sign in sign up
<<
Home , Catholic Church, Concilium (journal), Grand Inquisitor, Pope Benedict XVI

The of Benedict XVI The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI

The Shift

Emery de Gaál

Palgrave macmillan THE THEOLOGY OF POPE BENEDICT XVI Copyright © Emery de Gaál, 2010. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-10540-9 All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the —a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New , NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in , company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the , Europe and other . ISBN 978-1-349-28983-7 ISBN 978-0-230-11476-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230114760 Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gaál Gyulai, Emery de. The theology of Pope Benedict XVI : the christocentric shift / Emery de Gaál. p. cm.

1. Benedict XVI, Pope, 1927– I. . BX1378.6.G33 2010 230′.2092—dc22 2010013068 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, . First edition: 2010 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2011 In gratitude Leo Cardinal Scheffczyk (1920–2005) “Evangelizare investigabiles divitias Christi” (Eph 3:8) Preach the unsearchable riches of If we draw near to him [ Christ] with humble trust, we encoun- ter in his gaze the response to the deepest longings of our : to know and establish a living relationship with him in an authen- tic of that can fill our lives and our interpersonal and social relations with the same love. For this , humanity needs Christ: In him, our , “we have been saved.” (cf. Rom 8:24)1 —Benedict XVI, , 2008

Christ . . . is truly the origin of our harmony, the true who has restored the lyre of our body which had long lain idle, its frame crumbling. has restored it, making it His own. . . . God our Master Himself sought to renew this lyre, and so He hung His own lyre, nailed to the wood of His tree, and gave it fresh when the cross destroyed all . Thus He ordered mortal man from the different nations into a single lyre, and tuned it for heavenly music, drawing peoples of all races into a single body. Then he struck the cords with the pelcrum of the Word, and the sound of the fills all creation with the praise of God. —St. (355–431), Poema XX CONTENTS

Foreword ix Acknowledgments xvii Abbreviations xix

Introduction: The Christocentric Shift 1

Part I Establishing the Christocentric 1 Highlights of a Lifelong Ministry 9 2 Personality and Temperament 13 3 Formative Early Encounters as a Seminarian: Personal Existentialism Grounded in Jesus Christ 21 4 Graduate Studies in 33 5 His Language and 45 6 Academic Teacher: Truth as Person 49 7 to “Radical ”: The Integrated Community 53

Part II Jesus Christ: God’s Self-Disclosure 8 The Beginnings of His Theology 61 9 The Inaugural Lecture in 1959 73 10 Jesus Christ, the Sovereign, Unsurpassable Revealer of 79 11 The Question of in the World 107 12 The Unity of the Old and New Testaments 111 13 The Biblical Basis of 119 14 A Twentieth-Century Classic: Introduction to 129 viii Contents 15 Christ and the Pursuit of : Safeguarding the Nondisponibility of Christ 145

Part III The : The Christ-Filled Realm 16 : Christian Brotherhood and the Church as One Reality 165 17 Christ and the Church 175 18 Christ and Ecumenical Dialogue 189 19 An Ecclesiological Dispute at the Turn of the Millennium 199 20 Jesus Christ as the Unifying Ecclesial Reality 209

Part IV Being Christ to Others 21 Christ and Freedom: Evangelization 217 22 Christian Brotherhood: Entering into Jesus Christ’s Earthly Ineffability 231

Part V The : Christ-Filled 23 The Transparency of Christ and Christians: The Liturgy 239 24 : Provocation or Jesus Christ as the Basis for Civilized Discourse? Jesus Christ as the Reconciler of Faith and Reason 269 25 Jesus Christ, the Definer and Personification of the Eschaton 275 26 Mary: In Christ, the First Free Human Being 287 Epilogue: Jesus Christ the World Identity and Meaning 297

Notes 303 Bibliography 345 Index 357 Illustrations appear between 187 and 188 FOREWORD

The calling of a Christian is not, first and foremost, to be justified (), or to be a morally good citizen (Enlightenment), or even to enjoy heavenly bliss one day. Our beautiful on earth is to partake sacramentally in Christ’s eternal life and to make God visible to this world. By leading a holy life, Christians enable others to receive life’s profound meaning, which they could never discover or produce on their own: “we should be holy and blameless before him . . . his sons through Jesus Christ . . . to the praise of his glorious . . .” so that others know the hope to which he has called all (Eph 1). Through the fragility of human existence, may others behold the Divine. What a wonderful cause for which to exist! In his homily at the inaugurating his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI observed: “And only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. . . . There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by , by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know him and to speak to others of our friendship with him.”2 Establishing the identity and of Jesus Christ is of overriding, crucial importance for such a positively intrepid enterprise. Regarding this endeavor, it is of no small significance to exam- ine Pope Benedict XVI’s understanding of Jesus as he is one of the most outstanding theologians the has recently produced. As Cardinal Ratzinger, he served as of the Congregation for the of the Faith for twenty-three years, and he is now Supreme of a church numbering some 1.2 billion members worldwide. In a sense one can state that Pope Benedict XVI is the “anti-Nietzsche,” as the German author Botho Strauß formulated in the German daily news- paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 20, 1994. Nietzsche’s fate- ful “Umwertung aller Werte”3 (revaluation of all values) is being reversed. Benedict XVI is challenging to a revision of the suppositions and assumptions Nietzsche had instilled in such a sustained and lasting manner. A loss of purpose and of values has become the norm for many people. Nihilism has become the practical worldview, altering all areas of life. Nietzsche claimed, “Christianity is the greatest misfortune that x Foreword had befallen humankind.” Benedict XVI’s response is, “Jesus Christ is the greatest fortune imaginable for humankind!” As Christians and as disciples of Christ, human beings experience the fact that they are not the product of a faceless of nature, but rather they are personally willed by God. In Jesus Christ, God receives a face, a living -à-vis, who enters our history and never tires of turning the numerous peoples into the one chosen people. The author’s intention is to convey an appreciation for the understand- ing Pope Benedict XVI, as a believer and theologian, has for the person of Christ. In order to better illuminate the pope’s supremely Christocentric motivation, this study will briefly present, as a background to his own sig- nificant theological contributions, the thought and concepts of the think- ers who formed and informed Pope Benedict XVI’s own mind. Therefore, less attention will be given to his work as prefect and pontiff and the documents and that bear his signature. By a fortunate coin- cidence, this present work offers a background for Pope Benedict XVI’s book on Jesus Christ Jesus of . The threefold intention of this study is to demonstrate that Pope Benedict’s theology can only be understood if one grasps:

1. its overriding Christological concern; 2. its unification with the greater intellectual current within which it operates, namely, that of the Ressourcement movement (a return to patristic sources in order to live in the spirit of early Christianity); and, 3. its consonance with Christian faith, that is, with the testimony of scripture, the teaching of the councils, and the living faith of all the Catholic faithful throughout the Church’s history.

While he is in general agreement with Ressourcement theology, Pope Benedict is not part of a movement or school of theology, but rather he is committed to the whole of the faith as expressed in scripture, the liturgy, the , the , and the teaching office of the Church. An often used Thomistic axiom states “omnia quae recipiuntur recepta sunt secundum modum recipientis” (“Everything received is received according to the mode of the one who receives”). As they received the message of Vatican II, some societies were engulfed in a profound cultural upheaval: a previously unheard of period of and prosperity was disturbed by radical questioning of the very foundations Europe and had been built upon for millennia. Simultaneously, in various locations, discontent was expressed about inherited, and what were seen to be no longer verifiable, customs and traditions. Some societies with these dis- positions could not always appreciate the two central impelling forces behind the theological minds and intellectual currents giving shape and content to the documents of that great council. (Exacerbating the prob- lem was the fact that most societies received news concerning Vatican II Foreword xi through the filter of a mass media altogether unfamiliar with theolog- ical terminology.) John XXIII’s intention when announcing Vatican II was pastoral renewal. The central intellectual systematic currents giving shape and content to the work of the council’s periti (advisors) were (a) the retrieval of (neo-), and (b) the fathers of the Church (patrology) as enablers of a credible discipleship of Christ in the hic et nunc (here and now). The second current was a movement called Ressourcement, a French term meaning “going back to the living and life-giving wellsprings of Christian and existence: early writ- ings of the Church fathers, councils, traditions and .” Instead of the Council being understood in light of these two central concerns that were present and influential during it, the vague term “spirit of the council” was adopted and seems to have been interpreted by the media in terms of an outside, wholly unchristian context, that is, in terms of a naïve opti- mism regarding humanity’s ability for self-improvement unaided by grace or a good and caring God. At the time, the profound crisis of the Western identity in general—of which the upheavals of 1968, such as the student unrest at Berkeley and in , are emblematic—influenced the reception of the Council. Perhaps future generations might call it a crude variation of (history produces truth on its own). The age that received the message of the council often could not behold the at work in the council—as He had also been at work in previous councils—but rather was consumed with the temperament and spirit of its own age that came bursting forth: the self-becoming of the absolute spirit in time and space à la Hegel? It was an age that could not see God’s offer of grace or appreciate humanity’s need to embrace God’s as the positive basis for establishing a healthy rapport with the numinous. In short, the context was on the whole not conducive to a favorable reception of the council’s teachings, wrought for the faithful by the same Holy Spirit present in Genesis, the , , and each council. Despite such powerful outside vectors, Joseph Ratzinger did not shy away from patiently spelling out another perspective. He was motivated not by faith in his own intellect but by his supreme confidence in the Truth revealed definitively by Jesus Christ and handed down by the power of the Holy Spirit through the liturgy and the reality of , upon which the Church is founded.4 This is the basis for apprehending a correlation between reason and revelation, between scripture and tradi- tion, and between truth and freedom. It is to no small degree that this lack of appreciation for the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church—despite the rather recent pio- neering and magisterial works on the Holy Spirit by theologians such as Heribert Mühlen and Yves Congar5—explains the negative public image of Cardinal Ratzinger since the late 1960s, leading to such caricatures as “Grand ” and Panzerkardinal (Panzer is the German word for a military tank). This is aggravated by the fact that the Pope’s association with Ressourcement theology is ignored by the mass media. Following xii Foreword upon the intellectualistic understanding of faith that dominated the age of neoscholastic manuals, a rationalistic understanding of theology, now a more social understanding of the nature of the Church, set in. Ever since the , there has gradually been less and less of an appreciation for the Holy Spirit’s indispensable sustaining presence in the Church. The spiritual dimension of the Church—as an institution not made by human beings, but as God’s gift and presence among people—has been lost sight of. This was perhaps exacerbated by Ratzinger’s self-effacement and good humor in that he did not take offense easily and therefore did not rebuff negative perceptions. An additional factor adding to his negative image was that Ratzinger’s skepticism regarding the hasty implementation of the Council’s call for liturgical renewal was misinterpreted as an invitation to return to the Roman of 1962. Yet another contributing factor was his shyness in defending his own person both in public and within academia. This is only partially explained in terms of his temperament. In an age of mass culture, where people are formed and informed by an abstract/virtual reality concretized in the mass media, disregard for one’s public image comes close to . The question arises whether a Christian can care about the media’s perception and still remain a of Christ. The truth shines on its own conditions. It requires our words in order to be conveyed, but it does not need human cosmetics in order to . Were one to clad the truth in appealing trappings, one would betray the truth. Provocatively for the postmodern mind, Jesus is not a way, but the Way, and the Truth for all people of all ages. Indeed, for Ratzinger one criterion of a healthy Christian is the willingness to suffer a lack of understanding and appreciation, and even be subjected to malice, with good humor and without resistance, very much like Our Lord in “The of the Grand Inquisitor” in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s (1821–1881) classic novel . Much in the vein of Augustine, the inner logic of creation by God and that of allow the opposing, sinful person (the other) full well to recog- nize truth. No matter how many words lies might employ, the sovereign reality of truth cannot be denied. During his years as a student, Ratzinger was exposed to ’s6 (1885–1968) memorable interpretation of Dostoyevsky’s writ- ings in light of the ascendance of anti-Christian National .7 As a young professor giving retreats, Ratzinger would have the participants read the parable of the Grand Inquisitor with the intention that they would thus cultivate an appreciation for the Christian genius amid a superficial world. In Dostoyevsky’s masterful parable, the masses prefer the benign but ulti- mately cruel reign of the Grand Inquisitor to the truth of the defaced— and unrecognized by everyone but the Grand Inquisitor—Savior. The Russian novelist presents Jesus Christ, who returns to the Spanish city of Seville at the time of the , as a provocation for the people led under the seemingly benign, but actually totalitarian, guidance of the Foreword xiii aged Grand Inquisitor. After a long period of deception in which they have become accustomed to a life in which only earthly, material needs are sought after and met, the people have come to prefer ignorance to truth. The old man drives Jesus into the dark night after Jesus has kissed him rather than defend himself with words. This parallels Jesus’ behavior before Pontius Pilate. Hatred-filled blindness is met by Jesus with kenotic . The is left with a clear impression: had Jesus defended himself before a man who knew him to be the way, the truth, and the life, he would have betrayed his divine sonship. With rhetorical elegance, the Grand Inquisitor argues that people value bread and material well-being more than freedom, which ultimately leads to the disturbance of their relationship with God. In the depths of their , people opt for a world that is dedivinized, and the Inquisitor is “nonjudgmental” and “humane” enough to bring this about. The Dostoyevsky argued that people in the future would cheerfully surrender their to a faceless society and turn to it as their of choice. (Forty years later this would come to pass in the forms of , National Socialism, and consumerist societies.) In place of the individual, society would henceforth determine what is good and evil, sinful and holy. Along the same lines a friend of Dostoyevsky, the Russian philosopher and later convert to Catholicism Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), in the sobering A Short Narrative of the Anti-Christ, his last and most celebrated book, prophetically foretells a “new Jesus” appearing as savior on the stage of history as a global harbinger of peace who will lead all to embrace humanism and this world.8 Following the impressions of totalitarian- ism and II, both books were rather widely read by European intellectuals during Ratzinger’s adolescence and well into the 1960s. The common basis for these two Russian classics is the three temptations of Jesus by in Matthew 4:1–11. There Jesus is tempted to change stone into bread, throw himself down from a pinnacle, and finally to worship the world and its dross. Ratzinger refers often to these temptations in his . There is one additional factor contributing to a misinterpretation of Ratzinger. Due to no fault of its own, the public at large is unable to differ- entiate between neoscholasticism—a long bygone effort marred by ratio- nalism and transcendental Thomism—and modern-day Ressourcement theology. Support, however vague, for transcendental Thomism (vulgo: anthropocentric shift) is considered “modern,” while everything else is considered preconciliar, at best, or neoscholastic and therefore “conser- vative.” In keeping with the School of Church Councils, the has popularly been considered a watershed coun- cil dividing all of Church history into pre- and post-Vatican II eras. This unscientific “hermeneutics of discontinuity” explains the rise of irrespon- sibly superficial, black-and- categories according to which certain individuals are considered either “preconciliar” or “postconciliar.” Such a xiv Foreword view is unable to apprehend the Church as a spiritual reality transcending political or social , and it cannot grasp the legitimate and healthy plurality of different theological currents arising from the one Church, which remains the point of reference for all balanced . Thus, the anthropocentric shift tends to despiritualize and politicize . It has lost sight of two realities that vouch for the self-same identity of the Church of 2000 with herself in 2000, 2010, 1965, and 27 AD: the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit by virtue of: the charism of apostolic succession; and the Eucharistic presence of the risen Lord Jesus. As a con- , popular perception never considered labeling Ratzinger as any- thing but “preconciliar,” “conservative,” or “traditionalist.” If it was the tragedy of the past forty years to the major theo- logical developments leading up to the Vatican III Council from its message (especially from that of the Ressourcement movement), is it an overstatement to claim that the recovery of patristic thought will, by overcoming this artificial divorce, offer access to Vatican II and do greater justice to the singular inner coherence of the theology of Pope Benedict XVI? Please note: every generalization is an injustice. and should not be seen as mere precursors to the anthro- pocentric shift. The two would certainly not advocate a reduction of Christology into —as likewise many representatives of the anthropocentric shift would not. Lonergan’s epistemology, Trinitarian theology, and Christology are valuable achievements. ’s accentuates the need to apply also to America. The myth of a progressive, pre-Vatican II Ratzinger and a conserva- tive, post-Vatican II Ratzinger is fairly easy to explain in an age of over- simplification. In the public square, the anthropocentric shift implicitly became the exclusive lens through which the conciliar documents were interpreted. This has led to Ratzinger incorrectly and retroactively (that is, it is a classification of him that began around 1965 and afterward) being associated with this camp prior to and during the council. In fact, however, he has throughout his adult life, right up until the present time, belonged to the currents of Ressourcement and Christian . The erroneous interpretation of his positions is exacerbated by Vatican II’s general and unspecific treatments. In addition, he enjoyed a classical in the humanities (humanistische Bildung) in his formative teen years, which is almost unknown and therefore inaccessible nowadays to people living in North America and what is culturally post-Christian . But it is this very “living from the vivifying sources” of occidental culture and the Christian faith that make him appear—even in advanced age—to the unprejudiced observer as still youthful and on fire, not complacent and inert. The gleam in his eyes seeks to tell people that something fresh, bold, and noble is awaiting them; something that holds the promise of breaking away from the stale ways of life: Jesus Foreword xv is different and his disciples are original. Far more than being merely an indispensable basis for culture, Jesus Christ is a personal path to knowl- edge and happiness. It is a joy reading Pope Benedict XVI’s vast opus because of his sover- eign command of the Western heritage and his genuine theological con- cern, which is characterized by being humble, nonpolemical, and removed from the slightest suspicion of vanity. It is doubtful whether our age will produce anyone similarly educated and erudite. It be pointed out that on November 6, 1992, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was appointed (the first German ever to receive this honor) an associate member of the prestigious French Académie des Morales et , succeeding the Russian dissident, nuclear physicist, and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov. It is no exaggeration to call the Académie one of the most illustrious circles for intellectual discourse. It was founded in 1795 and is one of five academies belonging to the Institut Français, one of which is the Académie Française. It has included or includes members as varied as Albert Einstein, Václav Havel, and Prince Charles. His appointment illustrates how the Catholic faith, as expounded by someone of Ratzinger’s intellectual caliber, is attractive to human rationality even in modern times.9 It is hoped that this study will contribute to the recognition that the facile application of categories such as “liberal” or “conservative” are political predications ill-suited to capturing the existential and intellectual struggle every Christian takes up in following the one Christ and joining his Church in the one symphony of praise to the triune God. Jesus Christ not only grants the gift of the future as eternal Redemption, but he liber- ates the present from the cold grip of a faceless, crude mass culture. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Over the past years I have had the opportunity to teach regularly a course on Joseph Ratzinger’s/Pope Benedict XVI’s theology to seminarians at the of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary. Father Raymond Webb, the academic , suggested I give the course a Christological perspective. My students’ contributions, critiques, idealism, and joy in anticipation of to the priesthood have motivated me to see this scriptum mature into a publishable book. I am much indebted to Father Charles R. Meyer, professor of systematic theology, for painstakingly proofreading the text, discov- ering mistakes, and suggesting improvements. Words of gratitude also go to Father Thomas A. Baima, and professor of systematic the- ology, for suggesting the publisher. Mrs. Laura Malashanko from University meticulously edited the first draft. Last but not least, Mrs. Olley, director of the Feehan Library, as well Mrs. Marian Johnson and Mrs. Anna Kielian, ingeniously discovered even in faraway lands. Also, I benefited from the lively discussions on the mind of Benedict XVI at the informal gatherings of scholars hosted by the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of . made valuable suggestions. At the vibrant Catholic-Jewish Scholars Dialogue in Chicago I shared some of my insights into the thoughts of Pope Benedict XVI. I thank Chris Chappell, associate editor, and Samantha Hasey, edi- torial assistant, from Palgrave Macmillan for their kind patience and suggestions. With much competence and enthusiasm Father Paul Stemn undertook the final editing and supplied the ready-for-print version. This investiga- tion would not have come about without his reliable and always cheerful assistance. This study is dedicated to Leo Cardinal Scheffczyk. I studied theology under him in Munich and he was so gracious to be the homilist during my first holy mass at Ingolstadt’s splendid Münster . He and Pope Benedict XVI have much in common. He lived, as the pope does, exem- plarily charitable independence from passing fashions when proclaiming gently and joyfully the unsearchable riches of Christ’s gospel. xviii Acknowledgments Never did the scholar Ratzinger enjoy sufficient leisure to share with the public square a developed structure of his theological vision. May this study suggest its possible contours. The Holy Father lives constantly in the presence of the . St. Gregory the Great relates in the sec- ond book of the Dialogues concerning the Pope’s patron: the St. Benedict “lived with himself under the eyes of God.”

Fr. Emery de Gaál Mundelein, of Saints and Paul, 2010 ABBREVIATIONS

CA Confessio Augustana, Lutheran Confession of Faith, 1530. CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 95 vols. , 1866–present. DH Heinrich Denzinger, rev. Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum de rebus Fidei et Morum. 40th ed. Edited by Peter Hünermann. Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2005. ND J. Neuner, SJ, and J. Dupuis, SJ. The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church. 7th ed. : Alba House, 2001. PG Patrologiae cursus completus: series graeca. 162 vols. Edited by J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1857–1886. PL Patrologiae cursus completus: series latina. 217 vols. Edited by J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1844–1864.

Documents of Vatican II

DH , Declaration on Religious Freedom DV , Dogmatic on Divine Revelation GS , Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World LG , Dogmatic Constitution on the Church SC Sacrosanctum , Constitution on the Liturgy