Freedom of Choice Act

Here is an excellent article by Bishop Serratelli on Obama's radical anti-life stance.


The Beacon
Diocese of Paterson
9 October 2008

A Politician's Promise: No Right to Life! No Freedom!

After committing a murder in Rome, the famous 17th century Italian painter Caravaggio went to Malta to avoid the death penalty. While there, the Great Master of the Order of the Knights of Malta commissioned him to do a painting for the chapel of the Co-Cathedral of St. John in Valletta. Caravaggio chose as his theme the martyrdom of John the Baptist. He produced The Beheading of St. John, his largest work, the only one he ever signed. No doubt the scene touched him personally.

Herod was married to Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife. Because John the Baptist preached against this sin, he incurred the hatred of Herod’s wife. The day her daughter Salome delighted Herod with her seductive dance, Herodias had her make Herod promise to kill John the Baptist. Within the severe architecture of a 16th century prison, Caravaggio vividly depicts the grisly moment when Herod kept his promise.

Caravaggio’s work, considered his greatest masterpiece, immortalizes the misguided fidelity of a ruler to his gruesome promise. With the stroke of the soldier’s sword, John dies and so does freedom. Freedom is based on the truth of the human person as created by God and protected by his law.
When a ruler can decide against God’s law, true freedom is sentenced to death.

Recently, a politician made a promise. Politicians usually do. If this politician fulfills his promise, not only will many of our freedoms as Americans be taken from us, but the innocent and vulnerable will spill their blood.

On April 18, 2007, in Gonzales v. Carhart, The Supreme Court upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban. The very next day prominent Democratic members of Congress reintroduced the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). The bill is misleadingly packaged as a freedom bill. It is not! It is a clear act of unreasoned bias to end abruptly and brutally the debate on the pressing and fundamental moral issue of the right to life.

For thirty-five years, Americans have been wrestling with The Supreme Court’s decision legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade. Most Americans now favor some kind of a ban on abortion. Most who allow abortion would do so only in very rare cases. In fact, in January, 2008, the Guttmacher Institute published its 14th census of abortion providers in the country. Its statistics showed that the abortion rate continues to decline. Abortions have reached their lowest level since 1974. There is truly a deep sensitivity to life in the soul of America.

The Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) would mortally wound this sensitivity. In effect, it would dismantle the freedom of choice to do all that is necessary to respect and protect human life at its most vulnerable stage. FOCA goes far beyond guaranteeing the right to an abortion throughout the nine months of pregnancy. It arrogantly prohibits any law or policy interfering with that right. While advocates trumpet this law as the triumph of the freedom of choice, they hide the dark reality that the law would actually inhibit choice.

Laws protecting the rights of nurses, doctors and hospitals with moral objections to abortion would no longer stand. Health and safety regulations for abortion clinics would also vanish. Gone the freedom of health care professionals to be faithful to the Hippocratic Oath “to prescribe regimens for the good of …patients…and never do harm to anyone, to please no one [by prescribing] a deadly drug nor [by giving] advice which may cause his death.” Gone the freedom of conscience so essential for a civil society!

If a minority of avid abortionists succeed to impose this law because of the ignorance or apathy of the majority, the law would force taxpayers to fund abortions. Gone the freedom of taxation with representation!

In its 1992 Casey decision, The Supreme Court ruled as constitutional state laws requiring that women and young girls who seek an abortion receive information on the development of the child in the womb as well as alternatives to abortion. The ruling also determined that a period of waiting, usually 24 or 48 hours before making a decision about an abortion is not an undue burden. The Freedom of Choice Act would nullify these laws immediately. Gone the freedom of women and young girls to have all the information they need to make their own choices!

In about half of the States, there are parental notification or consent laws in effect for minors seeking an abortion. The Supreme Court has ruled that these laws are permitted under Roe v. Wade. With the stroke of a pen, these laws would be abolished. Gone the freedom of parents to care for and protect their children and grandchildren!

Advocates of FOCA redefine a woman’s “health” so as to expressly permit post-viability abortions. Thus, a child who survives an abortion can be left to die for the health of the mother. No politically correct word can mask this reality for what it is. This is infanticide. Gone the freedom for a baby, once born, to live!

Science does not dispute that the child in the womb already has all the characteristics that he or she will develop after birth. Notwithstanding, abortionists obstinately refuse the right of the child within the womb to live as a fundamental human right. They are not happy that Americans have not swallowed their distorted propaganda that denies the dignity of the human person from the first moment of conception.

Pro-abortion advocates close their eyes to the fact that abortion even hurts women as it undermines the very fabric of our society. Their zeal for the Freedom of Choice Act sounds the alarm for decent Americans to wake up! The more the right to life is denied, the more we lose our freedoms. The “pro-choice” movement is not pro-choice. It stands against the freedom to choose what is right according to the truth of the human person.

In 2002, as an Illinois legislator, the present democratic candidate voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act. This law was meant to protect a baby that survived a late-term abortion. When the same legislation came up in the Judiciary Committee on which he served, he held to his opposition. First, he voted “present.” Next, he voted “no.”

Along with 108 members of Congress, the present democratic candidate for President continues his strong support for the Freedom of Choice Act. In a speech before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund last year, he made the promise that the first thing he would do as President would be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act. What a choice for a new President!

At the time when Herod murdered John the Baptist because of his promise, Rome practiced the principle "one man, one vote." Whoever the emperor in Rome placed in authority over a subject people, ruled. Today we live in a democracy. We choose our leaders who make our laws. Every vote counts. Today, either we choose to respect and protect life, especially the life of the child in the womb of the mother or we sanction the loss of our most basic freedoms. At this point, we are still free to choose!


Most Rev. Arthur Serratelli, S.T.D., S.S.L., D.D.
Bishop of the Diocese of Paterson

Christus Rex

Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum (INRI)


Viva Cristo Rey!

On the 11 December 1925, four years before the great depression, Pope Pius XI inaugurated the anual feast of Christ the King, for the last Sunday of October, to put the entire world at the feet of Christ: "whose kingdom will never end."

Christ is the King of the universe and the center of human history. (Redemptor Hominis, 1 "The Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history.") This means that He is the supreme Legislator--the entire created world was established by Him and follows His laws...Also that He is the supreme Judge: that His Judgments are all from sound judgment without error to judge all things in the created world. In this way He shall ever be the supreme Governor of our minds--we shall think with the heart of Jesus our King. He shall reign over our will--we shall only will what He wills. And He shall reign over our hearts. For this reason also He is our great King, because of the heartful love which He inspires. No man has ever been loved or ever will be loved as much as He. His kingdom is that of love: of life commitment ("If you are the Son of God": His throne is the cross, and the earth is His footstool, to ascend it! The giving of self not violence or abuse), and thus we come to the last aspect of His reign--the executive power of Christ.

He has the power of works. All works of mercy are all the works of our King. He came to expell demons, to give sight to the blind, to raise the dead and to preach the Gospel to the poor. He came to seek out and to save the lost sheep. And so He still comes to execute His power of mercy and love, through the ministry of the Church, especially through the sacraments; our great King gives us His flesh and blood nourishment daily to face and transform the world with His way, with His truth, with His life in us. Our king, Christ, changes the world one man at a time, changing your heart and mine, giving us the consciosness of His law, the laws of the universe and of man, ever aware of His impending judgment which will ultimately set everything right giving to each man what each deserves, and eagerly speading His message of mercy and truth by bringing Him to the whole world. That He may reign.
Today we say to Him "Thy kingdom come, Father, en Christ our King. May He live, truly live in us and with us all!

Good Medicine vs Politics

The Star-Ledger (New Jersey) has recently been running biased politically charged articles from the Los Angeles Times challenging the integrity of all American Catholics and of all American medical professionals. Both articles are examples of the tyranny of relativism.

The first article "Hard to conceive now of IVF alarm" (1 August 2008) glorifies in-vitro fertilization as a great moral and medical advance while roundly ignoring the grave ethical questions and accusing "the Vatican" of a lack of wisdom and compassion in its consistent condemnation of the medically and morally objectionable procedure for "making babies." First of all, the author, Professor Gregory Pence, a teacher of bioethics at the University of Alabama medical school, betrays his very profession by promoting "baby making." Laboratories should not "create" or "produce" human beings because of the inherent violation of the fundamental rights of each of those tiny human beings so "made." Each person has a right to come into existence by "conception" in the act of love: to come directly from the conjugal act. Any violation of that right is an attack on the person and on the distinctive act of marriage.


IVF is wrong because:

1. The proper context for procreation of human life is the marital act. To "produce" babies any other way is to violate the innate rights of both parents and conceptus.

2. The manipulation and systematic destruction and freezing of embryos (human persons!) is criminal violence in every regard violating the fifth commandment: "thou shalt not kill." We ought not kill or manipulate human persons at any stage of life (especially at their inception, their most defenseless stage) not even with the noble intention of bringing forth a life. Every person is precious and none is undesirable or less desirable! The descrimination and natural selection and biological and social manipulation and extermination essential to the IVF process are barbaric.

3. The accepted perverted method of acquiring the sperm through masturbation is categorically condemned by God, betraying a complete disregard for the holiness of the human body and it is a direct violation of the exclusivity of marital fidelity. (cf. Genesis 38:8)

4. NaPro Technology addresses the underlying health issues. This is the only real medical model to date to evaluate, diagnose and treat fertility illness (i.e. infertility). It has no moral objections because it is sound medicine, and, because it is sound medicine it has a much higher success rate than the artificial fertility techniques.

5. One last point is that much of the present day infertility is due to bad medicine in the form of abortion, chemical contraception, sterilization, all of which have the direct aim of destroying that which is healthy.

With this last point I refute the second article "Health care shouldn't bow to religion" (8 September 2008, reprint also from the Los Angeles Times) saying that we need religion to know how to define "health" and "care" or else human persons are at the whim of popular opinion. No, the laws guiding the medical establishment should be firmly based on what is truly good for each and every human person, without bending even to the unjust laws of any nation which should legislate the destruction or mutilation or poisoning of our offspring or our women healty wombs. Just recall the recent series of apologies by several state governers for the forced sterilizations of the last century in USA. No doctor can be required to destroy that which is healthy.

Indeed, we must say more. Most medical professionals have begun their carreers vowing to promote healing and never to use their profession for harm (not even by referal), as found in the still prevelant Hippocratic Oath for doctors and the Pledge of Florence Nightingale for nurses.

"I swear by Apollo Physician, by Asclepius, by Health, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses...I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly, I will not give to a woman a pessary (pill) to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art." (From Hippocratic Oath)

"I solemnly pledge myself before God and in the presence of this assembly to pass my life in purity and to practice my profession faithfully. I will abstain from whatever is deleterious or mischievous, and will not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug." (From the Nightingale Pledge)

Both are thoroughly religious and categorical in their freedom from any external pressure in understanding and exercising this service of healing.


By way of conclusion we must defend the Church and true religion in the face of these unjust attacks on basic human decency in medicine. The first article says "The Vatican perversely persists in condemning IVF..." I should like to defend the Vatican position in the name of every decent citizen in America, especially all medical professionals and all Catholics. Is the Vatican perverse in her upholding the law of God and in her consistent defense of the sanctity of all human life including it's sanctity in its conception (notice the passive noun, not a human creation but an awesome reception), and the sanctity and inviolability of marital love? Or, is it not rather the present prevailing and increasingly dictatorial prevailing moral perversion that condemns the Church without considering or even presenting the very sound and consistent philosophical, scientific and moral arguments on which her teaching is based. To challenge the politically correct or even the technologically possible on moral grounds is not perverse but rather the necessary check on perversion. To blindly condemn the well founded and very reasonable moral stance of the most venerable human rights institution the world has ever known--the Catholic Church (the inventor of the hospital and of the university)--is the height of perversity and a thinly disguised attempt to defend every form of sexual and reproductive perversion and inhumanity.

And finally, a man like Gregory Pence, 33 years teaching bioethics at the medical school of the University of Alabama in Birmingham ignorantly spouting such bigoted anti-Catholicism in his blind defense of the brave new world in which might is right ("if it is technologically possible than it is OK" mentality;); and a man like Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center with his "if we can then we may, if we may than we must" mentality that "science" is the only truth; are both indicative of the moral climate in our Universities and in our propaganda media (e.g. The Los Angeles Times and The Star Ledger), publishing in largely Catholic areas of our nation. I must say the boldness of this anti-Catholic and tyranical pro-anarchy in medicine lobby betrays a negligence on the part of Catholics (especially of the American Catholic hierarchy and university educators) to understand, promote and defend their noble religious convictions, none of which ever contradict but rather encourage legitimate science and technological progress, authentically promoting the common good in defense of the rights and dignity of true marriage, holy marital love, the family, and the proper conception and procreation children. Professor Sloan thinks doctors should be directed to kill and should have a professional obligation to do so (with euthanasia and abortion and Plan B): so politics determines medicine in his view; any claim of right and wrong, according to him, would be irrelevant. He clearly shows that medical schools sorely need religion to rediscover the purpose of medicine: to heal and never harm!

Seminary and University Latin

Here I provide the regulations for the proper implementation of Blessed Pope John XXIII’s Apostolic Constitution Veterum sapientia of 22 February 1962 (Acta Apostolicæ Sedis 54, 129-135) mandating the preservation and promotion of and instruction in the Latin language in all Catholic seminaries and universities. These norms from the instruction Sacrum latinae linguae depositum (Acta Apostolicæ Sedis 54, 339-368) were produced at the express request of the Pope in Veterum sapientia and he approved their publication exactly two months after on 22 April 1962 by the Congregation of Seminaries and University Studies. The Congregation sets out a nine year outline of study which should be normative for use in all Catholic schools (adapting the texts as necessary but without lessening the total quantity of material). And in a concluding appendix there is an outline of selections of the Fathers of the Church to be studied in Latin for each of the areas of theology studies. Here is my translation of the nine year outline and later I give the theology outline in Latin.

In light of Pope Benedict XVI's Wednesday Audiences on the Fathers of the Church and his constant concern for the rediscovery of the Latin and Greek classics I hope that our seminaries and universities (faculty and students) might use this foundational outline as set out by the Vatican for our proper formation in the faith.

SACRUM LATINAE LINGUAE DEPOSITUM, Sacra Congregatio de Seminariis et Studiorum Universitatibus, xxii mensis Aprilis, anno MCMLXII 

Chapter III On the common way to study Latin

Article III Authors to be presented in the study of the Latin language in the humanities departments.

Paragraph 3: These Authors and this amount are to be tied to each year:

1st year: first, elegant and complete phrases excerpted from the Authors; certain proverbs and sayings are to be memorized; the second part of the year certain excerpts may be taken from the Old and New Testaments (like the creation of the world, the narrative of the seven Macchabean brothers, the parable of the prodigal son, etc.), at least 100 verses, of which some should be committed to memory; perhaps some short fables of Phaedrus or very brief Ciceronian letters may be added;

2nd year: at least 10 Phaedrus fables, one or two lives from Nepos, around 20 Ciceronian letters, some of the shorter Latin dialogues (from Erasmus, Vives, Jacobus Pontanus, etc);

3rd year: at least one of Caesar’s works, certain Cicero letters, 300 verses of Ovid,
a few hymns of the Roman Breviary, certain chapters of the Roman Catechism (Catechismus ad Parochos);

4th year: 3 selections (short poems) of Virgil, 5 elegies from Tibrollus and Propertius, at least one work from Livy, a few Cicero letters, and a few chapters from the Roman Catechism;

5th year: a few of the Cicero orations, 30 chapters of Sallust, book one of the Aeneid, and another from Georgias; some chapters from the Roman Catechism;

6th year: some philosophical work of Cicero (e.g. De Amicitia, De Senectute, ex Tusculanis, etc.); 10 carmina from Horace, 5 from Catullus, book one of the Annals or monographs of Tacitus; some chapters of the Roman Catechism;

7th year: Horace’s Ars Poetica; some comedy of Plautus or Terentius; excerpts from Lucretius (at least 300 verses); some book from the De Officiis of Cicero or the rhetoric of Cicero or Quintilian;

8th - 9th years: besides any outstanding material from the above program which remain to be interpreted (requiring more time), or which must be explained out of the proper place of study, add certain selections from the letters of Pliny and Seneca; excerpts from the Christian Latin Writers and the Fathers of the Church (Minucius, Lactantius, Ambrose, Augustine, etc.); from the Documents of the Roman Pontiffs; from the best of the more recent Latin Writers.



Appendix II (The Main works of the Fathers of the Church to be studied in the Course of Christian Latin for a profound and accurate knowledge of and sense of the Catholic faith under each of the areas of theology.)

I. Theologia Fundamentalis

ATHENAGORAS, Supplicatio pro Christianis.
S. IUSTIANUS Martyr, Apologiae.
EPISTOLA ad Diognetum (praesertim cc. 5-6).
TERTULLIANUS, Apologeticus; De praescriptione haereticorum; De Idololatria.
S. CYPRIANUS, De catholicae Ecclesiae unitate (praesertim cap. IV); Epistolae (praesertim ad Cornelium Papam).
LACTANTIUS, Divinae Institutiones.
S. AUGUSTINUS, De doctrina christiana (Lib. II-III: De exegesi biblica); De vera religione; De utilitate credendi; De consensus Evangelistarum; De symbolo ad catechumenos.
S. LEO MAGNUS, Epistolae.
VINCENTIUS LERINENSIS, Commonitorium.


II. Theologia Dogmatica

1. De Deo Uno et Trino.

MINUCIUS FELIX, Octavius, cap. 14-38.
TERTULLIANUS, Adversus Praxean.
NOVATIANUS, De Trinitate.
S. HILARIUS Pict., De Trinitate (praesertim libri II-III).
S. BASILIUS, Tractatus de Spiritus Sancto.
S. AMBROSIUS, De fide, ad Gratianum; De Spiritu Sancto.
S. AUGUSTINUS, De Trinitate (preaesertim lib. V).
S. GREGORIUS NAZIANZ., Sermones.
S. Io. CHRYSOSTOMUS, De incomprehensibilitate Dei.
S. GREGORIUS NYSSENUS, De Trinitate, ad Eustathium (agit praesertim de divinitate Spiritus Sancti).


2. De Deo Creante et Elevante.

S. GREGORIUS NYSSENUS, Liber de hominis opificio.
S. AMBROSIUS, Hexaemeron; De Paradiso.
S HIERONYMUS, Dialogus adversus Pelagianos.
S AUGUSTINUS, De Genesi contra Manichaeos; De Genesi ad litteram; De gratia Christi et de peccato originali.


3. De Verbo Incarnato

S. IGNATIUS ANTIOCH., Epist. ad Ephes., ad Smyrn.
TERTULLIANUS, De carne Christi.
S. AMBROSIUS, De Incarnationis Dominicae sacramento.
S. ATHANASIUS, De Incarnatione Verbi.
S. GREGORIUS NYSSENUS, Oratio magna catechetica (cap. 10-32).
S. AUGUSTINUS, Contra sermonem Arianorum; In Ioannis Evangelium tractatus.
CASSIANUS, De Incarnatione Christi contra Nestorium.
S. GREGORIUS MAGNUS, Homiliae in Evangelia.
S. HIERONYMUS, Adversus helvidium de perpetua virginitate B. Mariae, Epistolae.
S. LEO MAGNUS, Sermones.


4. De gratia et virtutibus.

S. HIERONYMUS, Epistolae.
S. AUGUSTINUS, De libero arbitrio; De fide rerum quae non videntur; De natura et gratia; De gratia Christi et de peccato originali. De gratia et libero arbitrio; De dono perseverantiae; Enchiridion ad Laurentium sive de fide, spe et caritate.
S. PROSPER AQUITANUS, De gratia Dei et libero arbitrio liber contra Collatorem.
S. FULGENTIUS, De fide ad Petrum liber.


5. De Sacramentis.

TERTULLIANUS, De Baptismo; De Paenitentia.
S. CYPRIANUS, De lapsis.
S. CYRILLUS JEROSOL., Catecheses.
S. AMBROSIUS, De Paenitentia; De Sacramentis, De Mysteriis.
S. AUGUSTINUS, De Baptismo.
S. IO. CHRYSOSTOMUS, Catecheses ad illuminandos; De Sacerdotio.


6. De Novissimis.

TERTULLIANUS, De carnis resurrectione; De anima.
S. CYPRIANUS, De mortalitate.
LACTANTIUS, Divinae Institutiones (liber VII).
S. AMBROSIUS, De bono mortis; De Iacob et vita beata.
S. AUGUSTINUS, De cura pro mortuis gerenda; De praedestinatione sanctorum; De dono perseverantiae; De Civitate Dei (lib. XXII, de caelesti beatitudine).


III. Theologia Moralis et Pastoralis

CLEMENS ALEXANDRINUS, Paedagogus.
S. AMBROSIUS, De officiis; De Virginibus.
S. AUGUSTINUS, Contra mendacium; De continentia; De bono coniugali; De moribus; Enchiridion (cap. LXIV-LXX, de peccatis). De catechizandis rudibus; Sermones; Confessiones.
S. GREGORIUS M., Moralia in Job; Liber Regulae pastoralis.

The Year of Saint Paul

Annus Sancti Pauli: 29 Junii MMVIII – 29 Junii MMIX

The 29th of June Pope Benedict XVI ushered in the jubilee year of Saint Paul for the bi-millenial year of his birth: “a year to learn from Saint Paul, to learn faith, to learn Christ and to learn the way of upright living”. (Wednesday Audience, 2 July 2008)

To assist in that goal of this year I here provide Saint Thomas’ schema of Saint Paul’s writings. He sees Christ’s grace as Saint Paul’s unifying theme. He thereby explains the order of the letters as we find them in the present New Testament canon. The Angelic Doctor systemitizes it thus to provide an easy way to learn and remember the order and the basic content of the entire Pauline corpus. That was one of the many geniuses of systematic theology: order and ease in learning. The synthesis does not pretend to be the whole but rather a minimal yet faithful sketch of the whole. Hopefully it will help us in our learning of Saint Paul, of faith, of Christ and upright living this year.


The Structure of the Pauline Corpus
According to St. Thomas Aquinas

There are fourteen letters (including Hebrews). Nine address the Gentile Church (Ecclesiam Gentium), four the leaders (praelatos et principes: reges) of the Church, and one addresses the people of Israel, that to the Hebrews.

All of the teaching in Saint Paul is about the grace of Christ which may be considered in three ways.
I. Nine letters consider the grace of Christ as it exists in the mystical body itself:
A. Grace may be considered in three ways. First, in itself, and this is how it is treated in the letter to the Romans.
B. Second, in the sacraments of grace:
1. In 1Corinthians, considered in the sacraments themselves;
2. In 2 Corinthians, in the ministers of the sacraments;
3. In Galatians, superfluous “sacraments” (namely those of the Old Law) are excluded;
C. Third, the grace of Christ is considered according to the uniting effect, in the Church.
1. First, the unity itself is discussed:
a) In Ephesians, the foundation [institutio] of the Church’s unity is considered;
b) In Philippians, the strengthening and advancing (confirmatione et profectu) of the Church’s unity is set forth;
2. Second, its defense:
a) Against certain errors, in the letter to the Colossians;
b) Against persecutions:
(1) In the present in 1Thessalonians;
(2) In the future (and chiefly at the time of the Anti-Christ) in 2 Thessalonians.

II. Four letters instruct the prelates regarding the grace of Christ considered as it exists in the chief members of the Church.

A. Instructing the spiritual prelates:

1. In 1 Timothy on the institution, instruction and governance of church unity;

2. In 2 Timothy on steadfastness (firmitate) against persecutors;

3. In Titus on the defense against heretics. B. Instructing the temporal prelates in Philemon.

III. One letter, that to the Hebrews, considers the grace of Christ as it exists in the head of the mystical body, Christ himself.

Musica Sacra 2008

In Feast of Faith (p. 98) the then Cardinal Ratzinger referred to Sacrosanctum Concilium’s promotion of Gregorian chant and polyphony in church choirs..

“This document contains…particular emphasis on the teaching of church music in seminaries and on the training of church musicians and singers, especially boys. Special mention is made of the desirability of establishing ‘higher institutes of sacred music’. (S.C., 115) Gregorian chant is particularly recommended, but there is also an express affirmation of polyphony”. (S.C., 116)

As a necessary preface to that we must add the Council’s (and the Roman Missal’s) insistence that the people are to be taught the Mass in Latin. “…[C]are must be taken to ensure that the faithful may…be able to say or sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them”. (S.C., 54, cf. Insititutio Generalis Missalis Romani, 2005, 41)

This need to preserve and promote the liturgical Latin music patrimony of the Church is surely the conciliar norm most universally neglected and rejected by the bishops and priests, seminaries and parishes these forty five years since the Sacrosanctum Concilium publication. This blatant disobedience to the clear liturgical directives of the Second Vatican Council is consistent with the complete rejection of Veterum Sapientia, which, on the 22nd of February 1962, mandated Latin as the official language for seminary instruction and formation. In an upcoming blog I shall provide a translation of the nine year Latin study program and the appended list of the most important theological texts of the Latin Church Fathers that should be studied in Latin, as found in the instruction given by the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and University Studies for the proper implementation of the Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia on 22 April 1962 (Ordinationes ad Constitutionem Apostolicam “Veterum Sapientia” Rite Exsequendam). For now, back to my present topic on Catholic Sacred Music today, the purpose of this essay.

There you have the problem which I and many of my contemporary post Vatican II laymen, seminarians, and priests have keenly felt. Even Pope Benedict himself admitted, in his Motu Proprio follow up letter to his brother bishops on the “Forms” of the Roman Ritual, the liturgical confusion he had to endure as a young priest in the post conciliar years. Well, the Church Music Association of America (CMMA) is providing a worthy response.

I attended The (CMMA) Sacred Music Colloquium XVIII at Loyola University’s Lakeshore Campus in Chicago this Summer (16-22 June), an exclusively Gregorian Chant and Polyphonic Masses and Motets seminar in a scholarly and prayerful atmosphere: some 250 participants, mostly parish music composers and music directors, music students and some priests and seminarians, from around the nation. We trained for and chanted and sang the daily Office and the daily Mass, both Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms, in Latin!!! Having had some practice chanting I joined the intermediate chant group for the training sessions that week, challenging and most delightful.

The organization and professionalism of the staff were exemplary. What completed the grandeur was the sense of sincere Catholic faith. All of the training and teaching were thoroughly imbued with Catholicism. Routinely there would be people in personal prayer in the chapel, especially before and after each of the chapel visits. Confession was daily available. Many of the women and young ladies wore veils for the Masses and everyone dressed with the greatest decorum throughout. Kneeling was normative for communion (it is the universal norm according to the updated Roman Missal). There were many young people, perhaps half the participants were under forty, and everyone was most friendly and unassuming.

The food and the accommodations were very good and the site and the weather were fabulous, not to mention the low price: $575 for the week which included everything, even the books. Just a couple of anecdotes before closing.

I loved being so close to the water. Being an early riser I would go out around six in the morning to get to the chapel for some early morning one-on-one with Our Lord. Well, on the final day, Sunday, I got out there around five thirty hoping to be on time for the sunrise, which I had missed all week. It was already too late, realizing that in Chicago we were just west of the time line, so the sunrise was an hour earlier than on the east coast. Anyway, I went to the walkway along the shore rocks and got to the chapel. The lake was flat with calm and the sun was soft and large, reflecting greatly across the lakes expanse. Taking my place in front of the chapel the foxes from the lakeside barrier boulders are playing in the morning grass just forty yards away. They swirl over and around each other as if in dance. There are several pairs of them back and forth from the rocks and across the lawns, parking lots and sidewalks. I even fed one of them at my feet, with a young incoming freshman beside me.

The young man’s name was Patrick. He saw me in my cassock (I am a priest) and he, also up early to see the sunrise, which he also had missed!, sat down and we ended up talking about philosophers and theologians (I told him about the Confessions of Saint Augustine and about Saint Thomas Aquinas, the greatest Catholic mind the world shall ever see, which must be read) and he asked about priestly vocation. He was very inquisitive and sincere. So I invited him to the polyphonic Mass of that closing day: Sunday, the Montiverdi Mass in F. He came and followed that Mass (Extraodinary Form) with my Mass chant and polyphonic books. At the end of the Mass all of the participants sang Bruckner’s Ave Maria, for which Patrick joined me with the first tenors: all 250 voices in four part harmony singing the words of the angels, having practiced only once: powerful!!! It was significant to close introducing a newcomer to our great heritage in that artistically and religiously excellent atmosphere. May God bless Patrick and CMAA and the Jesuits of Loyola for this part of the implementation of the most neglected part of the Second Vatican Council’s liturgical directives, in union with Pope Benedict XVI, the Vicar of Christ.

To hear some of the music or read about that colloquium or for information on next year's colloquium go to musicasacra.com.

Benedict's call to Universities

Writer, George Weigel in his "The Catholic Difference" column of the Archdiocese of Newark's The Catholic Advocate, expresses concern over Catholic educators' misappropriation of Pope Benedict's message to them. Here is Mr. Weigel's 5 June 2008 article.

Mulling pope's call to universities, without spin

Pope Benedict XVI, during his recent historic visit to the United States, had barely left the Catholic University of America on April 17 when the Catholic higher education establishment's spin machine shifted into high gear.

One university president said that what most impressed him about the papal address to Catholic educators was what it was not: a dressing-down. Still another president cooed that she felt "affirmed." An administrator at yet another institution said that, as the pope hadn't cited Ex Corde Ecclesia--John Paul II's concerns about Catholic identity were clearly old hat.

One got the distinct impression from the spin that a lot of people thought they'd dodged a bullet and were grateful they weren't going home to face irate alums and dubious donors. The "Benedict loves what we're doing" blah-blah has continued ever since.

The facts, to put it gently, suggest something rather more complicated. Consider these excerpts from the Holy Father's address:

"A university's or school's Catholic identity...is a question of conviction. Do we really believe that only in the mystery of the Word Made Flesh does the mystery of man truly become clear? Are we ready to commit our entire self--intellect and will, mind and heart--to God? Do we accept the truth Christ reveals?"

What percentage of this year's Catholic college and university graduates could honestly answer those questions with a convinced "yes?" What percentage would even understand the first question?

"While we have sought diligently to engage the intellect of our young, perhaps we have neglected the will. Subsequently we observe, with distress, the notion of freedom being distorted. Freedom is not an opting out. Freedom is an opting in; a participation in being itself. Hence, authentic freedom can never be obtained by turning away from God."

Might these sentences be printed, framed, and posted in co-ed dormitories on Catholic campuses?

"We observe today a timitdity in the face of the category of the good...an assumption that every experience is of equal worth and a reluctance to admit imperfection and mistakes. And particularly disturbing is the reduction of the precious and delicate area of education in sexuality to management of 'risk,' bereft of any reference to the beauty of conjugal love."

How many freshman orientation programs and student life offices on Catholic campuses would have to examine consciences here?

"I wish to affirm the great value of academic freedom. yet any appeal to the principle of academic freedom in order to justify positions that contradict the faith and the teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university's identity and mission; a mission at the heart of the Church's (teaching mission) and not somehow...independent of it."

Will the theologians at prestigious Catholic universities who affirm Humanae Vitae's teaching on the morally appropriate means of regulating fertility, the Catechism's teaching on the disordered character of homosexual acts, and the teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis on the inadmissability of women to Holy Orders please raise their hands?

The spin machine notwithstanding, Benedict XVI put serious challenges before the nation's leading Catholic educators.

To resolve any doubts that the pope has a different idea of what befits a Catholic college or university than a lot of the Catholic higher education establishment, however, I propose a simple test. Whether or not to produce Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues"--a "play" that mocks the settled teaching of the Catholic Church--has become a tedious annual ritual on many Catholic campuses. Prominent among them is Notre Dame University--to the public mind, a flagship among U.S. Catholic institutions of higher education. There, the university's president, Father John Jenkins, C.S.C., has allowed Ensler's play on campus, acquiescing to the demands of some Notre Dame faculty while rejecting the counsel of other distinguished faculty members and the arguments of the local bishop.

In the patristic period, disputes within and among local churches were submitted to the Bishop of Rome for adjudication. Se here's my proposal and my test case: let Father Jenkins send Pope Benedict XVI a copy of Ensler's play, asking the pope whether he considers this material appropriate for production or useful for discussion on a Catholic campus.

The answer, I predict, will not please the spin machine.

(George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.)

REGENSBURG ADDRESS

This is the final version (complete with footnotes) of the Holy Father's celebrated university lecture in Germany 2006, for which he received the highest German national prize awarded by the University of Tubingen. I provide it here because my future posts will be dealing with the foundations for the Enlightenment and the ensuing French Revolution, and their modern bequest, as necessarily related to Christ, and to the Vicar of Christ, a foremost advocate of the classics. Specifically, there is an inseparable alliance of human Reason and human Liberty with Christ (Logos), as indicated in Spe salvi.

LECTURE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI DURING THE APOSTOLIC JOURNEY TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG (SEPTEMBER 9-14, 2006) MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE

Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg
Tuesday, 12 September 2006

Faith, Reason and the University

Memories and Reflections

Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas - something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned - the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.[1] It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor.[2] The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to some of the experts, this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”[3] The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".[4]

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.[5] The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.[6] Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.[7]

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply asserts being, "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy.[8] Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity.[9] A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).[10]

This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity - a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.[11]

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal's distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue,[12] and I do not intend to repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature's capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield decisive certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.

This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was an initial inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not simply false, but it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss".[13] The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

[1] Of the total number of 26 conversations (διάλεξις – Khoury translates this as “controversy”) in the dialogue (“Entretien”), T. Khoury published the 7th “controversy” with footnotes and an extensive introduction on the origin of the text, on the manuscript tradition and on the structure of the dialogue, together with brief summaries of the “controversies” not included in the edition; the Greek text is accompanied by a French translation: “Manuel II Paléologue, Entretiens avec un Musulman. 7e Controverse”, Sources Chrétiennes n. 115, Paris 1966. In the meantime, Karl Förstel published in Corpus Islamico-Christianum (Series Graeca ed. A. T. Khoury and R. Glei) an edition of the text in Greek and German with commentary: “Manuel II. Palaiologus, Dialoge mit einem Muslim”, 3 vols., Würzburg-Altenberge 1993-1996. As early as 1966, E. Trapp had published the Greek text with an introduction as vol. II of Wiener byzantinische Studien. I shall be quoting from Khoury’s edition.

[2] On the origin and redaction of the dialogue, cf. Khoury, pp. 22-29; extensive comments in this regard can also be found in the editions of Förstel and Trapp.

[3] Controversy VII, 2 c: Khoury, pp. 142-143; Förstel, vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.5, pp. 240-241. In the Muslim world, this quotation has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing understandable indignation. I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Qur’an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion. In quoting the text of the Emperor Manuel II, I intended solely to draw out the essential relationship between faith and reason. On this point I am in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing his polemic.

[4] Controversy VII, 3 b–c: Khoury, pp. 144-145; Förstel vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.6, pp. 240-243.

[5] It was purely for the sake of this statement that I quoted the dialogue between Manuel and his Persian interlocutor. In this statement the theme of my subsequent reflections emerges.

[6] Cf. Khoury, p. 144, n. 1.

[7] R. Arnaldez, Grammaire et théologie chez Ibn Hazm de Cordoue, Paris 1956, p. 13; cf. Khoury, p. 144. The fact that comparable positions exist in the theology of the late Middle Ages will appear later in my discourse.

[8] Regarding the widely discussed interpretation of the episode of the burning bush, I refer to my book Introduction to Christianity, London 1969, pp. 77-93 (originally published in German as Einführung in das Christentum, Munich 1968; N.B. the pages quoted refer to the entire chapter entitled “The Biblical Belief in God”). I think that my statements in that book, despite later developments in the discussion, remain valid today.

[9] Cf. A. Schenker, “L’Écriture sainte subsiste en plusieurs formes canoniques simultanées”, in L’Interpretazione della Bibbia nella Chiesa. Atti del Simposio promosso dalla Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, Vatican City 2001, pp. 178-186.

[10] On this matter I expressed myself in greater detail in my book The Spirit of the Liturgy, San Francisco 2000, pp. 44-50.

[11] Of the vast literature on the theme of dehellenization, I would like to mention above all: A. Grillmeier, “Hellenisierung-Judaisierung des Christentums als Deuteprinzipien der Geschichte des kirchlichen Dogmas”, in idem, Mit ihm und in ihm. Christologische Forschungen und Perspektiven, Freiburg 1975, pp. 423-488.

[12] Newly published with commentary by Heino Sonnemans (ed.): Joseph Ratzinger-Benedikt XVI, Der Gott des Glaubens und der Gott der Philosophen. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der theologia naturalis, Johannes-Verlag Leutesdorf, 2nd revised edition, 2005.

[13] Cf. 90 c-d. For this text, cf. also R. Guardini, Der Tod des Sokrates, 5th edition, Mainz-Paderborn 1987, pp. 218-221.

Nihil permanens sub sole

The Holy Father's recent encyclical, Spe salvi, highlights the disillusion of man today. The confusion of philosophy, the moral anarchy and the prevailing Machiavellian political atmosphere all have their root in the rejection of God, the source of perfection; human utopias can only be as good as the men that comprise them. For a perfect world we need Christ, perfect man and perfect God; perfect in suffering. Christ is the perfection of Passion: Hope in suffering: Joy in certain knowledge of God the Father and complete confidence in Him within the world. This is true hope, hope in truth, which courageously faces the evil and defects of the world with goodness and honesty, with love and mercy. Outside of this attitude of Christ man has no hope! Let us propose a reflection on the limits of our world so as to highlight the need for God, as a transposition of the Holy Father's theme.

In his reflections on the 2006 Valencia visit under the theme of marriage and the family, the Holy Father indicates the demographic crisis in Europe as a crisis of moral orientation in parents. "...[T]he problem of Europe, which it seems no longer wants to have children, penetrated my soul. To foreigners this Europe seems to be tired, indeed, it seems to be wishing to take its leave of history. Why are things like this? This is the great question. The answers are undoubtedly very complex. Before seeking these answers, it is only right to thank the many married couples in our Europe who still say 'yes' to children today and accept the trials that this entails: social and financial problems, as well as worries and struggles, day after day; the dedication required to give children access to the path towards the future. In mentioning these difficulties, perhaps the reasons also become clearer why for many the risk of having children appears too great.

"A child need loving attention. This means that we must give children some of our time, the time of our life. But precisely this 'raw material' of life--time--seems to be ever scarcer. The time we have available barely suffices for our own lives; how could we surrender it, give it to someone else? To have time and to give time--this is for us a very concrete way to learn to give oneself, to lose oneself in order to find oneself.

"In addition to this problem comes the difficult calculation: what rules should we apply to ensure that the child follows the right path and in so doing, how should we respect his or her freedom? The problem has also become very difficult because we are no longer sure of the norms to transmit; because we no longer know what the correct use of freedom is, what is the correct way to live, what is morally correct and what instead is inadmissible.

"The modern spirit has lost its bearings, and this lack of bearings prevents us from being indicators of the right way to others. Indeed, the problem goes even deeper. Contemporary man is insecure about the future [without hope!]. Is it permissible to send someone into this uncertain future? In short, is it a good thing to be a person? This deep lack of self assurance--plus the wish to have one's whole life for oneself--is perhaps the deepest reason why the risk of having children appears to many to be almost unsustainable. In fact, we can transmit life in a responsible way only if we are able to pass on something more than mere biological life, and that is, a meaning that prevails even in the crises of history to come and a certainty in the hope that is stronger than the clouds that obscure the future.

"Unless we learn anew the foundations of life--unless we discover in a new way the certainty of faith--it will be less and less possible for us to entrust to others the gift of life and the task of an unknown future.

"Connected with that, finally, is also the problem of definitive decisions: can man bind himself for ever? Can he say a 'yes' for his whole life? Yes, he can. He was created for this. In this very way human freedom is brought about and thus the sacred context of marriage [which is by nature monogamous and heterosexual] is also created and enlarged, becoming a family and building the future."[1]

The truth is that the present world is very unstable and unreliable and is will fail us. It is not reasonable to put one's faith in the passing world, because everything on earth is passing and only God and His love lasts. An Italian Renaissance poem offers many poetic images for the limits and earthly life, which deceptively promises perfection.

"Our mortal life seems like...
...a show,
a display of vanity;
a beautiful garment which covers the deformities of a sick body,
a grassy meadow which hides among its green weeds a poisonous serpent.

"...a narrow field but full of hard stones,
a thick wood, but full of sharp thorns,
a shady mountain, but full of towering rocks
and altogether a great forest, but full of savage beasts.

"...[A] dark valley of tears,
a fountain barren of thoughts,
a river turbid with tears,
a stormy sea of troubles.

"...[L]ike a bubble in water which soon bursts,
like vapor in the air which soon vanishes,
and like the flower that suddenly withers on the hedge.

"...I compare it to an old house that threatens to collapse in ruins,
to a high tower built on the sand,
to a tree full of branches but without roots.

"...[It's] like a boat without a helm,
old age without a cane,
a horse without reigns
and a blind man without a guide.

"...[It can be likened to] confused order,
to tormented calm,
to ineffectual toil,
to good ailing health
and to poor wealth.

"...[D]eformed beauty,
infamous honor,
eager ambition,
precipitous height
and an obscure nobility.

"...[A] sack [riddled] with holes,
a cracked jar,
a dirty mirror,
a broken glass,

"...a golden fish hook with bait,
a sharp piercing dart,
a sour apple that disgusts
and a cup of intoxicating wine.

"...[A] journey full of traps,
a city full of strife,
a divided kingdom,
a tyrannical principality,
an irksome pilgrimage.

"...[A] castle in the air,
a ship in the sea,
a mist before the sun,
and a passing wind that does not return.

"...[A] deep whirlpool where many drown,
a narrow sea where many are in peril,
an ocean without a port where one passes at great risk.

"...[A] cave of serpents,
a den of thieves,
a lair of assassins,
a haven for evil doers.

"...[A] city square full of noise,
a winding street full of pitfalls,
and an old wall full of crevices.

"...[A] yoke that is not soft,
a heavy burden,
and a strong chain.

"...[I]t is pitch that defiles,
mud that sticks,
dust that blinds.

"...[A] sandy desert,
a horrid wilderness,
an uninhabitable country.

"...[I]t changes like the moon,
it passes like a mailman,
...it turns like a wheel.

"...[I]t is a city of blood,
a lusting after the flesh,
satisfaction for the eyes
and arrogant pride in the heart.

"...[The] love of madmen,
the desire of the wicked,
the pleasure of the sensualists.

"...[A] a poorly stocked table,
a leaking cistern,
a hard bed
and an empty coffer.

"...[A] singing mermaid,
an enticing whore,
a spell casting sorcerer.

"...[L]aughing grief,
weeping laughter,
complaining contentment.

"...[A] lying life,
a dead life,
a breathing death,
a hell of the living.

"...[A] funeral of living bodies,
a headlong race to death,
a noble show of pomp that is given to the worms.

"...[I]n fact all the vilest names and titles can be applied to this worldly life and they will all suit it excellently well.

"Now, so many people hold this worldly life in high esteem and enjoy it to such a point that they would rather never die because their sins have dimmed their sight and placed a veil before their eyes so that they cannot understand the truth of things. And therefore, mistaking the false for the true and evil for good, they stray into error. And meanwhile, Death overtakes them and carries them off to where they find nothing in hand but wind, with torment and grief.

"Men who live thus are most unhappy, since they sleep securely in so dangerous an error. How much better for them if once they could awake from such a deadly stupor.

"How much benefit it would be to people if they looked beyond the surface, beyond the misfortunes and imperfections of this life of deceit! Because by becoming too attached to its false beauties they fall into and do not see the tortures of Hell and the cruel arms of Death." [2]

Spe salvi is the Holy Father's post-enlightenment presentation of the same failed world to men showing them the inherent imperfection and limits and corruption with the world and especially within man, from which only Christ can free us.

Would that man should seek the deep meaning of life. Would that men should seek God. Would that men should find Jesus Christ, recognize and repent of their sins and receive His mercy: the Love of God in the Blood of Jesus. Would that men should begin to live in God , and thus really LIVE!

[1] Benedict XVI Address to the Roman Curia, 22 December 2006

[2] Emilio de'Cavalieri (1550-1602), from the introductory dialogue to the oratorio "Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo", February 1660 production, Rome.

Outline of Pope Benedict's Recent Publications

For a sketch outline of Benedict's recent papal publications: Deus caritas est, Jesus of Nazareth, and now Spe Salvi, I propose the Jubilee year address to Catechists below. More on this later.



The New Evangelization, building the civilization of love
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Address to Catechists and Religion Teachers
Jubilee of Catechists
December 12, 2000 (Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe)


Human life cannot be realized by itself. Our life is an open question, an incomplete project, still to be brought to fruition and realized. Each man's fundamental question is: How will this be realized—becoming man? How does one learn the art of living? Which is the path toward happiness?To evangelize means: to show this path—to teach the art of living. At the beginning of his public life Jesus says: I have come to evangelize the poor (Luke 4:18); this means: I have the response to your fundamental question; I will show you the path of life, the path toward happiness—rather: I am that path.The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice—all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world.This is why we are in need of a new evangelization—if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works. But this art is not the object of a science—this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life—he who is the Gospel personified.

I. Structure and method in new evangelization

1. The structure
Before speaking about the fundamental contents of new evangelization, I would like to say a few words about its structure and on the correct method.The Church always evangelizes and has never interrupted the path of evangelization. She celebrates the eucharistic mystery every day, administers the sacraments, proclaims the word of life—the Word of God, and commits herself to the causes of justice and charity. And this evangelization bears fruit: It gives light and joy, it gives the path of life to many people; many others live, often unknowingly, of the light and the warmth that radiate from this permanent evangelization.However, we can see a progressive process of de-Christianization and a loss of the essential human values, which is worrisome. A large part of today's humanity does not find the Gospel in the permanent evangelization of the Church: That is to say, the convincing response to the question: How to live?This is why we are searching for, along with permanent and uninterrupted and never to be interrupted evangelization, a new evangelization, capable of being heard by that world that does not find access to "classic" evangelization. Everyone needs the Gospel; the Gospel is destined to all and not only to a specific circle and this is why we are obliged to look for new ways of bringing the Gospel to all.Yet another temptation lies hidden beneath this—the temptation of impatience, the temptation of immediately finding the great success, in finding large numbers. But this is not God's way. For the Kingdom of God as well as for evangelization, the instrument and vehicle of the Kingdom of God, the parable of the grain of mustard seed is always valid (see Mark 4:31-32).The Kingdom of God always starts anew under this sign. New evangelization cannot mean: immediately attracting the large masses that have distanced themselves from the Church by using new and more refined methods. No—this is not what new evangelization promises. New evangelization means: never being satisfied with the fact that from the grain of mustard seed, the great tree of the Universal Church grew; never thinking that the fact that different birds may find place among its branches can suffice—rather, it means to dare, once again and with the humility of the small grain, to leave up to God the when and how it will grow (Mark 4:26-29).Large things always begin from the small seed, and the mass movements are always ephemeral. In his vision of the evolutionary process, Teilhard de Chardin mentions the "white of the origins" (le blanc des origines): The beginning of a new species is invisible and cannot be found by scientific research. The sources are hidden—they are too small. In other words: The large realities begin in humility.Let us put to one side whether Teilhard is right in his evolutionary theories; the law on invisible origins does say a truth—a truth present in the very actions of God in history: "The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you." God says [this] to the People of Israel in the Old Testament and thus expresses the fundamental paradox of the history of salvation: certainly, God does not count in large numbers; exterior power is not the sign of his presence.Most of Jesus' parables indicate this structure of divine intervention and thus answer the disciples' worries, who were expecting other kinds of success and signs from the Messiah—successes of the kind offered by Satan to the Lord: All these—the kingdoms of the world—I will give to you ... (Matthew 4:9).Of course, at the end of his life Paul believed that he had proclaimed the Gospel to the very ends of the earth, but the Christians were small communities dispersed throughout the world, insignificant according to the secular criteria. In reality, they were the leaven that penetrates the meal from within and they carried within themselves the future of the world (see Matthew 13:33).An old proverb says: "Success is not one of the names of God." New evangelization must surrender to the mystery of the grain of mustard seed and not be so pretentious as to believe to immediately produce a large tree. We either live too much in the security of the already existing large tree or in the impatience of having a greater, more vital tree—instead we must accept the mystery that the Church is at the same time a large tree and a very small grain. In the history of salvation it is always Good Friday and Easter Sunday at the same time ....

2. The method
The correct method derives from this structure of new evangelization. Of course we must use the modern methods of making ourselves be heard in a reasonable way—or better yet: of making the voice of the Lord accessible and comprehensible. ... We are not looking for listening for ourselves—we do not want to increase the power and the spreading of our institutions, but we wish to serve for the good of the people and humanity giving room to he who is Life.This expropriation of one's person, offering it to Christ for the salvation of men, is the fundamental condition of the true commitment for the Gospel. "I have come in my Father's name, and you do not receive me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive," says the Lord (John 5:43). The mark of the Antichrist is the fact that he speaks in his own name.The sign of the Son is his communion with the Father. The Son introduces us into the Trinitarian communion, into the circle of eternal love, whose persons are "pure relations," the pure act of giving oneself and of welcome. The Trinitarian plan—visible in the Son, who does not speak in his name—shows the form of life of the true evangelizer—rather, evangelizing is not merely a way of speaking, but a form of living: living in the listening and giving voice to the Father. "He will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak," says the Lord about the Holy Spirit (John 16:13).This Christological and pneumatological form of evangelization is also, at the same time, an ecclesiological form: The Lord and the Spirit build the Church, communicate through the Church. The proclamation of Christ, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God presupposes listening to his voice in the voice of the Church. "Not speak on his own authority" means: to speak in the mission of the Church ....Many practical consequences come from this law of expropriation. All reasonable and morally acceptable methods should be studied—to use these possibilities of communication is a duty. But words and the whole art of communication cannot reach the human person to such depths as the Gospel must reach.A few years ago, I was reading the biography of a very good priest of our century, Don Didimo, the parish priest of Bassano del Grappa. In his notes, golden words can be found, the fruit of a life of prayer and of meditation. About us, Don Didimo says, for example: "Jesus preached by day, by night he prayed."With these few words, he wished to say: Jesus had to acquire the disciples from God. The same is always true. We ourselves cannot gather men. We must acquire them by God for God. All methods are empty without the foundation of prayer. The word of the announcement must always be drenched in an intense life of prayer.We must add another step. Jesus preached by day, by night he prayed—this is not all. His entire life was—as demonstrated in a beautiful way by the Gospel according to St. Luke—a path toward the cross, ascension toward Jerusalem. Jesus did not redeem the world with beautiful words but with his suffering and his death. His Passion is the inexhaustible source of life for the world; the Passion gives power to his words.The Lord himself—extending and amplifying the parable of the grain of mustard seed—formulated this law of fruitfulness in the word of the grain of seed that dies, fallen to earth (John 12:24). This law too is valid until the end of the world and is—along with the mystery of the grain of seed—fundamental for new evangelization. All of history demonstrates this.It is very easy to demonstrate this in the history of Christianity. Here, I would like to recall only the beginning of evangelization in the life of St. Paul. The success of his mission was not the fruit of great rhetorical art or pastoral prudence; the fruitfulness was tied to the suffering, to the communion in the passion with Christ (see 1 Corinthians 2:1-5; ... 2 Corinthians 11:30; Galatians 4:12-14)."But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah," said the Lord. The sign of Jonah is the crucified Christ—they are the witnesses that complete "what is lacking in Christ's afflictions" (Colossians 1:24). Throughout all the periods of history, the words of Tertullian have always been verified: The blood of martyrs is a seed.St. Augustine says the same thing in a much more beautiful way, interpreting John 21, where the prophesy of Peter's martyrdom and the mandate to tend, that is to say, the institution of his primacy, are intimately connected.St. Augustine comments [on] the text John 21:16 in the following way: "Tend my sheep," this means suffer for my sheep.... A mother cannot give life to a child without suffering. Each birth requires suffering, is suffering, and becoming a Christian is a birth. Let us say this once again in the words of the Lord: The Kingdom of heaven has suffered violence (Matthew 11:12; Luke 16:16), but the violence of God is suffering, it is the cross. We cannot give life to others without giving up our own lives.The process of expropriation indicated above is the concrete form (expressed in many different ways) of giving one's life. And let us think about the words of the Savior: "Whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospel's will save it" (Mark 8:35).

II. The contents essential for new evangelization

1. Conversion
As for the contents of new evangelization, first of all we must keep in mind the inseparability of the Old and the New Testaments. The fundamental content of the Old Testament is summarized in the message by John the Baptist: metanoeìte—Convert! There is no access to Jesus without the Baptist; there is no possibility of reaching Jesus without answering the call of the precursor, rather: Jesus took up the message of John in the synthesis of his own preaching: metanoeìte kaì pisteúete èn tù eùaggelíu (Mark 1:15).The Greek word for converting means: to rethink—to question one's own and common way of living; to allow God to enter into the criteria of one's life; to not merely judge according to the current opinions. Thereby, to convert means: not to live as all the others live, not do what all do, not feel justified in dubious, ambiguous, evil actions just because others do the same; begin to see one's life through the eyes of God; thereby looking for the good, even if uncomfortable; not aiming at the judgment of the majority, of men, but on the justice of God—in other words: to look for a new style of life, a new life.All of this does not imply moralism; reducing Christianity to morality loses sight of the essence of Christ's message: the gift of a new friendship, the gift of communion with Jesus and thereby with God. Whoever converts to Christ does not mean to create his own moral autarchy for himself, does not intend to build his own goodness through his own strengths."Conversion" (metanoia) means exactly the opposite: to come out of self-sufficiency to discover and accept our indigence—the indigence of others and of the Other, his forgiveness, his friendship. Unconverted life is self-justification (I am not worse than the others); conversion is humility in entrusting oneself to the love of the Other, a love that becomes the measure and the criteria of my own life.Here we must also bear in mind the social aspect of conversion. Certainly, conversion is above all a very personal act, it is personalization. I separate myself from the formula "to live as all others" (I do not feel justified anymore by the fact that everyone does what I do) and I find my own person in front of God, my own personal responsibility.But true personalization is always also a new and more profound socialization. The "I" opens itself once again to the "you," in all its depths, and thus a new "We" is born. If the lifestyle spread throughout the world implies the danger of de-personalization, of not living one's own life but the life of all the others, in conversion a new "We," of the common path of God, must be achieved.In proclaiming conversion we must also offer a community of life, a common space for the new style of life. We cannot evangelize with words alone; the Gospel creates life, creates communities of progress; a merely individual conversion has no consistency....

2. The Kingdom of God
In the appeal to conversion the proclamation of the Living God is implicit—as its fundamental condition. Theocentrism is fundamental in the message of Jesus and must also be at the heart of new evangelization.The keyword of the proclamation of Jesus is: the Kingdom of God. But the Kingdom of God is not a thing, a social or political structure, a utopia. The Kingdom of God is God. Kingdom of God means: God exists. God is alive. God is present and acts in the world, in our—in my life.God is not a faraway "ultimate cause," God is not the "great architect" of deism, who created the machine of the world and is no longer part of it—on the contrary: God is the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life, in each and every moment of historyIn his conference when leaving the University of Münster, the theologian J.B. Metz said some unexpected things for him. In the past, Metz taught us anthropocentrism—the true occurrence of Christianity was the anthropological turning point, the secularization, the discovery of the secularity of the world. Then he taught us political theology—the political characteristic of faith; then the "dangerous memory"; and finally narrative theology.After this long and difficult path, today he tells us: The true problem of our times is the "Crisis of God," the absence of God, disguised by an empty religiosity. Theology must go back to being truly theo-logy, speaking about and with God.Metz is right: the unum necessarium to man is God. Everything changes, whether God exists or not. Unfortunately—we Christians also often live as if God did not exist (si Deus non daretur). We live according to the slogan: God does not exist, and if he exists, he does not belong.Therefore, evangelization must, first of all, speak about God, proclaim the only true God: the Creator—the Sanctifier—the Judge (see Catechism of the Catholic Church).Here too we must keep the practical aspect in mind. God cannot be made known with words alone. One does not really know a person if one knows about this person secondhandedly. To proclaim God is to introduce to the relation with God: to teach how to pray. Prayer is faith in action. And only by experiencing life with God does the evidence of his existence appear.This is why schools of prayer, communities of prayer, are so important. There is a complementarity between personal prayer ("in one's room," alone in front of God's eyes), "para-liturgical" prayer in common ("popular religiosity") and liturgical prayer.Yes, the liturgy is, first of all, prayer; its specificity consists in the fact that its primary project is not ourselves (as in private prayer and in popular religiosity), but God himself—the liturgy is actio divina, God acts and we respond to this divine action.Speaking about God and speaking with God must always go together. The proclamation of God is the guide to communion with God in fraternal communion, founded and vivified by Christ. This is why the liturgy (the sacraments) are not a secondary theme next to the preaching of the living God, but the realization of our relationship with God.While on this subject, may I be allowed to make a general observation on the liturgical question. Our way of celebrating the liturgy is very often too rationalistic. The liturgy becomes teaching, whose criteria is: making ourselves understood—often the consequence of this is making the mystery a banality, the prevalence of our words, the repetition of phrases that might seem more accessible and more pleasant for the people.But this is not only a theological error but also a psychological and pastoral one. The wave of esoterism, the spreading of Asian techniques of relaxation and self-emptying demonstrate that something is lacking in our liturgies. It is in our world of today that we are in need of silence, of the super-individual mystery, of beauty.The liturgy is not an invention of the celebrating priest or of a group of specialists; the liturgy (the "rite") came about via an organic process throughout the centuries, it bears with it the fruit of the experience of faith of all the generations.Even if the participants do not perhaps understand each single word, they perceive the profound meaning, the presence of the mystery, which transcends all words. The celebrant is not the center of liturgical action; the celebrant is not in front of the people in his own name—he does not speak by himself or for himself, but in persona Christi. The personal abilities of the celebrant do not count, only his faith counts, by which Christ becomes transparent. "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30).

3. Jesus Christ
With this reflection, the theme of God has already expanded and been achieved in the theme of Jesus Christ: Only in Christ and through Christ does the theme God become truly concrete: Christ is Emmanuel, the God-with-us—the concretization of the "I am," the response to Deism.Today, the temptation is great to diminish Jesus Christ, the Son of God, into a merely historical Jesus, into a pure man. One does not necessarily deny the divinity of Jesus, but by using certain methods one distills from the Bible a Jesus to our size, a Jesus possible and comprehensible within the parameters of our historiography.But this "historical Jesus" is an artifact, the image of his authors rather than the image of the living God (see 2 Corinthians 4:4ff; Colossians 1:15). The Christ of faith is not a myth; the so-called historical Jesus is a mythological figure, self-invented by various interpreters. The 200 years of history of the "historical Jesus" faithfully reflect the history of philosophies and ideologies of this period.Within the limits of this conference, I cannot go into the contents of the proclamation of the Savior. I would only like to briefly mention two important aspects.The first one is the Sequela of Christ—Christ offers himself as the path of my life. Sequela of Christ does not mean: imitating the man Jesus. This type of attempt would necessarily fail—it would be an anachronism. The Sequela of Christ has a much higher goal: to be assimilated into Christ, that is to attain union with God. Such a word might sound strange to the ears of modern man. But, in truth, we all thirst for the infinite: for an infinite freedom, for happiness without limits.The entire history of revolutions during the last two centuries can only be explained this way. Drugs can only be explained this way. Man is not satisfied with solutions beneath the level of divinization. But all the roads offered by the "serpent" (Genesis 3:5), that is to say, by mundane knowledge, fail. The only path is communion with Christ, achieved in sacramental life. The Sequela of Christ is not a question of morality, but a "mysteric" theme—an ensemble of divine action and our response.Thus, in the theme on the sequela we find the presence of the other center of Christology, which I wished to mention: the Paschal Mystery—the cross and the Resurrection. In the reconstruction of the "historical Jesus," usually the theme of the cross is without meaning. In a bourgeois interpretation it becomes an incident per se evitable, without theological value; in a revolutionary interpretation it becomes the heroic death of a rebel.The truth is quite different. The cross belongs to the divine mystery—it is the expression of his love to the end (John 13:1). The Sequela of Christ is participation in the cross, uniting oneself to his love, to the transformation of our life, which becomes the birth of the new man, created according to God (see Ephesians 4:24). Whoever omits the cross, omits the essence of Christianity (see 1 Corinthians 2:2).

4. Eternal life
A last central element of every true evangelization is eternal life. Today we must proclaim our faith with new vigor in daily life. Here, I would only like to mention one aspect of the preaching Jesus, which is often omitted today: The proclamation of the Kingdom of God is the proclamation of the God present, the God that knows us, listen to us; the God that enters into history to do justice. Therefore, this preaching is also the proclamation of justice, the proclamation of our responsibility.Man cannot do or avoid doing what he wants to. He will be judged. He must account for things. This certitude is of value both for the powerful as well as the simple ones. Where this is honored, the limitations of every power in this world are traced. God renders justice, and only he may ultimately do this.We will be able to do this better the more we are able to live under the eyes of God and to communicate the truth of justice to the world. Thus the article of faith in justice, its force in the formation of consciences, is a central theme of the Gospel and is truly good news. It is for all those suffering the injustices of the world and who are looking for justice.This is also how we can understand the connection between the Kingdom of God and the "poor," the suffering and all those spoken about in the Beatitudes in the Speech on the Mountain. They are protected by the certainty of judgment, by the certitude, that there is a justice.This is the true content of the article on justice, about God as judge: Justice exists. The injustices of the world are not the final word of history. Justice exists. Only whoever does not want there to be justice can oppose this truth.If we seriously consider the judgment and the seriousness of the responsibility for us that emerges from this, we will be able to understand full well the other aspect of this proclamation, that is redemption, the fact that Jesus, in the cross, takes on our sins; God himself, in the passion of the Son, becomes the advocate for us sinners, and thus making penance possible, the hope for the repentant sinner, hope expressed in a marvelous way by the words of St. John: Before God, we will reassure our heart, whatever he reproves us for."For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything" (1 John 3:19ff). God's goodness is infinite, but we should not diminish this to goodness to mawkish affectation without truth. Only by believing in the just judgment of God, only by hungering and thirsting for justice (see Matthew 5:6) will we open up our hearts, our life to divine mercy.This can be seen: It isn't true that faith in eternal life makes earthly life insignificant. To the contrary: only if the measure of our life is eternity, then also this life of ours on earth is great and its value immense. God is not the competitor in our life, but the guarantor of our greatness. This way we return to the starting point: GodIf we take the Christian message into well-thought-out consideration, we are not speaking about a whole lot of things. In reality, the Christian message is very simple: We speak about God and man, and this way we say everything.