual or group, and a set of checks and balances to offset any risk attaching to the strong emphasis on the abbot's authority. Authority is the negotiating of a variety of gifts in order to sustain a society in which all are at work for the sake of each other's flourishing and (in the monastic context) holiness).

In the macro political scene, this implies a serious valuation of cultural diversity - of local language and custom - and a suspicion of those trends that associate authority either with an isolated professional class or with an economically dominant partner in the community of states. The bureaucratic urge to homogenise is one which Christians have every reason to resist; and the characteristic style of international planning and debate needs to allow the less materially advantaged partners a free voice. One of the more positive factors of some of the language of European politics in recent decades has been the emphasis on regional autonomy - a recognition that the solid and inflexible concepts of national sovereignty that have prevailed in the modern period cannot do full justice to actual cultural diversity and the need for appropriate local freedoms.

A European community (in the strict sense, and in the looser sense of the general geographical ensemble of European countries) that reflected something of the Benedictine vision would be one in which smaller nations and minorities within nations would be assured of a voice. And, to pick up a point that is especially pertinent in our present situation, it would be one that did not panic about migrants. The migrant group that is prepared to work within the civic framework of a host society, that aspires simply to citizenship, is one whose voice in the community overall is of significance alongside those who have a longer history and a political or economic advantage. Once within the relationships of purposeful common life, the facts of coming from ethnically or religiously different backgrounds should not disenfranchise them. The basic importance of 'obedience', in the full sense give by the Rule to that word, requires governing authorities to listen to diversity and to ask how the overall balance of nation or transnational grouping needs to be adjusted so as to incorporate both the gifts and the needs of the incoming stranger who is seeking not simply hospitality (the Rule's priorities are clear about what to do in such a case) but shared belonging.

How this is achievable when we confront groups whose basic assumptions about civic identity appear to be different from our own historic ideals is of course a major challenge. While it is a facile and dangerous fiction to think of Islamic civic ideals and Christian or Western ones as so different that they cannot be sensibly compared, there is undoubtedly a spectrum of understanding from the ideologically secular liberal through to the most inflexible Muslim primitivist (the kind who elects to ignore most of Islamic history and jurisprudence in favour of a supposed adherence to the bare data of initial revelation). But once we have stopped thinking of this as inevitably a standoff between rational pluralism and simple theocracy - once we have actually begun to think about how to conduct debates over civic identity across some of these frontiers - the way is open to a properly 'Benedictine' questioning as to how we shape a common civic purpose out of these new diversities rather than assuming that this is now a level of diversity with which we can't cope.

I think he is rather optimistic about a community formed in a Christian Western civilization being able to maintain some semblance of harmony when cultural diversity is extended to include (a sizable population of) Muslims.

Democrats and Jihadists: A Love Affair by R. Cort Kirkwood

Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo