Cardinal shares insights
ROME. Sept. 12 – Pope Benedict XVI sees himself as a Gospel evangelist on a mission to recover the face of the risen Christ in a modern world that dangerously, if not precipitously, values mere knowledge over revealed truth, Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, an intellectual of the Roman Curia, told journalists during an educational seminar for them here.
The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s self-image is humble, as reflected in the laden bear symbol on his coat of arms, said Cardinal Stafford, who heads the Apostolic Penitentiary, a major Vatican tribunal.Backgrounder
That’s very key if you want to understand Ratzinger – that laden-down bear,” he said during his lecture at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross.
But if Pope Benedict goes about his work as “a faithful pack animal, in strong contrast to his predecessor John Paul II, he is at heart an intellectual who poses a radical, systematic challenge to secular ideology. His challenge is no less than to upend the system of the 18th century philosopher Kant, who split faith and reason. Benedict insists on reversing Kant by making reason secondary to beauty – the beauty of God’s glory that fills John’s Gospel,” said Cardinal Stafford, who is the former archbishop of Denver.
Beauty, to Benedict, is ultimate because it reflects God’s unification of reality by the power of the incarnation, Cardinal Stafford said, drawing on his close association with the pontiff and a close reading of his writings since the 1950s. The pope sees a “restless God in loving search for us” constantly working in history through the moral challenge of Christ to bring out this all-penetrating beauty, the cardinal said.
Scandalized, Jewish theology and Greek reason rejected the intrusion of God in history, as modernism refuses it in its worship of technology, Benedict maintains, said the cardinal. But the separation of knowledge from the truth of the incarnation makes the subjective human person a servant of objectivity, a mistake that Benedict sees as corrupting and potentially devastating. The future of humanism, Benedict maintains, is impossible without God.
Benedict, a systematic theologian as opposed to a biblical scholar, does not see reality in terms of good vs. evil, Cardinal Stafford said. His God bound the two together paradoxically and sacrificed his Son on the cross so that history should know that salvation is love.
Love alone is credible,” Cardinal Stafford said, paraphrasing Benedict. The pope’s primary metaphor for salvation is his role model Augustine’s “flaming heart of love.”
Benedict is troubled but what he sees as the crisis of modernity. “He believes the spiritual climate today is a new ice age,” Cardinal Stafford said. “Ratzinger sees the same forces that haunted the 20th century operating in the 21st.” Benedict stresses that today no less than in St. Peter’s time it is the martyr’s conscience that in its powerlessness is the true challenge to dehumanizing power.
For Benedict, the cause of the crisis is not the elevation of man to God-like status but man’s separation from God’s truth, as evidenced in technology’s equating of truth with what is feasible. He fears parallels to Hitler’s Germany, where he personally witnessed the frightening gap because secular possibility and moral energy. “What is happening today in hedonism is directly related, genetically related, to the Hitlerian experience,” Cardinal Stafford said.
Benedict’s theology was formed by young Joseph Ratzinger’s experience of the intrusion of Hitler’s evil into the beautiful, changeless Bavaria of his youth, Cardinal Stafford believes. In meditating on the experience in later decades he understood Augustine’s paradox of the divine trumpet that blows two sounds with the same breath. To Benedict the sounds are not contradictory but contrasting, Cardinal Stafford said.
Benedict’s belief in the reasonableness of truth as unity amid contrast is expressed in his sense that the Bible is a continuous work rather than a collection of books and his restoration of older liturgical forms, Cardinal Stafford said. Benedict sees the pre- and post-Vatican II liturgies as continuous, just as he sees no break between the pre- and post-conciliar Church, he said.
(By Rick DelVecchio)
