Friday 1 July 2011

Sandro Magister on the Pontificate of Benedict XVI.

This really interesting analysis of the first six years of the pontificate of Benedict XVI has just appeared on the website of Sandro Magister and is well worth reading.


BENEDICT XVI, CANONICAL LEGISLATOR




The hermeneutic of the "reform in continuity," from the motu proprio "Summorum Pontificum" to the new evangelization of the West



by Sandro Magister





The definition "canonical legislator" could seem a surprising one, when applied to Benedict XVI. And yet it defines an essential feature of his profile, of his vision of how to govern the Church.

If the tempest that has been tormenting the Church for several decades is due to "ruptures" with respect to its tradition and identity – as Benedict XVI has said on repeated occasions, starting with the memorable speech to the Roman curia on December 22, 2005 on the interpretation of Vatican Council II – one of these lines of rupture, in the pope's view, stands precisely on the terrain of canon law.

He wrote this in the open letter he addressed to the Irish Church on March 19, 2010. And he explained it in even more direct terms in the book-interview "Light of the World" published at the end of 2010:

"It is interesting in this regard," the pope replied to a question, "what the archbishop of Dublin said to me. He said that canon penal law worked until the end of the 1950's; of course, it was not perfect – it could be criticized on many points – but in any case it was applied. Beginning in the 1960's, it simply was no longer applied. The dominant conviction was that the Church should not be a Church of law, but a Church of love; that it should not punish. [. . .] In that era, even very sound people suffered a strange obscurement of thought, [. . .] which led to an obscurement of law and of the need for punishment. And in the final analysis, a constriction of the concept of love as well, which is not only kindness and courtesy, but is love in truth."

A few days before the letter to the Irish Church, on March 10, 2010, at a Wednesday general audience, Benedict XVI developed more extensively his interpretation of the history of the Church in recent decades.

The pope dedicated that audience to Saint Bonaventure, one of the three saints he personally loves the most, together with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas: the saint on whom he published his doctoral thesis in his youth, on his theology of history compared with the highly influential one of Joachim of Fiore.

According to Joachim of Fiore, after the era of the Father and the Son, the latter coinciding with the time of the Church, the dawn of a third and final era of the world was imminent, that of the Holy Spirit: an era of complete freedom, with a new spiritual Church with no more hierarchy or dogmas, an era of definitive peace among people, of the reconciliation of peoples and religions.

It's a small step from spiritualism to anarchy, Benedict XVI explained at that audience. And Saint Bonaventure, in his day, made no small effort to combat this tendency, widespread in his Franciscan order.

But today as well, the pope continued, this "spiritualist utopianism" is bouncing back in the Church:

"We know that after the Second Vatican Council some were convinced that everything was new, that there was a different Church, that the pre-Conciliar Church was finished and that we had another, totally 'other' Church an anarchic utopianism! And thanks be to God the wise helmsmen of the Barque of St Peter, Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, on the one hand defended the newness of the Council, and on the other, defended the oneness and continuity of the Church."

Newness and continuity. Because it is not true that the Church of God should be "immobile, fixed in the past, and that there cannot be innovations in it." The pope again cited Saint Bonaventure: "Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt," the works of Christ do not draw back, they are not consumed, but they advance and progress. They guarantee "innovation and renewal in all periods of history."

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This is enough to understand that pope Joseph Ratzinger is not at all a guardian of tradition and nothing more. His vision of the Church is dynamic. He is not afraid of using the word "reform" to define his hermeneutic of Vatican Council II.

This is what he did in that capital discourse which he addressed to the Roman curia on December 22, 2005, the eve of his first Christmas as pope.

"Vatican Council II," Benedict XVI said on that occasion, "with its new definition of the relationship between the faith of the Church and certain essential elements of modern thought, has reviewed or even corrected certain historical decisions, but in this apparent discontinuity it has actually preserved and deepened her inmost nature and true identity. The Church, both before and after the Council, was and is the same Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, journeying on through time."

The solely "apparent" discontinuity of which the pope speaks refers precisely to the "inmost nature" of the Church and to its "true identity," which have remained intact, he says, in spite of the corrections made by Vatican II to "certain historical decisions" of the Church itself.

At the same time, however – Benedict XVI also said in that speech – alongside this solely "apparent" discontinuity there has also been true discontinuity, at least in one case, between the Council and the previous magisterium of the popes.

The case that pope Ratzinger cited and analyzed is that of religious freedom, affirmed by the declaration "Dignitatis Humanae." The discontinuity there with the magisterium of the popes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is incontestable. "Dignitatis Humanae" affirms and proclaims what the encyclical "Quanta Cura" of Pius IX in 1864, with the relative "Syllabus Errorum," had refuted and condemned.

Nonetheless, this discontinuity, Benedict XVI explained, concerns not the nature and identity of the Church, but the conception of the state and its relationship with religion. The subject Church, instead, emerges from this change even more clear and luminous, because, the pope says, Vatican II, "recognizing and making its own an essential principle of the modern State with the Decree of Religious Freedom, has recovered the deepest patrimony of the Church." This means that it has put itself back "in full harmony" not only with the teaching of Jesus on the distinction between God and Caesar, but "as well as with the Church of the martyrs of all time," because they died precisely "for the freedom to profess one's own faith – a profession that no State can impose but which, instead, can only be claimed with God's grace in freedom of conscience."

This innovation of the Council was nonetheless seen by many, during the sessions and afterward, as a rupture with respect to the tradition of the Church. With great rejoicing for those who saw in Vatican II a radiant "new beginning" of the age and of the Church. With great consternation for those who saw in it a pernicious abandonment of correct doctrine.

And the temptation was easy for both sides. Benedict XVI, again in the speech of December 22, 2005, recognized that in effect, "if religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth and thus become a canonization of relativism," then it could give rise to the idea – unacceptable – that all religions are of equal value and that the missionary propagation of the Catholic faith no longer has any reason to exist.

An idea not devoid of grave repercussions for the life of the Church, if John Paul II felt the need in 1990 to dedicate an encyclical, "Redemptoris Missio," to the observance of the mandate of Jesus to make disciples and baptize all peoples, and if in 2000 the same pope, with the prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith at the time, Cardinal Ratzinger, felt obliged to reiterate, with the declaration "Dominus Iesus," that the Lord Jesus is the sole savior of all men.

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As successor of Peter, Ratzinger has continued decisively on this path. He has stated and argued without rest that the Church's recognition of the freedom of every citizen of every state of the world to observe the religion that he considers in conscience to be true, and to propagate it, is not in contradiction with the missionary nature of the Church and with the faith that only Jesus is "the way, the truth, the life." This recognition of religious freedom, however, prompts Christians to think of their own missionary action in the most genuine way, aware that the profession of faith in Christ "cannot be imposed by any state, but instead can be made one's own only with the grace of God, in freedom of conscience."

And therefore, Benedict XVI continued in that extraordinary speech of December 22, 2005:

"A missionary Church known for proclaiming her message to all peoples must necessarily work for the freedom of the faith. She desires to transmit the gift of the truth that exists for one and all. At the same time, she assures peoples and their Governments that she does not wish to destroy their identity and culture by doing so, but to give them, on the contrary, a response which, in their innermost depths, they are waiting for – a response with which the multiplicity of cultures is not lost but instead unity between men and women increases and thus also peace between peoples."

The "new evangelization" desired by Benedict XVI has this modern feature: it definitively strips itself of any secular extension, of any kind of imposition, even sophisticated and delicate, in this regard perfectly in line with the modern liberal conceptions of citizenship, and entrusts the truth to every man "only through the process of conviction."

But at the same time, the "new evangelization" of Pope Benedict reclaims and reinvigorates the original features of Jesus' mandate to the disciples. Because what is this, if not the pedagogy of God from the Old to the New Testament? And what is it if not the style of Jesus, in his preaching of the Kingdom? And what is it if not the dialogue of the biblical authors and then of the Fathers of the Church with the wisdom of the Greek philosophers and the prophecies of the Sibyls? And what is it if not the grafting of Christian art onto the classical heritage?

The lecture in Regensburg on September 12, 2006 is the other capital discourse of the pontificate of Benedict XVI, in perfect continuity with the one cited to this point. The best of Greek thought "forms an integral part of Christian faith," the pope affirmed at that university of erudition where he had taught. The human "logos" is the reflection of the eternal "Logos." Therefore even in the man farthest from God, this rational illumination that points back to God is never extinguished. The proclamation of Christianity must not and cannot do without the reasons for faith. All the more so in a world like that of today, and in a region like Europe, marked by Christianity but withdrawn far from it.

One aspect, but not the only one, of the "new evangelization" of Benedict XVI is what he has called the "courtyard of the gentiles." He announced it at the end of 2009 after visiting Prague, capital of one of the most de-Christianized regions of Europe. And he intended it for those "persons who know God only from afar; who are dissatisfied with their gods, rites, myths; who desire the Pure and the Great, even if God remains for them the 'unknown God'."

The image of the "courtyard of the gentiles," the courtyard outside the temple of Jerusalem for the "Godfearers," non-Jews who could not take part in Mosaic worship but approached it in prayer, leads to another great pillar of the pontificate of Benedict XVI, also in equilibrium between newness and continuity: the pillar of the liturgy.

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That Vatican Council II should have dedicated its opening and its first document to the theme of the liturgy "revealed itself as also the most intrinsically just thing," pope Ratzinger wrote in the preface to the first volume, intentionally liturgical through and through, of his "opera omnia." Because God is the absolute priority. Because the orthodoxy of the faith, as the etymology of the word says, is "doxa," the glorification of God. And therefore the right way of adoration is the true measure of faith: "lex orandi, lex credendi."

For this same reason, Ratzinger has repeatedly maintained that the crisis of the Church in recent decades has its origin in the disarray precisely in the field of the liturgy, and in particular in the widespread opinion that the new liturgy produced by the conciliar reforms marked a radical break with the previous liturgy.

In effect, the variations introduced in the liturgy starting at the end of the 1960's here and there marked an evident rupture with the past. The Mass understood above all as sacrifice of redemption and celebrated "facing the Lord" has been replaced with a Mass as fraternal meal, on an altar in the form of a table brought as close as possible to the faithful. The liturgy as "opus Dei" has been replaced with an assembly dynamic with the community as protagonist.

In some places and at certain times, these variations have been pushed to the extreme. One exemplary case is that illustrated by the booklet "Kerk en Ambt," Church and ministry, distributed in 2007 in the Dutch parishes by the Dominicans of that country. It proposed making a general rule of what was already being practiced, and is being practiced, in various places: the Mass presided over by a priest or a layperson, "it does not matter whether man or woman, homosexual or heterosexual, married or single." With the Eucharistic words of institution pronounced by one or another of those present, designated "from below," or even by the assembly as a whole, and freely replaced with "expressions easier to understand and more in harmony with the modern experience of the faith."

So it comes as no surprise that Benedict XVI gave this alarming description of the liturgical disarray following the Council, in a letter addressed in that same 2007 to the bishops of the whole world:

"In many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear. I am speaking from experience, since I too lived through that period with all its hopes and its confusion. And I have seen how arbitrary deformations of the liturgy caused deep pain to individuals totally rooted in the faith of the Church."

The letter just cited is the one with which Benedict XVI accompanied the promulgation of the motu proprio "Summorum Pontificum" of July 7, 2007, with which he liberalized the celebration of the Mass according to the missal of 1962, the one prior to Vatican II, which moreover was used peacefully during the entire conciliar assembly.

Benedict's intention, expressed in the letter, is that the two forms of the Roman rite, ancient and modern, in coexisting "can be mutually enriching."

In particular, the pope's wish is that "the celebration of the Mass according to the Missal of Paul VI will be able to demonstrate, more powerfully than has been the case hitherto, the sacrality which attracts many people to the former usage."

Which is exactly what is happening, before the eyes of all, every time pope Ratzinger celebrates the Mass: in the "modern" rite, but in a style faithful to the riches of tradition.

In the instruction "Universæ Ecclesiæ" released last May 13, as a further clarification and application of the motu proprio "Summorum Pontificum," this other passage from Benedict XVI's 2007 letter is cited:

"There is no contradiction between the two editions of the Roman Missal. In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful."

And vice versa – the instruction "Universæ Ecclesiæ" reiterates – the faithful who celebrate the Mass in the ancient rite "must not in any way support or belong to groups which show themselves to be against the validity or legitimacy of the Holy Mass or the Sacraments celebrated in the 'forma ordinaria'."

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It is clear from this citation that the "reform in continuity" is also in the liturgical field the hermeneutic criterion by which Benedict XVI wants to lead the Church out of the current crisis.

The uneven welcome seen in the Church for both the motu proprio and the subsequent instruction is proof of how serious and urgent Benedict XVI's proposal is.

In the liturgical field, in fact, the hermeneutic of rupture is the daily bread, still, both of those traditionalists who see in the new rite of the Mass the emergence of heretical elements, and of the progressives who see in the liberalization of the ancient rite the renunciation of the ecclesial "new beginning" inaugurated by Vatican II.

Among liturgists, this latter opinion is very widespread. For them the modern form of the rite has supplanted the ancient one, and cannot bear that the other should continue. Proof of this is the recent polemical "vis" with which Andrea Grillo, a liturgist, reacted to PierAngelo Sequeri, a theologian, this latter guilty of having defended the "Catholic-style lesson" imparted by Benedict XVI on restoring "ecclesial hospitality" to the ancient form of the Roman rite.

Sequeri had written on the front page of "Avvenire" on May 14:

"From now on, joining forces to restore to the liturgy the powerful spell of the faith that stands in the presence of the one Lord must appear to us, in these difficult times, as the only truly necessary thing for the splendor of the tradition of the faith. And what if this were exactly what we were missing? What is the source – and where does it lead us – of this habituation to do-it-yourself investiture, which sets up anyone as savior of Christianity, and certain guide of its uncertain guides?"

Benedict XVI's intention – as is known, and was reiterated on May 14 by Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the pontifical council for Christian unity, at a conference in Rome on the motu proprio "Summorum Pontificum" – is not, in fact, that of making the two forms of the rite, modern and ancient, coexist indefinitely. In the future, the Church will again have a single Roman rite. But the journey that the pope sees ahead in order to integrate the two current forms of the rite is long and difficult. And it demands the birth of a new, high-quality liturgical movement like the one prepared by Vatican Council II and drawn on by Raztinger himself, the liturgical movement of Guardini and Jungmann, of Casel and Vagaggini, of Bouyer and Daniélou, of those greats who were not by accident even severe critics of the postconciliar liturgical developments.

Just as the liturgy has been in recent decades the field of the most evident ruptures between the present of the Church and its tradition, so also the hermeneutic of "reform in continuity" has in the liturgy, with Benedict XVI, its most dramatic testing ground.





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