Gerhard Cardinal Müller

BENEDICT
AND
FRANCIS

Their Ministry as Successors to Peter

Translated by Michael J. Miller

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS

Manchester, New Hampshire

Original German edition: Benedikt und Franziskus: Ihr Dienst in der Nachfolge Petri: Zehn Jahre Papst Benedikt, copyright © 2015 by Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.

English translation copyright © 2017 by Michael J. Miller

Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

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On the cover: Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis meet, September 28, 2014, St. Peter’s Square (E818X9) © Realy Easy Star/Alamy Live News.

Interior design by Perceptions Design Studio.

Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible — Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Citations from Heinrich Denziger, Enchiridion Symbolorum (cited as DH), are taken from the 43rd edition, edited by Peter Hünermann (San Franciso: Ignatius Press, 2012).

Citations from Vatican II documents are taken from Austin P. Flannery, ed., Documents of Vatican II (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1975).

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Müller, Gerhard Ludwig, author.

Title: Benedict and Francis : their ministry as successors to Peter / Gerhard

Cardinal Müller; translated by Michael J. Miller.

Other titles: Benedikt und Franziskus. English

Description: Manchester, New Hampshire : Sophia Institute Press, 2017. |

Includes bibliographical references. | Petrine office

Identifiers: LCCN 2017012271 | ISBN 9781622824588 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ePub ISBN 9781622824595

Subjects: LCSH: Popes — Primacy. | Apostolic succession. | Benedict XVI, Pope,

1927- | Francis, Pope, 1936- | Catholic Church — Doctrines.

Classification: LCC BX1805 .M8513 2017 | DDC 262/.13 — dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012271

Contents

The Primacy of Peter in the Pontificate of Benedict XVI

Truth and Freedom: What Does Laicity Mean for Christians?

Poverty as a Way of Evangelization: Reflections in the Spirit of Pope Francis

Theological Criteria for Ecclesial and Curial Reform

Tenth Anniversary of Pope Benedict

The Primacy of Peter in the Pontificate of Benedict XVI

The Primacy of Peter in the Pontificate of Benedict XVI

Rome, Campo Santo, April 17, 2015

On April 19, 2005, the Catholic world heard the unforgettable words from the Loggia [balcony] of Saint Peter’s Basilica: “Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum. Habemus Papam: Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum Josephum Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Ratzinger.” The pontificate of Benedict XVI lasted almost eight years, until February 28, 2013.

This is not the occasion to evaluate the place of this pontificate in Church history or to get involved in controversies that arise in evaluating any historical personage. Rather, it is a matter of asking theologically how our faith in Jesus Christ was promoted by Pope Benedict and how we were led to a deeper understanding of the whole mystery of salvation: the revelation of the Triune God and consequently of the Church’s mission in our time.

Peter as the visible principle of unity

The popes, as successors of Peter, are the visible head of the pilgrim Church, and as pastors and teachers of the Universal Church they are vicars of Jesus Christ, who, on account of the Incarnation, is inseparable from the Church, His Body.

The cardinals are not the ones who confer authority to the newly elected pastor of the Universal Church. Therefore, neither does the Pope exercise his authority in the name of the Church, or of the College of Bishops, which he heads, or of the Roman Church, which, by means of the College of Cardinals and the dicasteries of the Roman Curia, shares responsibility for the Pope’s duties with regard to the Universal Church. The Pope answers to Jesus Christ alone and is supported in his universal ministry by the Church of Rome. Jesus Christ, the Lord and Head of His Church, is the sovereign; from Him proceeds all spiritual authority to govern, teach, and sanctify the people of God in the power of the Holy Spirit (cf. Lumen Gentium [LG] 20). The deliberations of the cardinals in the preconclave, along with their search for a suitable candidate and a coalition of votes forming a moral majority of more than two-thirds in the conclave, are only a prayer to God: “Show us whom you have chosen” (cf. Acts 1:24).

Jesus Christ, the true Head of the Church, bestows on the Bishop of Rome, as the successor of the apostle Peter, the fullness of authority to represent Him visibly as the universal teacher and pastor in the pilgrim Church on earth. The sacred primacy belonging to the Bishop of Rome, with its infallible teaching authority, is nothing less than the actualization of the perpetual and visible principle and foundation of the unity of faith and the communion that Christ Himself instituted forever in the Church in the person of Saint Peter (cf. LG 18). The primacy of the Roman Church with its bishop is due not to a claim of superiority over other local churches or to some will to power cleverly organized over the centuries by the clergy in the capital of an empire, but rather to the foundational will of the Lord of the Church. Peter suffered martyrdom in Rome, and thus his primatial apostolate devolves upon the Church of Rome and consequently upon its visible head, the Bishop of Rome. The primacy of Peter did not flare up at some point over the real world as an ideal, only to grow dim over the course of history and increasingly lose its contour in history’s vicissitudes. In order to comprehend the nature and mission of the episcopal ministry and of the primacy, one must go beyond a naturalistic understanding of the Church as a legal assembly. The Church has its origin in God’s salvific will and is the instrument thereof. By its nature and mission it is not merely a religious assembly organized by men. The dualism between a supratemporal ideal image and its pale reflection in its historical realization must be overcome also.

The one mediator, Christ, established and ever sustains here on earth his holy Church, the community of faith, hope and charity, as a visible organization through which he communicates truth and grace to all men. . . . This is the sole Church of Christ which in the Creed we profess to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic, which our Saviour, after his resurrection, entrusted to Peter’s pastoral care (Jn 21:17), commissioning him and the other apostles to extend and rule it (cf. Mt 28:18, etc.), and which he raised up for all ages as “the pillar and mainstay of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15). (LG 8)

The Church as incarnate reality

Only in terms of the Incarnation is the utter novelty of the Church revealed to us: it signifies the real and symbolic presence of the Lord. “Head and body: the one Christ and the whole Christ” (Augustine, Sermo 341, 1). With this famous formula Augustine, the lifelong conversation partner and friend of the theologian Joseph Ratzinger, put the Pauline understanding of the Church in a nutshell. God is not merely an ideal of pure reason; neither did Christ merely found an ideal image of Church. The Second Divine Person assumed human nature, and by that very fact the visible communion of the disciples who followed Christ also became a sacrament that represents and concretely brings about the supernatural fellowship [Lebensgemeinschaft] of the faithful (cf. LG 8).

This visible Church, led by the pope and the bishops in union with him, is the house and people of God, the Body of Christ, and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Jesus called specific men by name, so as to give them a share in His mission and authority (see Mark 3:13–19). First in the list of the Twelve Apostles mentioned by name is the fisherman Simon, to whom Jesus gave the name Peter so as to indicate his permanent role in the Church. The Incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ, humbled Himself in the servile form of His human body, which was subject to the law of suffering and death. Part and parcel of this is also the risk of handing over His mission and authority to men who — trapped within the limitations of their individuality — may fail in office, become bogged down in mediocrity, and deny and betray their Lord. The dark sides of Church history and the moral failings even of many of the Church’s highest dignitaries do not justify, however, the retreat of the faithful into a purely otherworldly ideal Church or the rejection of the concrete Church by citing an alleged ideal image of the ancient Church that supposedly existed in an earlier historical period, or even the projection of a Church imagined according to one’s own image and likeness into a utopian future.

Although Christ Himself remained free of sin, He suffered in His body and redeemed everything human that had been disfigured by sin. Christ, the Head of His Body, “loved the Church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the Church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph. 5:25–27).

The Church, in her sacramental holiness, which is not identical with the moral holiness of her members, is an effective sign of the redemption that has already been accomplished in Christ, but at the same time — in the sins and failings of her members — an indication of all humanity’s need for redemption in the past, the present, and the future. Therefore when a Catholic says, “Credo Ecclesiam [I believe the Church],” he does not mean a mystical, otherworldly, or utopian ideal image of Church, but rather the concrete Church that is “at once holy and always in need of purification” (LG 8). The concrete Church “follows constantly the path of penance and renewal. The Church, ‘like a stranger in a foreign land, presses forward amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God,’ announcing the cross and death of the Lord until he comes” (LG 8).

Anyone who becomes aware of the full import of salvation history and of the Incarnation will not be scandalized by the concrete historical form of the Church, which, as Pope Francis says, is not only splendid but also “dented.” He does not flee from the earthly Church into an abstract ideal that remains untouched by the dust and dirt of all-too-human behavior. We do not awaken from a beautiful dream only to be confronted with miserable reality. True piety does not dream but places itself bravely and joyfully at the service of redemption through Christ, who in His Body, the Church, walks through this real world, with its hope and joy, but also with its sin and disbelief.

The historical development of the dogmas of ecclesiology, which includes a deeper understanding of the episcopal ministry and of the papal primacy, does not appear in retrospect as a conglomerate of heterogeneous elements that were cobbled together by an ideology of power and special interest. It was instead the intellectual-conceptual and existential [lebensmässige] unfolding of what is contained in the revealed faith in the Mystery of the Church, so that the Church can carry out her mission in ever-new societal circumstances and in the challenges of intellectual and cultural history.

The Petrine ministry as a personal commission

All the words commissioning and sending Simon Peter that Jesus spoke during His earthly life and work are spoken personally in each era to the successors of the first of the apostles on the Chair of Peter. Simon, the fisherman from the Sea of Gennesaret, was a historical man, not an ideal artistic figure. This concrete, individual man with his heritage and life history, with human strengths and weaknesses, becomes the instrument of grace, the servant of the Word, and the eyewitness of the crucified and risen Lord, who promised to remain always with the Church until the end of the world.

Once near Caesarea Philippi, Peter summarized the Church’s profession of faith, which is derived from the revelation by the Father, as follows: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” Thereupon he hears for himself and for his successors the promise and the commission: “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16:16, 18–19). Jesus asks the whole company of disciples who they think He is, and Peter answers in his person for all of them. And Jesus addresses the whole Church in the person of Peter.

In the Cenacle on the night before His death, as the ultimate fate of all mankind is being decided, Jesus says to Peter: “And when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren” (Luke 22:32). He, the Son, has prayed to the Father with infallible efficacy that Peter’s faith might not fail and consequently that Peter, after his conversion, might strengthen his brothers and sisters in their faith in Christ, the Son of the living God, the Word of God made flesh.

The risen Lord reveals Himself to the disciples at the Sea of Tiberias. Three times he asks Peter whether he loves Him more than these do. Peter is sad to be reminded in this way of his failure and denial in the courtyard of the high priest’s house. But this relationship to Jesus in unconditional trust and unlimited love, even unto martyrium — witness by his word and by his life — bestows on Peter a unique authority for the Universal Church. Jesus says to him three times: “Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep” (John 21:15–17).

In Peter the popes carry out the pastoral ministry of Christ, who came to lay down His life for His sheep. Vatican I, in keeping with the entire Tradition, formulates it as follows: “Therefore, whoever succeeds Peter in this chair, according to the institution of Christ himself, holds Peter’s primacy over the whole Church” (DH 3057).

All three ecclesiological munera, or offices, that describe the nature of Peter’s primacy are accompanied by references to the human limits of Simon Peter, whether the fact that he tries to separate Jesus’ Messiahship from His suffering in the form of a slave, or the fact that when his life and reputation are at risk he publicly evades professing his faith in Jesus, the Son of the living God.

Again and again, non-Catholic exegesis has tried to see a relativization of the promise of primacy in the rebuke of Peter and of his denial, or else in the incident in Antioch when Paul opposed Peter because the latter was wrong about the practical consequences of the fellowship of the circumcised and the uncircumcised (cf. Gal. 2:11). If that were the case, one would also have to assume that Christ had allowed Himself to be deceived in His choice of His apostles or that reality had caught up with His ideal notions, as though He had failed miserably in founding a Church as God’s house for all nations.

“But why did Christ in his divine power and omniscience not choose the wise, the strong, the highly regarded to be his apostles, bishops, and popes?” we of little faith ask all too humanly, and we get the answer from Paul: “So that no flesh might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor. 1:29). But in keeping with God’s grace, the apostles are like master builders of God’s house, which once and for all has its foundation on Christ. Those who come after the apostles should take care how they continue to build upon it — with gold and silver, precious stones, or with wood, hay, and straw (cf. 1 Cor. 3:10ff.). The last word about another person, and even about a pope, belongs to no one but God, for He alone judges rightly and justly. Everyone should collaborate in building up the kingdom of God, each according to the measure of the grace and natural talent he has received. Only in God’s tribunal is judgment passed on our work as “God’s fellow workers” (1 Cor. 3:9) and “fellow workers in the truth” (3 John 8).

Thus we can understand every pontificate of a pope as a stretch of Church history, as a specific realization of the permanent Petrine primacy — mediated through the personality of him who has been called by God Himself to build up His house.

Religiously and theologically speaking, it makes little sense to compare the individual persons on the Chair of Peter and their pontificates with one another according to worldly criteria. The decisive thing is the relation to the primacy of Peter, which must be the measure and guide of every pope. For, strictly speaking, every pope is the successor of Peter and not just of his chronological predecessor.

Joseph Ratzinger — Pope Benedict XVI

One important characteristic of the pontificate of Benedict XVI was his extraordinary theological talent. By this I mean not simply skills resulting from his professorial activity, but the great originality of his theology on the most important themes of the doctrine of the Faith. What is true of every Christian in general is true also about popes in particular: the most varied charisms are given by the Spirit of God so that they might benefit others, and thus the Body of Christ is built up in the knowledge and love of God. Thus, in the collaboration of its members, the whole Body grows toward the fullness of Christ, so as to become the perfect man. Let him who has received the gift of teaching teach! — “in proportion to our faith” (Rom. 12:6–7).

This analogy of faith, the insight into the inner connection between revealed truth and the goal of salvation for every person, is based on the analogy of being, that is, on the truth-capability of created reason also, which recognizes in what really exists in the world the esse, verum, et bonum [being, the true, and the good], which in turn are the mirror and likeness of God’s reason and love. On the basis of the analogia entis, theology is possible as the science of revealed faith according to the analogia fidei.

Theological knowledge does not cater to the intellectual curiosity that preens in the private club of a few specialists and delights in its own intelligence. Without the constant exchange with theology, as it has been developed by the Fathers of the Church and by the great theologians of the Middle Ages and the modern era in a wide variety of schools, the Magisterium could not live up to its responsibility. For the Church’s Magisterium testifies to the revealed Faith of the Church in the Creed, the auditus fidei [the hearing of the faith], whereas the intellectual presentation thereof is accomplished rationally and conceptually, so that the intrinsic reasonableness of the entire depositum fidei comes to light in theological reflection and becomes fruitful in preaching and pastoral care.

Certainly, in its authority the Magisterium, as an authentic witness to revelation by virtue of the assistance of the promised Holy Spirit, is superior to academic theology, but at the same time it makes use of the latter out of an inner necessity. The Pope and bishops can correctly and completely teach and present for belief only those things and all those things that are contained in God’s historical revelation. As for the linguistic and conceptual form, however: “The Roman Pontiff and the bishops, by reason of their office and the seriousness of the matter, apply themselves with zeal to the work of enquiring by every suitable means into this revelation and of giving apt expression to its contents; they do not, however, admit any new public revelation as pertaining to the divine deposit of faith” (LG 25). For the Pope and the bishops, unlike Peter and the other apostles, are not personally bearers of revelation. Nor do they receive any inspiration, as the authors of Sacred Scripture did; rather, they are bound by the testimony of the word of God in Scripture and Tradition. In truly handing on the Faith in their teaching office, however, they enjoy the assistance of the Holy Spirit (assistentia Spiritus Sancti).

Even Peter in his first letter, an “Encyclical,” exhorted Christians and especially priests and bishops to have an answer ready for anyone who asks about the “Logos of hope” (cf. 1 Pet. 3:15) that is ours through faith in Christ the Lord, “the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls” (1 Pet. 2:25).

A major theme of Joseph Ratzinger, not only as a theologian but also as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and as the Pope, with different responsibilities in each instance, was to point out the intrinsic connection between faith as hearing and as understanding, between the auditus fidei and the intellectus fidei. Here the faith is not measured by an external standard and subjected to a criterion that is foreign to it, as in the rationalistic concept of reason that is reduced to feasibility. One cannot study philosophy, history and the social sciences more geometrico [in a geometric fashion]. Faith as enlightenment by the light of Christ (lumen fidei) is, instead, reasonable in itself, in keeping with the Logos of God — a rationabile obsequium [rational worship] (cf. Rom. 12:1). To academic theology belongs the task of mediating between the knowledge of God in faith and the knowledge of the world through natural reason (lumen naturale), as it is presented in the natural sciences and the humanities, so that in the consciousness of believers the truths of the faith and natural knowledge do not fall apart but, rather, form a new synthesis in every age.

Of course one cannot reduce the entire work of a pontificate to a single priority, and anyway it is reserved to God alone to judge the fruitfulness of it. But the theological elaboration of the intrinsic unity and interdependence of faith and reason is nevertheless one aspect that lends a particular character to the pontificate of Benedict XVI. Faith and reason are not mutually limiting or mutually exclusive but rather serve the perfection of man in God and in His Word, which assumed our flesh, and in His Spirit, who reveals the most profound being and life of God: God is love, as the great Encyclical Deus caritas est explains.

So we can say: Benedict XVI was one of the great theologians on the Chair of Peter. In the long series of his predecessors a comparison suggests itself with the outstanding scholarly figure of the eighteenth century, Pope Benedict XIV (1740–1758). Likewise one will think of Pope Leo the Great (440–461), who formulated the decisive insight for the Christological profession of the Council of Chalcedon (451). In the long years of his academic work as a professor of fundamental and dogmatic theology, Benedict XVI accomplished independent theological work that places him in the ranks of the most important theologians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For more than fifty years the name Joseph Ratzinger has stood for an original comprehensive outline of systematic theology. His writings combine scholarly knowledge of theology with the living form of the Faith. As a science that has its genuine place within the Church, theology can show us the special destiny of man as God’s creature and image.

In his scholarly works, Benedict XVI could always fall back on a marvelous knowledge of theological and dogmatic history, which he conveyed in such a way that God’s vision of man, which supports everything, comes to light. This is made accessible to many people by Joseph Ratzinger’s use of [Umgang mit] words and language. Complex subjects are not made incomprehensible to the average reader by a complicated presentation; instead these matters are made transparent, revealing their inner simplicity. The point is always that God wants to speak to every person, and His Word becomes a light that enlightens every man (cf. John 1:9).

Faith and reason

To point out only one of the groundbreaking theological speeches of the Pope, I would like to mention the Regensburg Lecture from the year 2006. In it Benedict XVI once again emphasized the intrinsic connection between faith and reason. Neither reason nor faith can be thought of independently of the other and still achieve its real purpose. Reason and faith are protected from dangerous pathologies by mutual correction and purification. Benedict XVI thereby connects with the great tradition of the theological sciences, which, in the overall structure of the university, can prove to be the element that binds everything together.

The encyclical Fides et ratio by John Paul II comes to mind whenever there is a discussion of the tragic developments in European intellectual life. In nominalism a voluntaristic picture of God had developed. In order to remove God entirely from the reach of our metaphysical reason, He was thought of as sheer will, which man must accept in blind obedience, without any possibility of understanding Him rationally. In opposition to Him, man had to declare his autonomy so as to ensure his freedom. Modern atheism as humanism without or against God has one of its roots in a theological aberration. But if God Himself is reason and will, word and love, then the knowledge of God and our understanding of the world, nature and grace, reason and freedom do not come into conflict but rather prove to be the expression of the personal communion of God and man in Jesus Christ, the God-man. God is not man’s rival, but rather the fulfillment of all searching for truth and for the perfection of man in freedom as love and self-gift [Hingabe].

The figure of Jesus of Nazareth

The fortunate combination of the Pope as the universal teacher of the Faith with the theological thinker Joseph Ratzinger probably appears most convincingly in his three-volume work, Jesus of Nazareth.

As the successor of Peter, the Pope professes the revealed truth, which goes beyond natural reason, that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. The theologian Ratzinger, based on his lifelong study of the question of Jesus in historical criticism, has at his disposal the intellectual means of making very clear, that is, of communicating intellectually the consistency and inner truth of the fact, that the Jesus of history is identical with the Divine Word made flesh who is recognized in faith.

Joseph Ratzinger’s lifework culminates in his book on Jesus. With his three volumes on Jesus he has stimulated a vigorous discussion about Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians profess as the universal Savior and the sole Mediator between God and mankind. In this individual man, Jesus of Nazareth, God definitively and irreversibly made the historical coincidence of divine revelation and human self-surrender to the Father become a concrete event. Hence we profess with the Church that Jesus is the Christ, in whom it becomes possible for mankind to experience the historical salvific presence of God. He is the one who accomplishes the Father’s will and wishes to lead all mankind along the way to the knowledge of the truth (cf. 1 Tim. 2:4–5).

In the New Testament we find the formation of the apostolic Church’s profession of faith, which is achieved in the living faith of the disciples; this faith originated in the encounter with Jesus of Nazareth as a historical person, with the words of His preaching of the kingdom of God, and in the experience of His death and Resurrection from the dead. In the event on Easter morning and in light of God’s self-revelation in His Son, the believer meets with a person who is his Creator and Perfecter: Jesus Christ is the Lord whom we profess in faith, the Lord and Head of His Church.

In its epilogue, the Gospel of John mentions the justification for its composition and for the Church’s entire witness to the Faith in Scripture and Tradition, so as to oppose all attempts to read the Gospel as a simple historical biography. The purpose is not merely to give information about a person, but rather it was written “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:30–31).

This look at the six decades of intensive intellectual and scholarly penetration of the various themes of Christology in the theological work of Joseph Ratzinger brings to light the continuity of his thought. His long wrestling with the figure of Jesus, which he himself formulates in the first volume of the trilogy on Jesus can be traced through his writings. From the very beginning he asks himself the question: “Who is Jesus of Nazareth” — for men, for the world?¹

He decisively opposes an attitude of skepticism that considers God incapable of revealing himself definitively, and he shows a fine sense of the ideological constraints that may monopolize people’s attention.

With the clarity that can be derived from the Church’s profession of faith, he develops from historical findings and the Gospel accounts an inviting overall view of Jesus of Nazareth that stimulates further reflection. On the basis of the historically consolidated formulations of the Christological dogmas, as they were formulated in the great ecumenical councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, Joseph Ratzinger develops his approaches to Christology and to Catholic theology as a whole, which now are being presented synoptically in the sixteen volumes of his Collected Works in German [Gesammelte Schriften].

Finally, in looking to the crucified and risen Lord Jesus, man finds his ultimate fulfillment in the one “whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30), “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). Until the second coming of Christ, Peter unites the many disciples in their profession of the one Faith: You are Christ, the Son of the living God. This is the mission of the papacy for the Church and for the world.

The primacy — quotations and thoughts

In the Decretum Gelasianum, some parts of which go back to a set of documents compiled by Pope Damasus I (366–384), the primacy of the Roman Church (i.e., of the pope with the clergy and the people) is justified not politically by the rank of the capital and residential cities of the Roman Empire, but rather in strictly ecclesiological terms; it is derived Christologically from the authority of the Lord of the Church:

After [all these] prophetic and evangelical and apostolic writings [which we have set forth above], on which the Catholic Church by the grace of God is founded, we have thought this (fact) also ought to be published, namely, that, although the universal Catholic Church spread throughout the world is the one bridal chamber of Christ, nevertheless the holy Roman Church has not been preferred to the other Churches by reason of synodal decrees, but she has obtained the primacy by the evangelical voice of the Lord and Savior, saying: You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church. (DH 350)

The conviction that Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church speaks in Peter to each of his successors “day in and day out” (Sermo III, 3) the words: “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church,” and that in every pope, even if he should be personally unworthy, Peter professes on behalf of the whole Church: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” is expressed poignantly by Pope Leo the Great in a solemn sermon “On the Anniversary of His Elevation to the Pontificate”: “Just as what Peter believed about Christ is always valid, so too what Christ instituted in Peter continues forever” (Sermo III, 2). And therefore this feast is celebrated with the right disposition “if everyone sees and honors in my person the one (i.e., Peter) who eternally unites in himself the concerns of all pastors with his custody over the sheep entrusted to him and even in the case of an unworthy successor loses none of his dignity” (Sermo III, 4).

¹ Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Adrian J. Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 6.

What Does Laicity Mean for Christians?

Truth and Freedom: What Does Laicity Mean for Christians?

Paris, Académie Catholique de France,
March 26, 2015

As a child and a youth in the postwar period, I
had the good fortune and the grace to grow
up in the young democracy of the Federal Republic of Germany. The stories our grandparents told about the First World War and our fathers told about the National Socialist dictatorship and the horrors of World War II were ever present in our mind and imagination. We were shaped and positively attuned to the future, however, by other events and images. I am thinking about the meeting between Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle in the cathedral in Rheims, when the representatives of the two states extended their hands to each other — a symbol of reconciliation, which should be understood most profoundly as an expression of a Christian way of thinking. Hereditary enmity and rivalry are no longer the keys to a common house of Europe and for the worldwide family of nations, but rather friendship and trust. I like to remember the German-French youth-exchange program in which I participated with our whole class in Alsace. We experienced and learned that different languages and cultures do not alienate us, but rather enrich us, and they can bring about a happy sense of expanding one’s intellectual horizons. The intellectual cosmos of Catholic life is unimaginable without French history, literature, philosophy, and theology. Henri Blondel, Étienne Gilson, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Louis Bouyer, and Jean Daniélou became friends of mine who accompanied my journey as a European citizen and a Catholic Christian.

The Christian faith does not alienate us from life and modern culture. In the encounter with Jesus Christ, who proclaimed the kingdom of God and made it real through His Cross and Resurrection, God reveals Himself as the origin and goal of every man. The mystery of man is truly elucidated only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word (cf. Gaudium et spes [GS] 22). Faith in the transcendent God (“Glory to God in the highest”) and responsibility for the immanent world (“peace on earth”) intrinsically belong together in Christ, the God-man. The hope that there will be justice in eternal life for the victims of injustice and violence obliges Christians to serve the poor and to work for peace and justice in this world. Wholehearted love for God and love of neighbor as oneself are the heart of Christian life (see Mark 12:29–31). The God of truth guarantees and promotes human freedom, which is perfected in love. “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31–32).

Lessons from history

The political ideologies of National Socialism and Communism — the latter did not fall in Eastern Europe until 1989 — taught us that opposition to the truth is not the humble search for it, but rather a lie that destroys the trust that is necessary as the foundation of every society. And freedom is far more than the absence of compulsion and force, or even the opportunity to follow my impulses and interests exclusively. True freedom is freedom for the good and liberation for an unconditional commitment to the good. In every truth that is acknowledged, God is implicitly acknowledged, and in every good that is done, a person aims at God’s goodness. Freedom presupposes the internal and external possibility of living according to one’s conscience, doing good for its own sake, and not obeying immoral and criminal orders.

We must draw two lessons from the catastrophes of the twentieth century that were brought on by the relativization of truth and morality and the absolutization of state, nationality, and race:

1. The inalienable dignity, the essential equality, and the rights and duties of all men must always be respected.

2. As understood by social justice, a share in the earth’s resources and in cultural goods must be made possible for all men (cf. GS 39).

From these it follows that ethical principles must be universally valid and must never be subordinated to the interests of a nation, a class, or a religious or ideological group.

Based on our experience, first with the mentality that favored the authoritative state in Prussia and then with two misanthropic, godless dictatorships, we in Germany are skeptical about any form of governmental omnipotence. The state is relatively necessary for the common good. Nevertheless in its legislative, executive, and judicial authority it must never claim absolute control over the intellectual and moral life of the citizens. The state is not above the conscience of its citizens, and it is not above the natural moral law. It is not the master of its citizens, and it does not own the land. The state exists for persons and for society. It has to regulate the temporal concerns of its citizens and guarantee respect for fundamental human rights. Conversely, a societal group must not take control of the state in order to favor a prevailing ideology through the opportunities offered by school education, university formation, or the news media. State control of the mainstream media not only betrays a mentality in favor of the authoritative state, but also contradicts the human right to objective information and freedom of opinion. People must not suffer discrimination and restriction of their civil freedoms merely because they oppose a momentarily dominant ideology.

The modern democratic state, which on the basis of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience faces a pluralistic society, not only acknowledges the individual citizen as a partner, but also must develop a partnership with the religious and civic groups in civil society. Since man is a social being, freedom of religion too can never be interpreted in a merely individual sense, but necessarily has a social component. Therefore one inviolable human right is people’s freedom to join together in a religious community with a common profession of their fundamental intellectual and moral principles, with common public worship and an independently drawn-up constitution for the community. These individuals must not be forbidden to participate in public life on an equal footing, and the state must recognize their activity for the common good. The state cannot make Christianity or Islam or any other community the state religion, nor can it officially adopt agnosticism or atheism and relegate dissenters to the status of a merely tolerated minority. This is a matter of genuine equal treatment. If it favors one, it inevitably disadvantages the others. The creed of the nineteenth-century liberals and socialists, whose ethics and teaching about the state were directed toward the interests of their own class, along with twentieth-century forms of political absolutism, consolidated in the axiom: Religion is a private matter. That statement, however, fundamentally contradicts individual and social human rights. What right does a citizen have to say: “My view of the world is scientifically superior to yours; I consider you less enlightened than myself, and therefore my hermeneutical and ethical principles will define public life in politics, science, public life, and culture”? What group has the right to decree, “The place for our opinions is the public forum, and the place for your intellectual and moral convictions is your private residence. Behind the walls of your church you can say what you like, but the street in front of the church belongs to us”?

Since the eighteenth century there has been a peculiar restriction of the acknowledgment of truth, while agnosticism has been made into an absolute. Is it possible, though, to prove philosophically that human reason as a matter of principle is incapax infiniti, incapable of grasping the infinite? How can anyone try a priori to rule out the possibility that finite, created reason can be elevated by God to participate in His reason through the mediation of His Word, which became flesh? It is the nature of reason to be ordered to truth, and it is part of the dynamic of freedom to be united with the good in love. No one can take from the Church the freedom to bear witness and to testify publicly: “Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:17–18).

The dramatist Lessing, with his parable of the ring [in the comedy Nathan the Wise] did not prove that there can be no sure knowledge of revelation and that religions can therefore have only moral and humanitarian, i.e., functional usefulness. He merely illustrated his agnostic position without proving its universal validity. Kant by no means disproved once and for all the possibility of metaphysics, but only pinpointed the impossibility of bridging the gap between rationalism and empiricism. Feuerbach, who considered faith in God to be a projection that alienates man from his nature, overlooked the fact that the events of historical revelation are not derived idealistically from the individual and collective consciousness of believers, and consequently his whole argument just begs the question. Auguste Comte’s law of three stages is his subjective schema with which he tries to brand intellectual history, without taking into account the spontaneity of philosophical knowledge, which is qualitatively different from the knowledge of empirical things. Nor is religion by any means — Marx and Lenin notwithstanding — the “opium of the people.”

Religion, the worship of God, the Creator and Father of all men, is instead the most profound source for the humanity and respect of our neighbor as a brother or a sister, in whose sufferings and needs Christ Himself meets me. Respect for freedom of religion and freedom of conscience forbids legal discrimination against or persecution of citizens with equal rights who belong to a particular religious community or to Christ’s Church. The state is not religious or atheistic; rather it must be neutral with regard to worldviews. The modern state does not govern civil society as an authoritative state, but rather ensures the free space for the involvement of its citizens and free associations. For this reason it must not only ensure the equal treatment of religious communities and associations that represent a worldview, but must also promote the constructive involvement of its citizens for the benefit of society in all areas.

Laicism and laicity

Someone who does not come from the Romance culture in Belgium, France, or Italy has difficulties at first with a laicist worldview of the state, which declares itself to be the supreme norm of public discourse and consequently makes itself absolute vis-à-vis pluralistic, free society. In Germany, this term and the concept of the state behind it cannot be translated literally. “Separation of church and state” has no hostile undertone there, but rather means mutual respect for the different responsibilities and consequently cooperation — for instance, in education and in the field of social services and charitable works. The common goal is the common good. If a school or a hospital that is owned privately or even by the Church is partially financed by tax revenues, the ones who are acting generously are not the politicians, but the citizens, who with their taxes help to support the institutions that benefit everyone.

In Europe we face the challenge of rethinking the various traditions for determining the relationship between the state and the Church or the non-Christian religious communities. The ideological power struggle over the European Constitution, in which the mere mention of the religious and Christian roots of European culture was rejected by so-called laicism, must not be repeated. It is always a sign of ideological narrow-mindedness when historical facts are denied. All the citizens in a pluralistic society should participate on an equal footing, and on this basis we must find a constructive relation of states to communities of believers or of persons who share a worldview. The laicity of the state needs a new, positive definition if society is not to be robbed of the intellectual, moral, and charitable resources that come from man’s religious predisposition and from the historical religions. For citizens cannot be compelled by state laws to embrace moral principles and to practice solidarity if people’s consciences are not formed by moral philosophy (“the categorical imperative”) and religion (“I am the Lord, thy God. Thou shalt . . .”) in such a way that they acknowledge the fundamental moral law: good must always be done for its own sake, and evil must be avoided unconditionally.

The concept laikos (First Letter of Clement 40, 5) in the Christian context has had a positive meaning from the beginning. The layman is the Christian as citizen of the kingdom of God and member of the household in the Lord’s family, as believer in Christ and person filled with God’s Spirit who enjoys “the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). Through faith and Baptism, Christians have been included in the People of God. The doctrine of the common royal priesthood emphasizes the equal dignity of all baptized persons as well as their duty to testify by word and deed to God’s universal salvific will for all men and to proclaim the Gospel (see 1 Pet. 2:5, 9).

The Church as the communion of salvation in Christ, the High Priest of the New Covenant and the bearer of hope for every man, is not divided thereby into two classes, so that a few from the company of disciples are appointed shepherds by Christ Himself and lead the pilgrim People of God to meet the Christ who is to come. The whole Church, as one salvific communion in Christ, is the sacrament of salvation for the world (see LG 1).

The faithful (priests, religious, and laity) are citizens of the one People of God, and the clergy are holders of a sacred authority for the entire Church; a note of opposition crept into this ecclesially defined view when societal and political developments were superimposed on the theological terminology. Think of the educational offensive of the Carolingian Renaissance. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the intellectual achievements of the Greco-Roman culture and the great patristic heritage were preserved chiefly in the cloisters and passed on to the empires that arose after the barbarian invasions. Bishops in governmental service, monks and priests in cathedral and monastic schools and in the later universities of the High Middle Ages were responsible for education and science, while “layman” became the designation for the uneducated. Over the long term this resulted in a drive to emancipate the laity from the educational monopoly of the clergy. From the fifteenth century onward, this was connected with a certain anticlericalism. The Protestant Reformation considered itself to be the rediscovery of the dignity of the layman (“We are all priests in like manner”), and by way of its anticlerical, anti-Roman sentiment it was able to make its concerns plausible to a broad populace. In contrast, the Catholic Church in the Tridentine Reform strengthened the hierarchical structure of the Church.

A political form of anticlericalism first developed against the papal universal monarchy in temporal matters in the Investiture Controversy in Germany. In France the tendency to set the state over the Church began symbolically with the attempt by Guillaume de Nogaret, the Chancellor of King Philip IV, to arrest the Pope in Anagni (September 7, 1303). This was supposed to break the political power of the clergy and to subject the Church to the state. The Church became an instrument of absolutism. The Edict of Fontainebleau (1685), with which King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had called for tolerance, was not only an act of violence against the religious liberty of the Reformed Christians but also an abuse of the Catholic Faith, which was forced to serve the ideology of France’s absolutist unity (“State religion”: un roi, une loi, une foi [one king, one law, one faith]). The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) and the 1791 Constitution could only be welcomed as a victory over the religious persecution of minorities, even though they were later thwarted during the Jacobin Reign of Terror. The anticlericalism of the French Revolution was aimed at the religious and Christian trimmings of state absolutism, but it maintained the absolute character of the state and even heightened it, because it no longer recognized any higher moral authority to which rulers had to answer in conscience.

The liberal anticlericalism in the nineteenth century saw its mission as the exploitation of state and culture to liberate enlightened citizens, the “nonclerics” — precisely the “laity” — from “rule by priests” and “religiously caused ignorance of the masses.” The secularization of Church property, the disbanding of cloisters and monasteries, keen supervision of pastoral work and preaching by state officials, and a constitutional oath as a prerequisite for pastoral activity were considered a boon for mankind by those who were politically responsible for the culture wars in Italy and Germany and by the champions of the laicist laws establishing the Separation of Church and State in France (1905) and in other countries. In how many formerly Christian states of Europe did laicism lead to the open persecution of Christians — and even to the plan to eradicate Christianity and above all the Catholic Church?

What a transformation: from the originally positive concept of the layman as someone called to be a citizen in the kingdom of God, to laicism as an ideological-political movement fighting against the Church! Both within the Church and in the Church’s relations with the non-Christian world, we must overcome the harmful battle between clericalism and laicism, which has been and still is responsible for so many infringements of freedom of conscience and for violations of human dignity. Society, politics, and culture need to be de-ideologized and liberated from the mania of dividing people into the categories of revolutionary and reactionary, right and left, liberal and conservative, and so forth. Ideologies always aim to marginalize their alleged opponents. Faith and reason, nevertheless, are founded on the recognition of the dignity of the other and of his otherness, and they motivate us to solidarity and to common action for the common good. Mere tolerance as mortar binding the individuals in a pluralistic society is not enough. Much more is required: willingness to understand the other and preexistence (being for others) (Dietrich Bonhoeffer), and the cooperation of everyone for peace between nations, for the freedom of every person, and for the political and economic participation of millions of poor people in the material and spiritual goods that belong to mankind as a whole.

Church and State according
to the Second Vatican Council

In the gradual development of a positive definition of the laicity of the state, the Second Vatican Council has epochal significance. The great challenges of the present and the future confronting all mankind cannot be met with a continuation of the ruinous ideological trench-fighting of the past.

First of all, within the Church the connotation of merely passive membership in the Church that has been associated with the term layman since the early Middle Ages has been overcome. The Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity Apostolicam actuositatem adopts the new overall approach to ecclesiology and puts it into concrete terms. The wider context is, as the Constitution on the Church Lumen gentium elaborates, an understanding of the Church in the mystery of God’s universal salvific will and thus also the depiction of the Church as the People of God, as the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Spirit, as sacrament of the most intimate union of men with God and sacrament of the unity of mankind. The special ministry of bishop, priest, and deacon — in contrast to the participation of all in the Church’s overall mission — is justified not functionally (in the Protestant sense) but rather sacramentally (in the Catholic sense). It is a matter of carrying out one mission with various forms of authority and charismatic gifts.

In connection with our topic, however, we must now turn to the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes, which essentially was prepared by French theologians. In it the Council addresses all people of goodwill, including atheists, to offer them an honest dialogue about the momentous topics of peace and war, about the immense potential of science and technology, and about the future of the human family. And no one can look away when people are starving, deprived of their rights, and enslaved in growing numbers, when the tragedy of refugees advances into the European house, and the globalization of opportunities and risks has become the greatest challenge for the world. The Church in today’s world is not a special-interest group that lobbies for its own interests alone. Everything that Gaudium et spes says “about the dignity of the human person, the community of mankind, and the deep significance of human activity provides a basis for discussing the relationship between the Church and the world and the dialogue between them” (GS 40). The Church therefore is offering not only dialogue but also collaboration in building the fraternal fellowship that corresponds to man’s noble, divine vocation. “The Church is not motivated by an earthly ambition but is interested in one thing only — to carry on the work of Christ under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, for he came into the world to bear witness to the truth, to save and not to judge, to serve and not to be served” (GS 3).

This is also a major theme in the pontificate of Pope Francis: “A poor Church for the poor.” The Church is poor in the totality of the faithful laypeople and their pastors who see themselves as following their Lord in His mission. Church property should not be given up, as idealists and enthusiasts demand, but rather used with great determination as a means to an end, namely, the fulfillment of the Church’s pastoral and charitable works. “The poor” are all persons in their existential need and material neediness, to whom Christ proclaims the gospel (see Luke 4:18). The whole drama of human history — the human condition, its hopes and disappointments, its joys and sorrows, love and death, man as a creature and in his God-given vocation to eternity, the whole mystery of man — finds in Christ its solution and redemption [Lösung und Erlösung]: “And that is why the Council, relying on the inspiration of Christ, the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, proposes to speak to all men in order to unfold the mystery that is man and cooperate in tackling the main problems facing the world today” (GS 10).

The knowledge about man derived from divine revelation does not detract from the rightful autonomy of man, of society, and of the sciences but rather puts it into the proper light: created realities have their own order and laws; after all, they are the result of the reason [Vernunft] that the Creator Himself placed in them (see GS 36). This assessment of the rightful autonomy of human research and activity in the sciences, in culture, in business, in the legal system, in medical advances, and in the service of politics for the common good of citizens and states should also allay the suspicion of some political parties that the Church would use her authority to tip the scales in the fight for political power. On principle the Church maintains an equal distance from political parties that stand on the common ground of human rights and democracy. Nevertheless she cannot help intervening constantly on behalf of the personal dignity of every single human being from conception until natural death. As she follows Christ, however, her preferential option for the poor is not taking sides with any one class or ideology in the fight for power, but rather participation in the fight for the non-negotiable dignity and essential equality of all human beings, regardless of their religion and social status. A human being must never become a means to an end — this is the necessary “interference” of the Church in politics.

The Church recalls that in a pluralistic society there are various competencies in relation to these earthly realities. But all discussions must remain on the common ground of the universally binding natural moral law, which is accessible to human reason and must not be ignored. The only alternative to the natural moral law would be the social Darwinist principle of the survival of the fittest, or “might makes right” in a battle of everyone for himself. Here we see clearly the prophetic service that the Church cannot fail to offer to a pluralistic society and to the whole human family. This also makes clear, however, the ethical criterion for the public activity of every Christian who becomes involved in government, business, law, culture, and sport for the common good. For this purpose the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith composed in 2002 a special Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life. According to this document, all Christians as citizens of their country are called on to take part in societal, cultural, and political life. Every Christian in a parliament, in a governmental office, or in the administration and the judiciary has the civil right and at the same time the personal responsibility, in conscience before God, to align his political work with Christian anthropology and Christian teaching about society and government. The duty of loyalty and obedience to civil laws and institutions can never be absolute, inasmuch as a real democracy is already the alternative plan to state absolutism and totalitarianism. In his Apostolic Letter Proclaiming Saint Thomas More Patron of Statesmen and Politicians, John Paul II observes that this great witness to conscience did not abandon loyalty to the civil authority and the legal institutions, yet with his life and death testified that “man cannot be sundered from God, nor politics from morality” (AAS 93 [2001]: 78f.).

This is the constructive critical laicity that we Christians owe to the common good. What we expect of a state founded on the natural law — according to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas about government and the teaching in Francisco de Vitoria about international law — is only the theoretical and practical recognition of the human dignity and the human rights of all, and by no means any compliance with the doctrines of the Faith that result from supernatural revelation, which can be accepted only by free consent anyway.

The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration Dignitatis humanae is of the utmost importance in defining the Church’s relation to the nonconfessional, philosophically neutral state that is founded on the natural law. In this document the Church affirms “the principle that religious liberty is in keeping with the dignity of man and divine revelation” (DH 12). The only possible foundation of a society is the dignity of man. He is endowed with it by the Creator. It is part of his intellectual-moral nature and constitutes the mystery and the uniqueness of his person. This dignity belongs to man from the very start, and no power in the world can deprive him of it. Man is a goal and end in himself and never a means to an end. His conscience is the sanctuary in which he is encountered by his Creator, to whom alone he must ultimately give an accounting, a sanctuary that must be protected against profanation and consequently from exploitation [Funktionalisierung]. From this come the rights of associations to self-determination and to protection from influence or restriction by the state.

For its part, the exercise of religious freedom is bound up with the natural moral law and has to respect the lawful public order and legitimate authority (see DH 7). No man may be forced to act against his conscience that is aligned with the natural moral law. Therefore, it would be a violation of human rights if a physician were compelled to kill a child in his mother’s womb or to assist a suicide. Likewise no one may commit immoral actions or disregard lawful public order by citing certain traditions of his religion.

Any religiously based destructive violence, in other words, the brutal violation of fundamental human rights to life and physical integrity, is a contradiction in itself. Whether and how a more than merely pragmatic ethics can be developed in theoretical atheism remains moot. How a moral action can be required without acknowledging the unconditional obligatory character of the good, in other words, on the basis of convention and consensus alone, is to this day not clear to me. In the religious act, in contrast, man recognizes that he is finite and ordered to a transcendent mysterium tremendum et fascinosum [awesome, fascinating mystery]. However he may understand the mystery of the absolute, he can never feel entitled to take from others what he himself has received.

The fact that destructive violence has been committed in the name of religion does not mean that it can be religiously justified, much less authorized. The purpose of the religious act is the worship of God, and consequently also the acknowledgment of the natural moral law that calls man in his conscience to render an account to his Creator. According to Jewish and Christian belief, the Decalogue is part of positive historical revelation and is written on the hearts and consciences of all those who do not know the revelation of the moral law (see Rom. 2:14).

This natural religious and moral ordering toward God, the Creator and Judge of every man, and the revealed faith in the same God, who revealed Himself in Jesus Christ as Love, categorically forbids any justification of violations of fundamental human rights, because God is the author and guarantor of human dignity in the first place. The good in creation is a manifestation and participation in the uncreated good of God. Appealing to God’s will in order to justify an evil deed is plainly a denial of the worship that is owed to God and a refusal to recognize His will, which always wants good, truth, and life for man. Something is not good because God commands it; rather, because something is good, God makes it the goal of our ethical activity. Therefore, no one can cite God so as to compel others with threats to acknowledge a concrete historical religion.

Christianity is about a self-revelation by God as Truth and Life for everyone in His Son Jesus Christ. Therefore, the God-man Jesus is Himself in His person the criterion for interpreting Sacred Scripture and apostolic Tradition, which testify to the revelation event. “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Only when a person lays down his life for another does he act in the spirit of Christ. Where lies and murder prevail, God is not at work, but rather the devil, “the father of lies . . . a murderer from the beginning” (see John 8:44). “This is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another, and not be like Cain who was of the Evil One and murdered his brother” (1 John 3:11–12).

No one can cite a saying in the sacred writings of his religion in order to justify the evil that he does to his brother. Either he is worshipping an idol instead of God, or he has misunderstood a statement. Recognition of the natural moral law, which raises its hand to speak in the conscience of every man, is the only secure foundation for a peaceful coexistence in solidarity in pluralistic societies and in the family of nations.

The position of the Catholic Church in today’s pluralistic world is clearly set forth by the Second Vatican Council — and I would like to conclude my comments with this description:

Whatever truth, goodness, and justice is to be found in past or present human institutions is held in high esteem by the Council. In addition, the Council declares that the Church is anxious to help and foster these institutions insofar as it depends on it and is compatible with its mission. The Church desires nothing more ardently than to develop itself untrammelled in the service of all men under any regime which recognizes the basic rights of the person and the family, and the needs of the common good. (GS 42)

Poverty as a Way of Evangelization

Poverty as a Way of Evangelization: Reflections in the Spirit of Pope Francis

Vallendar, Cardinal Walter Kasper Institute,
March 10, 2015

The “preferential option for the poor” is justified primarily and on principle Christologically. About Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was sent by His Father “in the likeness of sinful flesh” in order to condemn sin in the flesh (Rom. 8:3), the apostle Paul says: “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). Through His poverty and humiliation of Himself, we poor beggars before God, we mortals doomed to death, share in His universal message of salvation and are clothed with the glory of God.

Prompted by the Conciliar Constitution Gaudium et spes, Latin American liberation theology expanded this insight to the Church:

For theirs is a community composed of men, of men who, united in Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit, press onwards towards the kingdom of the Father and are bearers of a message of salvation intended for all men. This is why Christians cherish a feeling of deep solidarity with the human race and its history. (GS 1)

Church is authentic wherever the Good News is proclaimed in fidelity to Jesus’ mission to the poor (see Luke 7:22). Along the way of this universal mission to all mankind until the end of time, the Church does not let herself be defined by earthly splendor, wealth, and ambition, but solely by one motive: “to carry on the work of Christ under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, for he came into the world to bear witness to the truth, to save and not to judge, to serve and not to be served” (GS 3).

A poor Church for the poor

Benedict XVI addressed a concern with his demand for a certain “liberation of the Church from forms of worldliness,” in other words, its constant alignment with the gospel; Pope Francis takes up this theme again in Evangelii gaudium when he writes: “I want a Church which is poor and for the poor” (EG 198).

The no to spiritual worldliness (see EG 93–97) contrasts with a yes to the challenge of a truly missionary spirituality (see EG 78–80). When Jesus calls the “poor in spirit” blessed and promises them the kingdom of heaven (see Matt. 5:3), he is not justifying an escapist, irresponsible spiritualization and idealization of His gospel. Instead, spiritual poverty means being radically conformed to the mind and the destiny of Christ. This means that the spirit-filled person, unlike the earthly-minded person, actively agrees with what the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, says to him (see 1 Cor. 2:14). A disciple of Jesus cannot set his heart on deceitful wealth, fleeting power, or public esteem. He is liberated from slavery to false idols so as to serve others with all his material possessions and his intellectual and spiritual gifts, so as to become, like Jesus, a “man for others” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). That is the true freedom for which “Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1). This attitude of spiritual poverty, as interior freedom in Christ, connects those who have married in the Lord, who are rightly concerned also about the physical well-being of their family, with those Christians who have taken a vow of poverty. This charism of symbolic voluntary poverty points to the comprehensive dependency of everyone on God and to solidarity with all the poor who find themselves in material or spiritual need. Believers in Christ are united above and beyond all social and ethnic barriers. And they set their hope solely on the One and Triune God, who through the Church continues His work of redemption and liberation in history, until He Himself perfects it at the end of time.

The Church and we as her members are always tempted to present ourselves to the world as indispensable through the activism of a well-institutionalized spiritual–social-service operation, so as to gain recognition from the powerful and the leaders of public opinion. The Church’s institutions, her cultural accomplishments and charitable efforts, and Church property, instead of serving as means, threaten here to become ends in themselves by which we allow ourselves to be ruled. This is the malevolent spirit of worldliness and the desire to please men more than God. Pope Francis tirelessly warns us precisely against this. Jesus promises to send a counselor from the Father. The Spirit of God is “the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you” (John 14:17).

The problem is to overcome the crisis of relativism and secularism in many parts of the Church, without just falling into the opposite extreme of spiritualizing and idealizing the Faith and the Church. An apocalyptic mood and “inner emigration” [the decision of some German writers who opposed National Socialism to remain in Germany when the Nazis seized power] are overcome by a new trust in Divine Providence, which in the end will make everything turn out for the best. This requires personal love for Jesus Christ and a Spirit-filled profession of the Faith, instead of principled reliance on activity and a merely technical professionalism. Although externally we appear firm in our dogmatic convictions and religious practice, nevertheless we often secretly cling to economic security, to a feeling of power and esteem, instead of offering up our life for others in mission. “Let us not allow ourselves to be robbed of missionary enthusiasm!” Pope Francis exhorts us (EG 80).

The Church, which in Christ’s human nature has become poor and in His divine nature — rich, follows the way of the Gospel. She is evangelized by Christ in the poor and brings the Good News of Christ to the poor (see EG 198). In the fire of her love for Christ, in those who hunger and thirst, and in all works of corporal and spiritual mercy, the iceberg of spiritual worldliness must thaw. With the proclamation of the gospel to those who are materially, socially, and spiritually needy, and to all who long for justice, love, and eternal life with God, the Church fulfills her task of making Christ present in her communion by carrying out martyria, leiturgia, and diakonia [witness, worship, and works of service].

The task of evangelization

In His Incarnation, Jesus Christ assumed the poverty of creatureliness in all its aspects. We must not stop at the material, economic, and political surface of poverty. As Pope Francis writes in the foreword to the book On the Side of the Poor: The Theology of Liberation, which I published with Gustavo Gutiérrez, in a primordial sense, poverty is a paraphrase of our contingency. We are creatures and stand before God empty-handed. But our empty hands and our open mind are given to us by God, and they reach out toward our Creator. We receive from him the bread that we need each day, not humiliated and hurt on account of our reliance on the Creator and Father, but gladly and gratefully — eucharistically. Because we are created with Him as our end, our longing for truth and love does not exist in a vacuum. God communicates with us in His Word, His Son Jesus Christ, who assumed our humanity and shared our human lot. He is the true Bread from Heaven. He gives Himself to us as food and drink unto eternal life. Thus the transience of all earthly things does not lead us astray into tragic existentialism. Our existence in the world is directed instead toward a Logos-defined, that is, meaningful participation in God’s truth and love in creation, salvation history, and perfection in His eternity. Instead of pessimism, melancholy, and a yearning for death à la Schopenhauer, we live on “hope [which] does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5). Our PIN — the Christian’s personal identification number — is not Weltschmerz [weariness with life], but Evangelii gaudium, the joy of the Gospel.

Human existence by faith in Jesus Christ is always Eucharistic existence. But Christ took human nature upon Himself not only abstractly but also in the historical concreteness of its enslavement and disfigurement by sin. In a formula that bursts every paradigm of human understanding, Paul expressed the inclusion of sin with all its destructive power in the theandric mystery of Jesus: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). Everything that can be called hatred of God — the brutal violation of human rights, slavery and exploitation, the refusal to show solidarity and brotherly love that cries out to heaven — is thus encompassed by the mystery of love and mercy, so that we might become children of God, sisters and brothers of the Lord. The sin of the world is borne, suffered, and overcome by the Lamb of God. He who suffers in His own person all destructive violence becomes through His nonviolent response the one who overcomes evil and suffering. His Cross becomes the sign of hope and the sacrament of the reconciliation of men with God and with one another. He assumed our creaturely poverty, our proneness to death and sin, and filled it with the wealth of His divinity. He created us anew, “that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (1 Pet. 2:24).

In following Christ we recognize that Christianity is not an elite, philanthropic worldview with a humanitarian social praxis, placidly lulled in sentimental religious personal experiences, a narcissistic, self-indulgent ego trip. The intrinsic form and external measure of Christian life is not self-realization, the pursuit of one’s interests and passions, but rather service to the kingdom of God, namely, “to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1) — the logiké latreia. Our faith in Christ is the beginning of a lifelong process of the death of the old Adam and a daily pilgrim fellowship with the risen Lord. “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). A withdrawal from the real world into the realm of the ideal, a farewell to personal and public responsibility in nostalgia for lost paradises and golden ages, and a privatization of the Christian message that makes it exclusively otherworldly contradict what God has revealed to us in creation and in the redemption event, and everything that He has given to us with His Son and His Spirit. Indeed, Christ overcame the world of sin and wickedness, of suffering and death. He came to His own, not to emphasize the infinite distance between God and world, but in order to dwell among us, in order to stay with us always as God with us. “To all who received him . . . he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12).

Only from the vantage point of Jesus Christ do we recognize in the light of man’s divine vocation the whole economic, political, and societal extent of the poverty and misery of people who must lead a life beneath the standard of a dignified human life. Millions of our fellow men lack the most basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter; can afford neither medical care nor assistance in their old age; are denied a fair share in cultural goods; and politically are not recognized as full citizens with equal rights. Rather, to the detriment of the common good, they are demeaned as pawns in the pursuit of a monopoly on influence, esteem, and wealth by the powerful. Think of the countless hosts of people who became victims of injustice and violence: in war and genocide, through enslavement and rape, criminality and terrorism. Some stretches of history read like a mockery of the just by the wicked: “Where is your God?” (Ps. 42:10). These are our brothers and sisters, living beings of flesh and blood who are robbed of their human dignity. In view of this ocean of blood and tears that floods the history of mankind, no one could resist the feeling of despair, of abysmal nihilism, or of protest against fate or against God, had not the God and Father of Jesus Christ provided justice for the victims of unjust violence in the Cross and Resurrection of His Son; indeed, had He not revealed to men, who had lost all their glory, “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ” (Rom. 3:22). The judgment of the world is the victory of love over hatred.

Given the tragic failure of modern ideologies of progress and of the attempt at self-redemption in a capitalistic or socialistic paradise on earth, in short, the failure of a “godless humanism,” the basic questions arise once again, as they are so vigorously formulated in Gaudium et spes: “What is man? What is the meaning of suffering, evil, death, which have not been eliminated by all this progress? What is the purpose of these achievements, purchased at so high a price? What can man contribute to society? What can he expect from it? What happens after this earthly life is ended?” (GS 10).

The Church does not set up another monument of self-redemption alongside all the global declarations and programs to improve the world that are designed by men and doomed to defeat, because her Faith does not come from men but rather from God. By word and deed she gives witness to the Faith that was given and entrusted to her through God’s self-revelation. For the Church believes: “Christ, who died and was raised for the sake of all, can show man the way and strengthen him through the Spirit in order to be worthy of his destiny. . . . The Church likewise believes that the key, the center and the purpose of the whole of man’s history, is to be found in its Lord and Master” (GS 10). In the light of Christ, therefore, the Church carries out her mission, namely, to speak to men so as to illumine the mystery of man and to collaborate in his search for solutions to the problems of our time.

By proclaiming the Good News of Christ to the poor and the oppressed and by collaborating in the building up of a communal life in freedom, solidarity, and justice while acknowledging the unqualified dignity of every person, the Church follows the way of Christ, who “carried out the work of redemption in poverty and oppression” (LG 8). He was equal to God, but He emptied Himself and assumed the form of a slave like us. Therefore, He was also exalted by God (see Phil. 2:6–11). And we expect that the exalted Lord, who will come again as Judge, will transform our miserable body into the form of his glorified body (see Phil. 3:20–21).

God’s glory is revealed in the servile form of the Son. The sacrum commercium is the exchange of wealth and poverty between God and man. In Jesus Christ an intrinsic unity is displayed between theologia crucis and theologia gloriae [the theology of the cross and the theology of glory] both in Christian anthropology and in ecclesiology, because for us Christ is the crucified and risen Lord at the same time. The unknown and ineffable God granted that we might know Him and have the privilege of calling Him “Abba, Father” through the Son in the Spirit (Rom. 8:15), because we are not only called children of God but are so in truth (see 1 John 3:1). That is our situation and at the same time the eschatological dynamic that defines our approach to the world in relation to the mystery of redemption and communion of life with God: “Creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). Divine glory shines upon the face of the Church, so that in this way all men might be enlightened with the light of Christ through the Gospel. But this is certainly not “the deceitfulness of riches” (Mark 4:19, KJV), the splendor of earthly glory, pomp, and power. The Church follows her Lord. If she suffers and is persecuted, then precisely in this Cross shines the splendor of God, the “glory of the Lord” (Luke 2:9), the “fullness of his grace” (see John 1:16).

The Church as a visible community in this world needs material means only to carry out her task, “not . . . to seek earthly glory, but to proclaim, and this by her own example, humility and self-denial. . . . [Like Christ,] the Church encompasses with her love all those who are afflicted by human misery and she recognizes in those who are the poor and who suffer, the image of her poor and suffering founder. She does all in her power to relieve their need and in them she strives to serve Christ” (LG 8). Whereas Christ, her Founder and her Head, was holy and sinless, “the Church, however, clasping sinners to her bosom, at once holy and always in need of purification, follows constantly the path of penance and renewal” (LG 8).

An authentic theology of liberation

This is the place to talk about true liberation theology. It came about as a special response to the challenges of the poverty, exploitation, and degradation of millions of people in Latin America, a Catholic continent. Its Christological paradigm is the encounter with Jesus, the imitation of the merciful Samaritan. For Jesus did not appear as a guru of a supernatural mysticism or of a world-disdaining asceticism. On the contrary: in His proclamation of the kingdom of God, along with His healing of the blind, the lame, and the deaf, and His care for the poor and the outcast, the unity between the transcendent dimension of salvation related to God and the immanent dimension among our fellow men is evident. His death on the Cross does not manifest tragic failure but rather grants redemption from sin and injustice and reveals the new union of creature and God.

Jesus died on the Cross to show the liberating love of God that transforms the world and gives to every man a real hope, not an illusory one. Jesus’ death on the Cross made the world and history a place in which the new creation begins — in the here and now. And so liberation is bestowed on us not just in a purely interior way and at the moment of our individual death. Rather, the end of history is also the moment in which salvation is perfected: in God’s sight, in the eternal communion of love with Him and all His saints. In Jesus Christ, the God-man, an entirely new, eschatological, and definitive relation between God and world is brought about. Christianity cannot be reduced to a feeling of dependence on the absolute (Schleiermacher), an awareness of the infinite love of a heavenly Father with a bit of social commitment (Harnack). Being a Christian is not the sum total of metaphysics and ethics or the reduction of one set of questions to the other. Being Christian is not beautiful liturgy on Sunday plus social ethics for the rest of the week, nor is it traditional form plus social critique.

Being a Christian starts in the encounter with Jesus and is lived out as a venture for others. In his “Outline for a Book,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer sketched in prison in 1944 his answer to the question: “What is Christian faith in actuality?” as follows:

Our relationship to God is no “religious” relationship to some highest, most powerful, and best being imaginable — that is no genuine transcendence. Instead our relationship to God is a new life in “being there for others,” through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendent is not the infinite, unattainable tasks, but the neighbor within reach in any given situation. God in human form! Not as in oriental religions in animal forms as the monstrous, the chaotic, the remote, the terrifying, but also not in the conceptual forms of the absolute, the metaphysical, the infinite, and so on, either, nor again the Greek “god-human form of the human being in itself.” But rather “the human being for others”! therefore the Crucified One. The human being living out of the transcendent.²

In this perspective I would like to highlight some of the most profound insights of liberation theology. In a lecture that Gustavo Gutiérrez gave in the mid-1990s — with Cardinal Ratzinger attending — he emphasized: “It is important that in a final step the preferential option for the poor is an option for the God of the kingdom that Jesus announces to us.” And he continued: “Consequently, the ultimate reason for engagement on behalf of the poor and the oppressed lies not in the analysis of society that we employ, nor in the direct experience that we may make with poverty, nor in our human compassion. All these are valid reasons that no doubt play an important role in our life and in our relationships. Nevertheless, for Christians this engagement builds fundamentally on faith in the God of Jesus Christ. It is a theocentric option and a prophetic option, which has its roots in the gratuitousness of God’s love and is demanded by it.”

Jesus Christ died so that man might experience God as salvation and life in all areas of existence. From this results the original — Christological — impulse of liberation theology, which can be formulated as follows: it is not possible to speak about God without active, transformative, and therefore practical participation in the complex, integral liberating action launched by Him, whereby history becomes a process in which freedom is realized. And conversely the Church cannot restrict her efforts to improving the living conditions of the poor and at the same time cheat them out of God and the gospel. That would be an even worse kind of discrimination, a lack of spiritual care that would cause additional harm to the poor. In Evangelii gaudium Pope Francis states:

The great majority of the poor have a special openness to the faith; they need God and we must not fail to offer them his friendship, his blessing, his word, the celebration of the sacraments and a journey of growth and maturity in the faith. Our preferential option for the poor must mainly translate into a privileged and preferential religious care. (EG 200)

If the Church, therefore, together with the human race and in history, is at the service of this plan of Christ, then she can — as Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes — “be Church only when she is there for others.”³ This results in a final discernment of spirits, and each person is confronted with an interior choice. Either it is true that: “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ” (GS 1), or they are not really followers of Christ. To put it another way: either the Church shows in this way that she is not a self-satisfied community cut off from the world but rather the universal sacrament of salvation (see LG 48), or the Church is not fully Church as far as her nature and mission are concerned. The Church is truly Church when she is faithful to her liberating mission for the integral salvation of the world, which has its origin in the message of Jesus about freedom and liberation and in Jesus’ actions, as spelled out also in the Instruction Libertatis conscientia (1986) by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

As in the times of Bartolomé de Las Casas, to whom Gustavo Gutiérrez devoted a comprehensive study, today too God consistently stands on the side of the poor and works to lead them to freedom and to make it possible for them to participate in the fulfillment of the integral salvation that He promised for all men. From this perspective, finally, it becomes absolutely clear that talk about the “historical power of the poor” (Gutiérrez) is far removed from the formulation of an ideology at the service of “eternally recurring” utopian projects or plans that give rise to violence. “Historical power of the poor” is not to be understood as the violent elimination of one societal class, ethnic group, or religion by another as a way to abolish oppression and injustices, so as to arrive at a supposed paradise on earth or the classless society. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned against such tendencies of an ideologically falsified liberation theology in the Instruction Libertatis nuntius (1984). Finally, aid programs from capitalist-laicist countries that make developmental aid dependent on the acceptance of gender ideology and population control policies involving abortion and compulsory sterilization are discriminatory — and thus are guilty once again of the crime of colonialism.

God’s love also embraces rulers, exploiters, human traffickers, drug dealers, and Mafiosi. Even the threat of eternal damnation, which is only fair and should always be justified along the lines of a necessary theodicy, springs ultimately from the divine love that in Christ took the world’s sins and crimes upon itself so as to make repentance and conversion possible. Preaching about judgment and grace liberates them from their own form of slavery: from the typical slavery of greed, the “root of all evils” (1 Tim. 6:10), and from the idolization of money and power. These idols keep their worshippers from finding peace of heart, and in the end their own greed swallows them up.

Above all, though, liberation theology shows — in contrast to what Marxism says along with its twin brother, capitalistic liberalism — that Christianity is not an “ideology of consolation” or “Platonism for the people” at all (Nietzsche), nor mere illusion and projection. Genuine liberation theology makes it clear that in reality only God, the Father of Jesus Christ, and the gospel of grace and truth can plan an authentic, ongoing role in the humanization of mankind, both in the individual and in the societal-social respect. John Paul II splendidly summed up this same idea in other words in his 1986 Letter to the Brazilian Conference of Bishops: Rightly understood, liberation theology “is not only opportune, but useful and necessary.”

The judgment of Pope John Paul II has lost none of its relevance; it is even more valid today. In a time when hostility and greed have become predominant, in a time when we need as never before the living God, who loved us unto death, the Good Samaritan in his immense love, in the fleshliness of everyday life [der konkreten Existenz], bends over the suffering, the oppressed, and those who need salvation most. Pope Francis put it strikingly on July 27, 2013, in Rio de Janeiro: “So we need a Church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of mercy. Without mercy we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of ‘wounded’ persons in need of understanding, forgiveness, love.”

The liberating mission of the Church

A look at Sacred Scripture shows that covenant history is a history of liberation: with an ever more clearly apparent preferential option of God for the poor, the suffering, and the exploited, so that soteriology must always result in a social ethics also. Social ethics is meant as a theological discipline, because diakonia [service], caritas [charity], is an essential act of the Church. The liberating mission of the Church takes as its point of departure the liberating message of Jesus and His kingdom-of-God praxis. The Church promotes “the foundations of justice in the temporal order” (Libertatis conscientia 62) and remains faithful to her prophetic-critical mission “when she condemns the forms of deviation, slavery and oppression of which people are victims” (ibid., 65). The Church, however, in keeping with her mission, condemns also methods that repay violence with violence, terror with terror, and the deprivation of rights with disenfranchisement.

As for the relation between personal sin and social structures, it must be said that there is such a thing as “a structure of sin,”⁴ the result of collective aberrations and the expression of false mentalities. These can be called sin because, like evil concupiscence, they come from original sin, the death of the soul, and lead to sin. But this does not rule out the personal responsibility of the individual. No one can excuse himself by saying that the economic-political system forced him to exploit other people and ruin them. In no case do so-called historically necessary processes fatalistically define a person, as it were, and relieve him of the free exercise of his responsibility in God’s sight. “Fate” or “historical laws” (pertaining to ethnic, cultural, and sociological facts) do not determine the course of history, but rather Divine Providence (providentia Dei) in relation to human freedom and its fulfillment in love — both in this earthly life and with respect to man’s supernatural vocation.

Consequently the priority of person over structure remains. This is why the liberating praxis of Christians, which results from redemption from sin and the communication of grace, has as its consequence the change and the constant improvement of material and societal living conditions, and also understands the personal encounter of one person with another in the love of Christ as the heart of Christian life.

“Christians working to bring about that ‘civilization of love’ which will include the entire ethical and social heritage of the Gospel are today faced with an unprecedented challenge. This task calls for renewed reflection on what constitutes the relationship between the supreme commandment of love and the social order considered in all its complexity.” What is needed is “an immense effort at education: education for the civilization of work, education for solidarity,” and “access to culture for all” (Libertatis conscientia 81). Such an effort by the entire Church is necessary for the poor in the one globalized world, God’s creation.

I would like to conclude these reflections on poverty as a way of evangelization with words by Pope Francis:

For the Church, the option for the poor is primarily a theological category rather than a cultural, sociological, political or philosophical one. God shows the poor “his first mercy.” This divine preference has consequences for the faith life of all Christians, since we are called to have “this mind . . . which was in Jesus Christ” (Phil 2:5). Inspired by this, the Church has made an option for the poor. . . . This is why I want a Church which is poor and for the poor. They have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei, but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to acknowledge the saving power at work in their lives and to put them at the centre of the Church’s pilgrim way. . . .

The poor person, when loved, “is esteemed as of great value,” and this is what makes the authentic option for the poor differ from any other ideology, from any attempt to exploit the poor for one’s own personal or political interest. . . . Only this will ensure that “in every Christian community the poor feel at home. Would not this approach be the greatest and most effective presentation of the good news of the kingdom?” (EG 198–199)

² Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Christian Gremmels et al. (New York: Fortress Press, 2010), 501.

³ Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 502.

⁴ John Paul II, Sollicitudo rei socialis, December 30, 1987, no. 36.

Theological Criteria for Ecclesial and Curial Reform

Theological Criteria for Ecclesial and Curial Reform

Rome, L’Osservatore Romano,
February 8, 2015

The Church is concerned about the gospel, the truth, salvation. The history of the last two millennia teaches us that whenever the Church liberates herself from worldly thinking and earthly models of exercising power, this clears the way for a spiritual renewal in Jesus Christ, her Head and the source of life. The point of reference of the Church’s doctrine, life, and constitution is not the dominium of kings, but rather the ministerium of apostles: “Not that we lord it over your faith; we work with you for your joy” (2 Cor. 1:24).

This is evident in all attempts at a reform in capite et in membris [in the head and in the members] — for instance, in the eleventh-century Gregorian reform movement, when the libertas Ecclesiae was at stake; in the sixteenth-century Tridentine Reform; or even in the new springtime of the Church at Vatican Council II, into which flowed the biblical, patristic, liturgical, and ecclesiological renewal movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The temporal power of the pope and of the prince bishops had often been superimposed on the Church’s spiritual mission. In this liaison between political power and spiritual ministry, the pernicious influence of the mentality of power and prestige was often manifest. Even more devastating were the modern state-church system in Gallicanism, Febronianism, and Josephinism and royal patronage in the Spanish and Portuguese empires with the subjection of the Church to the authority of the state. Yet the Church derives her significance not from social consensus, the function of Christianity as a civil religion, or contacts with those in political power, but rather from the Word of salvation for mankind, especially for the poor on the margins of life.

The Lord instituted the Church as the universal sacrament of salvation for the world (see Lumen gentium [LG] 48) so that “all men may be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (see 1 Tim. 2:4). The Church cannot understand herself or try to justify herself in the sight of the world according to standards of power, wealth, and prestige. Reflection on the nature and mission of the Church of God is therefore the basis and prerequisite for any genuine reform.

Given people’s failures, there is always the temptation to spiritualize the Church and to relegate it to the realm of ideals and dreams — beyond the abyss of temptation, sin, death, and the devil, as if we did not have to go through the valley of crosses and suffering in order to reach the glory of the Resurrection. In a sort of analogy with the Incarnation of the Word of God, the Church forms an interior unity of spiritual communion and visible assembly, and thus serves the Holy Spirit as a sign and instrument of salvation for the purpose of continuing Christ’s work among men. The Church, therefore, is holy and sanctifying because she has been sanctified by God, and at the same time, as far as we on the pilgrimage of faith are concerned, she is “always in need of purification [and] follows constantly the path of penance and renewal” (LG 8).

In this sense Benedict XVI spoke about the need for an Ent-Weltlichung of the Church, that is, a liberation from forms of worldliness, to counteract her Ver-Weltlichung, or increasing worldliness. Pope Francis took up this idea resolutely with the theme of the “Church that is poor and for the poor.” The Church must not give in to the temptation to secularize herself by conforming to secular society and a life without God.

In the speech in which he extended his Christmas greetings on December 22, 2014, the Holy Father emphasized the priority of the Church’s spiritual purpose over any earthly means, which must not become an end in itself. This address is a spiritual exhortation and an examination of conscience for the whole Church. The compass for renewal is not the extent of the Church’s property or the number of people employed in our bureaucracies, but rather the spirit of love in which the Church serves men through preaching, the sacraments, and charitable works. The reform of the Roman Curia, which had been the subject of debates during the 2013 preconclave, should be an example for the spiritual renewal of the whole Church.

The Curia is not a profane administrative structure but a spiritual institution rooted in the special mission of the Church of Rome, which is hallowed by the martyrdom of the apostles Peter and Paul. The goal of reforming the Curia will not be reached if we expect the master plan from experts in politics and business, however helpful their recommendations may be. If the Church is not a worldly organization, she cannot be renewed by sidestepping her nature with merely worldly methods, but only in terms of her spiritual and sacramental nature.

“In exercising his supreme, full and immediate authority over the universal Church the Roman Pontiff employs the various departments of the Roman Curia, which act in his name and by his authority for the good of the churches and in the service of the sacred pastors.”⁵ Taking this theological description as its point of departure, the Second Vatican Council initiated a reorganization of the Curia to bring it up to date. The organizational structure and functioning of the Curia are subordinate to the special mission of the Bishop of Rome. He, as the successor of Peter, is given by Christ to the Church as “the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful” (LG 23). Just as we can distinguish the Church from a merely human religious community only by the light of revealed faith, so too only in faith do we understand that the Pope and the bishops have a sacramental authority of mediating salvation that unites us to God. This distinguishes them from the leaders that every religious community has for sociological and organizational reasons.

In the local Church, the bishop appointed by the Holy Spirit (see Acts 20:28) is by no means just a delegate or representative of the Pope, but rather Christ’s representative, the principle and foundation of unity in the Church entrusted to Him. The doctrine of the primacy of the Pope and the collegiality of the bishops is to be understood as the expression of their common concern for the whole Church as communio ecclesiarum [a communion of churches]. Therefore, the relation between universal Church and particular churches cannot be comprehended in terms of worldly forms of organization. The universal Church is not a sum total of the particular churches, nor are the particular churches subordinate branches of the universal Church. It is a matter of an inner meshing of universal and particular Church. The Church is the one Body of Christ; it is led and represented by the college of bishops cum et sub Petro [with and under Peter].

The Pope, in whom the unity and indivisibility of the episcopate and of the whole Church is made visible, presides at the same time as bishop of the local Church of Rome. The primacy is forever connected with the Roman Church by the work of the apostle Peter as Bishop of Rome and above all by his martyrdom. Just as “the bishop is in the church and the church in the bishop,”⁶ so too the Roman Bishop is never pastor of the universal Church without his connection to the Church of Rome. Just as the head cannot be separated from the body, so too the connection between the Bishop of Rome and the Roman Church is indissoluble. This is why Tradition often speaks also about the primacy of the Roman Church. The Pope always exercises the primacy together with the Roman Church.

As the visible head of the Church of Rome, he is at the same time the visible head of the whole Church. On account of the special authority of its founding by Peter and Paul,⁷ every other Church must agree with the Church of Rome in its apostolic Faith. In this way the essential marks of the one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church a fortiori are realized in the Roman Church. Since ancient times it has also been called the Holy Roman Church — not on account of the subjective holiness of its head and its members, but on account of the holiness of its specific mission, which consists of preserving intact the apostolic Tradition, the depositum fidei, and handing it on faithfully. The primacy of the Roman Church has nothing to do with any sort of dominion over other churches. According to its inner nature it consists of “presiding in charity,”⁸ in service to the unity of the Faith and of the communion of all churches.

The Pope carries out his universal pastoral ministry personally and immediately, because in his person he is the successor of Peter, on whom the Lord built his Church. But he performs this ministry also through the support that is due to him from the Roman Church. Over the course of history the College of Cardinals developed out of the bishops of the suburbicarian dioceses and the most important priests and deacons of the Church of Rome. As in a diocese the presbyterate, represented by the council of priests, assists the diocesan bishop, similarly the College of Cardinals is, so to speak, the “presbyteral” consilium for the Pope in his universal pastoral ministry. The recent regulation [issued by John XXIII] that Curial cardinals must also receive episcopal consecration corresponds to their incorporation into the College of Bishops; this fact is of considerable importance; for instance, for the bishops’ ad limina visits.

Through all the vicissitudes of history the basic idea has persisted, that the Roman Church, in the form of the College of Cardinals, collaborates in the Pope’s universal pastoral and magisterial responsibility. Rather large groups of cardinals and a few bishops who are appointed by the Pope make up the Roman Congregations, to each of which a particular area of competency is assigned. The Roman Curia essentially consists of the Congregations, the Pontifical Councils, and the tribunals. It does not form an intermediate authority between the Pope and the bishops, because through episcopal collegiality there is an immediate connection between the Pope and each individual bishop. The cardinals and bishops of the Curia support the Pope in his service to Catholic unity and make available to him the means necessary for carrying out his pastoral and teaching ministry. Within the framework of their assigned task and decision-making competency, the cardinal prefects ensure the collaboration of the members, the consultors, and the coworkers of a dicastery with the associated commissions and give an account of the results of their consultations and labors to the Pope. The latter is in no way restricted by the Curia’s activity, but only supported in the exercise of the primacy, which is entrusted to him as the successor of Peter for the benefit of the universal Church.

The way in which the Roman Curia works is collegial, analogous to the collegiality of the presbyterate under the leadership of their diocesan bishop. The prefect of a Congregation is only the chairman and representative, whereas the Fathers in the plenary assembly bear the same responsibility for the welfare of the whole Church. For the reform of the Curia it is important for it to be understood as a spiritual family. Collaboration, care for one another, prayer and Eucharist, retreats, and cooperation in pastoral work and preaching give a spiritual character and the necessary, fundamentally pastoral approach to the official work.

In this context it is important to distinguish the Roman Curia from the civil institutions of the Vatican State, whose organization is subject instead to the laws of governmental administration; these institutions guarantee the political independence of the Church. The Synod of Bishops, strictly speaking, is not part of the Roman Curia either. It is an expression of the collegiality of the bishops in communion with the Pope and under his direction (see Christus Dominus 5). The Roman Curia, in contrast, helps the Pope in the exercise of his primacy for all the Churches. Therefore, the Curia and the Synod of Bishops are formally different, inasmuch as the Curia supports the Pope in his service on behalf of unity, whereas the Synod of Bishops gives expression to the catholicity of the Church. Indeed, all bishops share in the concern for all Churches (see LG 23). Concretely, these two missions are interconnected, because as a rule the heads of the Roman dicasteries participate in the Synod, and many Synod participants are also members of Congregations and Pontifical Councils.

The Synod of Bishops, the conferences of bishops, and other federations of bishops belong to a theological category different from that of the Roman Curia. Only someone who thinks in terms of power, influence, and prestige interprets the organic correlation of primacy and episcopacy as a dispute over competencies. Rather, the Holy Spirit, from whom we must never close ourselves off, creates harmony between the poles of unity and multiplicity, between the universal Church and the particular churches, as he does also within the particular Churches themselves. The spirit of the world, however, sows quarrels and mistrust. Healthy decentralization cannot mean that now the bishops’ conferences get more “power,” but rather that they exercise the genuine responsibility that belongs to them on the basis of the episcopal teaching and governing authority of their members — always, of course, in union with the primacy of the Pope and the Roman Curia.

Curia and Church reform is more than just increased efficiency, reorganization, reducing costs, and controlling expenditures. Its goal is to bring to light more clearly the mission of the Pope and of the Church in the world of today and tomorrow. The Church is facing a challenge from worldwide secularism, which in unprecedentedly radical ways is defining man without God, barring his way to transcendence, and pulling the rug of humanity out from under his feet as well. In the dictatorship of relativism (Benedict XVI) and in the globalization of indifference (Pope Francis), the boundaries between truth and falsehood, good and evil are blurred. The challenge for the officials and the members of the Church is not to let themselves be infected by these worldly diseases, or else to be cured of them. In order to make God’s glory shine in the Church as a light for every person, Pope Francis is conducting a “spiritual cleansing of the Temple” that is at the same time painful and liberating. What the reform of Church and Curia is supposed to accomplish may dawn on us when we, like the disciples, remember the Scripture verse: “Zeal for your house consumes me” (see John 2:17).

⁵ Decree Concerning the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church Christus Dominus, October 28, 1965, no. 9.

⁶ Cyprian, ep. 66, 8.

⁷ Propter potentiorem principalitatem: Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus haereses III, 3, 3, 2.

⁸ Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans, prologue.

Tenth Anniversary of Pope Benedict

Tenth Anniversary of Pope Benedict

Afterword by the German publisher
Manuel Herder

The present volume is the result of a program of lectures on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the election of Pope Benedict, for which I invited guests to the Campo Santo Teutonico [the “Teutonic Cemetery,” adjacent to Vatican City, site of the German College and the Roman Institute of the Görres Society]. Gerhard Cardinal Müller gave a ceremonial address there on April 17, 2015, which is made available in this volume in revised form under the title of “The Primacy of Peter in the Pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI.” Additional lectures and brief remarks by Gerhard Cardinal Müller now supplement this lecture. Together they make up a whole, a look at the two popes, Benedict and Francis. Both with the event and with this volume [the German publishing house] Verlag Herder and I wish to express our respect for the German Pope. The book is dedicated to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI on the tenth anniversary of his election to the papacy.

The pictures that I selected for the back cover of this publication stand for the respective pontificates of the two Popes, Benedict XVI and Francis. First and in somewhat greater detail about Pope Benedict XVI: the picture was taken at an exhibition. It was the exhibition of all the books penned by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI that have ever been published — more than six hundred books; all languages, all editions, one copy each. I had launched this exhibition on the occasion of the journey of Pope Benedict to Germany. It was organized by our reader Dr. Stephan Weber, who takes care of the Collected Works of Joseph Ratzinger, and the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. It was displayed in Castel Gandolfo, in the Campo Santo Teutonico and in the Herder publishing house in Freiburg, before and during the papal visit in 2011.

Benedict, of course, viewed it only in Castel Gandolfo. Within the framework of an audience we were able to open the exhibition, which the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung dubbed “Benedict’s Book Fair.” The photo on the cover was taken on that occasion. What does it show? Through the long row of two book tables the viewer sees the Pope sitting on a golden chair. Around him stand people who turn toward the Pope. One person (the director of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana) offers a word of greeting. All the others are listening, the Pope too. Between his books, however, on the smooth, polished marble floor of the Sala Svizzera [Swiss Hall], the Pope’s image is reflected. For me this photograph expresses a phenomenon that we are becoming aware of with the increasing distance from Benedict’s pontificate, namely, the great discrepancy in how this Pope is perceived by those who try to understand him by his documents, writings, and homilies, and by those who evaluated his pontificate primarily according to short-term political standards.

The work of Joseph Ratzinger, which developed over decades, comes together as a great publishing oeuvre in the sixteen-volume German edition, Joseph Ratzinger Gesammelte Schriften [Collected Writings].

If one interprets the pontificate of Benedict XVI through his writings and documents, there are many surprises for the reader as a result. The surprises, of course, have to do with the author and writer of these documents, but also with the reader himself. The thinking of Benedict XVI is characterized by a magnificent familiarity with European intellectual, cultural, and theological history. The reader’s expectations of this author are derived from his own personal path of development and his own expectations of the offices that Joseph Ratzinger held in the Church. This does not seem to have bothered Pope Benedict; on the contrary. He publishes his books on Jesus under the name Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and writes in the foreword to the first volume: “It goes without saying that this book is in no way an exercise of the magisterium, but is solely an expression of my personal search ‘for the face of the Lord’ (cf. Ps. 27:8). Everyone is free, then, to contradict me. I would only ask my readers for that initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding.”

After the publication of the volumes on Jesus it was fascinating for me to see how various readers, women and men, drew quite different interpretations and personal conclusions from the text. They were, it seemed to me, like people who for many years or decades have gone for a walk every week in the same park or big botanical garden, Sunday after Sunday. They know the entrance and the exit, the hours when it is open; they know where the kiosk is and where each group of plants is located, from small ferns to the great giant trees. Their reading of the Jesus books was for them as though someone took them by the hand and led them through the familiar garden. He took them with him to the individual plants and explained to them the origin, history, and peculiarities of each: where they originally grew, what researcher first discovered them and brought them back home, how they are to be tended, and what medications can be derived from these plants. From a garden that was initially perceived in an undifferentiated way as a whole, countless details emerged. Many readers thus came to have a new understanding of the individual components that make up this garden — to remain with the image. Everyone listened attentively at a different place and did not take everything in the same way. Nevertheless each one recognized that in the writings of Benedict XVI there are suggestions for understanding his faith in God that are of personal significance for him. Thus, Pope Benedict gave these readers a direct insight into his thought.

Later generations will be astonished at what you could read about this Pope in contemporary newspapers. In retrospect, I think, the most credible accounts will be those that can explain the pontificate through their understanding of the documents. Then press reports and newspaper articles will no longer be consulted, but rather the books of Benedict XVI.

The first book of his pontificate was Values in a Time of Upheaval. We received the manuscript of this small book in January 2005, and consequently it was ready just in time for the conclave. I had taken a few advance copies with me to Rome and was carrying one in my coat pocket when I was in Saint Peter’s Square and heard the joyful news about the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope. Not far from where I was standing were youth groups. Very soon they began to chant the name of the new Pope, accompanied by rhythmic hand clapping — still somewhat clumsily at first, but after a few minutes already in the intonation that we then got to hear from the faithful so often during his pontificate: “Be-ne-detto, Be-ne-detto.” Together with the enthusiasm of the young people on Saint Peter’s Square I returned the next day to the publishing house in Freiburg to begin work for the new Pope. Only much later did I notice that my Catholic compatriots had missed the Saint Peter’s Square experience and the resulting enthusiasm for the new Pope and the new pontificate, and that many could find their way out of an attitude of embarrassed brooding only with the passage of time.

With the book Values in a Time of Upheaval the new Pope also started out on the best-seller lists in German-speaking lands. From then on we made almost all of Benedict’s writings available in a short time. Much later, specifically during his trip to Germany in 2011, I met a woman psychologist of the same age; she herself had grown up far from the faith, much less from any Catholic education, but after the election of Benedict she began by chance to read this short book. She was so enthusiastic about it that gradually she took an interest in the books of the new Pope and through them found a way of addressing the question of God in her life.

A reader of the book Light of the World could read as early as 2010 in this interview with Benedict that “if a pope clearly realizes that he is no longer capable, physically, psychologically and spiritually, of carrying out the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances, also a duty to resign.” And he also mentioned the suitable time for a resignation, namely, “at a peaceful moment or when one simply cannot go on.” This too is an example of how we can learn to understand this Pope by way of his books.

In the following remarks I would like to turn to Pope Francis. The picture of him that I selected for this publication shows the Pope among refugees on the island of Lampedusa. I see it as a symbol of his administration.

His pontificate too began for us in Verlag Herder with books. Only a few weeks after his installation we were able to present to him in Saint Peter’s Square his first books in the German language. We, that is, my brother Raimund Herder, the publisher of Editorial Herder in Barcelona, and I. The very night after his election as Pope, by brother began from his office in Barcelona to obtain rights to the Spanish-language books that until then had existed only in South America, in order to have them translated for German readers and consequently to secure them for our publishing house. Eventually Verlag Herder in Freiburg was able to print thirteen books penned by Pope Francis.

The first two books are substantial and may well say more about the Pope and his way of thinking than the German-speaking public has come to know so far. First we published the book Open Mind, Faithful Heart and his phenomenal book-length interview, Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio: His Life in His Own Words. Both books allow insight into the thinking of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. It got suspenseful for German readers with the two smaller books, Corruption and Sin and On Self-Accusation. With these, at the latest, it became clear that the new pontificate was not going to be a comfortable one — neither for him nor for us. The pictures on Lampedusa make visible what is already evident in his writings before his pontificate.

We are serving Pope Francis as a publishing house during his pontificate as we served Pope Benedict. On the basis of these books one can see a variety of topics and yet always a reference back to the images from his first trip at the beginning of his pontificate, to Lampedusa, to the margins of the Church. I am glad that we at Verlag Herder have the opportunity to accompany the change in the Church under Pope Francis just as we did during Benedict’s pontificate. For Verlag Herder, printing books is an entrepreneurial task that goes beyond economics.

My cordial thanks to Cardinal Müller for his lecture in Campo Santo Teutonico and for the publication of this and other texts in this volume in honor of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI commemorating his election as Pope ten years ago.

Manuel Herder

Freiburg, April 19, 2015

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Table of Contents

The Primacy of Peter in the Pontificate of Benedict XVI

Truth and Freedom: What Does Laicity Mean for Christians?

Poverty as a Way of Evangelization: Reflections in the Spirit of Pope Francis

Theological Criteria for Ecclesial and Curial Reform

Tenth Anniversary of Pope Benedict