Chicago Studies Spring/Summer 2024

Chicago Studies

Melanie Barrett

Editorial Board

Maria Barga Emery de Gaál

Lawrence Hennessey Paul Hilliard John Lodge

Brendan Lupton

Kevin Magas David Mowry

Anthony Muraya Patricia Pintado-Murphy

Juliana Vazquez Ray Webb

Founding Editor

George Dyer

CHICAGO STUDIES is edited by members of the faculty of the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary for the continuing theological development of priests, deacons, and lay ecclesial ministers. The journal welcomes articles likely to be of interest to our readers. Views expressed in the articles are those of the respective authors and not necessarily those of the editorial board. All communications regarding articles and editorial policy should be addressed to cseditor@usml.edu CHICAGO STUDIES is indexed in the ATLA Religion Database

Cover Design by Deacon Thomas Gaida

Copyright © 2025 Civitas Dei Foundation

ISSN 0009-3718

Bearing Fruit in Christ: Engaging Creation, Politics, & Liturgy

Editor’s Corner Volume 62 2, Spring/Summer 2024

By Dr. Juliana V. Vazquez, Ph.D.

This issue of Chicago Studies features the 2024 Albert Cardinal Meyer Lecturer, Mr. John Allen, with a reflection on the incredibly rich legacy of Pope Benedict XVI. The University of St Mary of the Lake was honored to host Mr. Allen, the renowned Vatican expert analyst for CNN as well as the founder and editor of Crux, for his two Meyer Lectures on March 7 and 8, 2024. The two lectures were subsequently synthesized into the single article featured here, titled “Pope Benedict XVI: Protocol, Politics, and Posterity.” Allen draws back the Vatican curtain to give us a warm and moving account of his close friendship with, and profound admiration for, the pope that he has known the best thus far. He recounts public reactions to Joseph Ratzinger’s time as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which spurred on his reputation as a stern prelate who loved to say “no” to worldly requests to change Church teaching. Allen then contrasts starkly this public reputation with the compassionate, gentle personality who always sought to encourage the flock to say “yes” to Christ and to authentic human flourishing. However, at the same time, he admits that Benedict’s papacy was regrettably marked by administrative difficulties and scandals, often magnified by never-ending news cycles in secular media. Lending context to his appraisal, Allen briskly (and humorously!) attempts to capture, with only two words per pope, the most memorable contributions of every modern pope of the past. He follows this with a unique angle on the reasons behind Benedict’s resignation. In the end, Allen paints the portrait of a humble and holy scholar who left us the fruits of a remarkable teaching magisterium, especially around issues of faith and reason, and whose contribution to the Church can be soundly celebrated and rightly balanced with the struggles and mistakes.

Directly following Mr. Allen’s Meyer Lecture comes an equally appreciative and substantive response from Fr. Emery de Gaál, Professor of Dogmatic Theology at University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois Fr. Emery de Gaál’s article “Ratzinger on State, Nature, & Liturgy: A Response to John Allen’s 2024 Meyer Lecture” provides further brush strokes to the papal portrait, emphasizing the creative ways that Ratzinger mines Augustine’s concept of Civitas Dei. Ratzinger agrees with Augustine that there is an unavoidable but also potentially positive tension between the City of God and the Earthly City. While the City of God, considered as the ecclesial communion that is the Body of Christ, is not co-identical or co-extensive with even the most ethical and holistic of external institutions, natural law, and governmental guarantees of fundamental rights, the latter can and must be penetrated by Christian charity and the freedom to offer true worship to God. Fr. Emery ends his response with the contention that it is only truly Christian existence, lived in active cooperation with God’s salvific activity in history, that can fruitfully reconcile the tension of the two cities. The good news is that this tension already finds fruition in the holy liturgy here and now, and unto eternal life.

Turning to the next contribution, Dr. Caitlin Smith Gilson, Professor of Philosophy at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary, compares and contrasts Ratzinger and Rahner on the fascinating topic of the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of the Christian polis In her article “The Image of Christ in the Polis: The Critical Difference between Ratzinger and Rahner,” Gilson proposes that Ratzinger’s sacramental understanding of the human person and of the fraught but ultimately victorious voyage of the Christian polis in history has distinct advantages over Rahner’s overly and thinly symbolic rendering of the Christian polis as only one alternative

in the proliferating plurality of modern religious options. She laments that Rahner seems to have done away with the thick metaphysical commitments that have empowered ages upon ages of Christian thought to welcome into humanity the realness of God’s grace, which is the deepest reality that any human being could ever receive, while still preserving a deep reverence for the ineluctably higher mystery of God’s transcendence. She holds that Rahner weakens such metaphysical realism in favor of a greatly watered-down “grace everywhere” schema, which places God’s activity everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Since the divine Person of Christ is the only true Image of God, a Christian polis must welcome this Word of Love and allow its divine communication to guide the Church’s engagement within the world, without ever being able to imitate it perfectly. She suggests four phenomenological elements that the Christian polis must steward with care for the God-Man to live both ever-transcendently and ever-presently within the believer Gilson ends her lyrical and studied contribution by agreeing with Ratzinger that the Christian polis only rests secure on the truth of the real presence of Christ, given sacramentally in creation and most creatively in the sacraments.

The second featured article by Fr. Emery de Gaál, titled “Benedict XVI on Protecting the Environment: Papal Advocacy for an Integral Ecology,” continues the theme of creation. Fr. Emery de Gaál insists that a truly Christian anthropology must include authentic ecological advocacy that respects both creation and the special role of the human community in its care. He reviews major twentieth-century Church documents on the theme of environmental protection, in addition to the biblical mandate, and then highlights some of the contributions of St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and the late Pope Francis on ecological advocacy. Pulling on his expertise in the thought of Joseph Ratzinger and his later papacy, Fr. Emery de Gaál focuses on the significant contributions of Benedict XVI to the topic. Time and time again, Benedict XVI underlined the deep theological meaning of creation as that of an ongoing covenant.

The issue closes with Fr. John Guthrie’s article on “Liturgical Formation for Seminarians & Priests: Toward Greater Participation, Communion, & Mission.” Fr. Guthrie invites us to contemplate three major dimensions of liturgical renewal, especially those emphasized in Pope Francis’s contributions to the synodal process in the Church. He analyzes several documents from the last twenty years that recapitulate the Second Vatican Council’s call for full, conscious, and active participation of both clergy and laity in the Eucharist, understood and lived as a dynamic reality: the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (2003); Pope Benedict XVI’s Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (2007); and Pope Francis’s Apostolic Letter Desiderio Desideravi (2022). Each of the three major sections on participation, communion, and mission includes a practical list of reflection questions for seminarians and priests who desire to deepen their appreciation and embodiment of the liturgy, as well as a short analysis of “counterindications/temptations” opposed to participation, communion, and mission, that we all must strive to resist. As the current Director of Worship at Mundelein Seminary at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois, he focuses primarily on the practical implications for seminarians around each of the three dimensions.

Pope Benedict XVI: Protocol, Politics, and Posterity

By John Allen

Over the course of my career, I have had the great privilege of covering four popes: John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and, just recently, Pope Leo XIV. The pope with whom I have had the closest personal relationship, by far, was Pope Benedict. 1

When I got to Rome in the mid-1990s, John Paul II was already pope, which meant he moved in a kind of papal bubble. While I interacted with him on countless occasions, I cannot really claim that we formed a close personal bond. I think I was one of a multitude of people that he was aware of and tolerated, and that was the extent of it.

Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, of course, did not live in Rome before he became pope. However, he came to Rome once a year on what he always described as his “annual penitential pilgrimage” prior to his election. I met him on a couple of those occasions, but again, I cannot say that we were particularly close.

Cardinal Ratzinger, on the other hand, was a fixture on the Roman scene from 1983 until his election to the papacy in 2005, and throughout his papacy. I had the opportunity to interview him many times. We ran into each other at various events, including diplomatic receptions, plenary assemblies, and conferences. We also had dinner together from time to time. We developed, at least in my mind and my heart, a close personal bond.

However, at the risk of eviscerating my own credibility, I must confess that my track record as a commentator and prognosticator of his ministry is not exactly unblemished. The most spectacular example of my failure in this regard came in 1999, when I published a biography of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the final chapter of which contained four reasons why he would never be pope. This is a point the Holy Father reminded me of quite often over the course of his eight-year papacy. Toward the end, he actually pulled me aside and said, “You know, there are days I wish you’d been right.”

I mention this because I want you to understand that I cannot claim to be a dispassionate observer when it comes to Pope Benedict XVI.

The Disparity Between the Person and the Public Image

I have always felt somewhat protective of Benedict. Though he obviously does not need my protection, I would contend that in the last fifty years there has been no greater disjunction between the private personality and the public narrative of a public figure than in his case.

Privately, you could never meet a kinder, gentler, humbler, and more decent human being than Benedict XVI. And yet, we know what the public narrative about the man was: Darth Vader in a cassock. When he walked into a room, you could almost hear “The Imperial Death March” peeling in people’s minds. Surely, you remember what people said about him prior to his election. That he was “Herr Panzer Cardinal ” He was the “German Shepherd ” He was the “Vatican’s Enforcer,” etc.

This article comes directly from transcriptions of the 2024 Albert Cardinal Meyer Lectures at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, given by John Allen on March 7th and March 8th of 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. The editorial board of Chicago Studies would like to extend special thanks to Mr. Robert Couri for his fine work synthesizing the original material from the transcriptions of Mr. Allen’s lectures into its current form.

The best public expression of this narrative was an editorial cartoon in l’Unità, the newspaper of the old Communist Party in Italy. Published on the day after Benedict’s election to the papacy, the cartoon was a play on the famous “discorso alla luna, ” the so-called speech to the moon of Pope John XXIII. You might remember the evening of the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, when Catholic Action, the largest lay movement in Italy, had organized a torchlit parade. It processed down the Via della Conciliazione and ended up in St. Peter ’s Square. It was like a literal “thousand points of light” because everybody was holding their torches. John XXIII stood at the window of the papal apartment and gave an extemporaneous speech to the crowd, in a way that only John XXIII could.

Among other things, he started talking about the moon: “Even the moon has come out to see the show tonight. You know, it’s so beautiful.” That’s why they call it the “speech to the moon.” At one point in this stream of consciousness, John XXIII looked at the crowd and said, “When you go home tonight, you’re going to find your kids. Give them a kiss and tell them this is the kiss of the pope.” It was a wonderful pastoral moment In Italian popular consciousness, it is like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; it is learned in schools, and every Italian child has it memorized from the age of reason.

So the editorial cartoon in l’Unità had the new pope, Benedict XVI, standing once again at the window of the papal apartments looking over a crowd in the square, with the caption, “Tonight when you go home, give your kids a spanking and tell them this is the spanking of the pope.”

This was the public image of Benedict XVI, and it was a great falsehood. It was an injustice to one of the great men, not just of Catholic history, but really of contemporary history. To this great man I want to pay a more fitting tribute.

There is a distinction between Joseph Ratzinger, the doctrinal prefect, and Benedict XVI, the pope. I like to compare the role of prefect of the Holy Office to that of the dean of men at a high school, who needs to write out the penalty period cards. It is a prescription for being unpopular. Basically, you are the guy who has to say no

I think becoming pope freed him up to be the guy who said yes, and this seemed a much more authentic expression of him than the sort of Dr. No routine that he felt compelled to perform at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Remember, shortly after his election he gave that famous interview to Vatican Radio in which he said that the problem with how Christianity is perceived today is that it has come to be seen as a collection of nos. No to abortion, no to same-sex marriage, no to whatever, right? He explained that what we must do is recover the capacity to present the great yes that is underneath those specific nos, because we are not actually trying to say no to anything. We are trying to say yes to authentic human happiness and flourishing.

Reflecting on the unique opportunity I have had to personally interact with four popes and sometimes see them operate in intimate settings, I am profoundly convinced that each one has been remarkable. So here is my brief apologia for the Catholic Church.

Consider the span of time we’re talking about from 1978, when John Paul II was elected, until today Think about the quality of leaders that other global institutions have produced during that period of time. I will stack the four popes we have given the world against any of them. I stand in awe of all four men in different ways.

I know Francis had the reputation of a humble, simple man of the people. There is a great deal of truth to that. But on the other hand, I would remind you that Francis was an Argentinian. You know the joke about Argentinians, right?

How does an Argentinian commit suicide?

They climb to the top of their own ego and leap to their death.

We indeed saw in Francis a healthy ego and a sort of stubborn streak. There was a strong sense of self in him like there was with John Paul II, who was the John Wayne of popes, the swashbuckling man’s man.

But if you want to talk true humility and selflessness, no one holds a candle to Benedict I think suffering of any sort touched him. Of course, suffering has touched all popes, but I see that the effect it had on him personally was especially deep.

In Light of the World, Benedict told journalist-author Peter Seewald that he grew up in Bavaria with a cousin who was mentally disabled. That experience left a very deep imprint on him. I think that the special sensitivity he gained at that time became the secret to the success of his meetings with abuse victims over the years.

One can argue at the level of policy whether Benedict made the right choices about reform in response to clerical sexual abuse. But I have spoken to many of the victims who had the opportunity to meet him. There was absolutely no question that his own heart was personally torn by the experience. He was shattered by it.

The Legacy of Benedict XVI

What will we remember, what will we inherit, what will we cherish and conserve from Benedict XVI in the arc of history? I want to address these questions at two levels. The first level is concerned with what is the popular “takeaway” about Pope Benedict. In the long term, what will resonate about Benedict XVI for nonspecialists, for generalists, for ordinary people? And then I want to increase the level of magnification a bit to reach the second level, which is concerned with what specialists will remember In other words, we’ll consider first what all the world will remember, and then what the Church will remember.

Popular Legacy

Let us start with Benedict XVI in terms of the popular imagination. What will people who do not eat, breathe, and sleep church affairs remember about Benedict in the course of time?

I have a theory that at this popular level you can summarize every pope’s legacy in two words. Now, these popes did many things. They issued encyclicals and motu proprios, made personnel appointments, engaged political questions, took trips, etc. So trying to boil a pope’s legacy down to a two-word soundbite is, in some ways, unfair. Inevitably, it is a disservice to the historical record.

That said, I am going to do it anyway. For purposes of this discussion, let us consider only the modern popes, and let us define the modern papacy as beginning with the election of Leo XIII in 1878, the first pope elected after the collapse of the papal states.

In the modern papacy, there have been twelve popes, including the current Pope Leo XIV Since Francis’s papacy only recently ended, we’ll leave it to the side for the moment and consider the other ten previous papacies. At the popular level, here is what most people remember about these papacies:

• Leo XIII: Social Teaching

Leo XIII was the father of modern Catholic social teaching, with his encyclical Rerum Novarum and the whole tradition that is developed from it.

• Pius X: Anti-Modernism

I will grant that this is only one word, but it contains two ideas I think what people remember were the loyalty oaths, the crackdowns on modernist thinking, and the sodalities, which were basically surveillance teams set up to root out modernist ideas.

• Benedict XV: Useless Slaughter

This was the phrase Benedict XV used to describe World War I, and it somewhat encapsulated his efforts to end the conflict. Though his efforts failed at the time, they established the basis for the creation of the League of Nations, which eventually flowered into the United Nations Many people consider Benedict XV to be a sort of spiritual patron and father of the United Nations as the idea of a unified global community.

• Pius XI: Lateran Pacts

Pius XI signed the deal with Mussolini that ended the so-called Roman question and ended the isolation of the modern papacy. Under Pius XI, the papacy made its peace with the new secular, independent Roman Republic and thus, in effect, with secular democracy.

• Pius XII: Holocaust “Silence”

Note the quotation marks for the word silence I think what most people remember is that there is a debate about the role of Pius XII in the Holocaust and whether he did enough to condemn the Nazis and denounce the Holocaust.

• John XXIII: Vatican II

This one is easy Vatican II is clearly what people remember about John XXIII.

• Paul VI: Humanae Vitae

This one is easy too. What most people remember of Paul VI is the issuance of Humanae Vitae, that landmark encyclical reaffirming the Church’s traditional ban on artificial birth control.

• John Paul I: Smiling Pope

John Paul I’s papacy lasted only around thirty-three days, but the image of him smiling is what we remember most After the sort of “gloom and doom” of the late Paul VI period, we had in John Paul I a charming, captivating, and engaging new personality who rather set the world on fire.

• John Paul II: Ending Communism

With his sponsorship of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, John Paul II set the dominoes in motion that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Empire, remaking the political and social face of the world.

• Benedict XVI: He Quit

Yes, quit. I think this is the greatest no-brainer at the level of popular consciousness. That is what people remember, that Benedict XVI was the first pope in 500 years to resign and the first one ever to do so for straightforward motivations, that is, for motivations that cannot be radically contested, at least not credibly.

As I will explain in a moment, the fact that this is what people are going to remember about his papacy probably reflects the man better than almost anything else we could imagine.

But let me acknowledge that certain aspects of his resignation were, of course, somewhat controversial. There are aspects of the way Benedict stepped down and the life he led postretirement that remain criticized to this day.

There are those, for instance, who object to the fact that he continued to use the title of Pope (as in Pope Emeritus) and who think that he should have simply reverted to being Cardinal

Joseph Ratzinger with no reference to the papacy. According to their theory, this created confusion about who was in charge. Now, I personally find this ridiculous. Is anyone here in my audience confused at all about who was in charge of the Catholic Church at that time? Nonetheless, this argument was made.

Some felt that it was inappropriate for him to continue to wear white.

Others objected to him continuing to live in the Vatican at the Mater Ecclesiae, the former monastery that was converted into his residence, rather than moving back to Regensburg.

But I think there is a danger of missing the point if we descend into that level of detail about the dynamics of his post-resignation life. Because in the popular mind, his resignation was the single most towering, inescapable, and emphatic refutation of clericalism in the modern era and perhaps ever. It demolished the notion of desperately clinging to clerical power and privilege, that stereotype that many people have about Catholic clergy

I do not think there was any single act that more clearly spoke of a kind of selfless, disinterested spirit of service than when Pope Benedict, having been invested with absolute power, voluntarily renounced it for what he perceived to be the good of the Church.

In many ways, I would suggest that Pope Benedict XVI was the Catholic Cincinnatus. You know the story of Cincinnatus, right? He was a commander of troops in ancient Rome who had retired and gone back to work on his farm. When there was an invasion by the Etruscans, the Romans clamored for Cincinnatus to take charge. He was erected as the first dictator of the Roman Republic and was invested with absolute power. He mobilized an army and defeated the foreign invader Then, as soon as the threat was neutralized, he renounced that absolute power and returned to his farm. And he became a permanent symbol of civic virtue in the popular mind for his spirit of selfless, disinterested service to the common good, for his willingness to renounce power the moment it was no longer necessary

Over the course of time, that spirit of selfless service has probably been honored more in the breach than in the observance. Nevertheless, to this day, Italians in Rome will appeal to Cincinnatus whenever they want to make a point about somebody who they perceive is trying to cling to power past its sell-by date. Thus, Cincinnatus is still a moral point of reference so many centuries later. He remains a beacon, a kind of invitation to virtue that has never lost its power. It may not always win the day, but it is always there as a corrective to the abuse of authority and the lust for dominance

In Catholic terms, Benedict’s example provides this same kind of brilliant guiding light. It will resonate forever as a sign of what it means to think of yourself as less important than the church community that you were trying to serve.

John XXIII famously said of himself that when he prayed before going to bed at night, he would remind himself, “Ultimately, I don’t run the Church, God does,” and that is how he was able to sleep.

Benedict XVI made that same point in a far more unmistakable fashion on February 11, 2013, when he made the dramatic announcement that he was resigning from the papacy. He explained it by saying, “I do not believe my forces are sufficient for the magnitude of the challenges the Church today faces.”

Name me another walk of life when a politician, a corporate titan, a sports coach, or indeed anyone, has voluntarily held in their hands a kind of absolute power and then was willing to renounce it because they felt that the community they were charged to lead would be better served by someone else.

I believe that a thousand years from now, the example of Benedict XVI, like that of Cincinnatus, will still be there on the shelf ready to be taken down whenever it is needed to confront any desperate clinging to control that no longer serves the common good. In other words, it will be a constant corrective to the lesser angels of our nature.

What I treasure most about this particular memory of Benedict XVI is that it so meaningfully repudiates the great injustice of him often being received as an autocrat, an authoritarian, a command-and-control figure. These were all words that were used about him repeatedly throughout his life. I am not saying that he retired to correct his own narrative, because I promise you no one on earth cared less about this narrative than he did. Still, the way in which he chose to end his papacy was a definitive rejection of that false narrative about him, and it will always be there.

Pope Francis repeatedly critiqued clericalism in various ways. His verbiage on this subject was remarkable and is still being unpacked. In a way, however, Benedict’s act of his resignation was a far more powerful and evocative rejection of clericalism than any verbal form will ever be.

So, at the popular level, I think that is what we will remember. He quit. Consider the irony that Benedict, that apotheosis of Catholic tradition, was the one to make such a revolutionary and rather untraditional choice. For me this demonstrates the titanic nature of what he felt was at stake in that moment.

Before we move on from the popular level to the ecclesial level, I should address the question of why he quit, especially since his teaching ministry had the potential to make a monumental impact, as I will lay out in the next section.

So why did Benedict step down? You probably know that there are conspiracy theories about this. At the time, it was believed and actually reported in some Italian media that he was muscled out by a so-called gay lobby in the Vatican. This theory posits a cabal of clerics with skeletons in their closet that he simply did not want to confront. I would not take it particularly seriously, but this speculation was in the air.

Others felt it was because of the sexual abuse scandals and financial scandals in the Vatican, and that Benedict simply did not have the wherewithal to deal with them. There was reporting in this regard about a secret dossier that a commission of cardinals had allegedly prepared and given to the pope.

I personally do not buy any of that. I think one fundamentally must take Benedict at his word. The reasons he gave for retiring were age and health. He said that at his age and in his physical condition, he did not believe he had the force necessary to do what needed to be done to carry the Church forward.

The triggering event was the 2013 World Youth Day in Brazil where he was scheduled to go. Realizing that he would be physically incapable of making the voyage, he decided to step aside and give the cardinals time to put somebody else in place so that the new pope would be able to make the trip.

However, accepting that the reason really was age and health, I think we also must ask why Benedict was so tired Why did he feel so wiped out by the experience of eight years of being pope?

I think there is just a basic reality here that we need to acknowledge, one that has become clear to me from my experience of covering several popes. In my mind, the thing that unites John Paul II and Francis, and that distinguishes them from Benedict, is that John Paul II and Francis both liked the gig. They exercised authority for their entire adult lives and liked being in charge. John Paul II was made an auxiliary bishop in Krakow when he was in his 30s. Bergoglio became

a superior in the Jesuits when he was in his 30s as well. Making decisions and carrying the weight of office came naturally to them. We see in them strong men with clear (though different) visions of where they wanted to take the Church, and they have enjoyed the exercise of their office.

Benedict did not like the gig and had never wanted to be pope. That was abundantly clear. As Cardinal Ratzinger, he had asked John Paul II for permission to resign three different times and go back to Germany. He was denied every time. He made it clear at the time of the conclave that he was not interested in being elected pope. He accepted only reluctantly because he humbly felt that he was compelled to do so if it was the will of his fellow cardinals.

I put a lot of weight on the mind-body dynamic. I believe that how weary or energized you feel is largely determined by whether you are excited to get up in the morning and do whatever it is you have to do. I think John Paul was excited in his time, and Francis was in his, about doing what they were called to do. I don’t think Benedict ever was excited about it

So probably the subtext of the resignation is not that he was on death’s door. I believe he simply did an honest self-diagnosis and said, “I am not going to be able to summon the energy in myself to continue doing this task that never came naturally to me and that I find deeply uncomfortable.”

There are people who very much regret that he made that choice and wish he had not done it. There is a healthy conversation to be had about this, but I do not think we can question his sincerity in making that decision.

Ecclesial Legacy

Now, let us pass from the popular level to the specialist level. In other words, if what the world will remember about Benedict is the resignation, what will the Church remember? What will be the legacy on that front?

It is difficult to be formulaic here because we are talking about a man who, had he never been elected pope indeed, had he never been made a bishop or a cardinal would nevertheless be remembered as one of the great Catholic minds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In other words, we would still be discussing the theological legacy of Joseph Ratzinger in the company of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, and Karl Rahner, even if the rest of his ecclesiastical career had never happened. Ratzinger ’s writings on eschatology, for example, are some of the finest work on that subject produced in the contemporary period, not to mention his writings on liturgy and other topics. We would take note of Dominus Iesus, the great document that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith produced under his leadership in the year 2000. It would become a permanent contribution to the Christian theological understanding of the world’s other great religious traditions.

Again, despite the vastness and profundity of his legacy, let me offer you a handy-dandy formulaic little soundbite to summarize it. I would suggest that if we want to look only at the eight years of his papacy, the contribution that is probably going to pass into history and that will still be studied hundreds of years from now will be his reflections on the relationship between faith and reason.

So, besides “he quit,” which is the popular formula, if you want two other words to describe his legacy on the specialized, ecclesial level, I would give you this: Faith and Reason.

The magisterium of Benedict’s papacy might be understood as one sustained eight-yearlong graduate level seminar on the relationship between faith and reason. In effect, the argument that he wanted to present to the world was that faith and reason need one another, that they are codependent, and that to be healthy, they have to be symbiotic.

Let me be clear that this was not just some sort of idiosyncratic preoccupation of an eggheaded pope. Everything in Joseph Ratzinger ’s life had shaped him to see this as the defining, towering question of the times.

Remember, we are talking about a man who was born in 1927, so he was six years old when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. He was eighteen when the Thousand-Year Reich ended in 1945. He spent the last few months of that war as an American prisoner of war.

And then, of course, as a priest he saw the rise of the Soviet system. He experienced the 1968 student revolutions at Tübingen. He had family who lived in East Germany. He knew, from the inside, the reality of the Soviet-dominated system.

He drew the conclusion that both National Socialism and Soviet Communism revealed the distortions in human experience that happen when you separate reason from faith or when you separate the stewardship of human experience from any sense of ultimate moral truth. If truth is taken out of the equation, all that is left is the drive for power. He had witnessed the cataclysmically destructive consequences of that pathology in his own life.

Let me point out, for example, that his cousin whom I mentioned earlier was executed by the Nazis in 1941 as part of their eugenics program. He saw in that a denial of the objective moral truth of the inherent dignity of each and every human life. And he saw what a system built on that lie looked like in flesh and blood and bone.

As you can see, the passion he brought to this subject was not only intellectual. It was also deeply personal.

I would suggest that over the course of his papacy, there were four touchstone documents in which this “graduate seminar” about faith and reason were most fully elaborated and presented as speeches: his 2006 address at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria; his 2008 address at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris; his 2010 address at Westminster Hall in London; and his 2011 address to the Bundestag in Berlin.

Note that all these speeches were delivered in secular, not ecclesial, venues. The University of Regensburg is a part of the German public university system, one of the places where the younger Fr. Ratzinger had taught. The Collège des Bernardins, although it was founded by the Cistercians, is now part of the University of Paris system. Westminster Hall is the birthplace of the British Parliament. And the Bundestag is, of course, the citadel of German democracy.

Benedict deliberately chose these secular venues because he wanted to have a conversation between religious faith and postmodern secularism, between the apostles of faith and the apostles of reason.

As he saw it, faith shorn of reason becomes fundamentalism and extremism. It becomes uninformed passion with all the destructive consequences that we see. That was the point he was trying to make in that Regensburg address in 2006.

Unfortunately, the public’s attention got swamped because of one line that he quoted in that address from a thirteenth century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus. In effect, the emperor said that Muhammad brought things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread the faith he taught by the sword This comment was taken as an assault against Islam, but if you read the Regensburg address you will see that really was not the Holy Father ’s point. It wasn’t about Islam. It was about any form of faith when reason has been taken away. More specifically, he was critiquing certain trends in modern Christian theology that moved in this direction.

This critique focused on what he saw as the effort to de-Hellenize Christianity, which posited a pure gospel that can be detached from its relationship with Greek philosophy and later

Roman intellectual currents. Benedict rejected this view, saying the encounter between the Christian proclamation and the Greek philosophical system was providential and was an essential aspect of salvation history. What Greek philosophy gave the early Christian proclamation was a bedrock conviction that faith must be rational because the divine author of the universe is the author of rationality. Therefore, this sort of genetic relationship between faith and reason is at the very heart of the Christian experience.

Benedict also pointed out that while faith uninformed by reason becomes fundamentalism and extremism, reason uninformed by faith becomes skepticism and nihilism. It becomes nothing more than a kind of blind will for power.

Then at the Collège des Bernardins, Benedict’s focus was on positivism, the idea that only what can be established by the empirical sciences counts as truth. His argument there was that this is an abdication of reason. It is a fatal truncation of our notion of truth, because if we accept the gospel of positivism, then we are ruling out the notion that there is any objective moral order to the universe. Again, his life experience would suggest that we know where this leads.

At Westminster Hall, he spoke about the relationship between religion and democracy. Basically, his argument there was that for secular democracy to be healthy, it requires the sort of infusion of values, of ethical convictions and ethical wisdom that the great religious traditions of humanity can provide. He pointed out that the British played a lead role in the abolition of the slave trade, which flowed from a conviction about the evil of the slave trade. But he posed the question, where did that conviction come from?

Certainly, it was not supplied by democracy, because majority rule is a perfectly logical and acceptable principle in a democratic system. That is, a majority can impose its will on a minority. In some ways that is exactly what democracies do.

So where did the preference for abolition over slavery come from? Benedict’s point was that it was ultimately rooted in a religious conviction, in a conviction of the inherent dignity of the human person created in the image and likeness of God. His argument, therefore, was that for a secular democratic system to function, it requires a kind of reservoir, a bedrock of values. And without those values, you end up with a pathological form of democracy.

He emphasized that secular democracy and religious faith need to be in vital dialogue. Secular democracy can supply the sort of inclusion, participation, and sense of investment in the social order that a healthy society needs. But in order for its moral compass to be pointed to true north, it needs the ethical wisdom that religious traditions can supply.

Finally, in his address at the Bundestag, his focus was on natural law and the importance of recovering the natural law tradition.

As an interesting footnote to this, it is quite popular to think of Francis as having been the eco-pope, the environmentalist pope. And that is fair enough. He was the first pope to publish an encyclical on the environment, Laudato Sí, and his advocacy around climate change has been notable.

But let us not forget that the first green pope in history was not Francis; it was actually Benedict. It was Benedict who installed solar panels atop the Paul VI Audience Hall in the Vatican. It was Benedict who signed an agreement to reforest a stretch of central Hungary that made the Vatican Europe’s first carbon-neutral state.

Why did he do all of this? It was not simply because he was convinced of the science behind climate change, although he certainly was. He also saw contemporary environmentalism as a route for recovering the natural law tradition. His reasoning was that people in the twenty-first century are coming to see that there is an owner ’s manual, so to speak, in the universe. We cannot

simply do whatever we want to nature without paying a price. There are rules and limits that come embedded in the natural order. Benedict felt that if we can recover that notion with regard to climate change and the environment, perhaps we can recover it in other areas of life as well. He unfolded this argument in this address to the Bundestag.

Putting together the four documents of these great addresses, what we get is a permanent gift to any serious reflection about the relationship between faith and reason, between religion and secularity. For future generations in academic settings, I think it will be impossible to teach a course on this subject without taking note of the contributions that Benedict made to the conversation.

In other words, at the specialized level, the legacy that Benedict XVI has bequeathed us is a renewed confidence that we are not the enemies of reason. We do not have to be intimidated by the sciences, by philosophy, or by new discoveries in the arts On the contrary, we are the natural companions and traveling partners of the sciences. It is together in this kind of constructive interaction that the future lies. Benedict has given us the scaffolding upon which a serious engagement with secular culture can be erected.

This is a precious and irreplaceable gift, and I think it will shine forever as long as these questions are asked, as long as people take seriously the question of how to be a serious religious believer in a pluralistic and diverse cultural milieu. Indeed, seeing evidence that the tides of history are pushing us back toward Christendom suggests to me that these questions are going to be with us for some time. So will the tools for engaging those questions in the constructive, positive, and rational fashion that Pope Benedict has shown us This is a contribution that I think only Joseph Ratzinger, only Pope Benedict XVI, could have given us. It was a historically unique intersection of a man and a world that desperately needed to hear what it was he had to say.

When Benedict was boarding the plane back to Rome after his visit to the UK, he received what was probably the greatest tribute that any British prime minister could have paid. In typical British stiff-upper-lip fashion, Prime Minister David Cameron said, “Holy Father, you have made this entire country sit up and think.”

He made people sit up and think. I think that was Benedict’s signature contribution to the Church and to the world.

Administrative Failures

Unfortunately, while his magnificent teaching magisterium was unfolding, it was often obscured or our attention was sometimes distracted because parallel to this magisterium, his administrative approach to the papacy was often lacking. He was not always very adept at making the trains run on time. We must acknowledge that this was one of the unfortunate dynamics of the Benedict papacy.

A case in point is Deus Caritas Est, the beautiful encyclical that he issued shortly after he became pope in 2005. Dedicated to love, it more specifically treated human erotic love. In the abstract, you might have thought that if Joseph Ratzinger writes an encyclical on sex, there’s going to be a lot of finger wagging going on, a lot of thou-shalt-nots. But Deus Caritas Est was not like that at all. It was a lyrical treatment of human erotic love as an icon of the love among the persons of the Trinity. It was actually mind-blowingly beautiful stuff.

That might have changed the narrative about Benedict XVI. Unfortunately, just days after that came out, the Boffo affair erupted in Italy. Let me recount the story in case you do not know it. Dino Boffo was a well-known Italian journalist who ran L’Avvenire, the official newspaper of

the Italian Bishops’ Conference. He was accused of harassing an alleged gay partner with whom he was trying to have an affair. It later emerged that the police documents that contained these accusations had been fabricated. And even though this was proved to be a fake story, it set the Italians loose. Now I have lived in Italy most of my adult life, and one thing about Italians (God love them) is that they have never seen a conspiracy theory they are not prepared to believe.

So the popular story began to metastasize that these documents had been whipped up by L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, on the orders of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Secretary of State, to get rid of Boffo, whom the Vatican disliked. The Vatican let this play out for eighteen full days without saying anything about it before they finally issued a denial. I think the popular reaction to that denial was captured best in a headline in the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero. It said, “Il Vaticano nega tutto, nessuno ci crede,” which means “The Vatican denies everything, no one believes it.”

That was meltdown number one.

Now, flash forward to 2008 Benedict XVI defied all expectations with a remarkably successful trip to the United States, including the first-ever papal meeting with survivors of clerical sexual abuse. On Benedict’s prompting, the meeting was organized by Cardinal Sean O’Malley and took place at the nunciature in Washington, DC. After this wonderful pastoral moment, his poll numbers in the United States shot up, and there was talk that the narrative about Benedict was finally changing.

However, this did not bear out because that magnificent success was immediately overshadowed by the Bishop Richard Williamson controversy Benedict had inadvertently rehabilitated this Holocaust-denying, traditionalist bishop when, in trying to end the traditionalist schism, he lifted his excommunications of the four bishops who had been consecrated by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, one of them being Williamson. I know for a fact Benedict had never met Williamson, and I don’t think he knew anything about him.

Benedict later confessed that he probably should have Googled this guy. Seriously, he actually wrote a letter to the bishops throughout the world, apologizing for mishandling this affair and saying exactly that, “I should have Googled him.” Indeed, Williamson’s record as a Holocaust denier was abundantly clear. He had to flee Canada to escape a hate crime charge because he had denied the Holocaust at a speech he gave in Toronto.

Then in 2010 he made the amazingly successful trip to the UK, but shortly after that we get the Vatileaks affair, involving the theft and publication of confidential documents of Benedict. Let me tell you that teams of Hollywood screenwriters could not dream this stuff up because, believe it or not, the butler actually did it. It was Paolo Gabriele, the pope’s butler, who had stolen the documents off Benedict’s desk and leaked them to Italian journalists, creating endless amounts of embarrassment and basically creating the impression that this was The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

In other words, we saw this remarkable mismatch between a beautiful, powerful, and resonant teaching dimension to the papacy and a horribly mismanaged and chaotic administrative level. This is another testament to what the Italians would call the dolcezza, the sweetness of Benedict XVI, because he just was incapable of firing anybody.

At one point, it had become abundantly clear to everyone that Cardinal Bertone, an otherwise lovely man, was clearly out of his depth trying to run the system in the Vatican as Secretary of State. We know this because Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne made this public after Benedict resigned Meisner said that he and a delegation of cardinals told Benedict that he

had to fire Bertone because the whole thing was just a disaster. Benedict refused, and Meisner concluded, “That’s the Ratzingers for you. They are loyal to a fault.”

And that characterization was the story of Benedict’s papacy. Unfortunately, it was in some ways tragic, because he gave us this magnificent teaching that the world caught glimpses of along the way, but before it could take hold, some new crisis would erupt. Then, suddenly, we were dealing with sideshows and putting out fires, rather than truly absorbing what the pope was trying to present to us.

A Larger Perspective

Acknowledging that there were controversial aspects of Benedict’s papacy, it is important that we not lose sight of the forest for the trees. In the long run of history, no one will remember the names Dino Boffo, Richard Williamson, and Paolo Gabriele, but they will remember the lasting contributions of the Benedict XVI papacy. He gave us a teaching magisterium of unsurpassed quality on one of the most central and galvanizing questions defining our times. And in the way his papacy ended, he gave us an example of selflessness and humility that will echo through the ages. No legitimate debate about particular aspects of the man or his papacy should obscure from our vision these two shining truths that will form forever the posterity of this remarkable and singular pope.

Ratzinger on State, Nature, and Liturgy: A Response to John Allen’s 2024 Meyer Lecture

by Rev. Emery de Gaál, Ph.D.

I would like to thank Mr. John Allen very much for a dynamic and balanced lecture on our beloved Pope Benedict XVI, the “Mozart of Theology.” Indeed, his excellent presentation was rich in information and provided a judicious valorization of the Benedictine pontificate The Mundelein Seminary community very much looked forward to this year ’s Cardinal Albert Meyer Lecture. Allen’s podcasts and articles on Crux Now provide reliable information both from Rome, the center of our Catholic faith, and from the Catholic world at large.

The Signal Importance of John Allen’s Reports

One of our colleagues here at the seminary, Father Raymond Webb, professor of pastoral theology, recently observed, “John Allen nimbly dances on a fence and never falls to either side.” He is rightly admired as a journalistic trapeze artist, providing fair, balanced, nuanced, and yet crisp news that cuts to the core of often very complex issues. Amid the febrility and larmoyance that contemporary news outlets and intellectuals delight in, Mr. Allen is witty, suspiciously joyful, and balanced in his reports. In short, his humorous agility and astonishing finesse reflect sane, wholesome Midwestern equipoise that the American Heartland can easily identify with. Seeing Mr. Allen and his wife in action as journalists, is certainly the very opposite of looking at the mortifyingly dull painting American Gothic by Grant Wood, on permanent exhibit in Chicago’s Art Institute.

Why do people look forward every week to Allen’s reports? In 2016 the British author Stuart Jeffries published the bestselling book The Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School 1 The title is borrowed from the Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács (18851971), who had considered this school and its twin, that of Critical Theory, to lead invariably to an abyss. The Grand Hotel refers to the rather elegant lifestyle these spoiled scions of wealthy magnates had enjoyed throughout their lives. This school of philosophy, going back to the 1920s, subcutaneously dominates Western thinking ever since, at least in its popular variant from the 1960s onward. It teaches quite apodictically that all aspects of life must be considered under political categories. Everything is a question of power play and politics rules supreme. Everything is a question of either left or right. Even family, friendship, religion, and spirituality are seen exclusively through this political better expressed, ideological lens. The sad result is irreconcilably fractious societies on both sides of the North Atlantic Ocean, dominated by facile shibboleths, endangering democracies to their core. Mr. Allen happily defies such categorizations and elevates our thinking on matters of faith and the Church above such banal slogans I suspect that Allen’s journalism also has something to do with an apostolate, resonant with the high-minded project of new evangelization. For this we owe him profound admiration and gratitude.

1 Stuart Jeffries, The Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London: Verso, 2016).

Aspects of Pope Benedict XVI’s Legacy

Joseph Ratzinger’s book Faith and Politics has been available in English since 2018. 2 To follow the lines of Mr. Allen’s brilliant paper, and also somehow to complement it, permit me first to offer a summary of Ratzinger’s reading of St. Augustine’s (354-430) celebrated distinction between Civitas Dei and Civitas Terrena the City of God and the Earthly City. This I base, first, on Ratzinger’s dissertation on Augustine’s ecclesiology and, second, on a text that he wrote in the 1950s while teaching theology in Freising Seminary. These have never been translated into English. The second text is a paper he had delivered at an international conference on St. Augustine in 1954 in Paris. Based on this, I will then, in a second step, attempt to unfold the essence of Christian existence amid the unbridgeable tension of polis and ecclesia, of body politic and the Kingdom of God, a fruitful and necessary tension, as it permits both components to gain their proper contours, according to Joseph Ratzinger. 3

Augustine on the Two Cities

The new House of God is the result of the self-immolation of Jesus Christ, in which we Christians join. The preceding intellectual currents that of the anti-gnostic Christian soma (body) understanding and the anti-Arian exegesis of Athanasius (ca. 298-373) aided Augustine in crystallizing his thoughts. The realist appreciation of the Eucharist, as articulated by Tertullian (160-240), Hilary of Poitiers (315-368), and John Chrysostom (347-407), leads to a sacramental ethics for Augustine. This distinguishes the Body of Christ from the pagan state of deities. Thus, Augustine achieves a remarkable “synthesis of the metaphysical term body.…As with the antiDonatist controversy also here the cohering key term is called caritas.” 4

Against this background the young Ratzinger investigates Augustine’s discussions of the concepts “tent of God,” “cult,” and the growth of “God’s temple,” which, in their Christian transformations, all possess Christ as their constitutive foundation. This yields the insight into Christ as the ecclesial caput (head) and angularis (cornerstone). By itself, the domus (house) term is a lower form of community vis-à-vis civitas (city or citizenship). Nevertheless, as House of God, it denotes a pneumatic, supernatural, and celestial edifice. Jesus Christ’s temple is “Wohnstätte und lebendiges Opfer für Gott” (both abode and living sacrifice for God). 5 This edifice is the supernatural “Einheit im Glauben und in der Liebe” (unity in faith and in charity). 6 While forcefully enunciated, unambiguously formulated, and rife with original accents, Ratzinger

2 Joseph Ratzinger, Faith and Politics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2018).

3 The Augustine bibliography of Ratzinger is found to a large extent in Joseph Ratzinger Gesammelte Schriften. Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustins Lehre von der Kirche, henceforth abbreviated JRGS, vol. 1 (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2011). This is rightfully the first volume of Pope Benedict’s collected works. It encompasses circa ninety percent of his studies on Augustine’s theology. The first section covers his dissertation (43–418), followed by diverse texts, including homilies, dictionary entries, book reviews, and introductions. In total, this volume is 792 pages long. Cf. Emery de Gaál, “Augustine: The Reciprocal Dependence of Faith and World,” in Joseph Ratzinger in Dialogue with Philosophical Traditions from Plato to Vattimo, ed. by Alejandro Sada, Tracey Rowland, & Rudy Albino de Assuncao (London: T & T Clark, 2024), 22-41. Tracey Rowland, “Modernity and Secularism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger, ed. Daniel Cardó and Uwe Michael Lang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 262-79.

4 JRGS 1, 296.

5 JRGS 1, 336, including fn 46, emphases in the original.

6 JRGS 1, 337, emphasis in the original.

stresses that Augustine’s ecclesiology is in no way idiosyncratic, but the organic outgrowth of his engagement with scripture and Christian thinkers.

Augustine sees the enduring polarity inherent in the figure of the two cities and citizenships expressed in the Old Testament by the images of the cities of Jerusalem and Babylon. It prefigures the polarity he encountered in the confrontation of the Church versus the city and state of Rome. Rome is but a metaphorical chiffre or figure for the transitory nature of the world, dramatically underscored by Alaric’s pillage of putatively eternal Rome in 410. 7 Amid the travails of the world, the Populus Dei, the living of the sacraments, the Church, owns a dignity unperturbed by the vicissitudes of human history, as in her essential nature she is inherently uncontestable by contingent reality. This comes about through and in the “Opfer des lebendigen Gottes zu sein durch die caritas im Leibe Jesu Christi” (to be the sacrifice of the living God by virtue of being charity in the body of Jesus Christ). 8 The Old Testament image of “people of God” anticipates the Christian Church as the definitive People of God, and yet, “aber ihr empirisches Volk ist gleichfalls nur Bild…für das wahre Volk” (but its empirical people is mere image for the true people). 9

Most deliberately, Augustine derives his understanding of the Church as “House of God” from a theological reflection on a physical church building. Therein one can detect, according to Ratzinger, “a conscious antithesis” to the Old Testament’s preliminary and (still partially) pagan, and therefore necessarily superficial, understanding of cult centered around the Temple on Mount Zion. For this reason, Ratzinger interprets Augustine as skipping over the House of God concept to “the living people of God, of the ecclesia sive congregatio” (Church or assembly), inchoately hinted at by the physical House of God. In the Body of Christ, both the adoratio and inhabitatio (the indwelling) of God occur. 10

Ratzinger discovers in his study that Augustine uses terms like fundamentum, petra, aedificare, and compages caritatis (foundation, rock, to build, and incorporation into a framework of charity) to describe the tangible and sacramental reality called Church. Using such images, he defines the essence of the Church as being grounded in a community of faith and charity in Christ. It is little wonder that, in the ecclesiology of Augustine, the term “House of God” is merely an interpretative tool, wholly deficient in conveying the essence of the Christian Church. She is the one catholica (universal reality) uniting omnes gentes (all peoples) into una gens (one people). Grounded ontologically in God, she is the civitas endowed with the Holy Spirt as “the pilgrim colony on earth.” 11 The intersection of cult and sacrament generates the Body of Christ. This Latin term Corpus Christi is neither mythical nor blurry, but eminently concrete as the “unus panis unum corpus sumus multi” (one bread as one body we are many), as Ratzinger quotes Augustine’s memorable line. 12

While the terms “people of God” and “city of God” have pre-Christian origins, “the notion of Corpus Christi rests on the reality of the sacrificing Church.” 13 In the conclusion to his dissertation Ratzinger points to the Doctor Gratiae, who viewed the angels as included in the Church. People of God and Body of Christ are not mutually excluding entities. Rather, Corpus

7 JRGS 1, 346.

8 JRGS 1, 382.

9 JRGS 1, 397.

10 JRGS 1, 412, emphases in the original.

11 JRGS 1, 414.

12 JRGS 1, 415.

13 JRGS 1, 417.

Christi expresses “the inner reality,” which is imperfectly circumscribed by the secular terms civitas and populus. 14

The Civitas Dei concept is of decisive import for Augustine’s thinking. Yet, Ratzinger had given it only passing attention a mere three pages in his dissertation. 15 This he compensates for when reacting in 1954 to Wilhelm Kamlah’s (1905-1976) interpretation of Augustine’s teaching on Civitas Dei, with a paper delivered at a conference on Augustine convened in Paris. A Protestant theologian turned philosopher, Kamlah had anticipated Bultmann’s thesis of demythologization and regarded Christianity as having undergone a profound alteration when encountering Greek culture à la the Protestant German dogma historian Adolf von Harnack (1856-1930). 16

Ratzinger notes with surprise that Kamlah also sees Civitas Dei denoting Bürgerschaft Gottes (God’s citizenship), just as Ratzinger had done in his dissertation three years earlier. However, Kamlah uses Augustine’s term Civitas Dei to designate merely a contingent (Lutheran) Gemeinde, i.e., a parish. 17 Ratzinger takes exception with such an “ideological construction,” 18 which contradicts both scriptural and patristic evidence. Kamlah’s claim that Civitas Dei stands for a Christian parish is contradicted early on in Christianity by Clement, Tertullian, Origen, and Ambrose (ca. 340-397). In addition, Ambrose refers to the celestial Jerusalem as the City of God. 19 Kamlah lacks appreciation for the concreteness of the New Testament term ekklesia and the allegorical concept “City of God,” as utilized in the Old Testament. Sensitized by the pillage of Rome in 410, Augustine embraces now a fortiori the use of the concept “City of God,” namely, “as an apology against the idolatrous civitas deorum” (i.e., Rome, the city of deities). 20

Ratzinger elaborates that the civitas Romanorum (the state of the Romans) relates to the Civitas Dei as letter relates to spirit. Rome is but yet another historic manifestation of the worldly civitas confusionis (city of confusion), symbolized in the Old Testament by vainglorious Babylon. However, the Church as City is secundum spiritum, according to the Holy Spirit, and thereby owns an eschatological perspective wholly alien to ancient Rome. Ratzinger faults Kamlah for not apprehending the unity of the four interrelated dimensions: empirical, eschatological, sacramental, and personal holiness. Such ecclesial unity is empirical, and yet in the priest’s sursum corda (lift up your hearts) of the Eucharist, the faithful express heaven as their actual home, when joining in Christ’s sacrifice to the Father. Paraphrasing a famous line from Confessions XIV 28, Ratzinger writes, “The center of the city, the point from which it unfolds is her love. The earthly city is marked by a self-love that verges on contempt of God, while the city of God is being edified through a love of God verging on contempt of self.” 21 Kamlah’s twentieth-century categories of empirical, theocratic, and idealistic are ultimately not helpful. The Church is primarily and essentially both pneumatic and sacramental. The City of God is the Church as the community of

14 JRGS 1, 417.

15 JRGS 1, 338-40.

16 JRGS 1, 338f.

17 Joseph Ratzinger, “Herkunft und Sinn der Civitas Dei-Lehre Augustins. Begegnung und Auseinandersetzung mit Wilhelm Kamlah,“ first published in Revue des Études Augustiennes II (Paris: Beauchesne, 1954), 965-979, reprinted in JRGS 1, 420-39.

18 JRGS 1, 423.

19 JRGS 1, 425.

20 JRGS 1, 31.

21 “Die Mitte der civitas, der Punkt, von dem aus sie sich entfaltet, ist ihre Liebe. Die civitas terrena ist gekennzeichnet durch den amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, die Civitas Dei wird auferbaut durch den amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui.“ JRGS 1, 437.

members of the Body of Christ. She is “the pneumatic polis of God” 22 on earth, existing within and beyond a state. She feels alien and awaits in fact, pines for the world to come.

This irreconcilable, and indeed necessary, difference between heaven and earth, between the City of God and the terrestrial City, does not lead to stasis, but is a fruitful tension, leading to discipleship in the hic et nunc. To Pope Benedict’s mind, theology is only credible if it leads to mystagogy lest it suffers shipwreck as a merely solipsistic academic l’art pour l’art. Divine revelation is not about sharing information but about healing, restoring the divine-human relationship. Theology means participating in God’s creative utterance to the world. This can only be the case if it is at the same time mystagogy, namely, leading to the mystery of the personal, triune God. This explains the fact that the final grand accord of Ratzinger’s theological oeuvre is the Jesus of Nazareth trilogy. 23 This work transforms theology into mystagogy. In this trilogy we sense something of the spirit of the neo-patristic synthesis as had been intended by the noted émigré Russian Orthodox priest and theologian Father Georges Florovsky (1893-1979). 24 Jesus of Nazareth is patristic, speculative, modern, personalist, and thoroughly based on the most recent insights of the historical- critical method. And yet, it transcends these it becomes almost Christ’s own inviting gesture to participate in His triune life. This trilogy is not simply critical à la Kant, but is the first post-critical Christology. It invites meditation and prayer. Faith fully embraces human rationality and leads it to its Creator-intended fulfillment. The logicity of the world meets the Logos, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the reason of history and the raison d’être of the human person. In Jesus Christ faith and reason become synonymous.

The Essence of Christian Existence

Amid the tension of the two Civitates, there is the reconciling center that is Christian existence. It is no coincidence that the idea of a wesenhafte Verbindung essential connection between cult and liturgy, dogmatics and ethics runs like a hidden thread through Joseph Ratzinger’s theological thinking. He is concerned with the genuinely Christian concept of the Logos. The beginning of creation and the beginning of redemption is the one divine will. From this, then, grows order for humankind. Revelation stands at the beginning of faith. Humankind is, as it were, in the passive; first, God acts actively in history. The human person should respond to this in his or her own life story. Even in his early bestselling work Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger formulated the concept of Christian charity succinctly and programmatically: “…in the Christian faith, man comes in the most profound sense to himself, not through what he does, but through what he accepts. He must wait for the gift of love, and love can only be received as a gift.” 25

Liturgy as a “Prelude to Eternal Life”

For Joseph Ratzinger, reflection on the charity imparted by God is sparked by the celebrated liturgy as a gift of God’s living space, in place of, as it were, the once promised land of Canaan that is, in liturgical worship. God’s absolute charity is first received as an unclaimed

22 JRGS 1, 438.

23 Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 3 vols. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2008-2012). Cf. the critical edition Joseph Ratzinger Gesammelte Schriften, 6. Bd., Jesus von Nazareth: Beiträge zur Christologie, 2 Teilbde. (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2014).

24 Cf. Andrew Blane, ed., George Florovsky Russian Intellectual and Orthodox Churchman (Crestwood NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1993).

25 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 267.

and yet deeply vital gift and vouched for as culture. Joseph Ratzinger describes liturgy as a “prelude to the future, eternal life, of which St. Augustine says that, in contrast to the present life, it is no longer woven out of need and necessity, but entirely out of the freedom of giving and giving.” 26In biblical terms, the Christian cult is Pascha liturgy, i.e., a ritualized exodus: the Old Testament exodus from the slave house of sin to the Promised Land, which takes the place of the lost Garden of Paradise, in order to serve God there, or rather, to enjoy God there. Thus “frui Dei” (delight in God) is St. Augustine’s laconic definition of eternity. It characterizes the essence of human freedom to be able to face the question of ultimate meaning and ultimate logic and not to be allowed to avoid it. The human being by nature can, may, and should trust the ever-superior logic of God and his charity and respond to it with his life in charity. This is a first core of Christian natural law!

The path to authentic culture is only possible from authentic cult. The tension that emerges at Sinai between the inner land of worship that is, the forum internum of sacrament and grace, the Church in the proper sense and the outer land of law that is, the forum externum of law and justice, the state as a space of justice and the necessary tension between these two spiritual landscapes are decisive. Only the inner land, the space of God’s charity, makes the outer land of justice and law habitable; and only this understanding of the cult as the inner backbone of a second nature of justice, which has taken the place of the first (lost) nature of charity, enables a correct understanding of culture.

Human law and its arbitrary laws then appear as an institutionalized ethos and guarantee the moral water table of pure survival, the minimum guarantee of goodness that is necessary to enable human coexistence. Such law only guarantees a peaceful life, not a life of perfect peace or charity. In essence, law and ethics are not human creations, even if they belong to the realm of created and written culture. Law and morality are formulations of the primordial sense of a world conducive to life that God has placed in human natural reason. Law and ethics are based on the kind of natural law that can also be described as rational law or personal law. This is an insight into the truly good that is given to humankind and historically achieved. Human beings retrace the traces of God’s loving logic with the powers of reason and of the spirit.

27

Law and Ethics as External Expressions of the Cult

The inner land of worship, to which the outer land of law and ethics should correspond, is God’s own land and the space of his unlimited charity. In this respect, Christian liturgy is really an anticipation and prelude to God’s good eternity, and the outer land in the institutions of constitutional politics is also a view of the eternal goodness of God, who calls the human person and gives him the opportunity to respond. This response takes the form of the celebration of God’s presence and the observance of the law. This brings into view the space of political action and a specifically Augustinian-impregnated theology of history, which moves from the inside to the outside, from the virtue of the heart to the institution of the state. In the Augustinian tradition, the state means the minimum morale in history, as the institutionalization and guarantee of the fundamental right to life and integrity.

26 Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 12.

27 Cf. Ratzinger, Faith and Politics

The Metaphysical Foundation of the State

The state is therefore metaphysically grounded, the distant echo of the lost and yet always longed-for charity of the paradisiacal beginning, which now survives as cold justice. The latter is meager indeed and yet necessary in the time of original sin, which has only been tamed with difficulty. Herein lies the hidden temptation of Marxism, ideologies, and Critical Theory: the human person and humanity no longer find their fulfillment beyond nature and history, but supposedly complete themselves immanently. This, however, leads to an objectification and reification of the individual in favor of political ends. The individual is understood only as an interchangeable protagonist of the best possible inner-worldly progress of humanity. History is then no longer the Augustinian expansion and development of the soul, but the development of the world toward an immanent, solipsistic goal, and this, in case of doubt, through revolution. Joseph Ratzinger argues that man does not need teachers of indignation (he can do that himself), but teachers of transformation, who uncover joy in the depths of suffering and unlock true happiness where well-being ends.

Conclusion

The new man is created through inner conversion into Jesus Christ instead of outer revolution, through the recognition of divine life in the distinctiveness of his own life, always in becoming and growth, through reform from the beginning, and through transformation.

The Image of Christ in the Polis: The Critical Difference between Ratzinger and Rahner

By Caitlin Smith Gilson, Ph.D.

As something that breaks out of history and transcends it, the Resurrection nevertheless has its origin within history and up to a certain point still belongs there. Perhaps we could put it this way: Jesus’s Resurrection points beyond history but has left a footprint within history. Therefore it can be attested by witnesses as an event of an entirely new kind. 1

―Pope Benedict XVI

Introductory Remarks: The Necessary and Impossible Christian Polis

The task at hand is to approach and clarify the impossibility of and necessity for the alter Christus. The metaphysical straining to embody and transmit the Image of Christ is how the faith is transmitted in the polis. There is a supreme and essential incommunicability in the second Person of the Trinity. This un-transmitted reality is not opposed to the work of evangelization but essential to it. No one can imitate Christ. Dostoevsky dipped into madness writing The Idiot and Prince Myshkin, for all his sanctity, falls short. This is the pattern throughout the centuries a failure to embody and transmit the Word. The Church calls us to put to life a truly good person, one in whom the conflicting perfections of Christ are not massaged away but communicated in their transcendent urgency. The question of this paper is whether Rahner’s sidestepping of metaphysical foundations, replaced with a manifold sense of symbol, can truly bring about the Christian polis straining for this impossible but necessary image and likeness the Christus Resurrectus Est! Vere Resurrectus Est!

We would be fools to think we can imitate Christ and transmit the Word as a guiding politeia. But we are also called to be fools, called to live out the Gospels. Christ is the Church, the source we must follow and imitate. This metaphysical impossibility is the foundation for all gift. In essence, there is a donative metaphysical violence in the transmission of the Word. The violence itself is the analogical gift, for it debrides us of the immanent self so that we can find our beyond image in Christ. Put another way, metaphysical violence is the human person’s grace-filled dilation as the ravished other of Christ. In Christ, the human person takes on infinite caverns where the vibration of the Word perfuses him. This perfusion becomes magnified in the Christian polis where each person is called to take the place of Christ for every other. The depth and vibration of this nuptial otherness that characterizes the Christian polis is a metaphysical violence pushing far past the capacity of beings, but not of Being. The human person is boundlessly more than himself and nothing belongs to him. The impossible Christian polis is the place for each unrepeatable and unique conversion, for community cannot become a mass homogeneity promoting only generic ideals. The polis is the locus where, in likeness to Christ, we are relatively higher than the angels. Man proceeds from man as God from God in our likening power, realized in the politeia. 2

The difficulty is how the polis becomes the place where each must, in all his ineluctable self-presence, lay himself open to the possibility of conversion. Each is called to cultivate Christ’s

1 Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, trans. Philip J. Whitmore (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 274-75.

2 ST I, 93, 3 resp

universal and unrepeatable image and likeness, uniting authority with genuine tradition. The impossibility of imparting the Image of Christ reveals the elusive and critical predicament of the Christian polis. The predicament is misunderstood precisely because it refuses worldly allegiance to the social sciences, or to the city of man, or to the latter’s demands for pluralisms. The Christian polis is simultaneously a living impossibility and an existential necessity. It transgresses conceptual borders, erodes thought to inform conscience, and transforms entirely the way we experience the world. To the secular scribes, we become at best an alien and an oddity or, at worst, the enemy where death is the practical solution. We need to transmit the Word, but the Word is beyond our power, we haven’t the tools. The paradoxical agon is that if we could transmit the meaning, it would not be the Word. This metaphysical violence lived out and transformed into joy is the only possibility of a Christian society, and of the gifts of the faith. Pope Benedict XVI in Milestones describes Holy Saturday as “fitting for the nature of our human life: we are still awaiting Easter; we are not yet standing in the full light but walking toward it full of trust.” 3 Our inability to achieve the movement, teaching, or transmission of the Word reminds us that we are forever on the eve of truth. The question I seek to raise is whether Rahner has de-emphasized this “forever on the eve of truth,” this impossibility and necessity to transmit the Word critical to the Christian polis

The long-standing tension between the philosopher and the polis enters a trembling engagement when the figure of Christ offers His ineluctable Image as arche and telos 4 Christ magnifies our civilizational struggle. As logos, the God-Man places us in a region of Being where we know we cannot concoct a conceptual or social foundation that can withstand creation and destruction. There can be no civilizational substitute for Christ, for we cannot embody the Word to guide this polis. It is, again, this rupture that we seek to understand as the very gift of both our image in Christ and of the core phenomena of the Christian polis

Christ is the unrepeatable and untranslatable ever-presence of Truth which we cannot utter, for only the Word can utter himself. The Word necessitates that we communicate it politically. This requirement places the authentic person in an ontological ferocity a stretching of his Being by way of divine abandonment. We are unsure how to communicate the Image and Word which is Imageless and Wordless. More still, our temptation to manage the Word politically may create pernicious all-too-worldly substitutes because the Word is in but not of the world. Christ is perpetually overcoming the world, elevating Time into Being, History into Event. Christ is not only the Event of history but the unrepeatable Image that cannot be organized politically into a pattern, or reduced to a species of generality, one of the many “isms.” The God-Man is the unpatterned patterner refusing all reductive patterns, and His dependent Christian polis must per impossible follow by way of analogy. The civilizational tension is always present right at the

3 Pope Benedict XVI, Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2011), 8.

4 Cf. von Balthasar in A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994), 69-70: “Christ can be called the ‘concrete analogy of Being’, analogia entis, since he constitutes himself, in the unity of his divine and human natures, the proportion of every interval between God and man. And this unity is his person in both natures. The philosophical formulation of the analogy of Being is related to the measure of Christ precisely as is world history to his history as promise to fulfillment, the preliminary to the definitive. He is so very much what is most concrete and most central that in the last analysis we can only think by starting with him; every question as to what might be if he did not exist, or he had not become man, or if the world had to be considered without him, is now superfluous and unnecessary….When God reveals his inner intention that he willed creation from all eternity; that now, bound up with the world in the indissoluble bond of the hypostatic union, he will never again be without the world; that he designed and predestined man as the brother of his eternal Son become man then it becomes clear how, without losing its validity, the plane of philosophy is transcended.”

threshold of language and meaning: “unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language.” 5

The Christian society is both possible because necessary, and yet impossible because unachievable, whether framed historically in terms of a state religion or a religious state. The problem goes to the very meanings of polis, of the human person, of Being, of God. There will always be a sense of the forsaken within the Christian politeia, of our inability to proceed, advance, or resolve. The human person, living to imitate the ineluctable divine Image, lives as a captive at odds with a world addicted to easily replicated mimetic patterns. As Eliot notes, “between the Church and the World there is no permanent modus-vivendi possible.” 6 The Christ-event is the enduring Image of the disparate, the forsaken, the contradictory, the supreme patterner without replication in existence. In Christ, faith is neither rational nor irrational, it is reason at the point of its necessary surrender in Love. Only if an uncreated Being can be felled by death is the impossible made possible. The world is not the Image, Christ is. Nature cannot supply us with the end, we are nomads in a nomadic world. Christ’s death the death of the uncreated, incarnated, and resurrected opens this truth. He is the Image of impossibility-as-perfection, beyond idea yet incorporating all ideas, too beautiful not to be true. When we attempt to be in the image of Christ, we experience this metaphysical crucifixion, this ontological lancing, that relentlessly moves us in and beyond the world, moving us in and beyond our own capacity. The inability and necessity to transmit the Word are discoverable only in human nature resolved to finding itself analogically within the supernatural. It is this resolution that protects the polis and its persons from the demonic suppression of our finitude in favor of ideological progressivism.

In our following discussions, the term polis has several interwoven meanings which ultimately concentrate on their theophanic realization in the Christian polis. It is the place of political science, of the ancient city-state now transformed into the modern community ordered to ends, progress, and advancement. The polis is the central reflection of the anthropos, where human nature is interrogated in science, philosophy, art, and religion, organizing society by human and ultimately by divine Persons. 7 As the human person enacts his finitude ever in reference to the infinite, the polis realizes the temporal necessities of life and becomes the locus for leisure, institutions, and culture. The polis allows our gaze to move from temporal ends to the eternal end encompassing a collective consciousness in and of Being. It is an expression of history, of human persons establishing community and governance, and of the divine Person, Christ, providing universal admission or membership into a far more fully realized end for all persons in time. 8 The

5 Pope Benedict XVI, The Regensburg Address, page 4 of the PDF accessible at hf_benxvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.pdf.

6 Eliot, Christianity and Culture (London: Harvest, 1967), 72.

7 Cf. Williams in Christ the Heart of Creation: “It is as the unfree, the mortal, the failing and suffering, that God realizes the centrality, the focal and magnetic significance of the divine in the created world. Only in the incarnate Word as revealed in the crucified Christ is it possible to have both direct openness to infinite activity and an unarguable sign of the fact that God is that which is ‘always greater,’ semper maior. This, Przywara affirms, is the heart of the doctrine of analogy no similarity without an always greater difference; so the Christ who reveals what the analogical relation of finite and infinite actually and abidingly is must be ‘man wholly circumscribed in his humanity, in whose humanity there is nothing visible, audible, scrutable, or tangible, that would immediately suggest divinity. Revelation means that we are enabled to recognize not only that God in general terms is the focus, the ground of the ‘rhythm,’ of finite reality, but that this is realizable only when God acts in and as the unequivocally finite, not in some sort of exalted and insulated finitude that ‘looks more like’ divine liberty as we might be tempted to imagine it.” Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (London: Continuum, 2018), 219-20.

8 Cf. Bonhoeffer in Creation and Fall: “The Church of Christ bears witness to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end. ‘Remember not the

Christian polis does reflect social and communal dimensions of the Church, but it is not an earthly political system, nor ever to be identified in that reductive and divisive manner. Christ is the estuary for understanding the Church’s engagement within the world, its historical realities, and its eschatological mysteries. A Christian polis is only “Christian” if it is united to the body of Christ.

Finitude, Pluralism, Sameness, & Difference

As I see it, the problem is that Karl Rahner is a divided theologian whose spirit in the world is closer to Hegelian leanings than one would like to admit. Rahner has undercut the inability and necessity to transmit the Word so critical to the Christian polis and to a sacramental view of history. In Rahner’s thought, the Christian polis vanishes into an increasingly undefined religious pluralism: “The Church will not so much regard herself today as the exclusive community of those who have a claim to salvation but rather as the historically tangible vanguard and the historically and socially constituted explicit expression of what the Christian hopes is present as a hidden reality even outside the visible Church.” 9

Rahner’s sense of symbolic reality is engaged through three fundamental ideas:

1. All beings are fundamentally symbolic because they attain their nature through expression; this symbolic reality is the precondition for self-possession in knowledge and love.

2. The revealed symbol is also the realization of being in the other; each being forms something distinct from itself but wholly united to itself.

3. The symbol is no secondary relationship assigned by an outside observer; in primacy, beings are symbolic as knowable.

Alternatively, Ratzinger holds the following:

Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us. 10

The question is: if we follow Rahner’s understanding of the symbolically prioritizing sacramental view of history, do we have the vanishing Christian polis? Is that genuine metaphysical rupture the awe and the terror that we cannot transmit the Word replaced with a degrading violence under the auspices of pluralism as enforced harmony? Does Rahner fall under Fabro’s critique that faith becomes “nothing but a psychological projection of the infinitized

former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing’ (Isa. 43:18-19). The new is the real end of the old; Christ is the new. Christ is the end of the old. He is not a continuation of the old; he is not its aiming point, nor is he a consummation upon the line of the old; he is the end and therefore the new.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: Temptation: Two Biblical Studies (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 9.

9 Karl Rahner, SJ, Theological Investigations II: Man in the Church, trans. Karl Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon, 1963), 3-12.

10 Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2011), §77.

human consciousness or mind?” 11 This is the consumptive secular society which extols its own “limits” and “humility” by ignoring the divine as “beyond its pay grade” or “too personal to discuss publicly.” It extends its control of the human person to every corner of his intimate life, replacing God as the cause and guarantor of human existence.

The noblest secular community carries within it the urge to pollinate or transfer its goods, ideals, and humanisms. If the polis is to be Christian, if each is to remain unendingly open in the form of the penitential, then how do we constitute a community where we and the polis must avoid the temptation of living and thriving under the necessary finitude of our species? How do the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, when transformed in and by Christ, refuse to be resituated as ideals in the species? How do they remain untranslatable in us and yet comprise a universal communion? It appears that if the impossibility of the Christian polis is translated, it is the image and act of each person’s irreducible personhood. The Christian polis never degenerates into its own absolutism, nor does its unrepeatability sequester itself into rank sentiment or relativist pseudo-commitment. 12

For there to be a Christian polis, it must be an effect of our untranslatable image in Christ. For this gaze to be fruitful, it must not seek out community, solidarity, or species as forms of temptation to distraction. Nor, however, must it reject them. The alternative temptations are that either everything is exactly the same or everything is totally different. But the true analogical necessity is that everything in the Christian polis is exactly the same and yet totally different. To further emphasize this genuine metaphysical violence, which is the supreme discourse with God, we must emphasize that we are intentional beings. We know ourselves only in the face of otherness. And in the Christian politeia what we know we cannot translate. Each human life is a protracted death ever on the eve of truth and life, but neither death nor life truly commands us. In the Christian polis where we live beyond reason but not beyond recognition, four key phenomenological features appear:

1. We cannot create a new morality. There is no escape from the world or from the conditions of our penitential gaze. We are all very much in the same boat, and even if it is not the Titanic, it is very much the ship of fools.

2. As virtue cannot be taught, so too, but more interiorly, the Word is not in our power. We cannot translate or transfer the untranslatable universal to others. We must each enter that invitational analogy which is the conversation of our soul in Christ’s.

3. We are intentional beings. We need to communicate the Transcendentals socially, in the polis. This cannot be muted or stripped. Our need to transfer the Transcendentals to others prefigures our own need to receive them. Our ability to possess the Transcendentals is made possible only by responding to or taking-in their locus in the other, and ultimately in the divine.

4. Possession and dispossession live within us. We are filled with the Word and in need of it at the same time. We are forsaken and saved, we have failed to transmit the Word, and our failure is the transmission. We are in the image of Christ who is both wayfarer and comprehensor.

11 Cornelio Fabro, God in Exile, trans. Arthur Gibson (New York: Newman, 1964), 664.

12 Cf. Ratzinger in The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000), 18: “The glory of God is the living man, but the life of man is the vision of God, says St. Irenaeus, getting to the heart of what happens when man meets God on the mountain in the wilderness. Ultimately, it is the very life of man, man himself as living righteously, that is the true worship of God, but life only becomes real life when it receives its form from looking toward God.”

The result of these four phenomenological intensities is that the Christian polis is both impossible and essential. Our need for the unrepeatable divine Image means “the instinct of destruction is as natural to the human soul as that of creation” and apart from “these two instincts all our faculties appear to be minor psychological properties, required only under given, and accidental, conditions.” 13 This metaphysical tension between creation and destruction, intentionality and the penitential gaze, reveals the Christian polis as the place where we go beyond image. The true politeia in Christ places its participants within an analogical structure of intensifying identity and difference, unifying all inner and outer aspects of our world. With Przywara we consider that

Christ is the eternal archetype of the inner and outer world. All the beauty of the cosmos the majesty of the high mountain range, the lovely simplicity of the verdant fields, the brilliant concert of birds in the springtime forests and the cracking and thundering of storms at night, the still solitude of the mountain retreat and the powerful rushing together of the industrial city is a manifold image of his unity. 14

The Christian society is no progressivism. It unfolds, by invitational analogy, the Word. The Christian society is never ideal, for its fullness rests on our radical acknowledgment that we cannot transmit or imitate the Image beyond all images.

The Problem of Symbol and Polis in Rahner & Ratzinger: A Closer Look

Here we must take a closer look at the sacramental view of history and particularly Ratzinger’s criticism of Rahner’s approach. Ratzinger, aligned with von Balthasar, is critical of the shades of Enlightenment theology and of an anthropocentrism to Rahner’s thought which may be far too close to Bultmann’s project of de-mythologized Christianity. In any Enlightenment project, the shift is marked and profound. It is straying from the underlying foundation, a shift from the theocentric to the anthropocentric. With respect to the practical Thomist, the philosopher and theologian must start from where we are and not from where we are not. A different fundamental foundation alters entirely the process, insights, and conclusions. Accept, for example, the cogito foundation, and one is not in the same world, and everything built on top of it is a substitute and surrogate replacement for truth. This is at least our question when dwelling on the strange situatedness of the Christian polis. Will Rahner’s sacramental view of history allow us to navigate the uniqueness of this polis, without reducing the mystery to vague transcendence? As von Balthasar sets out in New Elucidations:

If we ask ourselves what the ‘Enlightenment’ actually was, we could briefly answer: the change from a theocentric to an anthropocentric viewpoint; for religion (very clearly since the English deists), this means the change from a positive historical religion to a religion valid for man in general, who is essentially religious….Thus the central concern of the Enlightenment was to transfer the

13 Shestov, Penultimate Words and Other Essays, ed. Bernard Martin (Boston: John W. Luce, 1916), 138

14 Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics, Original Structure, and Universal Rhythm, trans. John Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 107.

principle of the universal validity of religious truth from the divine and therefore unique authority of Jesus Christ to the ‘human’ being, with the result that henceforth every form of positive historical religion is reducible, and must more and more become reducible, to a human religion. 15

Ratzinger finds within Rahner an affiliation to Enlightenment religion that subsequent thinkers take further, and problematically so. Rahner’s project appears to have a twofold and opposing directionality. While he has awe for mystery, and an aim at a sacramental view where grace is central, he unfortunately stresses the sign value of the sacraments, thereby promoting a turn to the Enlightenment view and a denigration of doctrine. He undermines the sacraments by the language of symbols. Rahner states: “The sacraments are the historical manifestations of the grace which is always and everywhere present in the world.” 16 His emphasis on grace everywhere in the world poses the danger of being viewed as abstract and ahistorical, making the theology of sacraments no longer wedded to the Christ-event. Grace as “symbol” becomes a means of circumnavigating the difficult questions that an ontological reality poses underneath sacramental theology, such as material causality and transubstantiation. He does so to make the faith more accessible to the masses. But that very accessibility may well be what ushers in the loss of faith. Once sacramental reality of Christ becomes symbol among a plurality of symbols, might we perhaps lose what makes it irreducible and other? Ultimately it becomes human, all too human.

In Foundations of Christian Faith, Rahner sets out “to try as far as possible to situate Christianity within the intellectual horizon of people today.” 17 Our issue is his discarding of neoscholastic foundations, subsequently weakening secure metaphysical tenets. Rahner incorporates large swaths of modern philosophy and there is no real challenge, engagement, or refutation. His adoption and modification, rather than challenge and refutation, “marks an important substantive change, which most scholars and historians of theology see as decisive.” 18 Ratzinger is critical of Rahner’s piecemeal adoption and modification, which cannot truly absorb the seismic shift in the approach to sacramental theology and its debriding of it companion metaphysics:

The crisis we are experiencing in the Church and in humanity is closely allied to the exclusion of God as a topic with which reason can properly be concerned an exclusion that has led to the degeneration of theology first into historicism, then into sociologism and, at the same time, to the impoverishment of philosophy. 19

Ratzinger’s concern is that this dichotomy reduces Christianity to an event process of human consciousness, a realization of what is “more or less consciously acknowledged.” 20 As Ratzinger continues in Principles of Catholic Theology:

15 Hans Urs von Balthasar, New Elucidations, trans. Mary Theresilde Skerry (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 33.

16 Rahner, “Thoughts about the Sacraments in General,” Theologian of the Graced Search for Meaning, ed. G. Kelly (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 228.

17 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Seabury, 1978), 57.

18 Reno, “Rahner the Restorationist,” First Things, May 2013.

19 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 316

20 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 164.

The particularity of Christianity with respect to the rest of history is now located in the realm of reflection; in Christianity is reflected that which, in itself, is always and everywhere….For Rahner man is, in fact, self-transcendent being; hence the God-man can be deduced as the true Savior of mankind in terms of man’s own being: the Incarnation of God is the highest instance of the ontological fulfillment of human reality, the successful, perfect transcendence….This broadly outlined thesis of Rahner’s has something dazzling, something stupendous, about it. The uniqueness of Christianity and the universality of man’s being coincide….But is that really the answer? Is it true that Christianity adds nothing to the universal but merely makes it known? 21

Rahner desires to move beyond a traditional framework for faith. As he remarks in Sacraments: “It would be pitiful if we were to reconcile ourselves forever to the inadequate, and perhaps half-magical, misconceptions which we drag along with us from early religious instruction, and from the practices of our childhood.” 22 But when it becomes conceptually muddied as to whether the Eucharist is the Real Presence of Christ, or merely a symbol, or even the unfolding event of humanity in relation to transcendent reality, we do find ourselves on a shaky anthropocentric ground. This cannot be the source of the Church, the sacramental anchor of the eucharistic reality, and particularly of the uniqueness of the God-Man in the polis. We see this reduction of the Eucharist to a symbolic unfolding repeatedly in Sacraments and in his Theological Investigations. For Rahner, the emphasis even for the Eucharist is on the universal though symbolic medium that “the sacraments make concrete and actual, for the life of the individual, the symbolic reality of the church.” 23 This symbol represents, points to, and directs to the underlying reality. It is precisely this pointing toward that denigrates the efficacious power of the sacrament not only to epistemologically direct us to grace, but to ontologically effect and cause the very grace each sacrament signifies. The more a sacrament is viewed as a symbolic pointing toward grace, the more the dialogic demands of the subjective experience of the faith and its objective reality are reduced to a one-sided, subjective monologue. Rahner’s notion of symbol dilutes the critical necessity of doctrine and of the objective reality of God’s here-and-now saving power and present action in the sacraments.

By eating the dish of God’s mercy, they anticipate the eternal meal when God, no longer in earthly symbols out in the accomplishment of his revealed glory, makes himself into the eternal meal of the redeemed. And while they eat thus, they look for the day when the Lord will be entirely with them, the day on which he ‘will come again’ (as they say). 24

In The Church and the Sacraments, Rahner seeks to overcome this criticism by focusing on the causality of sacraments as intrinsic symbols, particularly emphasizing the relationship between their function as signs and their causality in conferring grace. For Rahner, these intrinsic symbols are not merely signs but are causally effective in manifesting and conferring grace because

21 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 164-65.

22 Rahner, Meditations on the Sacraments (New York: Seabury, 1977), 39.

23 Karl Rahner, “On the Theology of Symbolic Reality,” Theological Investigations IV, trans. Karl Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961), 241

24 Rahner, Meditations on the Sacraments, 32-33.

of their ontological nature. Additionally, he sees traditional sacramental theology as problematically separating the symbolic meaning of sacraments from their causal efficacy and not taking seriously sacramenta significando efficiunt gratiam that the sacraments bring about grace by signifying it. By emphasizing the ontological dimension of symbols, Rahner argues that the sign and what it signifies are intrinsically connected in a mutual causal relationship.

The issue is how, for Rahner, the sacraments bring about grace by signifying it. The sacraments signify grace through his “supernatural existential,” that “permanent dynamism of grace.” 25 This framework views humanity as always and everywhere already affected by grace, even outside the explicit embrace of the Church and its sacraments. Under this view, Rahner, then, can no longer support his own claim that intrinsic symbols confer the grace of the sacrament within the “supernatural existential.” Sacraments instead become explicit, historical manifestations of the grace that is already and always present. This diminishes how the sacraments bring about grace, since the grace is already there, and thus the sacrament is reduced to the role of a flashlight or a laser pen merely pointing toward the given in an ontologically flattened world increasingly open to interpretation and narrative. Rahner sidesteps the centrality of the Eucharist and the liturgy in understanding the sacraments, and he also lessens the human person’s free assent in relation to the sacrament as a crucial part of its actual conferring of grace. 26 The Eucharist cannot be the special and privileged way that the Church encounters the mystery of Christ’s love, and the causal principle of the Church itself, if it is merely another flashlight pointing to the grace already given. What Rahner fails to accommodate is the actual new encounter with Christ and his grace. His permanent dynamism of grace minimalizes the centrality of the visible Church.

But for Ratzinger, on the other hand, we see that it necessitates a transformation no symbol can envision. This is no symbolic or secular view of one flesh and one spirit; reality demands far more. The Christian polis is only built on the truth of the Real Presence: “In the Eucharist a communion takes place that corresponds to the union of man and woman in marriage. Just as they become ‘one flesh,’ so in Communion we all become ‘one spirit,’ one person, with Christ.” 27

Rahner’s theological project has many admirable components, but his upending of sacramental reality by conflating it with symbolic identities is the inner and underlying step toward secularization, and is at the very root of current discussions of a so-called post-Christian society. According to Ratzinger, Rahner has “sought for a philosophical and theological world formula on the basis of which the whole of reality can be deduced from necessary causes revelation has given us no world formula. Such a concept is plainly counter to the mystery of freedom.

28

If we follow Rahner, the Eucharist is no longer an efficacious and ontological presence of grace but a vague unfolding of a kind of generalized operative grace that could very well mesh

25 Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace,” in Theological Investigations I (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961), 297-317, at 301.

26 Cf. Behr in Becoming Human: “From what we have seen, we might also say that in order to be a true human being in the image of God, who is Christ the true human being, we must be born into a new existence in Christ by a birth effected through our voluntary use of our mortality – as an act of sacrifice through baptism – thereby freely choosing to exist as a human being and grounding that being and existence in an act of freedom, so living the same life of love that God himself is. The human being only comes into existence by giving their own ‘fiat’ – ‘Let it be!’ For every other aspect of creation, all that was needed was a simple divine ‘fiat’ – ‘Let it be!’ But for the human being to come into existence, required a creature able to give his or her own ‘fiat!’ This is, of course, accomplished sacramentally, once and for all, in baptism. The life of the baptized thereafter is one of ‘learning to die,’ learning, that is, specifically to take up the Cross of Christ.” John Behr, Becoming Human: Meditations on Christian Anthropology in Word and Image (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), 64-66.

27 Pope Benedict XVI, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 142.

28 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 169.

just give it time (and we have) with a sort of secular humanism. “He gave himself to God as the one to be put to death and through death submitted to God as the eternal covenant of redemption, and He gave Himself to His disciples in the event and the symbol of the meal.” 29 Those careful distinctions between actual/habitual and operative/cooperative grace are critical to the life of the Christian polis. Lose this and we plummet into that post-Christian society. Rahner is manufacturing a sense of grace indifferent to its perfective relation with the Eucharist and the Church. His anthropocentric symbolism terribly undercuts the reality that there is always an exceeding reality to the Eucharist, an overflow of the Real Presence of Christ himself, that raises the Church and the Christian polis into its critical and unique position in but not of the world.

Ratzinger contends that it is the ambiguity of Rahner’s theological project that is the problem. 30 Rahner’s focus on anthropological principles in Spirit in the World creates a formula leading to a de-clericalized Church, one where the crucial theological issues can be reduced to and derived from a psychological-philosophical examination of the Christian’s spiritual and material elements. The delicate balance between the Church’s charismatic and institutional aspects is read through an unavoidably reductive anthropological lens. The roles of the Church are now on par with the individual’s inner spiritual reality and external material acts. In The Shape of the Church to Come he comments that

our present situation is one of transition from a Church sustained by a homogeneously Christian society...to a Church made up of those who have struggled against their environment in order to reach a personally clearly and explicitly responsible decision of faith. This will be the Church of the future or there will be no Church at all. 31

Concluding Remarks

In City of God, St. Augustine tells us that “when God is ‘all in all,’ then He will be the completion of every human desire, both realized and unrealized. Our union will be an endless love, a praise that never tires, an activity which is itself intimate and shared by all.” 32 We must take seriously the enduring impossibility of the Christian polis, especially in its living presence. We are called to defend and embody what we cannot impart by our own power. This Christian polis is outside visible society and yet inside it, hidden from view yet ineluctably present. This communion transfigures and transfixes our inner world, and the Christian enters the outer world as a holy fool fighting windmills. The world will not understand. It is not above death. What are the guidelines, the sacred pact, of this Christian polis? How do we know its presence when we can neither reimagine it nor can we hold it suspended in a futurity emptied of all substance? We must remember that Christ’s union with us means so much more than a side-by-side touching of self-sufficient existences: by “the very fact that He gives being to the things that fill every place, He Himself fills

29 Rahner, Meditations on the Sacraments, 29.

30 Cf. Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 166: “Rahner could, of course, refute all this by saying that he, too, takes as his point of departure that which is inconceivably new, the ‘Event’ that is the Savior. He could say that what is universal has now become that which saves only because, in this Savior, a universality of being has come to pass that could not emanate from being itself. I prefer to leave open the question of whether this does justice, on the conceptual level, to what is particular and unique in the salvation history that has its center in Christ.”

31 Rahner, The Shape of the Church to Come (New York: Seabury, 1974), 23-24.

32 St. Augustine, The City of God, ed. Vernon Bourke (New York: Image, 1958), xiv.

every place.” 33 Christ freely binds Himself as Mediator; the other Who can be in the one who knows. In this supreme bond, we are finally freed to know, love, and experience the only satisfying end, Christ, the logos. The Word is transmitted, the aniconic Image taken-in. Christ filling every place satisfies and overcomes the metaphysical violence at root in the fallen human condition straining for the divine. Our Lord’s lama sabachthani leaves no avenue of existence untouched, especially regarding the polis. As both master and self-descending slave to nature, Christ is life and death simultaneously, He is law beyond law. He is for and against the world as we are in and not of the world. The God-Man risen with His scars is the Image of the law of the polis, revealing the community of the impossible but necessary. St. Paul spoke of the oddness of Christ’s law in the transfigured polis: “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” 34

The Christian polis transfixes the human soul, leaving it with the knowledge of transience as much as eternity, an eternal transience ebbing its way into personal memory and living on in the Christian by recollection. We relive a past we cannot recollect, for it is not yet past us, nor is it our past, and yet we are defined by it, we are beings becoming redefined by an imageless present living within us, illuminating images as indications and presences too real for this world. We gain access into the Christian polis when the world is not enough and our souls are too much, and when the world is too much and our souls are not enough to navigate it: this is the ontologically trembling violence overcome when imitating Christ. Christ has no pattern, only unrepeatable eternal presence.

The odd appearance of the Christian polis cannot be broken down, but described only as it invokes its own description, only as it casts itself in undiluted contrast to its many secular substitutes and surrogates. It lives on through the supreme invitation of the analogia entis, overcoming failed egoisms and confiscating the boundaries where the myth of self-sufficiency is considered the adjudicator and separator of the City of Man from the City of God.

In sum:

1. The Christian polis never immanentizes transcendence. There is a real image we possess in Christ, but it calls us into its analogical invitation of greater dissimilarity within depths of similarity.

2. The Christian polis affirms the proper relation between God and persons through Christ. Christ is the always preceding Image, the archetype, the logos of existence. The Word cannot be transmitted as other, secular ideas can, and it is precisely this essential difference which preserves the communion and transcendence of its participants.

3. The Christian polis is intrinsically connected to the body as logos of Christ: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” 35 The politeia is an analogy between human reason and divine Reason, mediated by Christ’s image.

Christ is in but not of the world, overcoming the in and making the world no longer of itself. Our Savior expands our beings to accommodate what is impossible and yet necessary to take-in. By committing His spirit and becoming the life of the Christian polis, the God-Man is the living Word living inside us. He unites what is untranslatable into the only true Present amid all

33 Aquinas, ST I, 8, 2 resp

34 Gal. 2:21

35 Col. 1:17.

the substitute “heres” and “nows”. This Present is the place where fools become saints, and where faith, while always an exercise in futility, receives its highest expression as wisdom incarnate. We are fortunate, blessed, living out, through Christ, the magnificent elegy of desire:

So much has been said, O Queen of the Apostles, We have lost the taste for discourse We have no more altars but yours We know nothing but a simple prayer.

All that everywhere else demands an examination Here is but the effect of a defenseless youthfulness. All that everywhere else requires postponement here is but a present fragility.

All that everywhere else demands certification Here is but the fruit of a poor tenderness. All that everywhere else requires a touch of skill here is but the fruit of a humble ineptitude.

All that everywhere else is imbalance Here is but measure and grading, All that everywhere else is a hut Here is but a solid and lasting dwelling-place.

36 Péguy, La Tapisserie de Notre-Dame (Amsterdam: A. A. Balkema, 1946), 72.

Charles Péguy, “La Tapisserie de Notre Dame” 36

Benedict XVI on Protecting the Environment: Papal Advocacy for an Integral Ecology

By Rev. Emery de Gaál, Ph.D.

Environmental and climate protection are germane to the Christian and Catholic vision. The Catholic position is based on key principles pertaining to theological anthropology and the doctrine of creation, as they are revealed to us by the Bible. It all begins with Genesis. The first book of the Bible contains two creation narratives, the younger one dating from around 500 BC (Genesis 1:1 to 2:4a), the older one from around 700 BC (Genesis 2:4b to 25). In the more recent version, humankind’s relationship of dominion is established in relation to the environment (“And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every living thing that moves on the earth,’” Gen 1:28). God appoints humankind as guardians of the environment: “So the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). This gives rise to a moral duty, for the Catholic Church as well as for humanity in general, to protect the environment and the climate. From this moral demand it follows that ecological indifference is contempt for creation and thus for the Creator. The call to responsibility for the animal and plant worlds had a completely different, far more life-friendly, and even more ecological meaning in a time when humans were generally threatened by the natural world around them, or when they had to first adapt to and assert themselves in the wilderness they encountered, than it can possibly have today, after the almost complete development of all natural spaces by humans, who exploit animals, plants, and the soil. Conversely, if biblical writings from ancient times urged good coexistence and even ecologically illustrated visions of peace (Isaiah 11) when humans were not yet capable of exterminating entire species, destroying ecosystems, and influencing the climate, how much more can they serve as a warning today, when we are systematically destroying the environment and negatively impacting the climate.

How does the Church address the biblical mandate? It was not the biblical concept of creation, but the loss of a reverent perspective on creation due to the modern movement toward a scientific worldview, originating with Francis Bacon (1561-1626), that led to the transformation of the mandate of care into a concept of appropriation. The subject “nature” was no longer to be royally protected (“to rule” according to Genesis 1:28 lexically means “to guard,” according to Genesis 2:15), but rather to be exploited despotically. Hans Kessler 1 emphasizes that the biblical mandate of creation “has been read in its entirety up to the modern era” and thus “has not been understood as a call for the self-righteous instrumentalization and exploitation of nature.” 2 To make it and thus Christianity as such a hindrance to effective environmental and climate protection, and thus to deny the positive potential of a Christian perspective on nature, cannot be justified in the history of ideas and is the result of a historically recent and Zeitgeist-driven aversion to religion: “Even since they were added so secondarily, the biblical creation texts have not played the central role in the history of legitimizing modern domination of nature and the

1 Hans Kessler, Das Stöhnen der Natur. Plädoyer für eine Schöpfungsspiritualität und Schöpfungsethik (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1990), and Das Leid in der Welt – ein Schrei nach Gott (= Topos-plusTaschenbücher. Bd. 631) (Würzburg: Echter, 2007).

2 Kessler, Das Stöhnen, 123.

progressive destruction of nature that is sometimes rashly attributed to these texts by fashionable and cheap critics.” 3

The Church and the Protection of the Environment

How has the Catholic Church dealt with the biblical mandate in the past, and how does it deal with it now? A look at documents from Church history reveals an increasingly committed stance with regard to environmental and climate protection. As early as 1971, the World Synod of Bishops in Rome adopted the declaration De iustitia in mundo (“On Justice in the World”), 4 which, in several places, expresses in a strikingly clear way the close connection between justice, nature conservation, and lifestyle. Thus, the Synod traced humanity’s actual drive for unity to ecological necessities and, importantly, became, in a sense, a pioneer of the global environmental movement one year before the first international environmental conference in Stockholm in June 1972. 5 It is also noteworthy that Pope Paul VI already clearly articulated his concerns regarding environmental issues in Octogesima Adveniens (1971). 6 In Populorum Progressio (1967), he already formulated the idea of intergenerational justice by referring to the duty toward those “who, after us, will enlarge the circle of the human family.” 7 This document drew attention to the new global challenge of environmental protection, which was to be discussed for the first time at an international conference in Stockholm in June 1972. 8 So, even before the international community, the Catholic Church addressed the issue that is so uncomfortable for the industrialized countries. And so Paul VI argued, with remarkable clarity, that it is incomprehensible for the rich nations to presume to increase material goods in such a way that either other people continue to live in misery and poverty, or the danger arises that the physical foundations of life in the world will be destroyed. The rich must adopt a less materially demanding lifestyle and waste less so as not to destroy the God-given inheritance which they must share fairly with all other people. 9

From then on, the connection between ecology and economy, between environmental protection and justice, formed a common thread in Catholic social teaching until Francis’s Laudato Si’ (2015), which developed this connection more comprehensively than ever before. However, between Paul VI and Francis there are two very special environmental activists to note, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Since the 1970s, the protection of our natural environment has not only been a concern of society, but also of the Church. Statements by the last three popes St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis clearly show this.

3 Kessler, Das Leid, 34.

4 https://christusliberat.org/journal/social-doctrine-of-the-catholic-church/

5 See the website Environment and Society, Only One Earth: Stockholm and the Beginning of Modern Environmental Diplomacy | Environment & Society Portal.

6 Paul VI, Octogesima adveniens, https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/apost_letters/documents/hf_pvi_apl_19710514_octogesima-adveniens.html

7 Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, §17, https://www.vatican.va/content/paulvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_26031967_populorum.html

8 A reliable source for this document can be found at https://www.nachhaltigkeit.info/artikel/uno_konferenz_stockholm_1972_688.htm#:~:text=Die%20UNO%2DWeltko nferenz%20%C3%BCber%20die,ein%20internationales%20Umweltmanagement

9 Cf. Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, §24, https://www.vatican.va/content/paulvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_26031967_populorum.html

St. John Paul II

The idea that an authentic, responsible, Christian-inflected anthropocentrism is truly possible, and truly respectful of both man and the environment, is reflected by these popes. On May 8, 1993, the Pope had a veritable outburst of emotion at the Sicilian Ettore Maiorana Research Center. In a speech to scientists, he spoke of the danger of an “olocausto ambientale” (“environmental holocaust”), which had replaced the threat of an “olocausto nucleare” (“nuclear holocaust”) prevalent during the Cold War. This highly controversial phrase makes clear how seriously John Paul II took the environmental issue. 10

This highly explosive, but perhaps prophetic diction, makes clear how dear the environmental issue was for John Paul II, whose papacy is associated with many other things, but not with environmental protection. The sharpness of the rhetoric employed should not come as a surprise. Since the 1970s, environmental protection has been a core concern of the Church’s preaching, based on the motif of the preservation of creation as God’s mandate to humankind: “So the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15).

Already in his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis (1979), Pope John Paul II criticized the irresponsible relationship between human beings and nature:

Man often seems to see no other meaning in his natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption. Yet it was the Creator’s will that man should communicate with nature as an intelligent and noble ‘master’ and ‘guardian’, and not as a heedless ‘exploiter’ and ‘destroyer.’ 11

Laborem Exercens (1981) also deals with the domination of nature in the course of mankind’s work: “This universality and at the same time this diversity in the process of subjugating the earth sheds light on human work; for man’s dominion over the earth takes place through work and in work.” 12 Labor is thus closely related to nature.

For John Paul II, technology, which is increasingly and in an almost exclusive manner shaping human labor, is also at the service of the mission of creation: “If the biblical words ‘subdue the earth,’ which have been addressed to mankind since the beginning, are understood in terms of the entire modern industrial and post-industrial age, they undoubtedly also include a relationship to technology, to that world of mechanisms and machines which are the fruit of man’s intellectual work and a historical confirmation of his dominion over nature.” 13

In his encyclical Centesimus Annus (1991), Pope John Paul II refers to the “question of ecology” as “worrying”:

Man, who is seized more by the desire for possession and enjoyment than by the desire for being and development, consumes the earth’s resources and even its

10 John Paul II, Incontro di Giovanni Paolo II con gli Scienziati durante la Visita al Centro “Ettore Majorana” https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/it/speeches/1993/may/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19930508_scienziatierice.html

11 John Paul II, Redemptor hominis, §15, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paulii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_04031979_redemptor-hominis.html

12 John Paul II, Laborem exercens, § 5, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paulii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html

13 John Paul II, Laborem exercens, § 5, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paulii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html

existence in an excessive and undisciplined way. The reckless destruction of the natural environment is based on an anthropological error that is unfortunately widespread today. Man, who discovers his ability to reshape the world with his work and in a certain sense to create it anew, forgets that this only ever happens on the basis of the first original gift of things from God. Man thinks he can dispose of the earth arbitrarily by subjecting it to his will without reservation, as if it did not have its own form and a purpose previously given to it by God, which man can develop but must not betray. Instead of realizing his task as God’s coworker in the work of creation, man puts himself in God’s place and thereby ultimately provokes the rebellion of nature, which he tyrannizes rather than manages. 14

In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (1995), John Paul II takes up the idea of “human ecology” and finds in it the key to a Catholic environmental ethic in which life is to be protected, and man is at the center of this protection:

As one called to till and look after the garden of the world (cf. Gen 2:15), man has a specific responsibility towards the environment in which he lives, towards the creation which God has put at the service of his personal dignity, of his life, not only for the present but also for future generations. The ecological questionranging from the preservation of the natural habitat of the various animal species and the diverse forms of life to ‘human ecology’ in the true sense of the word - finds in the biblical text a plausible and effective ethical guide for a solution that respects the great good of life, of every life. 15

The “Gospel of Life” embraces life as such, without abandoning the special position of the human being.

Pope Benedict XVI as a Pope of Action

Pope Benedict XVI intensified efforts to find a Catholic response to the ecological question. Benedict was even considered the “Green Pope”: this was what US diplomats called him behind closed doors, as revealed by the Wikileaks platform. 16 At the International Youth Meeting in Loreto in September 2007, Benedict preached about the Church’s commitment to environmental and climate issues:

One of the areas where work seems urgent is undoubtedly the preservation of creation. The future of the planet has been entrusted to new generations, where the signs of a development that has not always been able to protect the delicate balances

14 John Paul II, Centesimus annus, § 37, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paulii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html

15 John Paul II, Evangelium vitae, § 42, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paulii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html

16 See Newsweek, March 13, 2010, Benedict XVI, the Green Pope, https://www.newsweek.com/benedictxvi-green-pope-86391. See also Erin Lothes at the Laudato Si’ Movement, “Three Questions that Explain Why Benedict XVI is the ‘Green Pope’,” January 10, 2023, https://laudatosimovement.org/news/three-questions-thatexplain-why-benedict-xvi-is-the-green-pope/

of nature are evident. Before it is too late, it is necessary to make courageous decisions that will rebuild a strong bond between humanity and the Earth. 17

This is not a populist manifesto for the “Fridays for Future” movement, but a bold call to young people to get involved in ecological issues. The Holy Father also addressed the environmental issue several times at the World Youth Day in Sydney (2008). These words were followed by actions. It was Pope Benedict XVI who, as early as 2008, had a solar power plant the size of a football field built in the Vatican. This saves around 225 tons of CO2 annually. Unsurprisingly, the Vatican was awarded the “European Solar Prize 2008” for this project. 18 Pope Benedict XVI built on this, intensifying efforts to find a Catholic answer to the ecological question. In his message for the 2008 World Day of Peace, he formulated a motif that his successor in office, Pope Francis, will take up in Laudato Si’: the earth as “our home,” and ecology as a derivation of the Greek word oikos, meaning “home.” 19 The “human family” lives “in that common home which is the earth,” because “the family needs a home, a suitable environment in which it can establish its relationships. For the human family, this home is the earth, the environment that God, the Creator, has given us to inhabit with creativity and responsibility.” It follows that “we must take care of the environment: it is entrusted to man so that he may preserve and cultivate it with responsible freedom, his standard of orientation always being the good of all.” 20

Faith in Creation as the Indispensable Basis

The theologian Joseph Ratzinger was no stranger to criticism of the activities of modern humankind. Even as early as 1968, in his famous, bestselling Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger analyzed the determining forces of the modern age and problematized a one-sided, mathematical-technical, feasibility-oriented reason with which humankind wants to make the earth, and ultimately his fellow human beings, submissive to techne. 21 He was influenced by the precursor of liturgical renewal Romano Guardini (1886-1968) and his prophetic book Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race, first published in 1927. 22 In this farsighted book, Guardini described how modern technology challenges the human being in his relationship to nature, and he also explored the implications that technology will have on culture and society, among them a perilous alienation between creation and its Creator.

As Pope Benedict XVI, Ratzinger summarized his reflections under the heading “human ecology,” which has since been illuminated and explored in greater depth in a number of collections of texts and conference proceedings. In addition to a section in his social encyclical

17 Benedict XVI, International Youth Meeting in Loreto, 2007, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/speeches/2007/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20070901_veglia-loreto.html.

18 2008 European Solar Prize , https://vbn.aau.dk/en/prizes/winner-of-the-eurosolar-european-solar-price2008.

19 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papafrancesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.

20 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papafrancesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.

21 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 57-69.

22 Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994).

Caritas in Veritate (no. 51) 23 and his address to the German Bundestag (Diet) on September 22, 2011, on the “Foundations of Law,” 24 he also spoke about this in particular in his Christmas address to the cardinals and the Roman Curia in December 2008. 25 First of all, it is remarkable that the Pope used the word “ecology” to take up a demand advocated by more left-wing political and social groups and linked it to Christianity: “The ultimate reason for our responsibility for the earth lies in our faith in creation. It is not simply our property that we can exploit according to our interests and desires.” 26

Mankind is not only concerned with the preservation of its own habitat, but even more profoundly with insight into the spirit-worked and spirit-filled nature of matter, of the cosmos. There are “inner orders inscribed” in nature that need to be understood and respected, which are beyond human control or even manipulation. “The fact that the earth…reflects the creative spirit also means that its spiritual structures...also carry moral instructions.” 27 Seen in this way, nature points beyond itself to the One who made it and continues to work in it, to the creative spirit of God, who speaks to us through the works of creation and thus “shows us the way of right living.” 28

Polarity and Complementarity

Here Pope Benedict XVI went a decisive step further than the generally widespread understanding of “ecology” as the “protection of nature.” Because man is not opposed to creation, but is himself part of creation, “ecology” understood as the endeavor to understand and protect the natural conditions of life must also apply to himself. “There must be such a thing as an ecology of man...” that essentially involves respect for the “order of creation,” which is intrinsically part of man and therefore also given to him.

This includes the reality of two genders, the polarity and complementarity of the two genders, and thus also the special protection of marriage between man and woman as the foundational “sacrament of creation” that cannot be redefined at will, by a self-enamored homo faber. The Pope saw the greatest danger and crisis of the present day in the fact that man is not only detaching nature, but also himself, from his Creator and is thus destroying himself under the pretense of complete “self-emancipation” from the ultimate laws that have bound him up to now. “The rainforests deserve our protection, but no less the human being as a creature inscribed with a message that is not the antithesis of our freedom, but its condition.” 29

In this context, Benedict XVI deliberately mentioned gender theory, which cannot be used as a key witness for the artificial emancipation of the genders, since it strives for the artificial elimination of all gender norms and denies any natural i.e., God-given predetermination of the human being. However, this theory also implicitly denies the inherent goodness of creation and the human being, something that is seen far too little by its sympathizers. In this way, it

23 Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html

24 Pope Benedict XVI, Address at the Bundestag, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/speeches/2011/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20110922_reichstag-berlin.html

25 Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Members of the Roman Curia for the Traditional Exchange of Christmas Greetings, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2008/december/documents/hf_benxvi_spe_20081222_curia-romana.html

26 https://www.kateri.org/quotes-by-pope-benedict-xvi-part-ii/.

27 https://www.kateri.org/quotes-by-pope-benedict-xvi-part-ii/

28 https://www.kateri.org/quotes-by-pope-benedict-xvi-part-ii/.

29 https://www.kateri.org/quotes-by-pope-benedict-xvi-part-ii/

unintentionally confirms that, at the deepest level, mankind cannot call itself good, cannot accept himself, and cannot love himself if he is not granted this from outside, from others, and ultimately from God, who is the summum bonum, the highest good. Cynicism then sets in as the only alternative. If the cosmos is but the result of a giant lottery à la Pascual Jordan (1902-80) German theoretical and mathematical physicist who had contributed to quantum physics then it is not a personal will, not eternal charity grounded in a Tripersonal Reality, but solely chance that causes the world and us.

The Meaning of Creation

For Pope Benedict XVI as for the Catholic mind in general, the marital union of man and woman reflects the meaning of creation and thus also of the “ecology of man,” as can be seen from other texts he has written: “the true vocation of creation” is “to be a space for the covenant, for the ‘yes’ of love between God and humanity, which responds to him” (thus in a sermon on March 26, 2012 in Santiago de Cuba). 30 The covenant between God and creation is made sacramentally present in the marriage covenant between man and woman. This is why a special blessing lies upon him in the mystery of fertility and new life, without which humanity would have ceased to exist long ago.

According to Pope Benedict XVI, the crisis of marriage and partnership in the Western world is also an effect of the decreasing reference to God in public life and the silent farewell of entire generations to commitment to the Church and Christian practice. In a pilgrimage sermon, while still a cardinal, he said: “If the basic relationship, the relationship with the one who created and sustains us, is no longer right, then all other relationships also change and ultimately fall apart.” 31

Then all that remains is the desperate search for a substitute, for example in Far Eastern meditation or, even worse, in occultism, drug consumption, or other risky adventures, “and in the end,” he predicted, “there is weariness, hatred of life, which no longer seems good and really worth living.,” Thus he preached on March 26, 1988, in the lovely Marian pilgrimage church in the Bavarian town of Maria Thalheim. 32 For without God, the human person cannot be sure of the goodness of life, and no philosophy or policy, no matter how “social,” can guarantee that it is good to live despite all the problems and crises.

The “Ecology of Humanity,” the importance of which Pope Benedict XVI emphatically impressed upon the German Parliament and thus on the entirety of Western democracy, is something of a barometer for the future of humanity. How it meets the great challenges of the twenty-first century, whether it secures its future on the “green planet” or gambles it away, will depend essentially on whether humanity once again sees itself as who it is and should be: God’s beloved image, which even as an “overturned mirror” (Gregory of Nyssa), in self-alienation and distance from God, reveals the traces of its Creator, who hears and respects “the language of creation” in his own life and thus also in his fellow human beings and in nature. In a sermon delivered on October 2, 2004, at the Austrian shrine of Mariazell, Ratzinger emphasized that we,

30 Pope Benedict XVI, Homily in Santiago de Cuba 3, 26, 2012, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/homilies/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20120326_santiago-cuba.html

31 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Homily in Mariazell, October 2, 2004, https://www.bischofskonferenz.at/dl/oLuKJKJKKoolOJqx4KoJK/Heft5_Papst_Benedikt_XVI_pdf

32 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Homily in Mariazell, October 2, 2004, https://www.bischofskonferenz.at/dl/oLuKJKJKKoolOJqx4KoJK/Heft5_Papst_Benedikt_XVI_pdf

who are truly made in the image of God, must not misinterpret our own creatureliness as a dependency that should be cast off, but as a calling in covenant and friendship with his Creator “willed by an eternal love and destined for his eternal love.”

33

The Church father St. Gregory of Nyssa (335-395) had called the human soul a “free and living mirror” that, gazing upon the face of its lover, the Word of God, Jesus Christ, is adorned with his comeliness. By looking on Jesus Christ, the human person becomes like Christ is. 34

The Pope and Human Ecology

Only when humanity learns to read “the book of nature” again, as Benedict XVI demonstrated during his pontificate, will it find a way out of the many crises in which it has become entangled, and enjoy the hope of a future.

The pontificate of the 265th Pope of the Holy Roman Catholic Church lasted “only” eight years. Yet, it will likely take eighty years, rather than er eight, for the faithful to unearth all the treasures that the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, bequeathed to the Church of Jesus Christ in these extremely dense years. So exceptionally pronounced was the capacity for integrative thinking in this successor of Peter that it is anything but surprising that even among the well-intentioned, few are able to keep pace with him. Among the many wonderfully polished spiritual jewels that this highly learned yet extremely humble shepherd of the Church left behind not only to Christians but to the entire world, undoubtedly, was his proclamation of the “ecology of man.” When he addressed the members of the German Bundestag in the historic Reichstag building in Berlin on September 22, 2011, Benedict XVI said, “I would like to underline a point that seems to me to be neglected, today as in the past: there is also an ecology of man.” 35 Humans, the Pope continued, “also have a nature that they must respect and that they cannot manipulate at will....Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he respects his nature, listens to it, and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled.” 36 Anyone who honestly engages with the encyclicals, sermons, speeches, and books of Benedict XVI quickly realizes that he was not merely a true scholar sharing his wealth of knowledge, but rather that he was one of the few great sages. He was one who had penetrated everything he taught, down to the very last corner, with heart and mind, and all of this with measured passion. Perhaps, therefore, the world will one day have to understand Benedict XVI’s resignation from the office of Vicar of Christ, who apparently no longer considered himself sufficiently equipped to steer the ship of Peter safely through the storms of the present, in light of these words: The will of man “is right when he pays attention to nature, listens to it, and accepts

33 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Homily in Mariazell, October 2, 2004, https://www.bischofskonferenz.at/dl/oLuKJKJKKoolOJqx4KoJK/Heft5_Papst_Benedikt_XVI_pdf

34 Gregory of Nyssa, In Canticum Canticorum, in Gregory of Nyssa, vol. 6, ed. Herrmann Langerbeck (Leiden: Brill, 1986), XV, 440.

35 Pope Benedict XVI, Address at the Bundestag, https://www.benedictusxvi.com/addresses/benedict-xvisaddress-before-the-german-parliament?q=%2Fansprachen%2Fansprache-vor-dem-deutschen-bundestag-dieberliner-rede-von-papst-benedikt-ueber-die-oekologie-desmenschen&cHash=83a4c116ca822c753862a6e36bce0817

36 Pope Benedict XVI, Address at the Bundestag, https://www.benedictusxvi.com/addresses/benedict-xvisaddress-before-the-german-parliament?q=%2Fansprachen%2Fansprache-vor-dem-deutschen-bundestag-dieberliner-rede-von-papst-benedikt-ueber-die-oekologie-desmenschen&cHash=83a4c116ca822c753862a6e36bce0817

himself as he is and as he has not made himself.” 37 What seems certain, however, is that humanity, which is increasingly enslaving itself almost everywhere, will only be granted a halfway prosperous future in the long run if it learns to spell anew what the Pope set out during his last official visit to his homeland, as well as elsewhere, with his talk of the “ecology of man.”

Already in his last encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (“Love in Truth”), issued on June 29, 2009, Benedict XVI intoned the theme of “human ecology.” Starting with humanity’s responsibility for creation, the Holy Father explicitly addresses the right to life in this teaching. “It is a contradiction,” the Pontiff continued, “to demand respect for the natural environment from new generations when education and laws do not help them respect themselves.” 38 “The book of nature” is “one and indivisible both with regard to the environment and to life and the areas of sexuality, marriage, family, social relationships in short, the integral development of the human being.” Because humankind’s duties “toward the environment” are intertwined with those duties “that we have toward humanity in itself and in relationship with others,” one cannot “demand” some duties while “repressing” others. This, according to Benedict XVI, is a “grave contradiction in contemporary mentality and practice, which humiliates humanity, disrupts the environment, and damages society.” 39

In Caritas in Veritate §51 he wrote:

The Church has a responsibility toward creation, and she must assert this responsibility in the public sphere. In so doing, she must defend not only the earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone. She must above all protect humankind from self-destruction. There is a need for what might be called a human ecology, correctly understood. The deterioration of nature is in fact intricately connected to the culture that shapes human coexistence: when ‘human ecology’ is respected within society, environmental ecology also benefits. Just as human virtues are interrelated, such that the weakening of one places others at risk, so the ecological system is based on respect for a plan that affects both the health of society and its good relationship with nature. 40

In order to protect nature, it is not enough to intervene with economic incentives or deterrents; not even an opposite education is sufficient. These are important steps, but the decisive issue is the overall moral tenor of society. If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves. The book of nature is one and indivisible: it includes not only the environment but

37 Pope Benedict XVI, Address at the Bundestag, https://www.benedictusxvi.com/addresses/benedict-xvisaddress-before-the-german-parliament?q=%2Fansprachen%2Fansprache-vor-dem-deutschen-bundestag-dieberliner-rede-von-papst-benedikt-ueber-die-oekologie-desmenschen&cHash=83a4c116ca822c753862a6e36bce0817

38 Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, §51, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html

39 Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, §51, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html

40 Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, §51, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html, emphasis in the original.

also life, gender, marriage, the family, social relations in a word, integral human development. Our duties toward the environment are linked to our duties toward the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other. Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice today: one which demeans the person, disrupts the environment, and damages society.

Creation as Love

While still cardinal prefect of the Congregation for Doctrine and Faith, he wrote that the Christian option is exactly the opposite [compared to the Gnostic one]: man is dependent, and only in the form of the lie of being can he deny this....He cannot help but live from others and live from trust. But dependence no longer has anything degrading about it when it takes the form of love, because then it is no longer dependence, no longer a diminution of the self through the competition of the other, but then it constitutes precisely the self as self and liberates it, because love essentially takes the form of ‘I want you to be,’ it is the creativum, the only creative power that can bring forth other than other without envy, without losing the self. Man is dependent - that is his primary truth. Because this is so, only love can redeem him, because only love transforms dependence into freedom. He can therefore only destroy his own redemption, himself, if he eliminates love ‘for safety’s sake.’ For him, however, the crucified God is the visible certainty that creation is already an expression of love; we exist on the basis of love. It is therefore a constitutive part of Christian faith to accept the mystery as the center of reality, i.e., to accept love, creation as love and to live from there. 41

Again, at a conference with French bishops, he observed that

the marginalization of the doctrine of creation reduces the concept of God, including Christology. The religious is actually only located in the psychological and sociological realm; the material world is left to physics and technology. But only if existence itself, including matter, comes from God’s hands and is in God’s hands can God really be our savior and give us life - real life. There is a fatal tendency today to avoid and withdraw to the symbolic wherever matter comes into play in the message of faith, from creation to the birth of Jesus from the Virgin and his resurrection to the real presence of Christ in the transformation of bread and wine and to our resurrection and the return of the Lord. It is not an indifferent theological dispute if the resurrection of the individual is transferred to death and thus not only the soul is denied, but above all the real physicality of salvation is

41 Joseph Ratzinger, “Konsequenzen des Schöpfungsglaubens,“ in: Im Anfang schuf Gott (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1996), 77-94, at 92f. For the liturgical ramifications of faith in creation cf. Joseph Ratzinger, “40 Jahre Konstitution über die heilige Liturgie. Rückblick und Vorblick“ (2005), in Joseph Ratzinger, Gesammelte Schriften 11, ed. by Gerhard Ludwig Müller (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2008), 695-712, at 703. For its gnostic connection cf. Joseph Ratzinger, “Konsequenzen des Schöpfungsglaubens,“ in Joseph Ratzinger, Im Anfang schuf Gott (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2nd ed. 2005), 77-94, at 71f.

disputed. A decisive renewal of faith in creation is thus also the prerequisite for the credibility and depth of Christology and eschatology. 42

And once again, in a well-known 1969 article, he commented that the belief in creation asks about the existence of being as such; its problem is why something is at all and not nothing. The idea of development, on the other hand, asks why precisely these things are and not others, where they have acquired their definiteness and how they are related to the other formations....Philosophically, one would say that the idea of development is on the phenomenological level, dealing with the individual entities that actually occur in the world, while the belief in creation is on the ontological level, asking questions behind the individual things, marveling at the miracle of being itself and trying to account for the mysterious ‘is’ that we say about all occurring realities together. One could also formulate: the belief in creation concerns the difference between nothing and something, whereas the idea of development concerns the difference between something and something else. Creation characterizes being as a whole, as being from a different whence, whereas development describes the inner structure of being and questions the specific whence of the individual existing realities. 43

Pope Francis and Provisional Completion

When he took over the Petrine ministry in 2013, Pope Francis also followed in the footsteps of his two predecessors with his own reflections on ecology. Nevertheless, he set new accents and standards. With Laudato Si’ published in 2015, the year of the Paris Climate Conference Pope Francis continued the Catholic social doctrine in ecological terms. In doing so, the Pope did not so much bring ecology into the Church, since, as indicated, it had arrived there long before. Rather, he brought Christian spirituality into the ecological discourse of contemporary secular society. In this way, defense of the world can become a dialogue in the spirit of love that is directed toward God, man, and nature. In other words: environmental protection is essentially the Catholic way.

With Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ (2015), the issue of environmental and climate protection finally and irrevocably reaches Catholic social teaching. Francis presents an ambitious program that calls us to conversion in holistic sense. He takes up the discourse on the environmental crisis and climate change, including the findings of climate research, but does not stop at the substantive issues; rather, he contextualizes them within the theology of creation, without concealing cultural-historical misinterpretations. The changes in energy supply, mobility, and diet are based on a changed view of the relationship with God, humanity, and nature. In doing so, the Pope not only brings ecology into the Church, but also, conversely, Christian spirituality into the ecological discourse. In this way, the ecological discourse can become a dialogue in the spirit of love, directed toward God, humanity, and nature.

42 Joseph Ratzinger, Die Krise der Katechese und ihre Überwindung (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1983), 34f.

43 Joseph Ratzinger, “Schöpfungsglaube und Evolutionstheorie,“ in Dogma und Verkündigung (München, 3rd ed., 1977), 143-56, at 145.

True Ecology

For many people, one of the most pressing problems of the twenty-first century is the climate crisis, the effects of which are now being felt around the world, giving rise to gloomy future scenarios. Human lifestyles may not be the only cause of rising temperatures and sea levels, floods, and forest fires, but they are certainly a determining factor. This is why the ecological movement is often accompanied by a strong self-accusation: the human being is the real environmental pest, living at the expense of others, the exploiter of natural resources, leaving “Mother Earth” empty and scorched. According to the French philosopher Corine Pelluchon (1967-), humankind must recognize that “it is time” that the era of the Anthropocene is coming to an end and that a new, universal, ecological awareness is the only way to secure the earth as a living space in the long term. 44

Conclusion

Since the earliest beginnings of the rise of environmental consciousness, popes have contributed to the discussions, reminding their audiences repeatedly of the inseverable nexus that connects the Creator; creation; the environment; the climate; and, last but not least, the human being. One cannot do justice to any one of these components without bearing in mind the remaining four. It is singularly the ensouled creature, the human person, who can and must link ecology and anthropology together again, since he is, in front of God, responsible for this planet. Not being mindful of this foundational reality is the consequence of the Fall. Ecology is first and foremost a moral issue that calls for the human being to discover that he is called to a live a graced “responsoriality” vis-à-vis God.

I will close with a statement that Benedict XVI made in one of the last general audiences during his singularly clairvoyant pontificate: “God is the origin of…the beauty of creation.…So it is that creation becomes a place in which to know and recognize the Lord’s omnipotence and goodness.…[it is] an appeal to our faith as believers that we proclaim God as Creator.…the Book of Genesis tells us that God’s first thought was to find a love that would correspond to his love.”45

44 Corine Pelluchon, Nourishment: A Philosophy of the Political Body (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

45 Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience February 6, 2013, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/audiences/2013/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20130206.html.

Liturgical Formation for Seminarians & Priests: Toward Greater Participation,

Communion, & Mission

Rev. John Guthrie, S.T.L.

Introduction

On the coffee table in my room is a small treasure trove of a book, The Rublev Trinity. It explores the history, theology, and iconography of that most famous of icons, Andrei Rublev’s Troitsa that is, Trinity. Tellingly, Rublev portrays the Trinity seated around three sides of a table, in perfect communion with one another. The fourth side the side closest to the viewer is open, seemingly an invitation to join their circle of love, three Persons, one God. 1

It seems to me a more-than-apt image to begin a conversation on the liturgical formation of seminarians and priests. The Ratio Fundamentalis [hereafter referred to simply as the Ratio] states that “the principal agent of priestly formation is the Most Holy Trinity” 2 and the recently promulgated Sixth Edition of the Program for Priestly Formation [hereafter PPF6] elaborates: “The identity of the priest…is fundamentally rooted in a relationship with the Trinity.” 3 The Trinity forms us in a myriad of ways, of course, but the most significant way occurs at the Eucharistic table, in the circle of Trinitarian love.

On May 7, 2022, the Holy Father addressed the teachers and students of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute at the Vatican. 4 He spoke about the conciliar spirit of renewal of the liturgical life within the Church and highlighted three dimensions that emerged from that renewal. The first is active and fruitful participation in the liturgy; the second is ecclesial communion inspired by the celebration of the Eucharist and the sacraments of the Church; and the third is the impetus to the mission of evangelization. These, of course, are not novel. Participation, communion, and mission are the recurrent themes of the synodal process. But these words are also highly Trinitarian and highly Eucharistic.

In this article, I would like to explore the Trinitarian and Eucharistic aspects of each dimension; indicate one counterindication or temptation that might pull us away from an authentic embodiment of each dimension; and offer some practical implications around each dimension toward the liturgical formation of priests and seminarians. I will focus primarily on the implications for seminarians, since that is my major focus as Director of Worship at Mundelein Seminary, but the same ramifications are equally relevant for priests.

1 This article was originally presented as an address on liturgical formation to the seminarians of the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, in Mundelein, Illinois, on September 6, 2022.

2 Congregation for the Clergy, The Gift of the Priestly Vocation: Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2016), available online at Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis - 2016, no. 125.

3 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Program of Priestly Formation, Sixth Edition: The Program of Priestly Formation in the United States of America (Washington, DC: USCCB, 2022), available online at Program of Priestly Formation 6th edition, no. 24.

4 The address is available online: “Address of His Holiness Pope the Francis to Teachers and Students of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute,” https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2022/may/documents/20220507-pont-istituto-liturgico.html

Participation

We all are acutely aware of Vatican II’s famous liturgical principle that full, conscious, active participation of clergy and laity is of central importance. It is a principle that still stirs the spirit. It is a reminder that the Eucharist is a dynamic reality.

It is dynamic because at the core of the life of every Christian is real participation in a dynamic God. Let us recall Moses’s first encounter with the living God and his question about the Almighty’s Name. Famously, the Lord Yahweh responds: “I am who am.” Of course, this is a highly cryptic and mysterious answer; it speaks of God as verb, of God as Being not God as a being. The dynamism oozes off the page and this is reflected in the utter dynamism of relationality within the Trinity. This is the God in whose being we participate. Our very existence is from him: “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17), and “apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5).

Similarly, the Eucharist is alive; it is not a static reality. More often than not, the word “Eucharist” is rendered as a verb in the New Testament. (It is worth noting that in the Gospels it is used only as a verb!) It is an action, an event. It can never be possessed or controlled. It should never be objectified or privatized. Rather, it is to be celebrated. Full, conscious, active participation of clergy and laity is of central importance. Of course, there has been much theological reflection on this principle quite a bit of it by the magisterium of the Church. Take, for example, three separate treatments of the theme appearing just in the last twenty years: General Instruction of the Roman Missal [hereafter GIRM] (2003); Pope Benedict XVI’s Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (2007); and Pope Francis’s Apostolic Letter Desiderio Desideravi [hereafter DD] (2022).

General Instruction of the Roman Missal (2003)

The General Instruction of the Roman Missal no. 18 states: “The entire celebration is arranged in such a way that it leads to a conscious, active, and full participation of the faithful, namely in body and mind, a participation fervent with faith, hope and charity, of the sort which is desired by the Church and which is required by the very nature of the celebration and to which the Christian people have a right and duty in virtue of their Baptism.” 5 This highlights a number of important aspects:

• The liturgy is intrinsically incarnational; we are meant to participate in the liturgy in both mind and body.

• It is tied to the theological virtues; it is meant to be “a participation fervent with faith, hope and charity.” 6

• It is the right and duty of every baptized Christian.

Sacramentum Caritatis (2007)

A few years later, Pope Benedict XVI reflected at length on the topic in his Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (2007): “‘Participation’ does not refer to mere external activity during the celebration. In fact, the active participation called for by the Council must be understood in more substantial terms, on the basis of a greater awareness of the mystery being celebrated and

5 See USCCB, available online at General Instruction of the Roman Missal.

6 Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium [Dogmatic Constitution on the Church], November 21, 1964, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumengentium_en.html, no. 31.

its relationship to daily life….[The faithful] should learn to make an offering of themselves….They should be drawn day by day into ever more perfect union with God and each other.” 7 Here we see a deepened appreciation of several truths:

• Authentic participation in the liturgy is more substantial than mere external activity.

• We are being called to a greater awareness of the mystery being celebrated.

• The liturgy is related to our daily lives.

• The centrality of Christ’s self-gift in the liturgy means that we also must learn to make an offering of ourselves.

• In and through the liturgy, we are drawn to a more perfect union with God and others.

Desiderio Desideravi (2022)

Finally, in 2022 Pope Francis issued his Apostolic Letter Desiderio Desideravi on the liturgical formation of the People of God. The Holy Father speaks of healthy participation as “existential engagement”: “From all that we have said about the nature of the Liturgy it becomes clear that knowledge of the mystery of Christ, the decisive question of our lives, does not consist in a mental assimilation of some idea but in real existential engagement with his person…The full extent of our formation is our conformation to Christ. I repeat: it does not have to do with an abstract mental process, but with becoming Him.” 8 Then Francis quotes his predecessor Leo the Great: “Our participation in the Body and Blood of Christ has no other end than to make us become that which we eat.” 9

It is critical that participation be understood and lived as existential engagement:

• Participation is not the mental assimilation of some idea. It is not a spiritual abstraction: “The Liturgy is done with things that are the exact opposite of spiritual abstractions.” 10

• Participation in the liturgy is concrete and real: it is nothing short of an encounter with Jesus Christ.

o Francis never tires of quoting Benedict: “Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” 11

o John Paul II also voiced this theme in his first encyclical: “The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may

7 Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis [Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist as the Source and Summit of the Church’s Life and Mission], February 22, 2007, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedictxvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20070222_sacramentum-caritatis.html, nos. 52-63, at 52.

8 DD, nos. 41-42, at 41.

9 DD, no. 41.

10 DD, no. 42.

11 Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005), no. 1, available online at Deus caritas est (December 25, 2005)

be able to find Christ in order that Christ may walk with each person the path of life.” 12

• Participation is inherently powered by praise and gratitude in the Gloria the Church sings, “We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory.”

• Participation comes about through, and is strengthened by, docility to the action of the Holy Spirit.

• Participation in the liturgy conforms us more and more to Christ. 13

Counterindication/Temptation

One particular temptation that we need to guard against is what the Holy Father terms “liturgical formalism” that is, “a going after forms, formalities rather than reality.” 14 He explicitly addresses the importance of attention to details and rubrics. But he knows and we do too that this is not enough; it is the bare minimum. “Seminaries must…offer the possibility of experiencing a celebration that is not only exemplary from a ritual point of view, but also authentic and alive, which allows the living out of a true communion with God.” 15

In addition, the Holy Father speaks of the need to foster “astonishment,” awe and wonder at “the ocean of grace that floods every celebration.” 16 He goes further: this astonishment must be “of the right kind.” It is not “being overcome in the face of an obscure reality or a mysterious rite. It is, on the contrary, marveling at the fact that the salvific plan of God has been revealed in the paschal deed of Jesus, and that the power of this paschal deed continues to reach us in the celebration of the ‘mysteries,’ of the sacraments.” 17 It is not an abstraction but an incarnate, concrete reality; it is not meant to be static but dynamic.

Practical Implications for Seminary Life

Keeping the temptation of liturgical formalism in mind, I think it is healthy and important for us to ponder these different elements of liturgical participation and ask ourselves several formation questions raised both in the Ratio and the PPF6:

• In our celebration of the Eucharist and Adoration, how am I doing as an individual, and we as a community, with regard to full, active, and conscious participation as the Church understands it?

• What does “existential engagement” mean for us? How are we existentially engaged in all that we are mind, body, heart, and spirit in the mysteries we celebrate?

• How is our celebration of Eucharist and Adoration intimately related to daily life?

12 John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1979), no. 13, available online at Redemptor Hominis (4 March 1979)

13 Cf. DD, no. 21.

14 See “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis to Teachers and Students of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute available online at Teachers and Students of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute” (7 May 2022).

15 DD, no. 39

16 DD, no. 24

17 DD, no. 25

• How are we drawn into a deeper relationship with God and others through our celebration of the Eucharist?

• How are we being conformed more and more to Christ through our celebration of the Eucharist?

• How are we docile to the action of the Holy Spirit through our celebration of the Eucharist?

• How are we growing in our ability to offer ourselves through our celebration of the Eucharist?

Communion

The title and jumping off point of the Holy Father’s recent Apostolic Letter Desiderio Desideravi is derived from the first two words of the scripture verse: “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk. 22:15). He then comments: “These words of Jesus, with which the account of the Last Supper opens, are the crevice through which we are given the surprising possibility of intuiting the depth of the love of the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity for us.” 18 If we explore this “crevice” a bit more, we find the depth of what the Church means by koinonia. In fact, as the Holy Father indicates, Eucharistic communion is rooted in the communion of the Trinity.

Here we recall that Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium made the same move ecclesiologically: the foundation of the Church is based on the mystery of the Holy Trinity. As we have seen, at the heart of God is relationality a relationality of the three Divine Persons whose love is so intense (infinitely intense) that all being flows from their overflowing love. This divine relationality at the heart of reality is also at the heart of the Church. The communitarian nature of liturgy is based on the communitarian nature of the Church and ultimately of God.

Put another way, if God is love, then so must be the Church and so too the Eucharist. This is an extraordinarily powerful countercultural truth. As Lumen Fidei no. 27 reminds us, love is “a relational way of viewing the world.” 19 Born of an encounter with God, we are opened up to relationships lived in communion.

All this must also be reflected in our liturgical life. “Rendering glory to God in the liturgy finds its counterpart in the love of neighbor…in the community in which we find ourselves.” Liturgy opens us up to the other, to a deeper and wider relationship of love to the nearest and farthest from the Church. This, the Holy Father says, is “living a fully ecclesial liturgical life.” 20

Counterindication/Temptation

As we know, this takes work and intentionality, especially today. Priests and seminarians are not immune from the culture in which we live. We are tempted to live life and see faith individualistically. The Holy Father describes such a faith as subjective, one in which a person is “imprisoned in his or her thoughts and feelings.” 21 One way this manifests itself is when a priest or seminarian succumbs to ideological thinking or has “an agenda.” This is a temptation of both

18 DD, no. 2.

19 Francis, Lumen Fidei (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2013), available online at Lumen fidei (29 June 2013).

20 “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis to Teachers and Students of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute,” available online at Teachers and Students of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute (7 May 2022)

21 Evangelii Gaudium, no. 94

the left and the right a manipulation of the Gospel to suit one’s particular outlook. We are to be wary of any “desktop theology” that is cut off from the People of God. 22

So, what is the answer to this? Simply to become more deeply a man of the Church to develop the habit of “thinking with the Church.” This means not only thinking with the hierarchy but being part of the People of God, pastors and people together. Our people want companions on their journeys. It is a theme that Francis returned to again and again. In a talk that he gave to priests in March of 2014, he said: “In the image of the Good Shepherd, the priest is a man of mercy and compassion, close to his people, and the servant of all….This is a pastoral criterion I want to emphasize, closeness, closeness.” 23 It is a very Catholic intuition. Belonging to the Body of Christ, if fully embraced, is the most important counterbalance to a heightened individualism in the priesthood. For Francis, it is difficult, if not impossible, to be ideological if one has given oneself to the entire Church.

The Pope is deeply concerned when liturgy is “exploited by some ideological vision.” 24 This stance is reflected in the GIRM: “attention should be paid to what is determined by this General Instruction and the traditional practice of the Roman Rite and to what serves the common spiritual good of the People of God, rather than private inclination or arbitrary choice.” 25 We are not ordained as priests to serve our own whim, our own agenda…liturgically or in any other way. We are in service to “the common spiritual good of the People of God.”

The Liturgy forms us; we do not form it. It does not belong to any one of us. “Liturgical services are not private functions but are celebrations of the Church which is ‘the sacrament of unity.’” 26 The celebration of the Mass is not a matter of personal choice or preference. Francis reminds us that “the liturgy does not say ‘I’ but ‘we,’ and any limitation on the breadth of this ‘we’ is always demonic.” 27 Liturgical wars are always tragic, because liturgy is never to be divisive quite the opposite! We must, therefore, be careful lest any spirit of division enters in. We are being formed to be priests that is, to be men of communion.

Practical Implications for Seminary Life

Both the Ratio and the PPF6 place heavy emphasis on community. All vocations to the priesthood are “discovered and accepted within a community”; indeed, “the call to priesthood is essentially communitarian in nature. It is within the community of the family [and] parish…that a vocation to priesthood is discovered.” 28 The seminary itself is to be “grounded in community.”29 This is true not only for the student body but for the faculty and staff as well: we must consider ourselves to be “a true formative community.” 30 If we all take seriously this call, “this community leads the seminarian, through ordination, to become part of the ‘family’ of the presbyterate, at the

22 Pope Francis, Audience with Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, January 26, 2018, available online at Audience with Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

23 Pope Francis, “To the Parish Priests of Rome,” March 6, 2014, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2014/march/documents/papa-francesco_20140306_clerodiocesi-roma.html

24 DD, no. 16.

25 See USCCB, General Instruction of the Roman Missal, no. 42.

26 SC, no. 26.

27 SC, no. 26.

28 PPF6, no. 13.

29 Ratio, subtitle under Introduction.

30 Ratio, no. 8.

service of a particular community.” 31 For after ordination, through sacramental ordination, you will participate in the one priesthood; you will acquire a common priestly spirit; you will become cooperators with your bishop and will be closely united to him; you will exercise a ministry of building up the Church.

It is important to challenge ourselves to live a fully ecclesial liturgical life. It is good to ask some important questions here:

• How does the Eucharist open us up more fully to relationships lived in communion?

• How does the Eucharist help us to get out of our comfort zones within the community?

• How does the Eucharist lead us to be more compassionate and merciful?

• How does the Eucharist unify our community and develop a community spirit among the faculty and students, while at the same time valuing our diversity?

Mission

Finally, let us turn our attention to the third dimension that emerges from the liturgical renewal of Vatican II: the impetus to evangelizing mission. Pope Paul VI called Jesus “the very first and the greatest evangelizer.” 32 Pope John Paul II developed this theme by discussing how Jesus evangelized, recounting the stories of the Lord’s encounter with the Samaritan woman (John 4), Zacchaeus (Luke 19), Mary Magdalene (John 20) and Saul of Tarsus (Acts 9, 22, 26). 33 If one examines those four episodes from the New Testament, one notices a three-step pattern: encounter, conversion, and proclamation. The pattern ends with proclamation and mission.

In his book, Bridging the Great Divide, Bishop Barron writes: “No biblical figure is ever given an experience of God without receiving, at the same time, a commission.”

34 Think of Moses at the burning bush, or Isaiah at his encounter with the Lord within the temple liturgy, or the Magi who worship the child Jesus and are called to go back to their land “by a different route” (Mt. 2:12), or Saul on the road to Damascus and his subsequent call to apostleship. Bishop Barron concludes: “So the worshipper who comes to Christ’s liturgy to be gathered, transformed by contact with the scriptural world, and divinized in the loop of grace, is sent home by a different route.” 35 It is true: mission always follows the encounter with Christ, and mission is a natural sequel to participation and communion.

Every liturgical celebration concludes with mission. All are sent “go” proclaims the priest or deacon. “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.” It is important that we go out. I was

31 Ratio, Introduction, no. 3.

32 Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi [Apostolic Exhortation on Evangelization in the Modern World], December 8, 1975, https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_pvi_exh_19751208_evangelii-nuntiandi.html, no. 7.

33 John Paul II, Ecclesia in America [Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Encounter with the Living Jesus Christ: The Way to Conversion, Communion and Solidarity in America], January 22, 1999, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_22011999_ecclesia-inamerica.html, no. 8.

34 Robert Barron, Bridging the Great Divide: Musings of a Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative Evangelical Catholic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 49.

35 Barron, Bridging the Great Divide, 51.

struck by one of the Gospels proclaimed recently. In Luke 4, Jesus heals all kinds of ailments, from a severe fever inflicting Simon’s mother-in-law to casting out demons. But it is important to note that his healing ministry begins once he leaves the synagogue, not while he is in it. The opening line of the passage is a crucial one: “After Jesus left the synagogue…” (v. 38)

The message is clear: go out. That is where the mission is. Go out and carry this good news Christ himself to the world. Genuine liturgical life moves believers to mission. It impels us to charity. It opens us to dialogue, to attention to others, and to accepting them with the heart of Christ and bringing his healing love to them.

Counterindication/Temptation

One counterindication or temptation here is “ecclesial introversion.” I don’t know who first used the term, but I do remember reading it for the first time in the writings of Pope John Paul II. 36 I liked it immediately because I saw signs of it throughout the Church and, indeed, in my own heart.

Ecclesial introversion occurs when we as the Body of Christ get self-absorbed and wrapped up in our own concerns, focused too much on intraecclesial matters. Rather than staying focused on the mission Christ has laid before us “go and teach all nations” (Mt. 28:19) our vision is restricted. We become small. This cannot be from God, since God’s love as Trinity is anything but restricted. God always expands our hearts and our vision.

Pope Francis picked the term up in his programmatic apostolic exhortation The Joy of the Gospel. In it, the Holy Father calls the Church to be “permanently in a state of mission” and to a “pastoral and missionary conversion” 37 that is, to “a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather for her selfpreservation.” 38

One experience I had with a fellow priest and colleague in his native country comes to mind. I spent much of July 2022 visiting Fr. Maina Waithaka in Kenya. Toward the end of the visit, we attended the presbyteral ordination of Fr. Denis Telewa, a member of an African missionary order. The four-hour ordination was a liturgical tour de force in the Kenyan tradition: exuberant dancing, singing, and ululating. But what struck me was the announcement of his assignment: he was to serve in Lusaka, Zambia. He was being sent! The faithful were exultant. The whole purpose of that liturgy was not merely the ordination of a new priest but his sending on mission. At the reception, various tribal groups danced with the ordinand and gave him gifts, many of them to be used for mission the first gift being a suitcase!

Liturgy, seen in its proper and full perspective, is a very effective antidote to ecclesial introversion. We need to continue to keep our eye on the ball here. If our focus is on inspecting and verifying, analyzing and classifying, 39 then our vision becomes too small. If we spend too much time discussing the minutiae of rubrics and styles of celebration, we can easily get distracted from the dynamism of the liturgy and the impulse to GO and take the life and love of Jesus we have received to the world. My prayer is that each of us can continue to allow our hearts and vision to be broken open and enlarged by the mystery we receive and are.

36 John Paul II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Ecclesia in Oceania (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2001), available online at Ecclesia in Oceania (November 22, 2001), no. 19.

37 EG, no. 25.

38 EG, no. 27

39 EG, no. 94; DD, no. 17.

Practical Implications for Seminary Life

In this vein, it should come as no surprise that the Ratio calls for formation to be “missionary in spirit” 40 while the PPF6 states that “priestly formation clearly must have a missionary character.” 41

Liturgy is integrative. It integrates not only the human, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions of seminary life but also the pastoral dimension. Seminarians do not live in a hermetically sealed community cut off from the world. No, they are here even in the years of seminary formation (especially in the years of seminary formation!) to serve and not to be served.

This invites us to ask ourselves some questions:

• How do we individually and as a community experience liturgy as being sent?

• Do I notice the three-step pattern in my life encounter, conversion, and proclamation?

• What is one experience that I have had of being “sent home by a different route” after celebrating Mass?

• Do I recognize ecclesial introversion in my life and/or my community? If so, how?

• Do dialogue, acceptance, and inclusion define my relationship with others?

Conclusion

Let me conclude. In the Holy Father’s letter on liturgical formation, he notes that Christ’s desire for us comes long before our response to His invitation to the supper of the wedding of the Lamb. “We may not even be aware of it, but every time we go to Mass, the first reason is we are drawn there by his desire for us.” 42 I am struck by the loveliness of that thought: the primacy of Christ and His grace.

We repeatedly daily! celebrate the Eucharist. It is not merely an act but a habitus, a habit. It inhabits us and we inhabit it. It is who we are. It is who we are because Christ is who we are; we are about him. In him, we participate in the life of God; in him, we live in communion with God and one another; in him, we are sent on mission. In our communal prayer, and most especially in the celebration of the Eucharist, let us strive always to grow into Christ to become he whom we receive.

40 Ratio, Introduction, no. 3.

41 PPF6, no. 14

42 DD, no. 6

Authors’ Page

Mr. John L. Allen, Jr.

Mr. John L. Allen, Jr., is President of Crux Catholic Media, Inc., and editor of Crux, an independent news site covering the Vatican and the Catholic Church. He holds a M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Kansas and has received honorary doctorates from several universities. He is a senior Vatican analyst for CNN and has spoken frequently in the United States and internationally His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, CNN, and elsewhere. He is the author of over ten books, including on Opus Dei, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis, anti-Christian persecution, and the future of the Church

Rev. Emery de Gaál

Fr. Emery de Gaál is a Catholic diocesan priest (Eichstätt, Germany). He holds a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Duquesne University and a Dipl. Theol. from the University of Munich. He serves as Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois. He authored The Art of Equanimity: A Study on the Theological Hermeneutics of St. Anselm of Canterbury (2002), The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI: The Christocentric Shift (2010), and O Lord, I Seek Your Countenance: Explorations and Discoveries in Pope Benedict XVI’s Theology (2018). He is a member of the Academy of Catholic Theology and the Pontificia Academia Marianum Internationalis and serves on the editorial board of several theological journals.

Dr. Caitlin Smith Gilson

Caitlin Smith Gilson, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary. She is Associate Editor of The New Ressourcement Journal and author of a number of books on theology, Christian philosophy, and poetry, including As It Is in Heaven: Some Christian Questions on the Nature of Paradise.

Rev. John Guthrie

Fr. John Guthrie is a priest of the Diocese of Bismarck, North Dakota. Ordained in 1990, he has served as pastor of several parishes in his home diocese as well as the Director of Continuing Education and Vicar General. He also served on the staff for the Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, DC. His latest assignment is serving as the Director of Worship at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois.