It turns out there is quite a crop of tributes to B16 on his 90th birthday. I will start out with those that are already in English.
One of the best, for its specific focus, comes from a Cameroonian priest who is pursuing a doctorate in theology at Boston College (not what you might call
a bastion of Catholic orthodoxy but rather of heterodoxy) while teaching at the college's Woods School. Judging from his essay of appreciation for Benedict XVI,
however, the priest keeps his own counsel, regardless of his current milieu...
One expects more tributes as we move on from the Emeritus Pope's milestone birthday to the 12th anniversary on April 19 of his election to the Chair of Peter...
Father Benedict: Friend of Jesus Christ
by FR. MAURICE ASHLEY AGBAW-EBAI
April 17, 2017
On April 18, 2005, two days after he had just celebrated his 78th birthday, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger delivered the homily Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice to the College of Cardinals gathered at St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome.
As Dean of the College of Cardinals, it was Ratzinger’s responsibility to highlight to his brother cardinals some spiritual yardsticks that could guide their discernment as they entered into conclave to elect Peter’s Successor.
While the buzz word of Ratzinger’s masterful homily became his denunciation of what he styled the “dictatorship of relativism,” the central nexus of Ratzinger’s homily, I believe, lay elsewhere.
He was not a prophet of doom unleashing canons of denunciation on culture, but a lover who was eager to share the love of his life, Jesus Christ, because he was convinced that encountering Jesus of Nazareth was a more liberating and joyful experience than atheistic secularism could offer. In other words,
the central nexus of Ratzinger’s homily was an invitation to a friendship with Jesus Christ.
Commenting on the Gospel text from John,
“I no longer speak of you as slaves…. Instead, I call you friends” (Jn 15: 15) [a text he often quotes in relation to the priesthood and his own ordination back in 1951], Ratzinger identifies two essential qualities regarding friendship with Jesus Christ:
Firstly, there are no secrets between friends, evidenced by Christ entrusting the body of his Church into the hands of weak mortals, in this context, those charged with the solemn responsibility of electing the Bishop of Rome.
Christ has made known to them the knowledge of God. He has made known to them everything he has learnt from his Father. Above all, he has entrusted the mysteries, the sacramental economy into their hands. We speak in his name, “This is my Body”; “I absolve you from your sins,” etc.
Because the Lord has made us his friends, we have been invited into his power, into his relationship with the Father, so that from this encounter and intimacy, we become active agents of bringing about God’s liberating love to our world that is so much in need of God’s love, and yet often unconscious of this need.
The second reading that Ratzinger gives to friendship with Jesus is the communion of wills:
idem velle — idem nolle, same likes, same dislikes:
“You are my friends if you do what I command you” (Jn 15: 14).
To be a friend of Jesus is to allow one’s discernment and consciousness to be shaped by Jesus Christ. It is to love what Jesus loves. It is to strive to live daily God’s will. I cannot be a friend of Jesus if my choices, preferences and likes contradict the manifest and revealed will of Jesus.
For Ratzinger therefore, I am a friend of Jesus if I am completely open and transparent with Jesus, and daily seek to live a Christ-like life.
As Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger developed this theme of friendship with Jesus Christ especially in his homilies at priestly ordinations in which he presided as Bishop of Rome. To be a friend of Jesus Christ invites one into a greater intimacy of knowledge and communion, for friendship demands intimacy and knowledge.
Father Benedict’s new ministry of prayer on behalf of the whole Church certainly mirrors to us his intimacy with Jesus of Nazareth, the love of Benedict’s life.
To be a friend of Jesus Christ as seen in the life of Benedict XVI, clearly has an ecclesial dimension. How could it be otherwise in Joseph Ratzinger! As Benedict himself said in his Chrism Mass Homily in 2008, “being friends with Jesus is par excellence always friendship with his followers. We can be friends of Jesus only in communion with the whole Christ, with the Head and with the Body; in the vigorous vine of the Church to which the Lord gives life.”
Friendship with Jesus Christ is friendship with the Church of Jesus Christ, because owing to the intrinsic link between the Church and Christ, the community of the Church is not an accidental product of time that could perhaps have emerged in its concreteness in a later time that was unrelated to Christ.
Friendship with Jesus Christ likewise implies modelling one’s life after the hypostatic union of Christ, not primarily in terms of the union between Jesus’s humanity and divinity as taught by Council of Ephesus in 431, but in the sense of the identification of mission and person in Jesus of Nazareth.
In Jesus, person and mission coincide, to the extent that to be a friend of Christ is to radically orient one’s life in a pragmatic, existential manner that is caught up in the never completely discernable transcendence that defines and shapes the openness with God, with Christ as the model of mission and person.
In large part, Benedict’s deep sense of the symbolic, of a 'usable' anthropology, is built on the conviction that his life is simply a standing for Another, a “representative” of Another, a being-in-reference to Another, a symbolic intercommunication meant to keep the window of the world open to the refreshing and life-giving breath of God.
Because Benedict believes that mission cannot be severed from person, what mattered was not his own person as Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger. He responded to the call of the Lord as a priest, and the consequence of that response was to cease to live for himself.
Like his mentor, Augustine of Hippo, Benedict’s fruitful priestly life was a search for the face of his friend, Jesus Christ, as he himself wrote in the introduction into his trilogy on Jesus – a classic that will be with the Church for ages to come.
And still following Augustine, Benedict, as is evident from his Last Testament, found himself, in finding Jesus. It became clear to this Son of Bavaria, with the passage of time, that he was not the only one searching, but Jesus was searching for him as well, even antecedent to Benedict’s conscious search for the Lord.
Benedict discerned the
a priori love that Jesus has for him
[as he does for each of us], a realization that led him to see love as the very being of God.
With Augustine, his theological and spiritual master, Benedict discerned his life as a gift of love, and he was certain that God’s love would never abandon him, since God had fashioned everything in measure, weight, and number
(Wis 11:20).
The search for God, for the face of the love of his life, became for Joseph Ratzinger, the bedrock of genuine anthropology. Christology, as a systematic treatment of the person and work of Jesus, was not his intention, as Benedict forcefully wrote in the foreword to the second volume of his trilogy on Jesus.
The reason was simple: Christology, notwithstanding the gains made by the historical-critical method, is often subjected to a sterile demythologization and conceptualization-sounding verbalism in which Jesus of Nazareth becomes someone left in the past, perhaps in stacks of university libraries.
Benedict’s sole desire was not a systematization of Jesus, but to make his friend known and loved, because he had arrived at the certainty that the brokenness that was plaguing the lives of so many post-modern men and women was a desperate cry for help that could only be met by the loving encounter with Jesus of Nazareth.
To know Jesus of Nazareth was to enter into the open future of God that is transformative of the present. It was not mere coincidence that when Benedict visited his homeland, his theme for his apostolic visit to Germany was: Where there is God, there is a Future! The subtle implication could not be ignored. Where there is no God, perhaps there is no future!
When Joseph Ratzinger found himself in finding Jesus of Nazareth what did he see? We can dare a response to this question by looking into his spiritual memoirs, his trilogy on Jesus of Nazareth, which should be seen as the unmistakable public testament of Ratzinger’s long friendship with Jesus.
Clearly, in the evening of his earthly life, Ratzinger, like the Samaritan woman in John’s Gospel, felt the greatest good he could do for the world was to invite the village of the world to come to the well of Jesus and drink, so that we will never be thirsty again.
The alternative is to settle for the mediocre, the minimal, and lesser waters away from Christ; that is, the shallow waters of egoism whereby life is lived for the narrow vision of the self.
Standing by Jacob’s well, we suddenly realize that it is not the well that is deep nor us having no cistern to draw from the well. The real well is Jesus, and the water he gives to quench our thirst is the friendship with him. Little wonder that the Samaritans begged him to stay longer in their town!
To get a better appreciation of what Joseph Ratzinger’s life-long search had found, we must turn to the second volume of Jesus of Nazareth. In the foreword, Ratzinger writes that it is
“in this second volume do we encounter the decisive sayings and events of Jesus’ life (…) I hope that I have been granted an insight into the figure of our Lord that can be helpful to all readers who seek to encounter Jesus and to believe in him.”
For a man who has always read into the fact that his birth took place on Holy Saturday, a symbolic sign of
the Church that though longing for the light and hope of the Risen Lord, is not yet there, Easter for Benedict is the real defining moment of his quest for his friend, Jesus of Nazareth. His friend is the Risen One! This is the quintessential Ratzingerian characterization of Jesus of Nazareth.
Why? Because hope in the present and for the future is borne from the Risen One, and without hope, the human being has nothing to live for, and life becomes a meaningless, boring routine. The Risen One is the central theological metaphor for Joseph Ratzinger because it is about hope and the future that informs, humanizes and divinizes the present.
This is significant because Joseph Ratzinger is a thorough Augustinian who believes in a broken human nature, a broken world, in which the battle between the two loves of the City of God and the City of men and women is a tangible, unending reality.
With the eyes of Easter, Ratzinger is able to diagnose the cure for the malady of what Pascal trenchantly called diversion and indifference, that are not only eroding the humanity of men and women, but also depriving us of the meaning and joy of life, to the extent that men and women now live with little or no sense of the future.
As we mark the ninetieth year of Father Benedict’s birth that begins on Easter Sunday, in gratitude to God for the unique gift of this man, this priest, this bishop, this genius of a mind, this unassuming, meek and shy friend of Jesus Christ, it is important to still pay attention to what this friend of Jesus Christ is telling us about his friend:
“Jesus’s Resurrection was about breaking out into an entirely new form of life, into a life that is no longer subject to the law of dying and becoming, but lies beyond it—a life that opens up a new dimension of human existence—an “evolutionary leap.”
In Jesus’s Resurrection, a new possibility of human existence is attained that affects everyone and that opens up a future, a new kind of future, for mankind. Christ’s Resurrection is either a universal event, or it is nothing
(1 Cor. 15:16, 20).
And only if we understand it as a universal event, as the opening of a new dimension of human existence, are we on the way toward any kind of correct understanding of the New Testament Resurrection testimony.
Jesus hdid not -re-enter' normal human life like Lazarus and the others whom Jesus raised from the dead.
“He has entered upon a different life, a new life — he has entered the vast breadth of God himself, and it is from there that he reveals himself to his followers.”
Finally, we now know what Benedict found in finding Jesus: A “new kind of life”; a vast “breadth of God himself”! Jesus has not kept this “new life” from his friend Ratzinger precisely because there are no secrets between friends, and Ratzinger, by submitting his will to Jesus, entered into the same likes and dislikes of his friend, Jesus the Nazarene.
With immense gratitude and uplifted hearts, we thank you, Father Benedict, for your eloquent communication of this “new kind of life” to us.
Vergelt’s Gott, Father Benedict!
An earlier tribute in CRISIS magazine was the ff essay from a professor of theology at the Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and author of a number of books, including Still Point: Loss, Longing, and Our Search for God (2012) and The Beggar's Banquet . His most recent book is Witness to Wonder: The World of Catholic Sacrament. He resides in Steubenville, Ohio, with his wife and ten children.
A Pope turns ninety
by REGIS MARTIN
April 12, 2017
In the long march of the Church’s history, stretching all the way back to a certain failed fisherman called Peter — whom Christ himself caught with the bait of eternal life —few occupants of the papal chair have evinced as lofty a level of erudition, existing in happy combination with ardent and uncomplicated piety, as the Bavarian Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Who, God willing, turns ninety on April 16, this Easter Sunday.
Although he was not born on the feast of Easter, but the day before, the Vigil of the Lord’s Resurrection, which sacred tradition speaks of as the Mystery of Holy Saturday, it remains central to his life. And when he was at once baptized with water freshly blessed for the great feast, it left an impression.
In fact, it is a point he makes much of in
Milestones, which is a moving account of his life from 1927, when he came into this world, until 1977, when he became Archbishop of Munich.
Chosen on the strength of a single book,
Introduction To Christianity, which grew out of lectures delivered at Tubingen in 1967, it evidently so captivated the then Pope Paul VI that he had him elevated straightaway into the episcopacy.
[I do not think that it was just that one book that made Paul VI pluck Joseph Ratzinger from his academic career, but the overall impression he had made as a theologian who was named to the International Theological Commission under the CDF when it was first established in 1967.]
After that, the scramble to the top was swift and sure. Only he was never one to scramble.
But getting back to the timing of his birth, he believed it to have been the result of divine Providence that, coming into the world when he did, he should then have been the first to be baptized. The experience filled him, he said, “with thanksgiving for having had my life immersed in this way in the Easter mystery.”
Putting it a little differently, we might say that given the pilgrim shape of the soul, of an existence lived always on the way, forever in transit, this sudden and dramatic juxtaposition of 'already and not yet' struck him as wonderfully “fitting,” since it left him in a state of “still awaiting Easter … not yet standing in the full light but walking toward it full of trust.”
What can that mean for the rest of us but that we need constantly to be in a state of readiness before the door of Easter, waiting expectantly for it to swing open, yet not quite able to cross the threshold. The pivotal moment, then, becomes the event of baptism, which he would years later describe, in an arresting formulation, as nothing less than “the final mutation in the evolution of the human species.”
He has certainly been living that tension a very long time. Meanwhile, the record of his achievements, which are vast, varied, and undeniable, testifies to an amazing and productive life. But what remains especially instructive about that life, one crowded with accomplishment, is the fact that he has spent it in a constant state of trust, of overarching hope in the Lord.
And why shouldn’t his life have been stepped in such trust? Benedict is, after all, a Christian, a believer, which means someone who carries within him the adamantine conviction that Another accompanies him every step of the way. Perhaps this is why the virtue of hope figures with the same striking prominence in his writings as it does in his life.
“The dark door of time, of the future,” he reminds us in
Spe Salvi,
that most beautiful of encyclicals [AGREE! AGREE! AGREE!], undertaken to unearth the meaning of the theological virtue revealed as Hope, “has been thrown open.” And in showing us the face of Christ, we are thus given a saving glimpse of Someone to whom we may entrust everything, including especially our brokenness and sin.
But Christ is not merely a face to be seen, as though salvation were nothing more than a snapshot. There is God’s outstretched hand as well, which we are free to grab hold of because it is the hand of Jesus who, first grasping hold of my own hand, enables the two of us to move together through the dark valley.
Here we see, he tells us in a profound and telling passage from
Introduction To Christianity, “the most fundamental feature of faith … namely, its personal character:
Christian faith is more than the option in favor of a spiritual ground to the world; its central formula is not ‘I believe in something,’ but ‘I believe in Thee.’ It is the encounter with the human being Jesus, and in this encounter it experiences the meaning of the world as a person.
The life of a believer, in other words, is that of someone who stands on the secure ground of God alone, who thereby “lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning, but that this meaning knows me and loves me, I can entrust myself to it like the child that knows all its questions answered in the ‘You’ of its mother.”
For Benedict, then, and for the Church he no longer leads but continues surely to inspire and to pray for, Christ is “the true shepherd … who walks with me even on the path of final solitude, where no one can accompany me.”
This is because Christ, having fallen himself into the hellish depths of that strangest of mysteries found at the center of the creed (on which day he, the future pope, was born), is uniquely placed to vanquish all the darkness that surrounds and oppresses us, since he himself already assumed it out of an incomprehensible depth of love. Neither death nor the devil, therefore, need hold us in fear any more.
And who better than Mary, he asks at the very end of
Spe Salvi, to help blaze that trail home to God? “Who more than Mary could be a star of hope for us? With her ‘yes’ she opened the door of our world to God himself….”
And if the future belongs to those who show up, what better company to have on a journey than one who, having already arrived herself, can, like a good mother, nudge the rest of us across the same finish line?
“When you hastened with holy joy across the mountains of Judea to see your cousin Elizabeth,” he writes, citing the great Mystery of the Visitation, “you became the image of the Church to come, which carries the hope of the world in her womb across the mountains of history.”
This is heady stuff. And it is but a single stone in the great mosaic of his work, that will soon belong to the ages. And, like everything else he thought and wrote about, it remains most wonderfully evocative of the great themes on which his life turns.
What a towering presence he has been for the Catholic world all these years! Not a day goes by that I do not thank God for this holy and learned man. May God reward him greatly for the many good things he has done for Christ, the Church, and for the world he came to save.
Benedict XVI has always been an Easter child
By Father Raymond J. de Souza
April 16, 2017
Easter Sunday is the 90th birthday of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Born on April 16, 1927, he was a Holy Saturday baby, born the day that God is dead, the day of the tomb.
Joseph Ratzinger has lived his long life in a liturgical key, and it began as a newborn. In 1927 — before the reform of Holy Week by the Venerable Pius XII — the Easter vigil was celebrated in the morning of Holy Saturday. So little Joseph was taken to the church the same morning of his birth and baptized with the newly blessed Easter water. Born on the day of the dead God, he was reborn by water and the spirit into the new life of the Risen Jesus.
“Holy Saturday: the day God was buried; is not this the day we are living now, and formidably so?” wrote Ratzinger in one of his hundreds of incomparable biblical meditations. “Did not our century mark the start of one long Holy Saturday, the day God was absent, when even the hearts of the disciples were plunged into an icy chasm that grows wider and wider? And thus, filled with shame and anguish, they set out to go home; dark-spirited and annihilated in their desperation they head for Emmaus — without realizing that he whom they believed to be dead is in their midst.”
Ratzinger was born on the threshold of Germany plunging into that icy chasm. But the God who had been relegated to a historical curiosity by so many of Germany’s most gifted biblical scholars, the God whom Ratzinger’s countryman Nietzsche declared dead, the God of the children of Israel whom the Nazis were determined to exterminate — this God remained in their midst. God was in the midst of the Bavarian piety that nourished Ratzinger as a boy; God indeed had descended into the hell of Germany’s Holy Saturday.
Joseph Ratzinger, emerging from the horrors of World War II, devoted himself to the great question of God. Could he be known? Where could man find him? If he was not dead, was he a tyrant against whom we had to rebel? Or was he a Father who sent his Son to be our friend?
His project did not remain a purely speculative one, for he remain convinced that God of speculative theology did not remain only such. He revealed himself and came to encounter us, above all in the two privileged places of revelation — the sacred Scriptures and the holy Mass. In defense of the reliability of the Scriptures and the divine action in the liturgy, Ratzinger waged a decades-long battle against the prevailing trends of ecclesial life. Such was his brilliance, though, that even when his positions were in a minority, they demanded respect. In time, with the prominence he gained as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and then as pope, his writings became massively influential.
It is plausible to imagine that 60 years hence, on the 150th anniversary of his birth, Biblical study of the Gospels will have been completely transformed by his trilogy Jesus of Nazareth. The celebration of the Holy Mass ad orientem will again be the norm. In 2077, Benedict will be recognized as a decisive turning point.
All pastors have to answer to God for their ministry. Benedict will have to answer for his decision to relinquish it, the utter innovation of a papal abdication absent a crisis. The Holy Spirit had heretofore never prompted the successor of Peter to do that, and it is not evident the Holy Spirit prompted it now. The public arguments offered for the abdication by Benedict are unconvincing; the results of the abdication are destabilizing.
Yet the man himself is serene as he awaits judgment by the Lord of history. He saw firsthand St. John Paul refuse to come down from the cross and admired that heroic witness. But he was convinced that God was calling him to a different path, “to climb the mountain ... to devote myself even more to prayer and meditation.”
The man who knows the great tradition better than anyone of his generation felt free to depart from it. Perhaps he saw farther than others into God’s providence.
The depth and breadth of the Ratzinger vision was manifest in an Easter meditation he published decades ago that focused on the binding of Isaac, who, as he ascends Mount Moriah, is told by Abraham that “God will provide” a lamb for the sacrifice. Isaac then realizes that he himself is that lamb and his own father is preparing to sacrifice him.
“The name Isaac contains the root ‘laughter,’” wrote Ratzinger. “And indeed, had he not grounds for laughter when the tension of mortal fear suddenly disappeared at the sight of the trapped ram, which solved the riddle? Did he not have cause to laugh when the sad and gruesome drama — the ascent of the mountain, his father binding him — suddenly had an almost comic conclusion, yet one that brought liberty and redemption? This was a moment in which it was shown that the history of the world is not a tragedy, the inescapable tragedy of opposing forces, but ‘divine comedy.’ The man who thought he had breathed his last was able to laugh.”
Joseph Ratzinger, who saw his share of tragedy in the world and betrayal in the Church, has lived long years alongside the “mortal fear” of totalitarian violence and a dying Church in his native Europe.
History may be tragedy, even a farce. But salvation history is a comedy. And Benedict has never ceased hearing — in the sacred word and in sacred music — the laughter. He has always been an Easter baby.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 18/04/2017 08:35]