This reply to Radaelli/Livi comes from a most unexpected source - the Italian edition of Aleteia...
Ratzinger a heretic?
Let’s not be absurd!
By Giovanni Marcotullio
Translated from
ALETEIA ITALIA
January 3, 2018
The disciple and heir of Romano Amerio, Enrico Maria Radaelli, has dedicated his latest book to a systematic contestation of Joseph Ratzinger’s INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIANITY. Mons. Antonio Livi wrote a review that Sandro Magister published online.
Much can certainly be discussed quite amply on this issue while just as much can be made clear – from Radaelli and Livi's adherence to the
embarrassing [???] Correctio Filialis to the pope on AL
[they are both signatories], to considering the generic aversion of a certain kind of ‘theology’ to all of the Church’s living Tradition (in which the magisterium and theology of the 20th century would seem to be nothing but a pretext).
Sandro Magister yesterday published the text of a review by Mons. Antonio Livi of a new book by Enrico Maria Radaelli,
"Al cuore di Ratzinger. Al cuore del mondo" (At the heart of Ratzinger. At the heart of the world)
[I think it translates best idiomatically as ‘At the heart of Ratzinger is the heart of ‘the world’].
Radaelli’s hypothesis is synthesized in extreme terms by Livi thus:
that the hegemony (first de facto ,then de jure) of progressivist theology in the magisterial and governing structures of the Catholic Church owes itself even – and perhaps above all – to the teachings of Professor Joseph Ratzinger which were never denied nor even overcome by Joseph Ratzinger as bishop, cardinal and pope.
Livi adds: “
This hypothesis, which thus enunciated, could appear to many as unacceptable (I refer to all those who have so far seen Ratzinger as Cardinal Prefect of the CDF and then as Pope Benedict XVi as a providential bulwark against what he himself called ‘the dictatorship of relativism’,
has adequate scientific justification in Radaelli’s book which analyzes page by page Ratzinger’s fundamental theological text, "Einführung in das Christentum: Vorlesungen über das apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis" (Introduction to Christianity: Lectures on the Apostolic Creed) which was published in 1968 as a re-elaboration of the lectures in theology given the preceding semested by the then young professor at the University of Tuebingen, which has had 22 editions since then, the latest one on 2017.”
A passage ever useful to remind us that the black legend of Ratzinger as the “German shepherd’ of the faith was a
[not always] surreptitious campaign of calumny for decades against a man whose gentleness is equaled only by his erudition and piety.
Officials of the CDF have personally related to me of proceedings against certain authors [charged with possible anti-Catholic writings] that lasted far more than expected because ‘il Cardinale’ would delay a verdict for weeks by calling new hearings, asking for more explanations, reflections, prayer… One day, someone will tell the story of “Joseph Ratzinger, the ‘inquisitor’ with the heart of gold”.
But not today.
What is being told today is the nonsense about “Joseph Ratzinger, heretic in disguise”. At first glance, it would seem that the defamatory discourse also contains some praise – a bit like Ebenezer Scrooge praising Jacob Marley for his openminded kindness to orphans and widows. But in order not to fall right away into such simplistic Manichaeism (black or white)
one must remember that acclaimed progessivist modernist theologians like Hans Kueng have always pointed – and still do – to Ratzinger as the acme of conservatism.
Not seldom in the ecceisastical sciences, the crossfire to which a theory or a person is subjected is a good if rudimentary criterion to discern the goodness of these sciences. But the opportunity presented by Radaelli’s book demands more profound and extensive reflection. We could get a first impression from the immediate endorsement-agreement offered by Massimo Introvigne on Facebook:
“Interesting intervention by don Antonio Livi, who is the true maître a penser of those who run La Bussola and other publications hostile to Pope Francis, in which he accuses Benedict XVI of heresy – and even John Paul II does not come out well, especially because he was much too friendly with the Jews. It is a very very important text to understand the ideology underlying the campaigns against Pope Francis, whose most influential theoreticians – who are not necessarily those who are most often heard – are not at all nostalgic for Benedict XVI but accuse all the post-conciliar popes globally of heresy (some of them, in truth, do not like either Pius XI or Pius XII, because for them, the last pope whose faith they trust was Pius X who succeeded a pope they mistrust, Leo XIII). As I have written often before, these are the true leaders of the revolt against Francis, and those ingenuous ones who still lament for Benedict XVI only serve as cannon fodder in battles fought by generals they don’t even know.
Introvigne is a sociologist of religions – one of the foremost on the world – as well as a man who, through his own personal trajectory, has been able to familiarize himself thoroughly with theological topics, and is therefore not forced to judge them as an outsider. Without getting into the merits of the various headlines that Introvigne includes as evidence for the ‘campaigns against Pope Francis’, I do share the following with him:
1. The enemies of Pope Francis turn up their noses even at the popes who preceded him.
2. For every post-conciliar pope, they have always brought up the words of Paul VI about the ‘smoke of Satan’ that has entered the Chruch (the only Montinian statement they like, but which they promptly turn against him.)
3. When one scratches under the surface of their vaunted appreciation for Pius XII (it seems difficult to resist the magnetic fascination of such a hieratic man), and tries to test that appreciation, one would find them either unprepared or extremely critical about documents like Divino afflante Spiritu, Mystici corporis, and others.
4. Since those documents by Pius XII were only the latest touches that preceded the great event of Vatican-II, these critics turn up their noses even more if they go back to Pius XII, with his
Quadragesimo anno and
Casti connubii.
So, who is the pope who they think is good? I would say: No one. In words, they might say Pius X (as Introvigne suggests), but
Papa Sarto was appreciated by these critics above all for some of his dialectical opposition to the modernist tendencies of some theologians as in the encyclical
Pascendi dominici gregis, and I cannot resist thinking that even him – a gentle man who as Patriarch of Venice gladly visited an insane asylum in full ‘choir dress’ in order to entertain the wards with the spectacle of ecclesiastical garments (“They like red,” he told his aides) – would have rapidly drawn complaints from the professional belly-achers for whom bile appears to be the sacrament of their religion.
But I would not say this of Mons. Livi, whose balanced erudition I have always had great respect, which did not keep me from thinking about him recently as the figleaf which the 62 signatories of the Correctio Filialis managed to get on their side.
[Why would they need a 'fig leaf', to begin with - since the Correctio is as solid as such a document can be?]
I have not yet read Radaelli’s book, so I cannot speak here of the latest work by the heir of Romano Amerio. But I will comment on some of the things Livi wrote. As for Amerio and his ‘school’, in general, it is worth reprising a very instructive passage from a bibliographical summary published on unavox.it. In which two introductions are quoted, which were published respectively by Fede e Cultura and by Lindau:
Iota Unum as an instrument to “realize the pope’s project to read a substantial continuity vetween the magisterium and theology before Vatican II, during Vatican II and after Vatican-II”, as Mons. Luigi Negri wrote; or
Iota Unum as an instrument “to discern and admire the unchangeable identity of our Church, the lastingness of what she defines. We recognize her identity and her unity in her diversity”, as Mons. Castrillon-Hoyos did.
The two statements resemble each other in certain ways: both emphasize the possibility that
Iota Unum offers to
construct an overall framework in which what the Church has always taught and the innovations of Vatican I could be coherently and organically reconciled, a framework that would thus better describe the multiform ‘face of the Church'.
The difference is that Mons. Negri favors an
a posteriori reading of Vatican II in the light of the underlying need to identify its continuity with Tradition, while Cardinal Castrillon emphasizes the multiform diversity of the Church
a priori – ‘the wealth of the Church in its polychrome manifestation'.
It is not my intention to be disrespectful but I have the impression that neither of them ever read
Iota Unum. Or rather, it is very probable that they had read it and then sought to salvage what was salvageable, namely by directing the reader to a hermeneutic effort that would embrace all of the 20th century (it was precisely in 1918, a hundred years ago, that Romano Guardini’s
Lo spirito della liturgia was published), and would motivate him to read every passage in the book – even those that are not necessarily positive – as a stage in an organic development. That is very probable, but the editors of unavox.it were right in their assessment: that both Mons. Negri and Cardinal Castrillon were not speaking about the spirit of
Iota Unum, nor of Amerio nor of his school.
But we are not now talking of Amerio but of Radaelli, and not even of the latter, but of Livi and his presentation of Radaelli’s book, and it was not to settle any accounts that we cited the frank and instructive commentary from unavox, but rather to remind the reader that the question of the current diatribes in the church will not be extinguished with respect to the present pontificate as some would have us understand – that is just propaganda, as Introvigne suggests, which is useful
to mobilize the ‘cannon fodder’ (whose surrogates today are the ‘lions of the [computer] keyboard’). The question is really the diversity of Catholic theology throughout the 20th century, and this time it is being unfurled starting from the writings of one of its indispensable protagonists. Joseph Ratzinger, precisely.
That
Introduction to Christianity, which the Polish Pope admired so much that it led him to name the then-Archbishop of Munich Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, effectively represents
a first academic reading of the documents of Vatican II (where the young Ratzinger distinguished himself as the theological consultant of Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne)
[and shortly thereafter, was named on his own as an official theological expert for the Council],
substantiated and tested in the fire of the most ancient Patristic sources and then weighed by the criteria of modern criticism.
That text did not have 22 editions of its original (not counting all its translations) because it was written by Joseph Ratzinger: Ratzinger became known as the giant that he is because of this book. Therefore it will surely be worthwhile for anyone deeply interested in theology to acquaint himself with Radaelli’s close [page by page, according to Livi] critique.
Of course, Radaelli’s hypothesis is arduous, as Livi synthesizes it:
”[It is] an immanentist theology in which all the traditional terms of Catholic dogma remain linguistically unaltered but their meaning has changed: he has set aside, because he considers them incomprehensible today, all the conceptual schemes proper to Scripture itself, to the Fathers of the Church, and to the Magisterium (which presuppose what Bergson called ‘the spontaneous metaphysics of the human intellect’, the dogmas of the faith are re-interpreted with conceptual schemes that are proper to modern subjectivism (from Kant’s transcendentalism to Hegel’s dialectic idealism).
All at the expense, Radaelli correctly observes, most especially of the basic notion of Christianity, namely, faith in the revelation of supernatural mysteries by God, ‘fides qua creditur’ (faith as belief). This idea becomes irremediably deformed in the theology of Ratzinger by the adoption of the Kantian scheme that it is impossible to have a metaphysical knowledge of God, with the consequent recourse to ‘the postulates of practical reason’, which entails the denial of the rational premises of the faith and its replacement by ‘the reasons for believing’ which constituted the classic argument of apologetics after Vatican-I, merely on the ‘desire to believe’ which was theorized by the philosophy of pragmatist religion a la William James.
Now, while I fail to see any trace of William James in
Introduction to Christianity, I recall easily that Ratzinger named Kant among the champions of that radical change in Weltanschauung (worldview) typical of modernity that cannot be completely rejected because it expresses “essential features of the faith that are more or less ignored in other constellations” (p 60) but can neither be embraced ingenuously:
“As much as one needs to go slowly with peremptory and hasty judgments, it is still obligatory nonetheless to advise being wary of short-circuits. Whenever the two attempts cited verum quia factum and verum quia facendum - true because of fact (i.e., because it has been done); and true because it can be done - become exclusive and situate the faith totally on the plane of done or doable, they end up masking the true ‘significance of what a persons means when he says “Credo” (I believe).”
What do we mean when we say ‘I believe’? Mons. Livi writes: "Ratzinger has always sustained, even in his most recent discourses, that the Christian act of faith has as its specific object, not the mysteries revealed by Christ but the person of Christ himself, as we know him in the Scriptures and in the liturgy of the Church."
I wish Mons. Livi would better explain what he means – because what he attributes to Ratzinger resonates with Origen’s
autobasileia (Jesus as ‘the kingdom in person’),
Iesus dulcis memoria attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, and
Adoro te devote attributed to Thomas Aquinas – and how could this all contribute to ‘weak thought’.
The insistence on the personal relevance of Christ in the salvific act and in our individual faith does not attenuate – rather, it provides both foundation and substance forb- the Messiah’s magisterial mission. And one can only gape when one sees the Preface to the first edition that Livi clearly distorts to the point of making it say the exact opposite of what Ratzinger expressly affirms:
‘And poor Hans [Ratzinger cites the famous German story of ‘Hans in luck’] – in this case the Christian – who trustfully allowed himself to be led from one exchange to another, from one interpretation to another, does he not risk ending up soon having in hand, instead of the lump of gold he had at the start, nothing but a useless stone instrument which he happily threw away?” (J. Ratzinger, Introduzione al cristianesimo, 26)
Ratzinger compared the descending trajectory of some contemporary theologies to that of the peasant who bartered a lump of gold with objects which were seemingly more advantageous to him but were gradually less and less precious and more and more useless – so how can Livi write as he does that “theology today, according to Ratzinger, cannot speak of the faith except in ambiguous and contradictory terms”?
He follows with
ad personam arguments which are more embarrassing for Mons Livi as much as he raises little surprise when he indulges in low-league polemics: One of his main accusations against Ratzinger would be that he uses some terms also used by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini (cited in Radaelli), but Livi also adds that both clerics were in agreement here with Gianni Vattimo [a Nietzschean Italian philosopher, born 1936, who emphasizes ‘weak thought’, namely, that objective truth founded in a rational unitary subject be relinquished for a more multi-faceted conception closer to that of the arts].
From one surrealism to the next, Livi arrives at seeing ‘weak thought’ in Ratzinger’s invitation to non-believing intellectuals:
"We must therefore overturn the Enlightenment axiom and say: even he who fails to find the way to accepting God, must nonetheless seek to live and direct his life ‘veluti si Deus daretur’, as if God did exist. This is the advice Pascal gave to his non-believer friends This is the advice we woiuld like to give even today to our friends who do not believe. This way, no one would be limited in his freedom, but all our work would find a support and a criterion which it urgently needs.”
For Livi, this means assuming Kant’s practical postulate for the existence of God, not an invitation to non-believers to live a good life, namely, one that purifies conscience, and consequently, the intellect and the will itself. I think this is also found in the definitions of Vatican-I which Livi often cites. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, the Dominican theologian whom Livi cites as an authority in support of his position, wrote about Vatican I: “A Conciliar Father asked – during the discussion on the dogmatic constitution
Dei Filius [Son of God] – that the verb ‘dimostrare, demonstret’ which supposes that reason starts from principles whose truth it perceives by its own light, be replaced by the verb ‘provare, probet’, which does not make that supposition”.
And after reporting that the monsignor’s amendment was voted down by the Council, Garrigou-Lagrange quotes the monsignor’s reply: "Even if the intrinsic truth of faith is not demonstrated, without any doubt, its foundations, in a certain sense, can be shown”. And he explains in a footnote: “'In a certain sense’ does not mean that the demonstration is not rigorous: it means that the foundations of faith can be demonstrated in a certain sense but not in others, but are believed nonetheless by supernatural means. The fact of Revelation is demonstrated insofar as it is supernatural
quoad modum (in manner) (a miraculous intervention of God) but not that it is supernatural
quoad substantiam (in substance). From this point of view, it is a formal reason for a faith that is supernatural in substance.
(Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Dieu, son existence et sa nature, 30 passim)
Moreover, it was precisely Thomas Aquinas who illustrated in the first article of his
Summa Theologiae that
theology is not a theoretical but a practical science: if it were not so, then one cannot explain the supernatural epic of the
Divine Comedy, written not long after St. Thomas’s great teaching, and how Dante disposes himself to the ‘beatific vision,’ which did not bring him unparalleled erudition, but rather through a very long and detailed ethical review that was both personal and universal.
Nontheless, we find in Henri de Lubac the great author one must look to in order to understand Ratzinger’s theology better (in this case,
Livi does not honor to himself by liquidating this theological colossus as being no more than ‘an important representative of progressivist theology’, implying moreover that John Paul II was wrong in making him a cardinal).
In his famous
Méditation sur l’Église, the Jesuit Patrologist explained how faith always lived in the tension of being ecclesial in its method, but theological in its on purpose and principle.
(Henri De Lubac, Méditation sur l’Église 25)
How is it possible to taint with charges of ‘anthropological reductionism’ and idealistic subjectivism authors who are so clear and direct in continually reaffirming the primacy of God! – this escapes me altogether. I think it is useful to cite the preceding paragraph in
Meditation to understand what Ratzinger admired in one whom he always declared to have been one of his teachers.
[He has aways spoken fondly of de Lubac’s ‘Christianity’ as fundamental in his seminary education.]
“Through many hesitations and rethinking about which Greek Texts or Latin translations bear traces of it – rarely does a new idea quickly find expression in a fixed term – more and more, ‘to believe in’ has become the habitual expression for designating the act of Christian faith. The fact is that it implies a gradual revelation of God about Himself, a revelation that culminates in Christ, and suggests an attitude of the soul that responds to this revelation.
Although the two words ‘belief’ and ‘faith’, in our current language, serve equally as a noun to the verb "to believe", and although they may be employed as synonyms, the latter word ‘faith’ is capable of evoking in some cases a more profound act than the first. More profound and of another nature.
The subject engages more in his faith than in a simple belief. Because you can believe many things: but one really does not give one’s faith if not to someone. One can believe in beings, that is believe in their existence – this is how one speaks of belief in angels. But faith, in the strongest sense of the term, can only be addressed to God. It is this faith that is meant in the expression ‘to believe in’.” (ibid.)
It is difficult to turn back to stagnant, poisoned waters after having tasted the teachings of such masters. And truly, in reading some ‘theologies’, I can hardly recognize the features of Christianity (at last not the way I know it). But so no one can say thatI am defending heetics like Ratzinger with writings from heretics like De Lubac, I would like to close with one of the observations made by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, in the closing pages of
Dieu, son existence et sa nature, a work which in 1919 received the blessing of Papa Della Chiesa (Benedict XV), the pope from whom Benedict XVI took his papal name:
“We would like to be able to place ourselves in a totally supernatural atmosphere to be able to meditate beyond the noise of disputes the profound sense of divine words. The most elevated theological doctrines do not truly work on our spirit unless our interior Teacher opens up our intelligence, clarifies and instructs our hearts.
He can allow us then to understand in all their profundity the words which he said: “Without me you can do nothing.” We are not capable, by ourselves – as if it came from us – not even the smallest thought that is useful for our salvation. It is God only who works in us what we may want and what we may do, with his approval. What distinguishes you from others? What do you have, yourself, that you have not received?" (R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Dieu, son existence et sa nature, 847)
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/01/2018 18:19]