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For some reason, an image of the cover for Italian edition of Cardinal Sarah’s book is not yet available online, so I have improvised a cover using a headline from Il Foglio and the photo of Cardinal Sarah and the abbot of the Grande
Chartreuse at the monastery near Grenoble, France, made famous worldwide by the film ‘The Great Silence'. It is the head monastery of the Carthusian order.
One must hope Mons. Gaenswein sought and got a papal dispensation for the following text, which would gbe a credit to the Bergoglio
Vatican, because it echoes Benedict XVI’s effective condemnation of the verbosity and noise in the Church today, and in no uncertain
terms. Some say perhaps the emeritus Pope himself asked for his successor’s permission to write the Preface/Afterword to Cardinal
Sarah’s book – he did not have to do that at all - but we were told he had to ask specific permission for the publication of the last
interview-book with Peter Seewald uncharacteristically starts with what reads like Benedict’s ‘unconditional’ endorsement of his
successor (even allowing that this part of the interview may have come in the early days of the Bergoglio Pontificate) – pages upon
which I reflexively intone, “Out, out, damned spot!” with more passion and chagrin than Lady Macbeth had about the blood on her hands...
If GG did not clear this text with the powers-that-be, I shall take bets on who will be thrown out of the Curia earlier - he or
Cardinal Sarah.
Mons. Gaenswein presents Cardinal Sarah’s book
and was asked by Benedict XVI to read his Preface
VATICAN CITY, May 26, 2017 (Translated from ACIStampa) – “A very modern book” is how Archbishop Georg Gaenswein presented Cardinal Robert Sarah’s second booklength interview La forza del silenzio, the Italian edition of the book originally published last year in French.
Here is the full text of his presentation, in which the Prefect of the Pontifical Household and private secretary to Benedict XVI spoke about his early dream to become a Carthusian monk [they of ‘the great silence’] to the Foreword by Benedict XVI.
[The presentation was held at Santa Maria dell’Anima, a church in central Rome which was founded as a hospice in the 14th century by Dutch merchants under the Holy Roman Empire. In the course of the 15th century, it became the national church of the whole Holy Roman Empire in Rome, and afterwards, the national church of Germany in Rome with accommodations for German-speaking people visiting Rome. Its dormitory for visiting German prelates and clergy is famous for having lodged Germans, including then Prof. Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, who took part in the Second Vatican Council. The Church is familiarly called the ‘Anima’.]
Eminences, Excellencies, distinguished ladies and gentlemen:
I have the honor to speak tonight in front of you, Cardinal Sarah, and to an audience gathered here at the library of the Anima in your honor.
Indeed, it is with some amazement – if you will allow me to begin on a very personal note – that I look back to a dream of my younger years: to become a Carthusian monk following the rule of St. Bruno. It did not happen, as you all know. Man proposes, but God disposes.
And if we allow it, we could say that we can only continually pinch ourselves to make sure we are not dreaming when we see how God regularly goes beyond our most audacious dreams and even desires that we would never have imagined. It is what I feel today.
As if I am a minor friar bringing forth to you from the Mater Ecclesiae monastery a one-of-a-kind letter from Benedict XVI, with which the Emeritus Pope is breaking his silence to honor precisely the spirit of St Bruno and that ’great silence’ to which at one time I dreamed of consecrating my life.
It is this spirt of silence that breathes forth in almost every page of Cardinal Sarah’s new book, even if unlike St. Bruno, he did not come from Cologne on the Rhine, but from ‘the periphery’ of the Church, as it might be described today on Rome, namely from the Archdiocese of Conakry in Guinea which is a predominantly Muslim nation.
It shows once more that in truth, Mother Church does not have and does not recognize any periphery, because it has its center and its heart everywhere there is a tabernacle in which the Eternal Light burns night and day. Cardinal Sarah comes from such a center, and so does the spirit in which this book of conversations with him was written.
Before reading to you the Preface sent from Mater Ecclesiae by Benedict XVI, now 90, allow me to say a few more words.
Two years ago, German publisher Bernhard Mueller asked me to write a Preface to Cardinal Sarah’s first interview-book, God or Nothing. I agreed, and consequently I also had the honor of presenting that book here at the Anima. The date was November 20, by chance the day on which the Church remembers St. Gelasius [who was Pope from 492-496, the third of three popes of North African descent in the early years of the Church] under whose patronage, we might say, Benedict XVI made Archbishop Sarah a Cardinal on November 20, 2011.
Today, instead, we remember Mary Help of Christians – and certainly, in both cases, the presentation dates for the cardinal’s books did not happen merely by chance.
This time, in asking the Emeritus Pope to write a Preface for the German edition of La forza del silenzio, Bernhard Mueller did not have it easy as it was with me. Therefore, these surprising words from a pope who had stepped down and stepped aside can only be understood as yet another sovereign act made fully and freely by Benedict XVI.
The reasons can be found in the book itself. Of course, the emeritus Pope had read the book not just in German, but first in its original French, a language which, after Latin, is dearest to him, and the foreign language that he knows best.
And if, in my Preface to the first book, I called Cardinal Sarah a radical – from the Latin radix for root – then I think his new book is even more radical. Because I feel that this time, he has, so to speak, gone deeper to the root of things, to the very spring that is the source of Christian life, about which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote once.
It is about that most precious space in the life of the Church, which always risks being forgotten, whereas the Fathers of the Desert, as did St. Bruno later, recognized it as 'God’s parlor', the favored space in which God speaks to us.
It is about this space that the interview-book with Nicolas Diat speaks, and in a way, it recalls Blaise Pascal’s famous Pensees (Thoughts). It is therefore not surprising that during these agitated days, the book was given the prize for “Spiritualités d’aujourd’hui” (Spirituality today) in Perpignan, France; and that in Spain, where the faithful are passionately in search of a new orientation, the book has already reached a third printing even without a publicity campaign.
Probably it is because the spirit of the Carthusians, precisely the spirit of the only religious order in the world that has never been reformed or had to be reformed, is what the Church needs today more than anything else – a revolution of silence, an absolutely necessary reform of the Church in capite and in membris [in its head and its members], in which, for decades now – and even on the altar itself – “not the Cross, but the microphone, can be found in the center”, as Cardinal Sarah observes tersely.
How indeed, can the Church carry out Christ’s mandate for the faithful to be the ‘salt of the earth and light of the world’ unless it upturned that [most secular] orientation radically?
Beyond this consideration, this is not the place – and it is not for me – to judge Cardinal Sarah’s book on its literary merit. But let me give some of my personal impressions and some citations from the book before I carry out my most important assignment tonight.
La forza del silenzio is clearly a very modern book, and yet, it captures the tone and melody of the 14th to the 16th centuries as with great familiarity, Cardinal Sarah carries out a dialog with the Alsatian Johannes Tauler [1300-1361, Dominican mystic and follower of Meister Eckhart] and the Spaniard San Juan de la Cruz [1542-1591, Carmelite friar, mystic, friend and contemporary of Teresa de Avila, and Doctor of the Church] - always intrepidly, but also serenely and critically, and absolutely non-ideological. He cites St. Augustine, but also brings up Cardinal Danneels of Brussels, one of the major liberal figures in the contemporary Church.
In doing so, Cardinal Sarah does not hide himself. He does not fear to say that he considers himself a custodian of the faith – in the best sense of the term – namely, to use an expression from St. John XXIII, not a custodian of the ashes of the treasury of the Church but of that treasury as an ever-burning fire which warms and revives us all, especially in the liturgy that expresses the sacred mysteries.
More than that. It seems to me that in many of the cardinal’s answers, almost in passing, he overturns the heavy and relatively modern accusation leveled against theodicy – that is, the question of why God allows so much suffering. He does it, for example, when he speaks of meeting a Muslim boy who is in tears and asks him: “Does Allah exist? Then why did he allow my father to be killed? Why did he not do anything to prevent this crime?”
The cardinal says: “In his mysterious silence, God manifests himself in the tears of this suffering boy, and it is not on the order of earthly things that he promises to dry his tears. God has his own mysterious ways of being with us during our trials”.
That a Church which values silence is not mute – on the contrary it becomes truly missionary, precisely by starting out from the depth of God’s silence - emerges wondrously in a passage where the Cardinal, in a qay that is as poetic as it is realistic, says of the liturgy of the Carthusians: “Gregorian chant is not the abandonment of silence. It comes from silence and leads to silence. I would even say it is composed of silence. What a moving and engaging experience it is, in the twilight shadows, to sing together with the monks of the Great Charterhouse the Salve Regina at Vespers! The last notes die out, one after the other, in childlike silence and we are wrapped in our trust in the Virgin Mary.”
The book, the psalmist would say, is “like a pomegranate full of seeds”, with important phrases which may be repeated here and there, exactly as they would with a good teacher who does not fear to repeat the essentials using the same words just because he wishes to be original.
That is why in these conversations, Cardinal Sarah brings up lectio divina at least seven times, referring to an ancient practice in Christianity since the times of Origen to our day, of appreciating and savoring a passage in Scripture. About which, the cardinal says: “A time of lectio divina is, in itself, an opportunity to address ourselves only to God. It mirrors completely the richness of silence”.
As far as I am concerned, he could have referred to it another seven times, or seventy times seven. Because, in the end, the book has become for me a kind of lectio divina that I wish to recommend with all my heart to everyone, including those who would read it in other languages.
Because the book is clearly nothing less than an invitation as well as a guide to holiness and to a radical renewal of the Church starting from her very heart. Fundamentally, one would say that this book represents an ‘anachronism’ par excellence.
But if we are not anachronistic and instead conform to our time, then we would fail in our Christian calling. Drawing from the sources of early Christianity – the First Letter of Peter as well as John’s Apocalypse – we see they developed a luminous theology which considers it obvious that Christians will always be strangers in the world [and to the world] and in every age, since Heaven is their only ultimate and true homeland.
Amidst the deafening noises of our day and the frenzy of unending news and images, I do not need to underscore how isolated is the voice of Cardinal Sarah and his call for silence, at least insofar as it involves the liturgical practices of the Church. And yet, since the time of Samuel and David, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has always called on new prophets for new and vital corrections to the path of the people of Israel in their pilgrimage through time.
And what, if not prophetic, shall we consider Cardinal Sarah when, in this book, he says: “Silence is the law of God’s plans”.
And with this, let me proceed to the most important assignment I was given today. As many of you may know, this morning, in accordance with the protocol of the Pontifical Household, I welcomed the President of the United States to the Vatican.
But still, I consider it a greater honor – and I say so sincerely – to carry out a task that cannot be more important and lastingly fruitful, which is to read to you the Preface in which the Emeritus Pope succeeds in the paradox of breaking his own silence in order to praise remaining in silence and the very silence that Cardinal Sarah exalts in his book.
What Benedict XVI, a pope who has retired to silence, dares to do with his words seems a bit like squaring the circle. But listen to the Preface which you will find in the book, and which I will now read to you.
[Mons. Gaenswein proceeded to read the entire Benedettian text - a Preface in the German, Italian ans subsequent editions, but an Afterword for the French, English and Spanish editions printed earlier, but which will contain it in subsequent printings.
However, for GG to say that Benedict XVI is 'breaking his silence' with this Preface, is inaccurate and disingenuous, because in the past four years, he has done that with other messages made public and a couple of significant interviews, not to mention the last book-length interview with Peter Seewald. ]
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