The OR has once again indulged in something that is not comme il faut. Its lead story in its issue for 10/30/10 issue is on the Holy Father's audience for participants in a symposium on the late theologian Romano Guardini. As it happened to be the second occasion this week that the Holy Father addressed his audience extemporaneously in German (he spoke about theologian Erik Peterson last Monday), his text had to be transcribed first, and so, the Vatican press office could not post the text yesterday. And since the event took place at midday and ended just two hours before the OR had to go to press, the OR went to press anyway using it as the lead story without carrying a single word about what the Pope said!
And yet, both the English and Italian online services of Vatican Radio had come out with excerpts from the text - translated from the German transcript - reasonably early. It always bothers me that the various communications outlets of the Vatican don't even seem to check each other out!
So here is the OR story which is all about the introductory remarks of the president of the Romano Guardini Foundation, followed by the RV account of the Holy Father's remarks. The Foundation officer's remarks are, of course, significant, for giving a background on Guardini that includes references to Joseph Ratzinger's personal interest in Guardini, whom Sandro Magister once called one of Ratzinger's 'spiritual fathers'.
Romano Guardini:
His ideas continue to be relevant
and prescriptive for the future
Translated from the 10/30/10 issue of
When he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the first signatory to an appeal by the Berlin-based Romano Guardini Foundation to restore the professor's chair named for the late great theologian.
This was recalled today by Ludwig von Pufendorf, Foundation president, in his greeting Friday to the Holy Father who met the participants of a congress on Guardini held in Rome this week, under the sponsorship of the Pontifical Gregorian University, to mark his 125th birth anniversary.
Von Pufendorf underscored how, as a young student in Munich, seminarian and then priest-professor Joseph Ratzinger had found in Guardini a great source of inspiration.
"How much more influential, relevant and worthy of commitment Romano Guardini's thought is in today's theological and philosophical debates! How much more important today is that chair for the philosophy of religion held by Guardini, and Guardini's Catholic view of the world - which was exemplary in its ecumenism - now institutionalized in the Guardini course at Berlin's Humboldt University!
"And not the least, how worthwhile is the work of our Foundation which is based on the three themes that were fundamental to Guardini's thinking: faith, science and art".
In 1985, Cardinal Ratzinger, together with the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, organized a symposium on Guardini in order to cobnfront what he then called "a lively voice which today, after a brief period of muting following his death, once more moves us deeply".
Von Pufendorf told the Pope that the current congress has so far shown that "much of Guardini's thought is still unknown - a thinking that has contributed greatly to enrich the outlines of present philosophical thought".
"Without being presumptuous," Von Pufendorf said, "we wish to contribute, renewing our bonds to the spiritual presence of Romano Guardini where he left his mark, in order to further develop his thinking on one of his favorite themes - reflecting on 'faith and the world' - to reinforce knowledge of the faith and give forceful expression to a theology of the heart".
"Guardini's exceptional contribution, his authentically creative intuition, has been to provide a methodology for looking at the reality of the world, including its spiritual and cultural dimensions, from the perspective of the Christian faith."
Once again, Von Pudendorf recalled another previous intervention by Cardinal Ratzinger - this time at an academic celebration of Guardini's birth centenary - when he had expressed the hope at the time that "universities should place themselves totally in the service of truth, beyond all instrumentalization and political and social motivations".
Von Pudendorf cited this in pushing the Foundation's pet project: "If we can succeed in guaranteeing the permanency of the professorial chair at Humboldt closely linked to the Guardini course - which is unique in the German university panorama - further impulses and initiatives that are increasingly more essential will result. These will contribute to giving the European university an inconfoundable profile in the world as an institution committed to European ideals of education and formation.
"It was precisely for this reason that the Guardini Foundation was established, a project that has the participation of 15 European universities, with the aim of developing a formative and binding nucleus for European curricula of higher studies.
"We believe that thanks to the work of the Foundation, which brings honor to Berlin, it can be an example in a world that for the past sixty years has been shaped by unjust systems, which despise both God and man, resulting from the profound rupture in the Christian tradition of the West.
Guardini's Spirit of the liturgy inspired Joseph Ratzinger's work with a similar title, and his book on The Lord (right photo), whose present edition has a foreword by Cardinal Ratzinger, is a forerunner of the Pope's JESUS OF NAZARETH. In fact, a complete list of Guardini's books shows a remarkable analogy of the themes that he and Joseph Ratzinger have written about.
Guardini's Christian world view
Adapted from
20 OCT 2010 (RV) - The Christian view of the world as a means of drawing closer to God’s truth: As a priest and theologian, Romano Guardini, spent his entire life on this inner journey, undertaken at the same time as he pursued dialogue with others.
Pope Benedict XVI, who studied Guardini's books as a student
[and apparently audited some of his classes at the University of Munich, spoke of the key points of the theologian’s thought during an audience with participants of a Rome conference organised by the Pontifical Gregorian University for the Berlin-based Romano Guardini Foundation, dedicated to the analysis of the 'intellectual and spiritual heritage' of the Italian-German scholar, who died 40 years ago.
Benedict XVI spoke of Guardini as 'a man of inner dialogue', who was in love with "the truth of God and the truth about man", not as a mere exercise in abstraction, but as “a search that leads to choosing good for the benefit of others”.
Born in Verona in 1885, Guardini lived in Germany since early childhood and died in Munich in 1968.
Guardini defined the focus of his life as a journey of understanding and expressing "the Christian
Weltanschauung or world view".
The specificity of the Christian worldview, the Pope said, is that "man knows he is in a relationship with God who precedes him and from whom he cannot detach himself”.
Guardini believed that ethos, the foundation for our moral behaviour toward our neighbour, follows from man’s openness to God’s truth. “It is precisely because man encounters God that he can do good".
Guardini also discovered a new approach to the liturgy: "The rediscovery of the liturgy was for him the rediscovery of the unity of body and spirit in the completeness of the whole man. In fact, the liturgical act is always both a physical and spiritual act".
Pope Benedict concluded with observations on Guardini's views on the university: Guardini saw the university as the place for seeking truth, but this can only be "if [the university] is free from exploitation and from any outside involvement for political or other purposes".
10/30/10
The Vatican posted the transcript of teh Pope's remarks today. Here is a full translation...
Excellencies,
Distringuished President, Prof. Von Pufendorf,
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends:
It is a joy for me to welcome you to the Apostolic Palace, all of you who have come to Rome for the Conference of the Guardini Foundation on the theme, "The spiritual and intellectual legacy of Romano Guardini".
I wish especially to thank you, Prof. von Pudendorf, for the kind words you said earlier, during which you referred to the entire ongoing 'struggle' that links us to Guardini, and at the same time, demands of us that we carry on with his life work.
In his address of thanks on the occasion of the celebration of his 80th birthday in February 1965 at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Guardini described the mission of his life, as he understood it, as a way "of continual spiritual interrogation over what the Christian world view is".
That view, this overall look at the world, was not, for Guardini, a look from the outside as at an object of investigation. Nor did he mean a perspective on the spirit of the times which examines and analyzes what others have said or written on the religious situation of an era. All these viewpoints were insufficient for Guardini.
In his notes about his life, he said, "What interested me spontaneously was not what some have said about Christian truth but what is true."(Berichte über mein Leben, S. 24).
It was this orientation of his teaching that struck us who were young students then, because we were not looking to learn about any pyrotechnics of opinions that have been expressed about Christianity within it as well as from outside. We wanted to know what is. And here was someone who, fearlessly and with most critical thought, posed the question and helped us to think it through with him.
Guardini did not wish to learn some particular thing or many things: he desired the truth of God and the truth about man. And the instrument that he used to come closer to such truth was what was called at that time, the Weltanschauung, or world view, which comes from a living exchange with the world and with other men.
What is specifically Christian consists in that man knows he is in relationship with God, who precedes him, and from whom he cannot draw back.
It is not our thinking that sets the standard of measure, but God, who surpasses our measure and whom we cannot reduce to any entity of our creation. God revealed himself as the truth, but truth is not abstract. It is found in concrete living form, and it has its best expression in the person of Jesus Christ.
But whoever wishes to see Jesus - that is, Truth - must 'turn around', must emerge from the autonomy of arbitrary thought into a willingness to listen that can enable him to grasp 'what is'.
This movement of turning about, this conversion, shaped Guardini's entire thought and life. It meant a continual emergence from autonomy towards listening, towards receiving. And yet, even when he is in a genuine relationship with God, man does not always understand what God says. He needs a corrective, and this consists of an interchange with others who have found in the living Church at all times an interpretation that is reliable and binding.
Guardini was a man of dialog. Almost without exception, his work was the outcome of conversation - at the very least, an interior one. His lectures as Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Berlin in the 1920s consisted above all in encounters with the personages in the history of ideas. He read the works of these thinkers, 'heard' them thoroughly, learned from them, how they saw the world, and carried on a dialog with them, in order to develop through such a dialog what he, as a Catholic thinker, had to say about their thinking.
He continued this practice in Munich, and the fact that he was 'in conversation' with the great thinkers was the singular characteristic of his lecturing style. It was where he wanted to lead his students - the key word of his lectures was 'Look..." - even as he himself was carrying on an inner dialog with his listeners.
What was new compared to the rhetoric of other times was that he did not seek to use any rhetoric - he simply wanted to speak as simply as he could to us, and in doing so, speak the truth and lead us to dialog with the truth.
And so there was quite a wide spectrum of 'conversations' with authors like Socrates, St. Augustine or Pascal, with Dante, Hoelderlin, Moerike, Rilke, Dostoevsky. He saw them as living mediators, through whose words from the past, one could discover the present, see it in a new way, and allow us to live it in a new way. They give us the ability to infuse ourselves with something new.
A consequence for Guardini of man's openness to truth was an ethos, a foundation for our behavior with our fellowmen, as an exigency in our life. Since man can encounter God, he can therefore 'do good'. For him, ontology had primacy over ethos. Out of being, out of God's being rightly understood and heeded, follows right behavior. He said: "Genuine praxis - which means, right behavior - comes from truth, and one must strive for this" (ibid, p 111).
Guardini sensed this yearning for what is true, a reaching out towards the real and essential, above all in young people. In his conversations with them, usually on Rothenfels Castle, that had become through him a center of the Catholic youth movement, Guardini the priest and professor promoted the ideals of the youth movement, such as self-determination, personal responsibility, and inner truthfulness, purifying and deepening them.
As for freedom, he would say, "Only he is free who is completely what he is according to his nature...Freedom is truth" (Auf dem Wege, S. 20). The truth of man, for Guardini, was essentialness and self-moderation. Man achieves truth when he exercises "the obedience of our being to that of God". And this takes place ultimately in adoration, which Guardini believed was part of thinking.
In his guidance of young people, Guardini also sought a new approach to liturgy. The rediscovery of liturgy was for him a rediscovery of the unity of body and soul in the wholeness of the human being. And therefore, a liturgical act was always both a bodily and spiritual act.
Prayer ie amplified through physical and communal action, revealing the unity of all reality. Liturgy is symbolic action. The symbolic quintessence of the unity of the spiritual and the material is lost when these two are separated, when the world is split into spirit and body, subject and object. Guardini was profoundly convinced that man is spirit in body, and body in spirit, and that therefore, liturgy and symbol bring him to his inner essence, and through adoration, to the truth.
Among the great themes of Guardini's life, the relationship between faith and the world is of enduring relevance. He saw the university as the place for seeking truth. But it can be that, only if it is free of all exploitation and involvement in political and other purposes.
In today's world of globalization and fragmentation, we need more than ever to carry on this concern, which lies very much at the heart of the Guardini Foundation, and for whose realization the Guardini Professorial Chair was created.
Once again, I thank all those present for coming here. May your special interest in the work of Guardini sharpen awareness of the Christian foundations of our culture and society. I gladly impart to all the Apostolic Blessing.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/10/2010 14:23]