Ten Years Ago Today:
The priorities of Benedict
XVI's pontificate
by Camillo Ruini
In the homily at the beginning of his pontificate, Benedict XVI said that he
had no program of his own, if not the one that comes to us from the Lord Jesus
Christ. This was a clear reminder of what is essential in Christianity. The new
pontificate also situated itself in substantial continuity with that of John
Paul II, whose main collaborator in terms of decisive content was Joseph
Ratzinger.
In this context, it is not difficult to identify some of the priorities of
Benedict XVI's pontificate.
The first and greatest priority is God himself, that God who is too easily
pushed to the edges of our lives, focused on "doing," especially
through "techno-science," and on "enjoyment-consumption."
That God is even expressly negated by an evolutionist "metaphysics"
that reduces everything to nature, to matter-energy, to chance (random
mutations) and to necessity (natural selection), or more often is said to be
unknowable according to the principle that "latet omne verum," all
truth is hidden, as a result of the restriction of the horizons of our reason
to that which can be experienced and measured, according to the view now
prevalent. That God, finally, who has been proclaimed "dead," with
the assertion of nihilism and the resulting collapse of all certainty.
The first effort of the pontificate is therefore to reopen the road to God: but
not, however, by having the agenda dictated by those who do not believe in God
and rely only upon themselves. On the contrary, the initiative belongs to God,
and this initiative has a name, Jesus Christ: God reveals himself to us in some
manner in nature and conscience, but he has revealed himself in a direct and
personal manner to Abraham, Moses, the prophets of the Old Testament, and in an
unprecedented manner he has revealed himself in the Son, in the incarnation,
cross, and resurrection of Christ. There are therefore two paths, that of our
search for God and that of God who comes in search of us, but only the latter of
these permits us to know the face of God, his deep mystery, his attitude toward
us.
This brings us to the second priority of the pontificate: prayer. This is not
only personal prayer, but also and above all prayer "in" and
"of" the people of God and the body of Christ, meaning the liturgical
prayer of the Church.
In the preface to the first volume of his "Opera omnia," recently
published in German, Benedict XVI writes: "The liturgy of the Church has
been, since my childhood, the central activity of my life, and also became the
center of my theological work." We can add that today it is the center of
his pontificate.
This brings us to a controversial point, especially after the motu proprio
permitting the use of the preconciliar liturgy, and even more after the lifting
of the excommunication from the four Lefebvrist bishops. But even before this,
Joseph Ratzinger had made this point very clear. He was one of the great
supporters of the liturgical movement that paved the way for the Council, and
one of the main proponents of Vatican II, and has always remained so. But with
the implementation of the liturgical reform in the first years following the
Council, he opposed the prohibition against using the missal of St. Pius V,
seeing this as an unnecessary cause of suffering for the many people who loved
that liturgy, in addition to being a rupture with the previous praxis of the
Church, which, in the successive reforms of the liturgy in history, had not
prohibited the liturgies in use until then. As pontiff, he has thus believed it
necessary to remedy this inconvenience by making it easier to use the Roman
rite in its preconciliar form. He was also driven to do this by his fundamental
duty as promoter of Church unity. Moreover, he was moving in the direction already
begun by John Paul II. In this spirit, the lifting of excommunication was
granted in order to facilitate the return of the Lefebvrists, but certainly not
in order to dispense with the essential condition of this return, which is full
acceptance of Vatican Council II, including the validity of the Mass celebrated
according to the missal of Paul VI.
In the positive sense, Benedict XVI has clarified the interpretation of Vatican
II in his speech to the Roman curia on December 22, 2005, distancing himself from
the "hermeneutics of rupture," which has two forms: the prevalent
one, which sees the Council as constituting a radical novelty, and "the
spirit of the Council" as much more important than the letter of its
texts; the other, on the opposite extreme, sees only the tradition before the
Council as valid, and the Council as a rupture rife with harmful consequences,
as the Lefebvrists themselves maintain.
Benedict XVI proposes instead the "hermeneutics of reform," or
newness in continuity, supported before him by Paul VI and John Paul II: this
means that the Council constitutes a great novelty, but in continuity with the
one Catholic tradition. Only this kind of hermeneutics is theologically
sustainable and pastorally fruitful.
We have thus brought to light another priority of the pontificate: to promote
the implementation of the Council, on the basis of this hermeneutics.
Ten Years Ago Today
In the same perspective, we can speak of a "Christological" or
"Christocentric" priority of the pontificate. This is expressed in
particular in the book "Jesus of Nazareth," an unusual effort for a
pope, to which Benedict XVI dedicated "all of his free moments."
Jesus Christ, in fact, is the way of God the Father, he is the substance of
Christianity, he is our only Savior.
For this reason, there is terrible danger in the separation between the Jesus
of history and the Christ of faith, a separation that is the result of a
unilateral absolutization of the historical-critical method, and more precisely
an application of this method on the basis of the presupposition that God does
not act in history. Such a presupposition, already by itself, represents in
fact the negation of the Gospels and of Christianity. In this case as well, it
is a matter of expanding the room for rationality, giving credit to a form of
reasoning that is open, not closed, to the presence of God in history. This
book puts us in contact with Jesus, and in this way introduces us into the
substance, into the profundity and novelty of Christianity: reading it is an
effort that costs a bit of exertion, but repays this abundantly.
***
At this point, we can return to the first priority, God, in order to take into
consideration also the rational and cultural effort of Benedict XVI, for the
purpose of opening contemporary reason to God and of making room for God in
behavior and life, personal and social, public and private: particularly
important here is the address in Regensburg, the more recent one in Paris, and
also the one in Verona in 2006.
As for contemporary reason, Benedict XVI develops a "criticism from
within" of scientific technological rationality, which today exercises
cultural leadership. This criticism does not concern rationality in itself,
which on the contrary has great value and merit, since it allows us to understand
nature and ourselves as never before possible, and to improve enormously the
practical conditions of our lives. It concerns, instead, its absolutization, as
if this rationality constituted the only valid understanding of reality.
Such an absolutization does not proceed from science as such, nor from the
great men of science, but rather from a "vulgate" that is very
widespread and influential today, and yet is not science but a rather old and
superficial philosophical interpretation of it. Science, in fact, owes its
successes to its rigorous methodological limitation to that which can be
experienced and measured. But if this limitation is universalized, by applying
it not only to scientific research but to reason and human understanding and as
such, it becomes unsustainable and inhuman, since it would prevent us from
rationally pondering the decisive questions of our lives, which concern the
meaning and purpose for which we exist, the orientation to give to our
existence, and would force us to entrust the answer to these questions solely
to our sentiments or arbitrary choices, detached from reason. This may be the
most profound problem and also the drama of our present civilization.
Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI goes a step further, demonstrating that reflection
on the very structure of scientific knowledge opens the way to God.
One fundamental characteristic of this knowledge is, in fact, the synergy
between mathematics and experience, between hypotheses formulated
mathematically and their experimental verification: this has produced the
monumental, ever-increasing results that science is making available to us. But
mathematics is a pure and "abstract" result of our rationality, which
pushes beyond everything that we can imagine and represent materially: this
happens in particular in quantitative physics – where a single mathematical
formulation corresponds at the same time to the image of a wave, or of a
particle – and in the theory of relativity, which implies the image of the
"curvature" of space. The correspondence between mathematics and the
real structures of the universe, without which our scientific predictions would
not come true and our technologies would not work, therefore implies that the
universe itself is structured in a rational manner, such that there exists a
profound correspondence between the reason inside of us and the reason that is
"objectified" in nature, or rather intrinsic to nature itself. But we
must ask ourselves how this correspondence is possible: thus emerges the
hypothesis of a creative Intelligence, which is at the origin of both nature
and our rationality. The analysis, nonscientific but philosophical, of the
conditions that make science possible therefore brings us back toward the
"Logos," the Word of which Saint John speaks at the beginning of his
Gospel.
Benedict XVI is not, however, a rationalist, he understands very well the
obstacles that obscure our reason, the "strange penumbra" in which we
live. For this reason, even at the philosophical level, he does not propose the
reasoning that we have seen as an apodictic demonstration, but as "the
best hypothesis," which requires on our part that we "renounce a
position of domination and risk that of humble listening": the contrary,
therefore, of the attitude that is widespread today, and is called
"scientism."
In the same way, it cannot be called "scientific" to reduce man to a
product of nature ultimately the same as all the others, denying that
qualitative difference which characterizes our intelligence and our freedom. Such
a reduction constitutes, in reality, the complete overturning of the point of
departure for modern culture, which consisted in the defense of the human
subject, or of his reason and freedom.
For this reason, as Benedict XVI said in Verona, precisely today the Christian
faith presents itself as the "great yes" to man, to his reason and
freedom, in a socio-cultural context in which individual freedom is emphasized
on the social level, making it the supreme criterion of every ethical and legal
decision, and in particular in "public ethics," while however denying
freedom itself as a reality intrinsic to us, meaning as our personal capacity
to choose and to decide, beyond biological, psychological, environmental, and
existential conditioning and determinism.
Precisely the reestablishing of a genuine concept of freedom is another
priority of the pontificate, the last of which I will speak.
This concerns personal and social life, both public structures and personal
behaviors. Benedict XVI disputes, that is, the ethics and the conception of the
role of the state and its secularism that he himself has called "the
dictatorship of relativism," according to which there is nothing that is
good or evil in itself, objectively, but everything must be subordinated to our
personal decisions, which automatically become "rights of freedom."
This excludes, at least on the public level, not only the ethical norms of
Christianity and every other religious tradition, but also the ethical
guidelines founded on the nature of man, meaning the profound reality of our
being. This is a radical break, a genuine split with the history of humanity: a
break that isolates the secularized West from the rest of the world.
In reality, personal freedom is intrinsically relative to other persons and to
reality, it is freedom not only "from," but "with" and
"for," it is shared freedom that is realized only in combination with
responsibility. In concrete terms, Benedict XVI is sometimes accused of
insisting unilaterally on anthropological and bioethical topics, like the
family and human life, but in reality he similarly stresses social and
environmental topics (although certainly without indulging in "ideological
pollution"). His third encyclical, which is now imminent, will be dedicated
to social topics. The common root of this twofold insistence is God's
"yes" to man in Jesus Christ, and in the concrete it is the Christian
ethics of love of neighbor, beginning with the weakest.
I conclude by returning to the beginning. Speaking in Subiaco the day before
the death of John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger invited everyone, including men
of good will who are unable to believe, to live "veluti si Deus
daretur," as if God exists. But at the same time, he affirmed the need for
men who keep their eyes focused on God, and act according to this focus. It is
only in this way, in fact, that God can return in the world. This is the
meaning and the purpose of the current pontificate.
