BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

What a theologian Pope
tells his fellow theologians:
Interview with Mons. Bruno Forte
by Mirko Testa


It is unfortunate that Mons. Forte chooses to sprinkle his answers with Latin phrases, but not always explaining them....And by the way, here we see how radically different Joseph Ratzinger sounds as a theologian - he is never pompous, nor does he talk down to his audience, as perhaps Mons. Forte does too easily, but without JR/B16's wonderful gift of clarity...

I took the liberty of cleaning up the awkward English translation provided from the Italian, to make it read easier, but there are certain sentences that defeat me. It's the kind of dense offputting jargon that made me keep theology and all theologians at a long arm's length until after April 19, 2005, when one theologian began showing me that it could be as fascinating as being introduced to the world of philosophy in my teens through the eyes of Will Durant.

My other 'criticism' of this interview is that it ends up being much more a display of Mons. Forte's academic preparation than it is about Joseph Ratzinger's theology, as the title bills it to be. As it is, this is probably the wrong thread for this post..


ROME, JAN. 25, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI exhorts theologians to adopt an attitude of listening, replacing the temptation to consider themselves great with the virtue of humility

This exhortation, according to Archbishop Bruno Forte of Chieti-Vasto, president of the Italian bishops' Commission for the Doctrine of the Faith, Proclamation and Catechesis, is a safeguard against the "only authentically Christian heresy."

ZENIT spoke with Archbishop Forte about a selection of Benedict XVI's recent comments on theology. The archbishop notes how the roots of Joseph Ratzinger's thinking are revealed in his exhortations as Pope.


ZENIT:Last year, in his homily at a Mass celebrated with members of the International Theological Commission, the Pope explained that a true theologian is not one who attempts to measure the mystery of God with his own intelligence, but one who is conscious of his own limitations. On that occasion the Pope indicated humility as the way to arrive at truth, expressing a word of caution about expert theologians who behave like the ancient scribes. Do you think the Pope is referring to a marked tendency in our days?
Archbishop Forte: I believe this is an essential point that distinguishes Christian theology from any form of gnosis. The essential difference is that in theology everything stems from hearing, hence, from auditus Verbi, whereas in gnosis everything is the intellectual self-production of the individual.

This is the real reason why the only authentically Christian heresy is gnosis: the pretense to self-redemption by man who does not need the intervention of the Other, from on High, that is, the intervention of God.

A theology that is based, by its nature, on Revelation, cannot but be listening, first of all, hence humilitas: an attitude of profound willingness and obedience before God's action, who enters history in a surprising way and at the same time confirms it in its dignity, opening it to the novum adveniens of his promise.

It is a topic that Ratzinger, as theologian, has stressed repeatedly, and which comes from his knowledge of Augustine, who is the genius of the intellectus fidei lived in listening, in the use of intelligence at the service of Franciscan listening that predominates in Joseph Ratzinger's theological formation, and reappears in his teaching as Pope reappears in his intense call to humilitas and to auditus.

I would add that this topic is very important today in a society that has known the inebriation of reason and, hence, the gnostic temptation in the different faces of modern ideology. Today, in the uneasiness of post-modernity, if society does not open itself to listening and to humilitas, it runs the risk of falling into nihilism - meaninglessness....


In September of 2007, visiting the Cistercian abbey of Heiligenkreuz, the Pope criticized a certain "theology that no longer breathes in the realm of faith," and emphasized instead, "kneeling theology," a beautiful expression coined by Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Likewise, in presenting the figure of St. Bernard of Clairvaux to a General Audience, Benedict XVI said that without faith and prayer, reason on its own cannot find God, and theology becomes a vain intellectual exercise. Is this a scene present in the realm of today's theology?
The first decisive element is that, precisely because it is born from listening to the Word of God, theology needs not only a radical humilitas, but also a form of loving, hence prayerful acceptance of that Word.

Von Balthasar insisted very much on this aspect, maintaining that sanctity is not something superfluous to the theologian's work, but an essential condition. It is no accident that very great theologians, especially the Fathers of the Church, were also saints.

Hence the need to kneel before the mystery and to listen, to live the auditus not only with humility. but with the loving and persevering acceptance of worshipping faith which is inherent to the identity of Christian theology.

And also, in Joseph Ratzinger's thought, there is not only continuity with Augustine's and Bonaventure's line, but, also, a very important intuition taken up by Vatican II, namely, that there is a relation between Christian living, Christian thought and the liturgy.

The liturgy is at once culmen and fons [summit and source], as Vatican II says - that from which everything stems and to which everything in Christian existence tends, both in its living as well as in its reflective dimension.

Because of this, a theology without a liturgical soul, that is, without the capacity to praise and invoke God, is a vain intellectual exercise. It is another form of that gnosis that runs the risk of contaminating man's capacity to open himself to God.

In the great Christian-Catholic theological vision, man has been made capax Dei [capable of God]: but this capacity is conditioned on one hand by humilitas and on the other, by the capacity of invoking the gift of God and of allowing oneself to be permeated by him, so that he has a doxological and liturgical attitude, that is, glorifying God, which is also the willingness to be molded by his action in our life. When all this is put into words, theology is really born.

And here is another consideration on the relation between theology and spirituality. We have lived through a crisis of this relationship in modern theology - the theology influenced by the opposition between Vernunftswahrheit and Geschichtswahrheit, the truth of reason and the truth of fact.

In the Enlightenment's conception only the truth of reason is truth, because it presents an absoluteness and universality that the truths of fact don't have.

Christianity, on the contrary, is based on a truth of fact, which is God's historical revelation. But to the theology of an enlightened-liberal hue, pure theological exercises could not be reconciled with spirituality which, they felt, was best left to devotional practices.

This abyss between theology and spirituality has caused great harm in the era of modern theology - especially evident in liberal theology and in some forms of Catholic modernism. It continues to cause harm where, for example, in the 1960s and 1970s, some forms of Christian theology allowed themselves to be conditioned by modern ideology, including revolutionary ideology. [Why not name it outright - liberation theology based on Marxism?]

Today we feel, instead, that we must return to the original founding statute of theological endeavor, which is to to take to thought the experience of the Mystery that is proclaimed, and therefore heard and celebrated in the liturgy, lived and witnessed in faith and charity. {I'm sorry - This is a typical sentence that I cannot clean up, without recasting it completely, so I an leaving it as is.]

Therefore, theology is not only docta fides [wise faith], that is, a fides quaerens intellectum [faith seeking understanding], but also docta caritas [wise charity], that is, to take the Word to the living of love, the gift of the love of God which is given us in the liturgy and in the grace of the sacraments, but which must then be witnessed in living, in gestures of charity that have their own silent eloquence..

A theology without spirituality risks being empty, a spirituality without theology risks being blind - to paraphrase Kant's well-known saying on intuitions and concepts.

Part 2 of the interview follows:

The Magisterium of the Church is not repressive, but progressive. Far from restricting research, it keeps it from regressing and falling into old errors, says Mons. Forte.

The Holy See's adherence to the "Bologna Process" has led to a global re-ordering of theological formation in Italy, geared to revising the existing curriculum standards in light of those required by the accord. [The Bologna process has nothing to with sausage-making! It refers to making academic degree standards and quality assurance standards more comparable and compatible throughout Europe under an agreement reached by education ministers from 27 European countries who met in Bologna in 1999.] In your opinion, does not the fact of having to conform to the precise characteristics of what is defined as 'science' in the Agreement lead to setting aside a presumption of faith in theological study?
This is an old question which has always recurred in the history of theology. I would like to give two answers: one of a historical character and one of a current character, but also methodological.

The first answer is the one St. Thomas gives the same question when he begins the Summa Teologica an unthinkable. He asks himself: utrum praeter philosophicas disciplinas aliam doctrinam haberi? That is, he asks not if the philosophical disciplines are legitimate but if theology is legitimate, with an absolutely modern approach that seems to claim the autonomy of reason. His answer is that the rationality required by scientific disciplines is above all in the scire per causas, knowing through the connections between premises and deductions.

However, this scire per causas, can be exercised in two ways: beginning from the first internal principles of science, the so-called sub-alternating sciences (he speaks, for example, of mathematics, whose most intrinsic principles cannot be demonstrated, and whose consequences can only be deduced). [In this academic distinction, sub-alternating sciences are superior in that they demonstrate the reasons for things; whereas the sub-alternate sciences demonstrate the fact of things.]

On the other hand, the sub-alternate sciences use the principles that the other sciences offer them. To this end, Thomas gives as an intriguing example in music, which depends on mathematics, in its harmonies and its relations of proportion.

Similarly, Thomas says, theology depends on scientia Dei et beatorum, that is, on Revelation. In other words, the source of theological knowledge by its nature is lumen fidei, but for its argumentation, it uses the same epistemological [relating to the study of knowledge itself] statutes as the other sciences. Hence, it has the full dignity of universitas scientiarum.

How will we respond today to the developments of theology, but also of modern epistemology? I would answer by referring to the great 20th century philosophical and theological 'conquest', namely, the powerful rediscovery of hermeneutics, that is, of the science of interpretation.

Many years ago, as dean of the faculty of theology in Naples, I invited Hans Georg Gadamer, the father of contemporary hermeneutics, author of Truth and Method, to a quaestio quodlibetalis. A first year student asked him this question: "What is hermeneutics?"

To which Gadamer, without being ruffled, said, after a moment of reflection: "Hermeneutics means that when you and I speak we make an effort to reach the vital world that is behind the other's words, and from which they proceed."

Therefore, epistemology illumined by hermeneutics means not only to understand what is immediately perceptible, the visible, the phenomenalistic, the rational, but to also understand, or at least to try to reach, those vital worlds from which these expressions come.

In this context, one discovers that science is not only the sciences of phenomena, but that there is an ensemble of sciences, which are sciences of the spirit, which make an effort to reach what is not said, what cannot be said, what cannot be wholly divided into parts, but which is the vital world in which human processes, historical processes, etc. are situated.

And there is a further level that points to that experience of the mystery of life and of the world and that all of us have and which cannot be referred to a mere linguistic or rational formula, that is, an excess of the Mystery that surrounds the world, that surrounds the life of each one of us and that we continually perceive with surprise, with wonder, which we can reflect in words only up to a certain point. [Another paragraph that defeats my best intentions.]

However, a science that takes wonder in the face of Mystery seriously, the possibility of Revelation, and make this the subject of study, becomes absolutely precious. In a hermeneutical perspective - the interpretation of reality which does not stop at the immediate but always seeks the ultimate connections -- it seems to me that theology has the full dignity of a science for man who needs God and a meaning to life.


In 1986, speaking in Brescia at a meeting organized by the Italian editorial board of Communio magazine, Cardinal Ratzinger affirmed that it was widely held in Catholic theology that the authority of the Church is foreign to science, something that limits study, or worse, deny it. In your opinion, especially after what has happened with liberation theology, is that still the perception?
The Magisterium in the Church is not regressive - it is almost a task of exploration. In a famous essay of 1953, which became a historical highlight of theological debate, Karl Rahner, wondering about the Council of Chalcedon and its dogmatic definition of Christ as a divine person with two natures, human and divine (which continues to be binding for every Christian, regardless of his confessional membership) asked himself: "Chalkedon - Ende oder Anfang?" (Chalcedon, End or Beginning?)

His answer was very clear: Dogma is not an end, it does not stop thought, it does not paralyze it, but establishes milestones in regard to which there is no going back, because to want to go back would mean[ in the case if Christ's dual nature] to fall, on the one hand, into forms of Arianism, seeing Christ only as human, and not the Savior; and and on the other, into a form of modalism, that he is a God who appeared among men but who did not truly assume our mortal flesh, who has not truly committed himself to the human.

Karl Rahner rightly said that Chalcedon's dogmatic definition was a bulwark against regression, not against progress. Hilary of Poitiers, in turn, expressed a most beautiful dimension of this exercise of magisterial discernment by the Church.

He said: Dogma is an exigency of charity, an aid to not lose the way that God has indicated to us. EVen in this casem the vision was clearly not defensive or repressive but prospective.

The case of liberation theology that you mentioned seems to me an eloquent example, because the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had two interventions in this regard: one eminently critical, which illumined the limits often connected with the ideological dependence of this theology; the other brought to light its good ideas, the positive contributions of a theology inspired by the primacy of charity and service.

I believe that in that case, the Magisterium fulfilled exactly what Hilary of Poitiers meant, affired more recently by Karl Rahner, by which dogma is not a repressive action to extinguish life, but to protect and promote that authentic life that only the truth of God allows.

I would summarize with verse 8:32 of John, which John Paul II liked to repeat and which he also repeated to us in the International Theological Commission, when it was working on the document "Memory and Reconciliation" to support seeking forgiveness for the faults of the Church through history: "The truth will make you free."

Therefore, the more the cause of truth is served, the more the Magisterium is placed at the service of the truth, the more it can foster freedom, the genuine lfreedom iberty that gives meaning, fullness and life to man's heart.


I have my reservations about Mons. Forte, because although he had been touted often as a 'Ratzingerian' (even if he had studied witn Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini), reports at the time - which he never denied, and he is one of the Italian bishops who have the easiest access to the media -
[See accounts in the PRF:
freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=354494&p=129]
said he was one of the bishops who opposed Summoruum Pontificum at the first CEI Permanent Council meeting after its enforcement in September 2007 - on the theoretical grounds that the ecclesiology of the traditional Mass was supposedly incompatible with Vatican II .

The opponents of SP wanted the CEI to draw up an explanatory note of a restrictive nature for Italian dioceses, but they were voted down because, the majority of the 30-member Permanent Council pointed out, the Holy Father's own letter accompanying the Motu Proprio did not require further interpretation. Remembering that episode, I bristled upon reading Mons. Forte's comments bringing up the liturgy above!