Without Roots

Pope Benedict XVI joins the former President of the Italian Senate to offer a provocative critique of the spiritual, cultural and political crisis afflicting the West. On May 12th 2004, Pope Benedict XVI - then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - addressed the Italian Senate on the state of the West. The very same day, Marcello Pera, President of the Italian Senate spoke before the Lateran College of the Papal University. Together they called upon the West to confront the spiritual, cultural and political malaise that have afflicted in the earliest years of the 21st century. In the months that ensued, before Cardinal Ratzinger's election to the papacy, they developed their ideas into the eloquent dialogue that is Without Roots - a book that quickly became an Italian bestseller and is timelier today than ever. Europe, contends Ratzinger, has come to a point where it has a "crisis of its circulatory system". Low birthrates are creating a vacuum that is being filled by transplanted populations whose presence is a challenge to Europe's identity and could become a threat to European democracy.
Alongside this, Europe is being shaken by the war in Iraq, terrorism, security issues, Israel, relationships with the US, and by the rejection of the EU constitution in both France and the Netherlands. Europe's failure to secure its future is mirrored by an abandonment of its spiritual roots in the interests of relativist secularism. What do human rights, civility, tolerance and equality before the law mean in such a culturally diverse population? How, they argue, do we organise ourselves and live together, define our national identity, create public policy, in a society in which any notion of "truth" implies an unacceptable imposition of someone's "values" on someone else. At this moment of crisis in European identity, the authors ultimately call on Europeans and the West in general to accept that only a spiritual rather than political renewal will help us to make sense of changes in technology, economics and society for the good of all.