BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Mons. Koch and the Schuelerkreis:
Lively discussions and
a wealth of interventions
Translated from the 9/1/10 issue of






"Faithfulness to tradition and openness to the future - that is the most correct interpretation of Vatican II, which is the Magna Carta for the Church even in the 21st century".

Mons. Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said that this was what emerged at the recent reunion seminar of the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis, at which he was the principal lecturer.

He said that for him the experience of interacting with the former doctoral students of Prof. Joseph Ratzinger was "concrete, lively and positive'.

he summarized the two lectures he fave to the seminar which became the basis for discussions.

"The first," he said, "was a reflection on how to read and interpret Vatican II, indicating the priorities for a hermeneutic of reform... The second lecture examined in depth the constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium precisely to show concretely how a hermeneutic of reform can be realized".

Both lectures, he said, were followed by discussions which were very interesting and rich with significant contributions".

The discussions, he said, showed "how fundamental the spiritual dimension is in Christian life, in its every aspect. And in my opinion, this is true as well in the ecumenical dialog which now constitutes the direct field of work for me... But it was concrete examples that made the discussions very useful to each participant"..

He said his impressions were confirmed by the words of encouragement given to him by Benedict XVI at their private audience on Sunday, August 30.

"We spoke about the new ecumenical challenge, because the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity is not a reality by itself but acts on the Pope's mandate to see how the ecumenical dialog can develop".

Turning back to his lectures to the Schuelerkreis, Mons. Koch said that the first lecture, about Vatican II between tradition and innovation, was articulated in seven points:
- The history of its reception and non-reception
- The hermeneutic of reform as a fundamental continuity with the past (vs Vatican II as a rupture with Tradition)
- Return to the sources (ressourcement) and keeping abreast with the world (aggiornamento)
- Criteria for a hermeneutic of reform (integral interpretation of the Council documents; the unity of dogmatic and pastoral goals; and no division between the spirit and the letter)
- The Catholic amplitude and fullness of the documents
- The legacy of the Council in the present challenges to the Church
- Ecclesial reform as a spiritual mission.

On the second lecture, "The post-Conciliar liturgical reform between continuity and discontinuity", Mons. Koch's outline had eight sub-topics. "I began from the observation that
- Liturgy is the crucial point of the Conciliar hermeneutic; and later went on to
- The phenomenology and theology of liturgy:
- The liturgy as organic development (with the principles of active participation by all the faithful, and more comprehensible and simpler rites)
- Lights and shadows in the post-Conciliar liturgy
- Safeguarding the great patrimony of liturgy
- The unity of worship and liturgy in the New Testament
- Christian liturgy and mankind's principal religions
- The cosmic dimension of liturgy."

"Finally, I spoke about the reliving of the Paschal mystery in the Mass".



The German service of Vatican Radio interviewed a member of the Schuelerkreis, now the auxiliary bishop of Hamburg, which the Italian service presented as a transcript in Italian translation.

Prof. Ratzinger was
always attentive and kind
Translated from the Italian service of

August 31, 2010

At the end of the Ratzinger Schulerkreis seminar, one of Pope Benedict's former students, Mons. Hans-Joachim Jaschke, now auxiliary bishop of Hamburg, spoke to Fr. Bernd Hegenkord, head of Vatican Radio's German service:

MONS. JASCHKE: It was 1970 when I started research for my doctorate. I came to Regensburg to work with Prof. Ratzinger. I was particularly interested in pneumatology (study of the Holy Spirit). But during a course under him, I became interested in Irinaeus of Lyons, the great theologian of the second Christian century and father of dogmatic theology.

About 20 of us were pursuing our doctorates, and we met with him once a month. We always started with Mass, then we met till noon, with one of us reporting on how he was doing with his own work. That was the principal form of his professional guidance for our doctoral dissertations. Of course, we could ask him questions. Personally, I was always rather discreet. I came to him when I was almost done with my dissertation. He made some suggestions, and he trimmed some of it. In short, he always told me, "Go ahead" in a way that was always gratifying. I think I did not disappoint him.

The Ratzinger Schuelerkreis has existed for some time. How should we think of it - as an academic encounter or as a reunion of old friends?
It's a mixture of a 'veterans' club' and an academic encounter. We have all 'grown' and we have known each other for some time. Originally, it was we the ex-students who constituted this. Then, one day, we invited our ex-professor when he become Archbishop of Munich, and we have met yearly since then. When he became Pope, he took the initiative of inviting us to Castel Gandolfo every year. Even if he is now the Pope, we continue to speak to him as friends, and at a certain point, he is our former professor again.

These reunions always have a theme - this time, it was Vatican II and the interpretation of it as a reform and not a discontinuity. We heard lectures on the topic, and we discussed it among ourselves and with him.

On Saturday, the Holy Father spent time with us - and we met in the morning and in he afternoon. It was almost like going back in time, when we were taking a course with him. He led the sessions, he listened very attentively, and every once in a while, he spoke up. It was a very pleasant, moderate and friendly discussion.

This time, there were also young theologians who, of course, had never studied with Prof. Ratzinger...
Yes, for a few years now, we have been trying to widen the Schuelerkreis and make it 'younger'. There is a distinction though. The discussions with the Pope are reserved only for the original Schuelerkreis because we want it to retain its original identity. However, during these three days, we met with with the young theologians to discuss the seminar theme and we saw our positions converge. Last Sunday, the Holy Father presided at Mass and afterwards, we all had breakfast together, including the young ones. After the Angelus, they were presented to the Holy Father.

NB: In recent days, one of the Italian Vaticanistas wrote about Jaschke that as auxiliary bishop of Hamburg, he has been one of the prominent German voices opposed to some of Benedict XVI's policies, including Summorum Pontificum and the gesture towards tHE Lefebvrians, and that he has not been attending the Schuelerkreis reunions for some time. As soon as I find the reference, I will translate and post here.

The 9/1 issue of OR also has the Italian translation of Cardinal Schoenborn's homily at the Schuelerkreis Mass on Sunday. I will translate it later.



And an article by AGI's Salvatore Izzo this weekend made reference to a major interview that the OR published last February with the only ScHuelerkreis member who is now in the Roman Curia - an interview I had totally missed. This Schuelerkreis member is the very person who was being feted by Prof. Ratzinger and his sister Maria at their home in Pentling for having just passed his oral defense of his doctoral dissertation on the day the formal announcement came in 1977 that the Professor had been named Archbishop of Munich and Freising.


African culture and theology
in the service of the Church
by Gianluca Biccini
Translated from the 2/25/10 issue of


"He who does not have the simplicity to receive does not have the right to give". These paradoxical words by Joseph Ratzinger constitute the greatest lesson taken home by a young priest from Benin who earned his doctorate with the future Pope as his adviser at the University of Regensburg in the 1970s.



The priest is now the new secretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture. He is Barthélémy Adoukonou, descendant of an ancient royal family of Abomey, and a first-rank representative of African theology.

We spoke to him in Rome, the city where he was ordained a priest in 1966, when he arrived to take up his new Curial post. Now 68, he studied at the Pontifical Urbanian University, and had earlier worked with his former teacher as a member of the International Theological Commission, when Cardinal Ratzinger was its ex-officio president in his capacity as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

A profound connoisseur of Western Africa, he taught for decades in Benin's seminaries and universities. On December 3, 2009, Benedict XVI named him secretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture headed by Mons. Gianfranco Ravasi.

This summer, Cardinal Bertone announced a larger African presence at the Vatican. Recent nominations by Benedict XVI seem to confirm this tendency.
I read my nomination and that of all the other Africans in the light of the trajectory of our encounter with the West. This has not been translated only in the activities of soldiers and traders, but also of the missionaries.

I am among those who believe that the missionary is the Good Samaritan at the bedside, so to speak, of an Africa that had fallen into the hands of brigands, which the European soldiers and traders often were.

In the tragedy of the 'rejects' of humanity, the missionary was the figure through whom God made possible a different history for the black man, raising him back to his full dignity.

The missionaries may perhaps have hesitated about the existence of an African culture. But there emerged fervent evangelizers who paid careful attention to disseminating the Word of God into the native cultures and sought to assimilate them into the womb of the Living Word.

When in 1956, African priests started to examine themselves, one could perceive a first endogenous acceptance, although critical, of the efforts to synthesize faith and reason that the missionary fathers who had come from Europe carried out in behalf of Africans. The black priests did so by joining the pan-African movement of Negritude to defend the cultural values of the black man.

But it required years for the first effects to be felt...
At the time of Vatican II, the great Catholic intellectual from Senegal, Alioune Diop, along with all the men of culture on the African continent and in the diaspora in the Caribbean, had expressed the hope for an African council. When, more than 30 years later, John Paul II in 1994 did this in the form of a special assembly of the Bishops' Synod, African pastors and theologians used the anthropological depth of African culture to affirm their determination to build the Church in Africa as 'the family of God' and 'the brotherhood of Christ'. It was a great act of inculturation whose historical effect we have not yet fully grasped .

How do you interpret your nomination by the Pope?
As a decisive step in recognizing that human nature in Africa is endowed with the same expressive dynamism defined by Vatican II in Gaudium et spes. The black man, like all other human beings, is 'capable' of the Gospel because he is endowed with that dynamism of expression that is culture in its most profound sense. I think my nomination is a step forward in recognizing African theology as an expression of faith that makes culture. Faith becomes culture in order that it is not suffocated by culture which results in suffocating man. It is the man of faith who achieves inculturation.

In 2009, Benedict XVI first visited Africa and a few months later, he convoked the second Synodal assembly on Africa. Do you think the Church has paid enough attention to Africa?
Profoundly missionary in his soul, Benedict XVI loves Africa and is in heartfelt 'complicity' with it on the theological level. His own graduate thesis was on ecclesiology, on the Church as 'people and house of God'.

The post-Conciliar text on the Church as a brotherhood forms a sort of diptych with that thesis, and a symbiosis with the option for Africa that emerged after the first special Synod Assembly to build the Church in Africa as 'the house and family of God' and 'the fraternal Body of Christ'.

The Church of Africa achieves inculturation through the royal way of ecclesiology. it has the possibility and grace of doing so since an ecclesiological Pope, full of that ecclesiastical spirit, succeeded a Pope who was enamored of Africa. What luck, one might say. I prefer to say, what a grace!

In addition, Benedict XVI, by calling a second synodal for the continent on the theme of pastoral responses to social problems, went to the heart of what the Church should do to carry out its calling as the Good Samaritan who watches over the fate of an Africa that many consider moribund.

The African synod in October 2009 came on the heels of his encyclical Caritas in veritate, offering to Africa the manna of a social doctrine that it needs for its commitment to reconciliation, to justice and to peace.

The encyclical's personalist-communitarian perspective on the economy, in politics, in ecology, and on society in general is perfectly consistent with his ecclesiology, and applies particularly to Africa. [In fact, a leading economic commentator called CIV 'an encyclical for Africa' so well does it express all the concerns for the developing world that Africa embodies far more than Asia and Latin America.]

You are a compatriot of the unforgettable Cardinal Bernard Gantin [who was also one of the four 'classmates' of Joseph Ratzinger made cardinal in Paul VI's last consistory, and whom he ucceeded as Dean of Cardinals, afetr Gantin elected to retire to Benin, where he died in 2008]. What relationship did you ahve with him?
When he returned to Benin in 1957 as a young bishop, Mons. Gantin visited the minor seminary where I was a fourth-year student, and at that time, he virtually adopted me. Our relationship was like father and son. It was dimmed by something that took place in April 2006, on the 10th anniversary of the African Missions of Lyons when, misinformed, he condemned the African movement for inculturation that I had begun after Mission Sunday in 1970. But he regretted the mistake profoundly and he wrote me to express this regret.

After the election of Benedict XVI, I visited him at the Saint Gall seminary, where he was in retirement, to say a Mass of reconciliation. And I am back here in Rome in full sympathy with my spiritual father who had been for more than 30 years the African heart in the Roman Curia.

You are part of the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis. How was he as a professor?
During Vatican II, I was an admirer of him as well as of Karl Rahner. When I went to Regensburg to study, I found a brilliant theologian who did not read his lectures as from a professor's chair but as if he was reading them from Heaven. He had a panoramic vision that was both historical and synthesizing, as profound as one expects of a German and as clear as a Latin.

I was fasacinated by the Christocentrism of his thinking - it was evident in every subject he tackled, with his rare capacity for articulation. He developed his thinking about communion which was easy to grasp, and easily synthesized the multiple elements that many teachers cannot always unify, thus burdening their students.

Those wre years of ferment, though...
I was preparing my doctoral dissertation and i was bothered by the excessive rigorousness of the historico-critical method. Everythinjg seemed to be fragmented, and it was not clear which living and vital synthesis could be allowed so that the Word of God could nourish men. I give thanks to God that i found a teacher wich such a rare and acute capacity of discernment. He was a refined analyst and very capable theologian. That is how I knew him, that is how he still is..

Any particular memories?
Initially I was conditioned by the pan-African movement to affirm the black man and his self-determination - an attitude based on suspicion of anything Western, that rejected any external contribution to Africa as being just one more subtle example of cultural imperialism.

The awakening came to me one day while dining with my teacher in Pentling, when he said to me: "You know, Bartelemy, even we Germans after the war struggled to feed ourseklves, and it was necessary for the Americans to help us through the Marshall Plan. Those who do not have the simplicity to receive do not have the right to give".

It was then I truly understood that life is give and take, a sharing. And that the thought of communion which comes from such a beleif cannot possibly be imperialistic.

And how was he as a priest?
A man of faith and a vry attentive humanist, concerned with building relationships with others in the truth, and I was not surprised at the time that he chose for his episcopal motto 'Cooperatores veritatis'. Nor that just before the Conclave that would elect him Pope, he made the most profound diagnosis of the spiritual malady of our time when he spoke of the uniersal threat of the dictatorship of relativism.

The Black Continent, which appeared to be most exposed to this, was glad to welcome him a a Pastor who can defend them in what is the most essential for man: his vital relationship with truth.

About your academic activity, what did it mean to teach in the seminaries and state universities of your country?
It meant awakening a taste for culture and implanting those stimuli that would allow cultural growth. It is sad that Africa has more than its share of 'intellectuals by qualification', for whom culture is simply an ornament they use for vainglory.

But we also have 'intellectuals by vocation' who remain faithful to the true meaning of culture and who promote correct values. My concern was to form intellectuals of this kind. This led me to research the very heart of the culture of orality - which is typical of Africa and so many other populations that have no access to literacy - for those among them who can be called intellectuals by vocation, those whom the pan-African movement regard as 'community wise men'. And I have tried to organize them.

I believe African theology should emerge from a constellation of such groups of conmmunity wise men from all our tribes, so that together, we can render to the Church our coin of culture. Right now, the Church in Africa is not just poor materially. It is also poor culturally, The Sillon Noir movement has been working for 40 years on the theology of inculturation in which community wise men and acadmeic intellectuals cooperate at the crossroads of cultures.