It turns out that the Italian newspaper Il Foglio published substantial excerpts of Mons. Georg Gaenswein's address at the presentation of Rod Dreher's book THE BENEDICT OPTION in its Italian
version, held at the Italian Parliament building on Sept. 11, 2018. In it, Gaenswein comes up with the striking idea of labelling the PRESENT CRISIS FACING THE CHURCH as the 'Church's 9/11'.
A great simile for the secular world, and one that I hope will stick. But I believe Joseph Ratzinger or Benedict XVI once referred to the over-arching contemporary crisis of the faith as 'the Good
Friday of the Church' - an appropriately excruciating religious metaphor that nonetheless implies the resurrection that must follow... Gaenswein's text is just as remarkable, however, for his
citations of Benedict XVI to make his points. The newspaper labels the text as Gaenswein's 'J'accuse'.
The Church's '9/11'
Many believe that the Church will never recover from the current catastrophe.
The crisis is a crisis of the clergy, and no one knows this better
than the Pope.
by Mons. Georg Gaenswein
Translated from
Sept. 12, 2018
'THE BENEDICT OPTION: A strategy for Christians in a post-Christian world'
I am grateful with all my heart for the invitation that I gladly accepted to present the book by Rod Dreher about which I had already heard so much. Benedict of Norcia, the father of Western monasticism, to whom the book owes its programmatic title, inspired me a lot to be here today.
But I was also very touched and moved by the date on which we are meeting the author here in Rome. Because today is September 11, which in the United States since 2001, has simply been called ‘9/11’ to recall that apocalyptic catastrophe when some members of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda attacked the United States in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania before the eyes of the whole world, using commercial airplanes full of passengers which they had hijacked and rerouted to run into their target buildings.
Moreover, in the whirlwind of news about the Church in recent weeks, as I read through Rod Dreher’s book after the publication of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, I came to see this encounter today as a true and proper act of Divine Providence:
today, in fact, the Catholic Church is looking upon its own 9/11, even if, unfortunately, her catastrophe is not associated only with one particular date, but with so many days of so many years, and with innumerable victims.
I ask you not to misunderstand me. I do not mean to compare either the victims or the number of sex abuses committed by ministers of God in the Catholic Church to the nearly 3,000 innocents who lost their lives on 9/11 of 2001 following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
No one has yet attacked the Church of Christ with airplanes laden with passengers. St. Peter’s Basilica is intact and so are the cathedrals of France, Germany, Italy and other places where they continue to be the emblems of many cities in the Western world, from Florence to Chartres, Cologne and Munich.
Nonetheless, the news coming from the USA recently of how many more souls were wounded irremediably and mortally by Catholic priests send us a message that is more terrible than any news, for instance, about the sudden collapse of all the churches in Pennsylvania along with the Basilica and National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC.
In saying this, I remember as if it were just yesterday when, on April 16, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI in that very National Shrine tried to shake up the bishops who had gathered there from all over the USA:
he spoke of the ‘profound shame’ caused by ‘the sexual abuse of minors by priests’ and “of the enormous pain that your communities have suffered whenever men of the Church betray their priestly obligations and tasks with such gravely immoral conduct”.
Evidently, he spoke in vain, as we see today. The Holy Father’s lament failed to contain the evil, nor did the formal assurances and oral commitments made to him by a great part of the US hierarchy.
Now Rod Dreher is among us, who began his book with these words:
“Nobody saw the flood coming – a veritable universal deluge”. In his acknowledgments, he expresses particular thanks to Benedict XVI. And it seems to me that he wrote great parts of the book almost in a silent dialog with the emeritus Pope, working over the latter’s prophetic and analytical words, as when he says:
“In 2012, the then Pontiff said that the spiritual crisis assailing the West is the most serious since the fall of the Roman empire at the end of the fifth century. The light of Christianity is dying out in all of the West”.
So allow me to accompany this presentation of
L’Opzione Benedetto by Rod Dreher with words uttered by Pope Benedict during his Petrine ministry, words that have remained unforgettable for me, and which in the course of reading this book, came to mind naturally.
For instance, what he said to newsmen on the plane going to Fatima on May 11, 2010:
The Lord told us the Church would always be suffering, in different ways, to the end of the world… As to any novelty that we might discover today [in the Third Secret of Our Lady’s message in Fatima], there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and on the Church come not only from outside the Church, but the Church’s suffering comes from within the Church herself, from the sin that exists in the Church. Even this, we have always known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies outside, but is born from sin in the Church.
At that time, he had been pope for five years. Just a little over five years before that – on March 25, 2005 – during the Via Crucis at the Roman Colosseum, with John Paul II already in his final days, Cardinal Ratzinger’s words of meditation included the following:
What can the third fall of Jesus under the Cross say to us? We have considered the fall of man in general, and the falling of many Christians away from Christ and into a godless secularism. Should we not also think of how much Christ suffers in his own Church?...
[Mons Gaenswein only quotes the start of the meditation, but it is worth recalling the rest of it:
How often is the holy sacrament of his Presence abused, how often must he enter empty and evil hearts!
How often do we celebrate only ourselves, without even realizing that he is there!
How often is his Word twisted and misused!
What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words!
How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him!
How much pride, how much self-complacency!
What little respect we pay to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where he waits for us, ready to raise us up whenever we fall!
All this is present in his Passion.
His betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his Body and Blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart.
We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison – Lord, save us (cf. Mt 8: 25).
Earlier, John Paul II had taught us that the truly inclusive ecumenism is the ecumenism of martyrs, among whom, in our anguish, we can invoke St Edith Stein along with Dietrich Bonheoffer as our intercessors in heaven.
But in the meantime,
we know that there also exists an ecumenism of difficulties and mondanization, and an ecumenism of disbelief and a common flight from God and from the Church, running through all the Christian churches. It is an ecumenism of the general eclipse of God. And so, what we are experiencing today is just the ridge of an epochal change that Dreher prophetically presented when he published his book last year in the USA.
He saw the great flood coming. But he also firmly believes that
eclipsing God does not mean that God is no longer there, only that many no longer know God because so many shadows have been interposed that hide him from view.
Today, these are the shadows of sins, of misdeeds, and of crimes committed within the Church which serve to obscure God’s luminous presence. That Church of the people in whose bosom many of us were born – which was never found in America as it was in Europe – has been dead for some time with the advance of this darkening. Do you think I sound too dramatic?...
Lately however, there are days when I feel I am back in my childhood days – in the furnace of my father’s smithy in the Black Forest, with the seemingly endless sound of hammer on anvil – but this time, with my father no longer there, he in whose hands I entrusted myself as I entrust myself to God. I am certainly not alone in feeling this.
Last May, even Willem Jacobus Eijk, Cardinal Archbishop of Utrecht, admitted that, looking at the present crisis of the Church,
he thought about ‘the final trial that the Church must undergo’ before the second coming of Christ – as described in Paragraph 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church –
a trial that would ”shake the faith of may believers”. The Catechism goes on to say that “The persecution that accompanies the pilgrimage of the Church through this earth will reveal the ‘mystery of iniquity’”.
Rod Dreher has the familiarity, as of an exorcist, with this
mysterium iniquitatis, as demonstrated by his journalistic reconstruction of the recent months in the life of the Church, in which perhaps more than any other journalist, he has highlighted the disclosures of the scandal surrounding the ex-Archbishop of Newark and Washington.
Yet Dreher is not an investigatige journalist. Nor even a visionary. Rather, he is a serious analyst who has followed the condition of the Church and the world in a vigilant and critical manner, while still maintaining a child’s loving look at the world.
And so, he did not write an apocalyptic novel like the famous
Lord of the World with which in 1906, the English priest Robert Hugh Benson shook the English-speaking world. Dreher’s book is more like
a practical manual for constructing an ark – because he knows that there is no dike that can hold back the great deluge – a deluge that not just lately is about to inundate the old Christian West to which Dreher’s own America belongs.
There are clearly three differences between Dreher and Benson. In the first place, as a true American, Dreher is more practical than that somewhat bizarre Briton from Cambridge in the era that preceded the First World War. And as a citizen of Louisiana, Dreher is, one might say, hurricane-proof.
Thirdly, of course, he is not a religious, but
a layman who seeks to win more souls to the Kingdom of God which Jesus has announced for us, an effort Dreher has undertaken not because he was called on to do do it, but on the wings of his own personal enthusiasm and will. In this sense, he is
a man who corresponds totally to the wish and taste of Pope Francis [???] because
no one else in Rome knows better than the pope that the crisis in the Church is at heart a crisis of the clergy. [What would seem to be GG's obligatory bow to his Curial boss actually sounds like a dig at someone who is really in denial about the nature of this crisis.] And that therefore, the hour has sounded for strong and decisive laymen, especially in the new means of communication, for independent Christians as embodied by Rod Dreher, to take action.
In recent days, especially within the Church, one has repeatedly heard the concept of an earthquake that is shaking the Church and threatening its collapse, in which, as I earlier stated, the Church is experiencing her own 9/11.
And I will say to you that
Benedict XVI, from the moment he renounced the papacy, has thought of himself as an old monk who, after February 28, 2013, feels it his duty to dedicate himself to praying for Holy Mother Church, for his successor and for the Petrine ministry instituted by Christ himself.
And so, with regard to Dreher’s work, that old monk at the Mater Ecclesiae monastery behind St. Peter’s Basilica would look back to an address that he gave as pope at the College des Bernardins in Paris on September 12, 2008 – ten years ago tomorrow – before the cultural and intellectual elite of France. I wish to cute some passages of that address:
Amid the great cultural upheaval resulting from migrations of peoples and the emerging new political configurations, the monasteries were the places where the treasures of ancient culture survived, and where at the same time a new culture slowly took shape out of the old.
But how did it happen? What motivated men to come together to these places? What did they want? How did they live?
First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straightaway that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum (to seek God).
Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They were searching for God. They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is.
It is sometimes said that they were “eschatologically” oriented. But this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, as if they were looking ahead to the end of the world or to their own death, but in an existential sense: they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional...
Quaerere Deum – to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times. A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest
possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences.
What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.
Thus, Benedict XVI on September 12, 2008, about the true option incarnated by Benedict of Norcia.
Therefore, of Dreher’s book, all I have to say is that it does not contain a ready answer. You will not find in it a failproof prescription nor an all-purpose key that will open all those doors which had once been open but which have now been closed.
But between its covers you will find an authentic example of what Benedict XVI said ten years ago about the Benedictine spirit in the sixth century. It is a true quaerere Deum. A search for the true God of Jacob and Isaac who, in Jesus Christ, showed us his true face.
But for decades now – not just in Europe but around the world – we are living through mass migration of peoples that will never end....
If this time, the Church with God’s aid will be unable to renew itself, neither will we be able to renew our civilization.
For many, everything seems to make us think that today, the Church of Christ will be unable to recover from the catastrophe of the sins that threaten to engulf her. It is at this time that Rod Dreher off Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has chosen to present his book not far from the tomb of the Apostles. In the midst of the eclipse of God in most of the world, he comes among us to say, “The Church is not dead – she is asleep and resting”.
He also seems to be telling us that ‘the Church is young’, with the same joy and freedom as Benedict XVI did when he said this during the Mass inaugurating his Petrine ministry on April 24, 2005. Recalling the suffering and death of John Paul II, of whom he had been a co-worker for so many years, he addressed each of us in St. Peter’s Square to say:
During those sad days of the Pope’s illness and death, it became wonderfully evident to us that the Church is alive. And the Church is young. She holds within herself the future of the world and therefore shows each of us the way towards the future. The Church is alive and we are seeing it: we are experiencing the joy that the Risen Lord promised his followers. The Church is alive – she is alive because Christ is alive, because he is truly risen.
Not even the Satanic 9/11 of the Church can weaken or destroy this truth about the foundation of the universal Catholic Church through the Risen and Tirumphant Christ. That is why I must say, in all sincerity, that I perceive this time of great crisis, that is now evident to everyone, as a time of grace above all – because
we shall be ‘made free’ not by any particular effort of ours but by the truth, as the Lord has assured us.
With this hope, I look at Rod Dreher’s recent reconstructions for the ‘purification of memory’ asked of us by St John Paul II, and with much gratitude, I read
The Benedict Option as a source of marvelous inspiration in many ways. In recent weeks, I would say almost nothing else has given me such consolation.