Carl E. Olson's Blog, page 283

Benedict, Luther, and the "unity born of love"

Pope Benedict XVI gave a much anticipated address today to representatives of the Protestant EKD (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland) at the former Augustinian Convent in Erfurt, where Martin Luther spent many years before his break with the Catholic Church. He then gave another address at the same location at an ecumencial prayer service.

Although fairly short, the first address is quintessential Ratzinger/Benedict: personal, thoughful, embracing, and challenging, all at once. And is often the case with Benedict, he did not make his points with stark declarations, but with difficult questions. In fact, an entire paragraph of the address was taken up with a series of interrelated questions:

"How do I receive the grace of God?" The fact that this question was the driving force of his whole life never ceases to make an impression on me. For who is actually concerned about this today – even among Christians? What does the question of God mean in our lives? In our preaching? Most people today, even Christians, set out from the presupposition that God is not fundamentally interested in our sins and virtues. He knows that we are all mere flesh. Insofar as people today believe in an afterlife and a divine judgement at all, nearly everyone presumes for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and that ultimately he mercifully overlooks our small failings. But are they really so small, our failings? Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their own advantage? Is it not laid waste through the power of drugs, which thrives on the one hand on greed and avarice, and on the other hand on the craving for pleasure of those who become addicted? Is the world not threatened by the growing readiness to use violence, frequently masking itself with claims to religious motivation? Could hunger and poverty so devastate parts of the world if love for God and godly love of neighbour – of his creatures, of men and women – were more alive in us? I could go on. No, evil is no small matter. Were we truly to place God at the centre of our lives, it could not be so powerful. The question: what is God's position towards me, where do I stand before God? – this burning question of Martin Luther must once more, doubtless in a new form, become our question too. In my view, this is the first summons we should attend to in our encounter with Martin Luther.

By highlighting such essential questions, Benedict points out that authentic ecumenical dialogue (which he clearly and firmly believes must be at the service of unity and not just an exercise in facile conversation) should be rooted in asking the right questions about fundamental truths: the nature of God, the nature of grace and faith, and what it means to be a Christian, especially in a culture that is essentially post-Christian. And this means, of course, focusing on the person of Jesus Christ, without whom unity is both pointless and unobtainable:

Another important point: God, the one God, creator of heaven and earth, is no mere philosophical hypothesis regarding the origins of the universe. This God has a face, and he has spoken to us. He became one of us in the man Jesus Christ – who is both true God and true man. Luther's thinking, his whole spirituality, was thoroughly Christocentric: "What promotes Christ's cause" was for Luther the decisive hermeneutical criterion for the exegesis of sacred Scripture. This presupposes, however, that Christ is at the heart of our spirituality and that love for him, living in communion with him, is what guides our life.

Throughout his public life as priest, archbishop, cardinal, and head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger has not shied away from the fact that real and serious divisions exist between Catholics and Protestants (more on that below). But as Pope, as Vicar of Jesus Christ, he is mindful to emphasize the proper priorities for ecumenism and to indicate the way forward, mindful that union will only be possible through the power and grace of the Holy Spirit. Today, for instance, he said that

the first and most important thing for ecumenism is that we keep in view just how much we have in common, not losing sight of it amid the pressure towards secularization – everything that makes us Christian in the first place and continues to be our gift and our task. It was the error of the Reformation period that for the most part we could only see what divided us and we failed to grasp existentially what we have in common in terms of the great deposit of sacred Scripture and the early Christian creeds. The great ecumenical step forward of recent decades is that we have become aware of all this common ground and that we acknowledge it as we pray and sing together, as we make our joint commitment to the Christian ethos in our dealings with the world, as we bear common witness to the God of Jesus Christ in this world as our undying foundation.

And then, in his address given later at the Ecumenical Prayer Service he again focused on the need for common witness to the share belief in the Triune God, giver of Life and author of Love:

Our fundamental unity comes from the fact that we believe in God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth.  And that we confess that he is the triune God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  The highest unity is not the solitude of a monad, but rather a unity born of love.  We believe in God – the real God.  We believe that God spoke to us and became one of us.  To bear witness to this living God is our common task at the present time.

Benedict is, I'm confident, very mindful that Christ told Peter, "I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren" (Lk 22:32)—and that non-Catholic Christians are indeed brothers, even if separated brothers who are not in perfect and full communion. His words of encouragement are part and parcel of his consistent message, in this trip to Germany and in other such trips to other countries, that choosing life without God is to actually choose death, wittingly or otherwise. So he said today, at the prayer service:

But the more the world withdraws from God, the clearer it becomes that man, in his hubris of power, in his emptiness of heart and in his longing for satisfaction and happiness, increasingly loses his life.  A thirst for the infinite is indelibly present in human beings. Man was created to have a relationship with God; we need him.  Our primary ecumenical service at this hour must be to bear common witness to the presence of the living God and in this way to give the world the answer which it needs.  Naturally, an absolutely central part of this fundamental witness to God is a witness to Jesus Christ, true man and true God, who lived in our midst, suffered and died for us and, in his resurrection, flung open the gates of death.

Christians can easily lose sight of this need to witness, especially when they allow the world to set the agenda, frame the questions, and control the culture. And so Benedict addresses the problem of

the secularized context of the world in which we Christians today have to live and bear witness to our faith. God is increasingly being driven out of our society, and the history of revelation that Scripture recounts to us seems locked into an ever more remote past. Are we to yield to the pressure of secularization, and become modern by watering down the faith? Naturally faith today has to be thought out afresh, and above all lived afresh, so that it is suited to the present day. Yet it is not by watering the faith down, but by living it today in its fullness that we achieve this. This is a key ecumenical task.

There are, in essence, two paths for Protestant denominations to pursue today. The first is the path of capitulation, which has been embraced by a growing number of mainline Protestant groups, who are increasingly as faddish as they are irrelevant, as obsessed with being politically-correct as they are apparently blind to their own denominational deaths. The second is the path of catholicism, which involves a renewed (or completely new) interest in Church history, tradition and Tradition, liturgy, patristics, ancient devotions, and the historical witness of the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

An obvious example of both can be seen in the Anglican communion. Some Anglicans are (knowingly?) intent on sinking the ship as quickly as possible with the picks of sexual perversion and the axes of anti-doctrinal self-indulgence. But others are looking to Rome and realizing that the Holy Father and the bark of Peter have provided a safe harbor and a means not just of escape from a flailing faith but the fulfillment of a faith seeking communion.

Benedict said, "A self-made faith is worthless.  Faith is not something we work out intellectually and negotiate between us.  It is the foundation for our lives.  Unity grows not by the weighing of benefits and drawbacks but only by entering ever more deeply into the faith in our thoughts and in our lives." One thing that continually impresses me about the Holy Father is his ability to avoid two temptations: the temptation to live in the past to the detriment of truly living today, and the temptation to live as if the past has no true meaning for us today. This has, in fact, always been the case. It is readly evident in a 1984 interview, "Luther and the Unity of the Churches" (Communio; Fall 1984. Available as a PDF file.; it is included in the book, Church, Ecumenism, & Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology), in which Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger made a number of important remarks and observations about Martin Luther; in fact, I think it is key reading for anyone who wants some essential background to Benedict's statements in Germany.

In that interview, Ratzinger talked about the complexity of Luther, and distinguished between Luther the catechist, hymnist, and liturgical reformer, and Luther the radical and revolutionary polemicist against Rome. "It would be desirable," he said, "to keep in mind Luther's piety when reading his polemical works and the revolutionary background when dealing with issues concerning the Church." In other words, Ratzinger has always been interested in the whole Luther, not just one dimension or aspect of his huge and difficult personality. Then there is this fascinating question and answer, which I quote at length, that makes reference to Blessed John Paul II's trip to Germany in 1980:

Question: Would it be realistic for the Catholic Church to lift Luther's excommunication on the basis of the results of more recent scholarship?

Cardinal Ratzinger: In order to do full justice to this question one must differentiate between excommunication as a judicial measure on the part of the legal community of the Church against a certain person, and the factual reasons which led to such a step. Since the Church's jurisdiction naturally only extends to the living, the excommunication of a person ends with his death. Consequently, any questions dealing with the lifting of Luther's excommunication become moot: Luther's excommunication terminated with his death because judgment after death is reserved to God alone. Luther's excommunication does not have to be lifted; it has long since ceased to exist.

However, it is an entirely different matter when we ask if Luther's proposed teachings still separate the churches and thus preclude joint communion. Our ecumenical discussions center on this question. The inter-faith commission instituted following the Pope's visit to Germany will specifically direct its attention to the problem of the exclusions in the sixteenth century and their continued validity, that is, the possibility of moving beyond them. To be sure, one must keep in mind that there exist not only Catholic anathemas against Luther's teachings but also Luther's own definitive rejections of Catholic articles of faith which culminate in Luther's verdict that we will remain eternally separate. It is not necessary to borrow Luther's angry response to the Council of Trent in order to prove the definiteness of his rejection of anything Catholic: ". . . we should take him-the pope, the cardinals, and whatever riffraff belongs to His Idolatrous and Papal Holiness-and (as blasphemers) tear out their tongues from the back, and nail them on the gallows . . . . Then one could allow them to hold a council, or as many as they wanted, on the gallows, or in hell among all the devils." After his final break with the Church, Luther not only categorically rejected the papacy but he also deemed the Catholic teachings about the eucharist (mass) as idolatry because he interpreted the mass as a relapse into the Law and, thus, a denial of the Gospel. To explain all these contradictions as misunderstandings seems to me like a form of rationalistic arrogance which cannot do any justice to the impassioned struggle of those men as well as the importance of the realities in question. The real issue can only lie in how far we are today able to go beyond the positions of those days and how we can arrive at insights which will overcome the past. To put it differently: unity demands new steps. It cannot be achieved by means of interpretative tricks. If separation occurred as a result of contrary religious insights which could locate no space within the traditional teachings of the Church, it will not be possible to create a unity by means of doctrine and discussion alone, but only with the help of religious strength. Indifference appears only on the surface to be a unifying link.

Ratinzger mentions a point that is, it seems to me, one of the biggest bones of contention he has with Luther: the reformer's rejection of the Mass as sacrifice and, further, his belief that the Mass is idolatrous in nature. It's not surprising, needless to say, that this is upsetting to a Catholic. But it particularly galling to Ratzinger, I suggest, because his ecclesiology is so eucharistic-centered, a topic that he has taken up in several essays and books (for example, Called to Communion, The Feast of Faith, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church As Communion, and The Spirit of the Liturgy). In a 2001 lecture, "Theology of the Liturgy", Ratzinger noted that even some Catholic theologians (he specifically mentions  speak positively of Luther's "conclusions" that the sacrifice of the Mass is "the greatest and most appalling horror" and a "damnable impiety". He then stated, with a bit of an edge:

I certainly don't need to say that I am not one of the "numerous Catholics" who consider it the most appalling horror and damnable impiety to speak of the sacrifice of the Mass. It goes without saying that the writer did not mention my book on the spirit of the liturgy, which analyses the idea of sacrifice in detail. ... A sizable party of catholic liturgists seems to have practically arrived at the conclusion that Luther, rather than Trent, was substantially right in the sixteenth century debate; one can detect much the same position in the post conciliar discussions on the Priesthood.

And, a bit later, he connected the matter of the sacrifice of the Mass to the "principle presuppositions" about the authority of Scripture and how it is to be read, understood, and interpreted. Catholics read Scripture, said Ratzinger,

in the living community of the Church, and therefore on the basis of the fundamental decisions thanks to which it has become historically efficacious, namely, those which laid the foundations of the Church. One must not separate the text from this living context. In this sense, Scripture and Tradition form an inseparable whole, and it is this that Luther, at the dawn of the awakening of historical awareness, could not see. He believed that a text could only have one meaning, but such univocity does not exist, and modern historiography has long since abandoned the idea. That in the nascent Church, the Eucharist was, from the beginning, understood as a sacrifice, even in a text such as the Didache, which is so difficult and marginal vis-à-vis the great Tradition, is an interpretative key of primary importance.

Simply put, once the authority of the Church is jettisoned, or at least pushed to the side, the door is open for all sorts of errors, mistakes, and heresies. But Ratzinger doesn't believe that Luther set out to be rid of the authority of the Church; rather, Luther's eventual disregard for that authority came from his beliefs about the essential issues of faith and the nature of God. In the 1984 interview, Ratzinger said:

It seems to me that the basic feature is the fear of God by which Luther's very existence was struck down, torn between God's calling and the realization of his own sinfulness, so much so that God appears to him sub contrario, as the opposite of Himself, i.e., as the Devil who wants to destroy man. To break free of this fear of God becomes the real issue of redemption. Redemption is realized the moment faith appears as the rescue from the demands of self-justification, that is, as a personal certainty of salvation. This "axis" of the concept of faith is explained very clearly in Luther's Little Catechism: "I believe that God created me. . . . I believe that Jesus Christ . . . is my Lord who saved me . . . in order that I may be His . . . and serve Him forever in justice and innocence forever." Faith assures, above all, the certainty of one's own salvation. The personal certainty of redemption becomes the center of Luther's ideas. Without it, there would be no salvation. Thus, the importance of the three divine virtues, faith, hope, and love, to a Christian formula of existence undergoes a significant change: the certainties of hope and faith, though hitherto essentially different, become identical.

This, as he explained, is quite different from the Catholic understanding of faith, hope, and love. "Luther's insistence on 'by faith alone' clearly and exactly excludes love from the question of salvation. Love belongs to the realm of 'works' and, thus, becomes 'profane.'" Faith for Luther is not about the "commununal belief of the entire church"; it is radically interior and individualistic. The relationship between church and Scripture is skewed, and "Scripture becomes an independent measure of church and tradition. This in turn raises the question of the canonicity and the unity of Scripture."

My perception is that Benedict, in his two brief addresses today, was intent on focusing on the fact that Luther often asked the right questions about matters that are always relevant to all men, and, more implicitly, that while Luther rightly saw faith in Jesus Christ as the answer, that faith cannot be separated from the theological virtue of love, nor can it be separated from the Church, the Body of Christ, which is where full communion with God is found. Or, in Benedict's words, at today's first ecumenical gathering:

"What promotes Christ's cause" was for Luther the decisive hermeneutical criterion for the exegesis of sacred Scripture. This presupposes, however, that Christ is at the heart of our spirituality and that love for him, living in communion with him, is what guides our life.

And, from the second gathering: "The highest unity is not the solitude of a monad, but rather a unity born of love."

Finally, here is a passage from "Unitatis Redintegratio", Vatican II's Decree on Ecumenism, that quite nicely sums up many of the themes touched upon above:

What has revealed the love of God among us is that the Father has sent into the world His only-begotten Son, so that, being made man, He might by His redemption give new life to the entire human race and unify it. Before offering Himself up as a spotless victim upon the altar, Christ prayed to His Father for all who believe in Him: "that they all may be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us, so that the world may believe that thou has sent me". In His Church He instituted the wonderful sacrament of the Eucharist by which the unity of His Church is both signified and made a reality. He gave His followers a new commandment to love one another, and promised the Spirit, their Advocate, who, as Lord and life-giver, should remain with them forever.

On Ignatius Insight and Insight Scoop:

• Ratzinger on ecumenism: a reading list (Nov. 30, 2006)
• The Ecumenical Dream of Benedict XVI (July 2, 2008)
• Ratzinger on Luther (March 6, 2008)
• Further thoughts on Ratzinger and Luther, by Mark Brumley (March 10, 2008)
• Was The Joint Declaration Truly Justified? | An Interview with Dr. Christopher Malloy
• The Papacy and Ecumenism | Rev. Adriano Garuti, O.F.M.
• On the Papacy, John Paul II, and the Nature of the Church | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
• Peter and Succession | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
• "Primacy in Love": The Chair Altar of Saint Peter's in Rome | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
• Church Authority and the Petrine Element | Hans Urs von Balthasar
• Has The Reformation Ended? | An Interview with Dr. Mark Noll
• Why Catholicism Makes Protestantism Tick | Mark Brumley

Fr. Robert Barron: "I want our story told, and that's a reason I did this."

Tim Drake of National Catholic Register interviews Fr. Robert Barron of Word on Fire about "The Catholicism Project":

How did you first come up with the idea for "The Catholicism Project"?

That goes back about four or five years ago. I told the Word on Fire board that I wanted to do something like Kenneth Clark's Civilization, where he showed the beauty of civilization as he talked about it. I wanted to do the same for the Church by going to Europe, the Holy Land, Calcutta, Africa, Notre Dame Cathedral and elsewhere.

One of the board members suggested that I should drop everything else I was doing and do that. The board agreed and approached the cardinal about it. Cardinal Francis George, who had invited me to do the evangelizing-the-culture work, said that whatever he could do to make it happen he would do.

So, with the board and the cardinal behind me, we started raising money locally. It came through a lot of blood, sweat and tears, begging and events. Eventually, we obtained enough to do one trip. The cost was about $250,000 per episode for traveling, housing, filming and editing. We went to the Holy Land first.

I always had a 10-part series in mind. We filmed and continued begging, and once we had the money, we'd take our next trip. In the middle of the project, the economy collapsed, and many of our donors backed out. We continued praying, especially to the Little Flower [St. Thérèse of Lisieux], our patroness, and, in the end, we took 12 trips to 16 different countries and eventually got it done.

What was the high point in the filming?

For me, it was the Holy Land. It was the first time I had ever been there. Being in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher was overwhelming. Out of reverence and the religious excitement of being there, I knelt down. Our cameraman filmed that and used it in the series.

Another highlight was visiting Uganda. I teach a number of African students and asked them where I should go to see Catholicism in Africa. All of them said I should go to Namugongo, Uganda. There, on June 3, they have a massive liturgy and procession for the martyr Charles Lwanga and companions on the site where he was burned at the stake.

To see 500,000 African Catholics come with this giant procession of priests and bishops was overwhelming. In the video, I use the line about the "blood of the martyrs being the seed of Christianity," and the camera pans back to show this massive gathering. That was an emotional highlight for me. ...

In the past few years, the level of hostility directed at the Church has really intensified. Your project was, in some ways, a response to that, wasn't it?

The sexual-abuse scandal was the worst period in the history of the American Catholic Church. What do we do? We respond institutionally, certainly, as we did with the Dallas Charter. But secondly, and most importantly, we as a Church need to come back to the basics of evangelism.

The Church needs to reassert what it's about. That's what Sts. Dominic, Benedict and Ignatius did. They responded to crisis by talking about what we are about — Jesus Christ and caring for the poor.

I saw the project under this rubric and felt we should go forward at this time. A year ago I was on a local Chicago news program and the opening question was: "You represent the religion that has the worst public relations in the world." I said, "Yes, we have this problem, but I refuse to let 2,000 years of Catholicism be reduced to the sexual-abuse scandal. A handful of people did terrible things, but we have 2,000 years of beauty, art, architecture, liturgy and the saints. We have St. Thomas Aquinas, [Blessed] Mother Teresa, the Notre Dame Cathedral. I don't want that reduced to the sexual-abuse scandal." I want our story told, and that's a reason I did this.

Read the entire interview. The project is receiving rave reviews, including this from George Weigel:

Over the next four decades, I wondered whether someone, somewhere, at some point, would do a "Civilization"-like series on Catholicism itself: a Grand Tour of the Catholic world that explored the Church as a culture through its teaching, its art, its music, its architecture—and above all, through the lives it shaped. That has now happened. The result is the most important media initiative in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.

The man responsible for this feat is Father Robert Barron, a priest of the archdiocese of Chicago and a faculty member at Mundelein Seminary. Father Barron is an old friend (and a colleague on NBC's Vatican coverage), but I'll risk the charge of special pleading by stating unequivocally that Father Barron's "Catholicism", a 10-part series premiering on public television stations around the country this fall, is a master work by a master teacher. In 10 episodes that take the viewer around the Catholic world, from Chartres to the slums of Calcutta and dozens of points in-between, Father Barron lays out the Catholic proposal in a visually stunning and engaging series of presentations that invites everyone into the heart of the faith, which is friendship with Jesus Christ.

And Elizabeth Scalia writes:

I believe this effort by Father Robert Barron's Word on Fire — its instruction, it's beauty, it's passion and it's profound humanity in exploring the Incarnational Christ and His church — may well be the precise and timely tool we need to learn how to respond to the world "as it is," because it tells us things about ourselves, our church and our Savior that many of us do not even know, or have perhaps forgotten. ...

Catholicism is what we need to replenish and renew; this is the adult catechesis that can re-invigorate one soul, and then another, and then another, until a secure and confident force amasses — one that in the face of "reality" and relativism can declare "we know who we are, and who sustains us," and effect the spiritual and social revolutions we so desire.

Back in May, I wrote about my involvement with the project as author, under the direction of Fr. Barron and Fr. Steve Grunow, of the accompanying Study Guide:

It has been a tremendous honor to be involved in what I believe is a really remarkable project. There are many reasons for saying the "Catholicism Project" is remarkable, and I'll mention just a couple. First, the series is a unique and seamless marriage of catechesis, theology, history, culture, devotion, art, apologetics, and philosophy, adroitly presenting the great breadth and depth of Catholicism. This is a testament to Fr. Barron's impressive gifts as a pastor, theologian, philosopher, communicator, author, historian, and speaker. He challenges viewers to grapple with the mysteries of Faith while always avoiding two great temptations: to dumb things down or to be needlessly obscure or pedantic.

Secondly, having now seen a couple of episodes, I can say that the "Catholicism Project" captures, often in breathtaking fashion, the tremendous beauty of Catholicism. The cinematography is of the highest order, and the range of visual material is tremendous, including footage from all over the globe, in cathedrals and churches, at liturgies and in monasteries, of priests and laity, nuns and monks. Each episode highlights certain works of art, literature or architecture, and the Study Guide discusses these as well. In short, this is not only a most worthy introduction to Catholicism, but a vibrant and personal tour, if you will, of the Faith established by Christ and alive and well today, despite desperate rumors to the contrary.

"The Catholicism Project", I'm happy to say (again) is available through Ignatius Press; it has been on back order because of demand, but should be in stock again very soon:

• "Catholicism": The ten-part series on DVD
• Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith, by Fr. Robert Barron
• "Catholicism": Study Guide and Workbook

"The future will reveal what today cannot be read in the life of Padre Pio of Pietrelcina."

These words, written in January 1922 by Msgr. Raffaello Carlo Rossi, Bishop of Volterra-Inquisitor in San Giovanni Rotondo by order of the Holy Office in June 1921, when Padre Pio was just thirty-four years old—were then certainly a way to "cover his back", and avoid locking in too small a cage a man and a situation which to the prelate, sent on a reconnaissance mission to evaluate the stigmatic friar and the environment around him, had seemed—as we shall see—certainly out of the ordinary, but also substantially healthy and sincere. But those words were, at the same time, too easy a prophecy.

When we read them now—with Padre Pio having been proclaimed a saint in 2002, after many disagreements and vicissitudes—we can't help smiling. We now know very well what the future has said about that friar, rich since childhood in extraordinary charisms, but also—and I would say necessarily—subjected to a special attention on the part of the Church, and to a severity that often seemed excessive.

And we know it because, despite his humility and his reserve, the mission to which he had been called had an enormous echo, crossing all borders and channeling millions of pilgrims toward San Giovanni Rotondo. An event which, however one may have judged it, had captured the attention of everyone, believers and non-believers, helping considerably to strengthen the faith of many.

We should then know practically everything about him, since much has been written, both at a scholarly level and for the general public. But it is not so, as this volume by historian Fr. Francesco Castelli demonstrates. The book collects and analyzes what the jargon calls the Votum (that is, the final report of Msgr. Raffaello Carlo Rossi's inquiry, conducted, as noted, on behalf of the Holy Office), and other shorter texts like the Chronicle of Padre Pio, written by one of his spiritual directors, Fr. Benedetto Nardella of San Marco in Lamis.

These are almost entirely unpublished texts, and they are of remarkable documentary value: Since they were declared classified at that time, they didn't appear among the sources in the archives of San Giovanni Rotondo, and for this reason they were ignored for a long time. But in 2006, as is well known, Benedict XVI gave free access to the archives of the former Holy Office up until the year 1939, making it possible at last to examine what the archives held on the subject of the friar from Pietrelcina. The consequence of all this was the revival of the seemingly inexhaustible research on this saint, who has been long-loved and at the same time, in some circles, so discussed and looked upon with arrogant diffidence. These past few years have seen the arguments—both in favor and against the stigmatic Capuchin—rekindle, arguments that had apparently died down with the canonization.

Continue reading:

Benedict and Mozart on True Happiness

Benedict and Mozart on True Happiness | Monsignor Daniel B. Gallagher | September 23, 2011 | Ignatius Insight

Delivered on the eve of a highly touted visit to the United Kingdom last year, most of the world failed to notice a short speech Pope Benedict XVI gave following a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem at Castel Gandolfo. The Pontiff hailed the piece as an "elevated expression of genuine Christian faith" in which "everything is in perfect harmony; every note, every musical phrase is just so and cannot be otherwise." He reminisced about being overcome with "Mozart's che Heiterkeit" ("Mozartian serenity") every time he heard a Mozart Mass performed at his childhood parish. He marveled at Mozart's ability to fill even the most somber passages with a hope and joy that can only come from God's grace and a lively faith. Music, the pope claimed, was Mozart's way of making transparent the "illuminated response to divine Love, even when human life is torn apart by suffering and death."

The Holy Father has never kept his fondness for Mozart a secret. During a 1996 interview with Peter Seewald, the then-Cardinal Ratzinger explained that it was Mozart's unparalleled combination of luminosity and depth that first touched him as a boy in Traunstein. The glorious sound, combined with the sight and smell of incense gently rising to heaven, made manifest "the jubilation of the angels over the beauty of God."

A comment like this reveals not only the Holy Father's childlike faith, but his highly refined aesthetic sense that convinces him of the life to come. He considers music an authentic expression of reason, but a reason open to the depth of human emotion and the height of divine transcendence. He has recalled on numerous occasions hearing Leonard Bernstein conduct a program of Bach cantatas in Munich, after which both he and his neighbor (a Lutheran bishop) were immediately struck by the same certitude that the faith is true. "The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration."

In fact, music is one of the most direct ways of accessing Benedict XVI"s thought on reason, both human and divine, as well as the relation between the two. Our openness to the beauty and order of the world allows us to "discover that what is 'reasonable' extends far beyond what mathematics can calculate, logic can deduce and scientific experimentation can demonstrate." If we fail to catch sight of the breadth of human reason or logos, we fall short of appreciating the breadth of divine reason or Logos – a Logos which, in both cases, is "creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason." Music is a privileged forum in which the human and divine logos come to meet.

Read the entire essay on Ignatius Insight...

"But there is no excuse for being unaware of Aquinas."

Agreed! Here is a interesting post by Simon Rowney about shoddy Catholic theologians (specifically, Elizabeth Johnson), metaphysics, and naming God.

Pope: "To abide in Christ means ... to abide in the Church as well."

Benedict XVI's homily given today at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin was a masterful exposition of Scripture meant to correct misunderstandings about the nature of the Church and to exhort Catholics to abide more deeply in Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church:

In the parable of the vine, Jesus does not say: "You are the vine", but: "I am the vine, you are the branches" (Jn 15:5). In other words: "As the branches are joined to the vine, so you belong to me! 

But inasmuch as you belong to me, you also belong to one another." This belonging to each other and to him is not some ideal, imaginary, symbolic relationship, but – I would almost want to say – a biological, life-transmitting state of belonging to Jesus Christ. Such is the Church, this communion of life with him and for the sake of one another, a communion that is rooted in baptism and is deepened and given more and more vitality in the Eucharist. "I am the true vine" actually means: "I am you and you are I" – an unprecedented identification of the Lord with us, his Church.

On the road to Damascus, Christ himself asked Saul, the persecutor of the Church: "Why do you persecute me?" (Acts 9:4). With these words the Lord expresses the common destiny that arises from his Church's inner communion of life with himself, the risen Christ. He continues to live in his Church in this world. He is present among us, and we are with him. "Why do you persecute me?" It is Jesus, then, who is on the receiving end of the persecutions of his Church. At the same time, when we are oppressed for the sake of our faith, we are not alone: Jesus is with us.

Jesus says in the parable: "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser" (Jn 15:1), and he goes on to explain that the vinedresser reaches for his knife, cuts off the withered branches and prunes the fruit-bearing ones, so that they bring forth more fruit. Expressed in terms of the image from the prophet Ezekiel that we heard in the first reading, God wants to take the dead heart of stone out of our breast in order to give us a living heart of flesh (cf. Ez 36:26). He wants to bestow new life upon us, full of vitality. Christ came to call sinners. It is they who need the doctor, not the healthy (cf. Lk 5:31f.). Hence, as the Second Vatican Council expresses it, the Church is the "universal sacrament of salvation" (Lumen Gentium, 48), existing for sinners in order to open up to them the path of conversion, healing and life. That is the Church's true and great mission, entrusted to her by Christ.

Many people see only the outward form of the Church. This makes the Church appear as merely one of the many organizations within a democratic society, whose criteria and laws are then applied to the task of evaluating and dealing with such a complex entity as the "Church". If to this is added the sad experience that the Church contains both good and bad fish, wheat and darnel, and if only these negative aspects are taken into account, then the great and deep mystery of the Church is no longer seen.

It follows that belonging to this vine, the "Church", is no longer a source of joy. Dissatisfaction and discontent begin to spread, when people's superficial and mistaken notions of "Church", their "dream Church", fail to materialize! Then we no longer hear the glad song "Thanks be to God who in his grace has called me into his Church" that generations of Catholics have sung with conviction.

Read the entire homily on the Vatican Radio site. For more on the ecclesiology of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, see this excerpt from Fr. Maximilian Heinrich Heim's study, Joseph Ratzinger: Life in the Church and Living Theology—Fundamentals of Ecclesiology with Reference to Lumen Gentium:

New: "The Desert Fathers: Saint Anthony and the Beginnings of Monasticism"

Here is a press release about a new Ignatius Press book, The Desert Fathers: Saint Anthony and the Beginnings of Monasticism, by Peter H. Görg (also available in electronic book format):

Monasticism and the Desert Fathers continue to fascinate readers centuries later
 
SAN FRANCISCO, September 22, 2011 – In the late third century, more and more people withdrew to the radical seclusion of the desert so as to live entirely for God under the direction of a spiritual father. Among these "Desert Fathers" one figure is especially preeminent: Saint Anthony the Hermit. Centuries later, the stories of these Desert Fathers and their profound influence on the monastic way of life continue to fascinate the modern reader.
 
This book takes the reader back to the hour when monasticism was born and describes the life of those revolutionary Christians who sought God in the Egyptian desert. The focus of the book is the life and work of Saint Anthony, whose experiences of the spiritual life have a timeless beauty and validity, even for those not called to live as a monk.
 
The second half of the book presents other Desert Fathers, such as Paul of Thebes, Pachomius, and Simeon Stylites, as well as the great founders of the monastic communities in Western Europe who were inspired by them: John Cassian, Columban, and Benedict, for example.
 
Author Peter Görg explains, "The monk's self-denial begins radically in precisely those departments of life which have perennially seemed to be the most important: ownership, self-determination and sexuality. At the same time those who admonish so uncomfortably become the salt that lends Christianity its original flavor. . . . Just as the saints are God's specific answer to the needs of a given time, so too are the religious orders that have been founded over the course of the centuries."
 
Mike Aquilina, author of The Fathers of the Church, says, "These are the men who taught the world to pray – really pray. They fled to the dessert to avoid the crowds, yet drew disciples from everywhere. They still do. They're drawing you and me, right now, to join them in the greatest adventure. Our desert begins in these beautiful pages by Peter Görg."
 
"These 'desert fathers' fostered a new charism in the Church. Görg's work is a fitting mix of history, hagiography, and spiritual theology. His writing is clear, accurate, exhortative and exciting. In these pages Saint Anthony and those who followed his legacy, like Pachomius, Simeon Stylites, Saint Benedict, and others, come alive and inspire the reader to do the same," says Father David Vincent Meconi, S.J., Assistant Professor of Patristic Theology at Saint Louis University and editor of Homiletic and Pastoral Review.
 
About the Author

Peter H. Görg studied philosophy and theology in the German universities of Vallendar, Fulda and Augsburg, where he received his doctorate in dogmatic theology in 2007. Dr. Görg is an assistant professor of systematic theology at the University of Koblenz. He has written numerous articles and reviews for theological journals.
 
Ignatius Press Marketing Director Anthony Ryan is available for interviews about this book. To request a review copy or an interview with Anthony Ryan, please contact: Rose Trabbic, Publicist, Ignatius Press, (239) 867-4180 or rose@ignatius.com

Who was Alexander Solzhenitsyn? Why read his books?

From a ZENIT interview ("Solzhenitsyn's Prophetic Voice", Sept. 21, 2011) with Joseph Pearce about his biography, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile (Ignatius Press, 2011):

ZENIT: Who was Alexander Solzhenitsyn? Why should non-Russian audiences pay attention to his writing?

Pearce: Alexander Solzhenitsyn is one of the most important figures of the 20th century, both in terms of his status as a writer and in terms of the crucial role he played in the collapse of the Soviet Union and its evil communist empire.

As a writer, he was justly awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, unlike many other unworthy recipients. His novels "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," "First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" exposed the evils of socialism and totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn is a noble heir to the tradition of Russian fiction epitomized by the Christian humanism of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

His epic and seminal historical work, "The Gulag Archipelago," possibly his magnum opus, documented the brutality of the Soviet regime's treatment of dissidents.

All in all, Solzhenitsyn's corpus constituted a damning indictment of the injustice of communism and served to undermine the Soviet Union's political and moral credibility; it contributed significantly to the rise of dissident resistance within the communist empire and to the rise of political opposition to communism in the West.

In historical terms, Solzhenitsyn deserves a place of honor beside Blessed Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Lech Walesa as a major player in the final defeat of Soviet communism.

As an intellectual, he is indubitably one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century; as a cultural warrior he is an inspiration for everyone fighting for the culture of life in our nihilistic times; as a political critic, he is one of the most articulate advocates of the Christian alternative to the dead-ends of Big Government socialism and Big Business globalism, a champion of the subsidiarist principles at the heart of the Church's social doctrine.

ZENIT: One of the major themes of your biography is that Solzhenitsyn was a prophet, first in the Soviet Union, and then in the capitalist West. How did Solzhenitsyn have the ability to diagnose the deeper problems of his time?

Pearce: Clearly, as I've said, non-Russian audiences should pay attention to Solzhenitsyn as a great writer, and as a great hero in the cause of political freedom.

He is, however, also a prophet. He predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union as early as the 1970s when most so-called "experts" assumed that the Soviet bloc would be part of the global political picture for many decades to come.

Even more importantly, Solzhenitsyn prophesied the unsustainability of global consumerism and the impending catastrophe that awaited a culture hell-bent on hedonism at the expense of human community and the natural environment.

The current chaos in the global economy serves as a timely warning that Solzhenitsyn's prophecies are coming true before our eyes. Solzhenitsyn's socio-political vision, which harmonizes with the social teaching of the Catholic Church, is full of the sort of Christian wisdom that the modern world can scarcely afford to ignore -- or, at least, the sort of wisdom that it ignores at its peril.

Read the entire interview on ZENIT.org.

Here is part of a 2002 review by James F. Pontuso of the first edition of Pearce's biography (the new Ignatius Press edition has a chapter about Solzhenitsyn's death, as well as other updated material):

Pearce's biography is not as comprehensive as Michael Scammell's out-of-print 1984 opus, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography. But it is more probing, largely because Pearce, a writer whose previous work includes biographies of J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesteron, was able to interview Solzhenitsyn and his sons. A Soul in Exile highlights the extraordinary genius of Solzhenitsyn, recounting how he committed huge sections of The Gulag Archipelago to memory, fearing that a written version could be seized by the secret police. Pearce describes Solzhenitsyn's superhuman stamina — he often wrote for two eight-hour stretches per day, sleeping only a few hours between sessions. Solzhenitsyn's vast literary output seems to have been aimed not only at destroying the Soviet Union but also at rewriting Russian history in order to counter the widely accepted scholarly view that Soviet totalitarianism was more the result of the Russian national character than of Communist ideology.

Pearce demonstrates how many of Solzhenitsyn's much-derided predictions prior to the fall of Communism have come true. Solzhenitsyn anticipated that Communism would disintegrate, that the criminal element nurtured in the Gulag would take control of Russia's economy, that members of the KGB and the criminal elements were actually the same people, and that it would take 100 years for Russia to recover from Communism. Soviet experts in the West scoffed at these prognostications. Who's laughing now?

Most important of all, Pearce argues that Solzhenitsyn's highest goal in his writing was not political, but spiritual. Solzhenitsyn provokes people to consider their moral responsibilities to others and their personal responsibility for the development of their souls.

The Pearce biography includes lovely prose poems that Solzhenitsyn wrote after his return to Russia. The poems give us a glimpse of old age and of a personal reconciliation with death. It is almost as if Solzhenitsyn's body is in this world, but his spirit is reaching to experience the next.

Also see my interview with Joseph on Ignatius Insight:

Benedict XVI reflects with Jewish leaders on the horror of the Shoah and the Nazi terror

From the Vatican Radio website, the opening of Benedict XVI's address today to representatives of the German Jewish community:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am glad to be taking part in this meeting with you here in Berlin. I warmly thank President Dr Dieter Graumann for his kind words of greeting. They make it very clear to me how much trust has grown between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church, who hold in common a not insignificant part of their essential traditions. At the same time it is clear to us all that a loving relationship of mutual understanding between Israel and the Church, each respecting the being of the other, still has further to grow and needs to be built into the heart of our proclamation of the faith.

On my visit to the Synagogue in Cologne six years ago, Rabbi Teitelbaum spoke of remembrance as one of the supporting pillars that are needed if a future of peace is to be built. And today I find myself in a central place of remembrance, the appalling remembrance that it was from here that the Shoah, the annihilation of our Jewish fellow citizens in Europe, was planned and organized. Before the Nazi terror, there were about half a million Jews living in Germany, and they formed a stable component of German society. After the Second World War, Germany was considered the "Land of the Shoah", where it had become virtually impossible to live. Initially there were hardly any efforts to re-establish the old Jewish communities, even though Jewish individuals and families were constantly arriving from the East. Many of them wanted to emigrate and build a new life, especially in the United States or Israel.

In this place, remembrance must also be made of the Kristallnacht that took place from 9 to 10 November 1938. Only a few could see the full extent of this act of contempt for humanity, like the Berlin Cathedral Provost, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who cried out from the pulpit of Saint Hedwig's Cathedral: "Outside, the Temple is burning – that too is the house of God". The Nazi reign of terror was based on a racist myth, part of which was the rejection of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ and of all who believe in him. The supposedly "almighty" Adolf Hitler was a pagan idol, who wanted to take the place of the biblical God, the Creator and Father of all men. Refusal to heed this one God always makes people heedless of human dignity as well. What man is capable of when he rejects God, and what the face of a people can look like when it denies this God, the terrible images from the concentration camps at the end of the war showed.

Read the entire address.

Pope's opening address in Germany focuses on politics, justice, reason, positivism

Here is the opening paragraphs of the Holy Father's address given earlier today at the Federal Parliament in the Reichstag Building in Berlin:

Mr President of the Federal Republic,
Mr President of the Bundestag,
Madam Chancellor,
Mr President of the Bundesrat,
Ladies and Gentlemen Members of the House,

It is an honour and a joy for me to speak before this distinguished house, before the Parliament of my native Germany, that meets here as a democratically elected representation of the people, in order to work for the good of the Federal Republic of Germany. I should like to thank the President of the Bundestag both for his invitation to deliver this address and for the kind words of greeting and appreciation with which he has welcomed me. At this moment I turn to you, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, not least as your fellow-countryman who for all his life has been conscious of close links to his origins, and has followed the affairs of his native Germany with keen interest.

But the invitation to give this address was extended to me as Pope, as the Bishop of Rome, who bears the highest responsibility for Catholic Christianity. In issuing this invitation you are acknowledging the role that the Holy See plays as a partner within the community of peoples and states. Setting out from this international responsibility that I hold, I should like to propose to you some thoughts on the foundations of a free state of law.

Allow me to begin my reflections on the foundations of law [Recht] with a brief story from sacred Scripture. In the First Book of the Kings, it is recounted that God invited the young King Solomon, on his accession to the throne, to make a request. What will the young ruler ask for at this important moment? Success – wealth – long life – destruction of his enemies? He chooses none of these things. Instead, he asks for a listening heart so that he may govern God's people, and discern between good and evil (cf. 1 Kg 3:9).

Through this story, the Bible wants to tell us what should ultimately matter for a politician. His fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work as a politician must not be success, and certainly not material gain. Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the fundamental preconditions for peace. Naturally a politician will seek success, as this is what opens up for him the possibility of effective political action. Yet success is subordinated to the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of what is right. Success can also be seductive and thus can open up the path towards the falsification of what is right, towards the destruction of justice.

"Without justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?", as Saint Augustine once said (1). We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right – a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss.

To serve right and to fight against the dominion of wrong is and remains the fundamental task of the politician. At a moment in history when man has acquired previously inconceivable power, this task takes on a particular urgency. Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, so to speak, make human beings and he can deny them their humanity. How do we recognize what is right? How can we discern between good and evil, between what is truly right and what may appear right? Even now, Solomon's request remains the decisive issue facing politicians and politics today.

Read the entire address on the Chiesa site. Here is the Vatican site that will be, at some point, posting all of Benedict XVI's addresses given in Germany.