The following may be of particular interest at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. It is a quotation (The Rise of Benedict XVI, pp. 169-72--slightly abridged) from John Allen's just published book on the election of Benedict XVI. Allen is discussing the significance of the new pope's choice of name and quotes at length from a speech then Cardinal Ratzinger gave a mere 24 hours before the death of John Paul II. Ratzinger was receiving the St. Benedict Prize from the Benedictine monestary at Subiaco. Among other things he said the following (as quoted by Allen):

We need people like Benedict of Norcia, who, in a time of dissipation and decadence, sank himself into the most profound solitude, succeeding, after all the purifications that he was forced to undergo, in making the light rise again, returning to found Montecassino, the city on the hill where, amid all the ruins, he put together the energies from which a new world was formed. Thus, Benedict, like Abraham, became the father of many peoples.

Allen goes on to comment:

From this talk, one draws a keen sense of how Benedict XVI understands the historical legacy of his namesake. In an era of turbulence, of "dissipation and decadence," Benedict founded an utterly new kind of community, one based on love and truth, and in so doing kept the true humanism alive in a dark time. By way of analogy, the new pope has long believed that a similar process of intellectual and moral decay is at work in the contemporary West, and that Christianity's mission is once again to preserve an alternative vision of the meaning and purpose of human existence.

The comparison with the late fifth and early sixth centuries is not accidental. Though Joseph Ratzinger is too sophisticated a thinker to draw simplistic parallels between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the situation in the West in the early twenty-first century, he is nevertheles struck by the commonalities. In a November 28, 2000, lecture on the contemporary situation in Europe delivered in Berlin, he said: "The comparison with the Roman Empire at twilight imposes itself. [Rome] still functioned as a kind of great historical framework, but in practice it lived off forces that were destined to dissolve it, because in itself it no longer possessed vital energy."

Benedict XVI, as a man eminently aware of the intellectual conversation in the West, certainly knows the classic 1981 work, After Virtue, byAlasdair MacIntyre, one of the most celebrated works of contemporary philosophy on the cultural right. In it, MacIntyre unpacks this implied parallel between the final decay of the Roman Empire and the contemporary Western situation, and specifically located St. Benedict in this comparison. One of the new pope's aides and admirers suggested that I consult this passage from MacIntyre to contextualize the Pope's choice of name.

At this point, Allen quotes the justly famous last paragraph of After Virtue and concludes: "A quarter-century later, MacIntyre has his Benedict."