'Benedict's legacy is the faith itself'
Interview with Vittorio Messori
by Riccardo Cascioli
February 12, 2013
"Benedict XVI has a great devotion to Mary and a special predilection for Lourdes, for the crystalline clarity of that apparition. It is therefore not by chanced that he chose the 11th of February to announce his renunciation of the Papacy," says Vittorio Messori, the most=translated Italian author in the world, who has devoted years of in=depth study of Lourdes and the Marian apparitions to Bernadette Soubirous. (This has found its first synthesis in his most recent book,
Bernadette non ci ha ingannati - Bernadette did not deceive us.)
And of course, he knows Joseph Ratzinger quite well. Their friendship dates to the interviews that resulted in the best-selling
Rapporto sulla Fede (Report on the Faith) in 1985 (
The Ratzinger Report in English).
The circumstances that accompanied the publication of that book certainly contributed to cement the relationship. "We were still in full ecclesial contestation," he recalls, "and at the time, it was not easy within the Church to be known as a Ratzingerian. Already, there was a black legend about him. He was called the 'dark prefect' of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the persecutor, the Panzerkardinal, etc."
"(After the book was published),I had to go into hiding, disappear for a few months in a mountain retreat, because the priests of dialog, the ecumenical types, those preaching 'tolerance', literally wanted my skin. Anonymous letters, nighttime telephone calls. My fault was not just to have 'given voice' to the Panzerkardinal but to have agreed with him".
As a result, after the threats had abated, they saw each other often. "We often went to a trattoria together". And on those occasions, they spoke about Lourdes, among other things, because they shared something unusual - the same birthday, April 16, as Bernadette Soubirous.
So you say that the choice of February 11 as the announcement date was not at all casual.
I would say no. Why he chose the date was the first question that came to my mind, and I thought he was harking back to his "beloved and venerated predecessor", as he always refers to John Paul II. Since the time of Leo XIII, February 11 entered the calendar of the universal Church as the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. Given the special link that this shrine has to physical illness, John Paul II also declared it the World Day for the Sick. Benedict XVI was, in a way, referring to his own physical affliction.
What affliction? Father Lombardi has said that the decision had nothing to do with illness...
“S
enectus ipsa est morbus”, the Latins said. Old age itself is an illness. At 86, even if you are not formally 'sick', there are all sorts of age-related infirmities. The Pope feels he is not well because of his age. So I think that he chose the day, to acknowledge that he is a sick man with all the sick persons of the world. But it is also a tribute to our Lady, not just Our Lady of Lourdes, but to the Blessed Virgin in general.
The Pope has spoken much about Fatima, also. Does he feel a special relationship to Lourdes?
In the course of 25 years, we have talked a lot about Lourdes. And he used the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the apparitions to visit France (Sept 2008). To give you an idea of what Lourdes elicits in him, just think that during the day and a half that he was in Lourdes, the program called for him to deliver only three major addresses. In fact, he spoke 15 times, most of it extemporaneous, and most of the time, he was emotional. Always recalling his own great devotion to Mary since childhood, and to Bernadette.
On the other hand, he would speak of Fatima in connection with other circumstances such as the assassination attempt against John Paul II. But I had the impression that instinctively, he preferred the crystalline clarity of Lourdes compared to the rather complicated issues of Fatima. He considered Fatima (and those secrets) too complicated - he likes the transparency of Lourdes, where there were no secrets, everything was clear.
Many commentators have considered the Pope's decision as some sort of giving up in the face of difficulties...
There are situations that may look like surrender but are really a sign of strength, of humility. Catholic freedom is much greater than people think. There are diverse temperaments, diverse charisms, diverse stories - all must be respected because they are part of the sacrosanct freedom of the believer.
In John Paul II, it was the mystic side that prevailed, he was like an Oriental mystic. Whereas with Papa Ratzinger, it is Western rationalism that prevails. And so, there were two choices possible: the mystical, which is what John Paul chose, in holding up to the very end; or the rational choice, as Papa Ratzinger has done, in acknowledging that he no longer has the physical energy. But the Church needs someone who has great energy, fresh energy. And so for the good of the Church, he felt it best to leave. In any case, both choices are evangelical.
Papa Ratzinger has always struck everyone because of his great humility...
And indeed, his decision is a sign of great humility, a virtue that was always evident in him. I still remember an episode from that far=off 1985 which particularly impressed me. After three full days of taped interviews for the book, before I left him, I said, "Eminence, with all that you have told me about the situation in the Church - remember, those were the years of post-Conciliar conflict - may I ask you one more thing? How do you manage to sleep at all?"
And he, with that ageless face of a boy, said earnestly, answered: "Oh, I sleep very well, Because I know the Church is not ours, it is Christ's, we are merely her 'unprofitable servants'.
[Cardinal Bertone quoted the Bible verse about 'unprofitable servants' in his tribute to the Pope today, and the line about the Church not being ours but God's!]
"At night, before going to sleep," he continued, "I examine my conscience, and if I know that during the day I did everything with good will the best way I could, then I sleep well and soundly".
In short, he is absolutely clear that we are not called on to save the Church, but to serve her, and if you can no longer serve her in direct ways, then you fall on your knees and pray. Salvation is the work of Christ.
So, I thought his renunciation was along this line, not to think of yourself as the savior of the world. But to carry out your duty as far as you can, and when you know that you can do no more, that your own resources are no longer up to it, then remember that the Church is not 'yours', so you can pass off the work to someone more able, and do the work for the Church which, in the perspective of faith, is the most valuable: praying and offering your suffering to Christ.
So I see it as an act of great humility, of his constant awareness that Christ will save the Church, it is not we poor humans who will save her, even if you are Pope.
[One of the most important things I have learned from the Pope because he always says it to priests and seminarians is that one should not expect to be able to do everything - you do your part, you do it the best that you can, and God will take care of the rest. I think he said it again in a different formulation in last week's catechesis. In his particular case, the Holy Spirit will lead the Church to choose a more physically capable Pope who also has all the other qualities one desires in a Pope.]
Last Friday, speaking to seminarians at the Lateran, he said that even when people think the Church is dying, she really always renews herself. What renewal has the Pontificate of Benedict XVI brought?
People forget that at the start of his Pontificate, he said: My program is not to have a program. He meant that he would do whatever Providence called him to do, he would face what was laid at his door. So his strategic plan was always simply to confirm the flock in their faith.
I have always felt in great accord with him on this. He has always been convinced of the need to revive apologetics, the art of giving reasons for the faith. I share his conviction that so many of the so-called major problems of the Church are all secondary: institutional problems, ecclesiological problems, administrative, even moral and liturgical questions, are certainly very important. But surrounding all those problems is a clerical chaos that takes the faith for granted - he notes this in the document decreeing the Year of Faith - when in fact, in many cases, there is no longer faith.
Why are we fighting over how to organize the Roman Curia better, and even over non-negotiable principles, why do we fight among ourselves and perhaps even set up defenses if we no longer believe that the Gospel is true? If we no longer believe in the divinity of Jesus, then everything else becomes empty speech.
In fact, Benedict XVI's last great act was to decree a Year of Faith, but faith understood in the apologetic sense - to demonstrate that the Christian is not a cretin, that we do not believe in a myth, and to seek to demonstrate the reasons for our believing.
This Pope's great strategic line consisted solely in this: to reconfirm all the reasons why we stake ourselves on the truth of the Gospel. Everything else is to be dealt with day by day. And he has done this. He has done this the best way he can.
So are you saying that the Year of Faith is his true legacy?
Yes, it is his legacy, one that we should take seriously. In the Church, in terms of the future, apologetics should have a central role, because if the foundation is not true, all the rest is absurd. Benedict XVI leaves us with the awareness that we must recover the reasons for our faith.
Speaking of legacy, one thinks right away of who could possibly succeed him. Not to join the madness of the so-called papal sweepstakes, but certainly, the question arises as to who among the cardinals shares Benedict XVI's priorities.
We should not rob the Holy Spirit of his job! The predictions of so-called experts about papal conclaves are made to be belied. They hardly ever get it right. The impression is that the Holy Spirit amuses himself by playing tricks on them. The great 'trombones' of the media, the great experts, the great Vaticanistas, usually pick someone as the favorite only to have someone else elected.
I remember in 1978, when I was working at
La Stampa, I was in the newsroom when Papa Luciani was elected. Great panic ensued, because the great Vaticanistas on our staff had told us which biographies to have available because the new Pope would certainly be one of them. So when Luciani was elected, we discovered that the archives of
La Stampa did not even have a picture of him. The same story two months later with Papa Wojtyla. They had all predicted other names. So at the announcement, new panic. We had nothing on him. We did not even know how to spell his name!
Looking back at the years of this Pontificate. one gets the impression that Benedict XVI was not 'lucky' in the choice of his collaborators, some of whom have often placed him in difficulty.
Ratzinger was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for almost a quarter century, but he always lived apart - I always had the impression that he was isolated from the Curia. He had a very strong bond with Papa Wojtyla, they worked in tandem. Papa Wojytla did not make any theological pronouncement without first hearing what Cardinal Ratzinger had to say.
But I always had the impression that he chose to keep himself away from the Curia, from its games, its alignments. So when he was elected Pope, he really did not know enough of its mechanisms, nor ny of the persons who keep these mechanisms running. And then, of course, he made some appointments which were obligatory, but I don't think he was truly aware of how really things were in the Curia.
[If that is so, then Benedict XVI ought to have been confident that the men he named to head the various Curial offices would be able to get their hand on these mechanisms. But we do know Cardinal Bertone failed to do that in the Secretariat of State. What other Curial failures have been as bad? Perhaps the Congregation for Bishops which until two years ago was run by Cardinal Re, a very powerful figure from the Wojtyla era and who had mastered the mechanisms at the Secretariat of State where he had been the #2 or #3 man for a long time! The Congregation which also failed to do its homework on Bishop Wielgus in Poland and Bishop Williamson of the FSSPX.]
It is said that the Curia never liked him.
Of course they did not. Papa Wojtyla had chosen to have an itinerant Pontificate, and so he left the Curia to do as they please. So the Curia took the lead, and that is why all those wolves in the Curia found themselves basking in their power in the previous Pontificate - the Pope was away, he was not interested in their day-to-day work. But Papa Ratzinger wanted to know more about how the Curia really worked, he put his nose in, so to say. To make up for what he did not know before, and based on what he learned, with the discretion that is typical of him, he started making transfers, and chose who should be dismissed and who to promote [among the middle levels who run the offices]. This did not please the bureaucracy, one reason for why Benedict XVI was not popular with them.
Providentially, this time last year, when the initial disclosures resulting from the Vatileaks document thefts were building up - it was the first time I used the 'Vipers in the Vatican' banner - Corriere della Sera featured the following commentary by Vittorio Messori on Page 1, in which the veteran writer places the latest 'scandals' in the right perspective (he too generalizes the malady to the Curia but in this case, the generalization is valid. At the same time, Lucetta Scaraffia wrote about the poison in the Curia and Benedict's efforts at internal purification starting with the Vatican ...
The weakening of faith
in a den of intrigue
by Vittorio Messori
Translated from
February 13, 2012
These days, to follow what is certainly not edifying news about the Vatican can be lip-smacking or saddening, depending on whether the reader is anti-clerical or not.
In fact,
it should not be more than usually disconcerting for the Catholic who knows the history of his Church but who also keeps in mind the warnings of the Gospel.
Namely, that
the Church is a field where good grain and poisonous weeds are always found together. It is a net cast into the sea in which both good and bad fish are to be found.
These are words from Jesus himself, who calls on us not to be scandalized because of this, nor even to 'divide' the healthy from the rotten, because this will be his task at the Last Judgment.
The prime example of this situation is, obviously the center and motor of the ecclesial 'machinery': the Vatican Curia, which is the central administration of what Tradition calls 'the Church militant'.
In this regard, it was not a heretic or a priest-hater
[the Italian word for this is quite colorful: mangiapreti, literally 'priest-eater'] but a saint proclaimed Doctor of the church by Paul VI - Catherine of Siena. co-Patron of Italy - who once observed:"The Court of our Holy Father seems to me at times a nest of angels, at other times a den of vipers".
Good and bad found in the same entity, as they are in everything human. Because the Church is also a human institution - a historical shell (with its corresponding limitations) that guards a meta-historical Mystery.
We will get to the moral aspect later. First, let us consider the 'organizational' aspect. It must be remembered that the Vatican today is not just all about 'scandals' regarding sex crimes, finances or power.
It is the administrative machinery of the Church itself, which for years and years has appeared to stall with disquieting frequency - due to mistakes, distractions, diplomatic gaffes, even errors on official documents in the use of Latin which is still the official language but which is increasingly less and worse known by the people who work there.
Yes, the Curia, like the Church itself, must be
semper reformanda. But now it see4ms that even a 'corporate reorganization' is not possible, simply because of a lack of fresh energies and of people of quality.
The infinite number of Vatican offices have been led since the time of the Counter-Reformation by ecclesiastical persons who come from all the dioceses and religious orders of the world. But our world today is one where most dioceses and congregations have closed down their seminaries for lack of attendance, and they certainly can no longer send to Rome their most promising young people in the service of the universal Church.
In fact, there are few such young people, and these few are jealously kept close by their bishops and superiors-general.
And yet, after that Vatican II which was supposed to streamline the ecclesial structure, the Annuario Pontificio [listing all ecclesiastical personnel with official titles] has almost tripled in size. Bureaucratic expansion has proceeded unchecked, as functions, posts, responsibilities have grown, even as qualified human resources have inversely diminished.
And the available personnel seem unable to carry the crushing responsibility of administering God's will on earth!
Therefore, Catholic realism would seem to impose a drastic redimensioning of the structure of a Catholic Church which, for all the numbers it has, is becoming or has already become a minority community in many places.
To maintain the Church's baroque apparatus when her human resources are deficient (and those who0 do run this apparatus are often not up to the task) inevitably leads to the disintegration and errors we find in the management of the Church.
So should we then seriously consider what some propose as a return to the first millennium by turning over the Vatican with all its cultural, artistic and touristic assets to the UNESCO, and for the Pope to return to the 'true' cathedra of the Bishop of Rome at the Lateran Basilica, with an institutional structure reduced to a minimum?
We don't have to resort to such extreme measures, but the problem exists and it must be confronted - but not with a 1960s ideology or a demagoguery to pauperize the Church.
Of course, there seems to be a moral surrender as well in some aspects, not merely sexual (pedophile priests are an example, but not the only kind), but also a seeming return to the Renaissance era when the Vatican consisted of various foci of intrigues and infighting for career advancement, power, money, ideological and political interests.
And in this case, no reform can hold, and there can be no purely human remedy. Every technique of corporate reorganization would be ridiculously impotent.
Which means the situation should open itself up to the 'scandal' of prayer - words used by Benedict XVI, but words that have been used for decades now, by Joseph Ratzinger.
If the Church is in crisis, he has always said, it is the crisis of faith in men of the Church. Including the hierarchy.
He said to me once:
"At the point where we are, I must confess that faith - a full faith that does not hesitate - now seems to me so rare that when I encounter it, I am astonished by it more than by unbelief".
And that is why he has gone back to the roots of the faith - with his three volumes on the historical Jesus who is also the Jesus of faith. That is why he has created an organ expressly for the new evangelization. That is why he has proclaimed a Year of Faith.
:
"
L'intendance suivra" {The administrative people will come after), Napoleon used to say, meaning conquer [a territory] first, then bring in the people to run it.
Benedict XVI is certain that the Church needs to conquer - or rather, reconquer - first: to reconquer that faith in the historicity of the Gospels, in God who was incarnated in the womb of a woman, in a Jesus who demonstrated with his resurrection that he is the Christ.
Does the Church now have only a few good men, and among them, many who are not qualified? Well then, a true and proper institutional exfoliation would be assured if those who are still at work 'in the vineyard of the Lord' (as the Pope likes to call it), forget all about working for any human prize but for a divine one.
If faith wavers or is extinguished, if it is no longer their daily reason for existence, the clever laziness of the bureaucrat lies in ambush, and the old monsignor as well as the young religious will both be ready to transform themselves into functionaries of a clerical ministry and therefore, subject to every temptation.
Pray, pray and pray - and do penance! Benedict XVI is almost as insistent on this basic admonition as the Blessed Virgin is in all her apparitions. He says this to the faithful in almost all his homilies and in in his catecheses. Pray daily, regularly, and everything will follow, he says. He says it to priests and bishops at every occasion.
One must wonder how many of the priests and bishops who have become certified bureaucrats in the Vatican ztill remember that they are priests, first of all, that the priesthood should define who they are. and that they should take time off during the day to 'talk to God' regularly. Do they even say daily Mass as they should? I was struck when I read somewhere that as a university professor, Joseph Ratzinger was a rarity because he said daily Mass, whereas most professor-priests no longer do!
Poison in the Curia:
A response to the Pope's
efforts to purify the Church
by Lucetta Scaraffia
Translated from
February 13, 2012
For some time now there has been a new literary genre one might call 'Vatican mystery', but after
The Da Vinci Code, the genre has grown in a major way. Many authors and publishers today are hoping for worldwide success with books purporting in various ways to 'uncover profane altars' and thus desanctify the Church, which despite everything, has kept an image of sacredness - or at least, respectability - even in the eyes of non-believers.
It's not difficult to imagine that such readings have inspired the so-called 'crows' who have been instrumental in 'flying out' confidential documents from the highest levels of the Vatican's premier bureaucracy, the Secretariat of State, with the apparent ibtention to discredit the Vatican as a whole.
Even more influenced this way are the assorted Vatican reporters and commentators - many of them authors themselves of similar 'mysteries' in the form of pamphlets purporting to reveal the 'hidden plots' within the Vatican walls.
They are now unleashing a flood of commentary focused on Vatican infighting and power seeking, on opposing vendettas, on the next Conclave. All such commentaries appear to postulate the idea of a good Pope who is nonetheless incapable of dealing with rivalries and hostilities which have somehow managed to overwhelm him.
Perhaps, such an interpretation may also be seen as influenced by the world outside the Vatican, since the Vatican is situated within a far vaster society. One might even say that external forces are moving the chess pieces, with the complicity of some corrupt functionary or prelate within the Vatican.
But to understand something of what is going on, perhaps it is becessary above all to consider the role of the Pope, who in a few days will be marking the 30th anniversary of his joining the Roman Curia as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Thirty years spent at the heart of an institution he loves deeply but one he has not defended at any cost, least of all at the cost of truth. Cardinal Ratzinger came to know the reality of the Church - that is, its most elevated hierarchy - very well in a way he made clear with the meditations he wrote for the Good Friday Way of the Cross at the Colosseum in March 2005, just a few weeks before he was elected Pope.
Many were amazed at the courage and passion in his words denouncing 'filth' in the Church
[obviously, he was not referring only to pedophile priests], though later
many would consider it a sign from him of how he would govern if he were elected Pope. [I am surprised historian Scaraffia would make this statement! Clearly, at the time the cardinal was asked to write the meditations - it would have been at least several weeks before Good Friday - there were very few (him least of all) who thought that he was even papabile in the event that John Paul II passed away!]
It is to the honor of the ecclesial institution that the Conclave elected the man who knew a lot about the Vatican, perhaps everything there is to know [about what was wrong] but which had been unmentionable before then - that they elected a man who openly proclaimed his desire to purify the Church.
By choosing him to the Pope, one presumes that his electors agreed to this work of cleansing, even if some perhaps hoped in their hearts that it would not come soon nor radically. By choosing him, love for the Church - or, if you will, a sense of the institution - appeared to have prevailed among the cardinals.
Of course, Benedict XVI did not take his stand as a harsh judge and prefect of the former Office in charge of the Inquisition, but as a man of God. Now as Pope, he is in a position to realize his desire - and that is, to recover the faith, begin a new process to evangelize countries that had once been strongly Christian but now largely secularized.
But a Church that is not purified, that is encumbered by heavy baggage from the past and the opacities of the present, cannot undertake a new evangelization credibly and effectively.
He made his intentions clear when early in the Pontificate, he disclosed the results of the CDF's investigation of Father Marcial Maciel, who founded the Legionaries of Christ, and opened an investigation into the workings of the congregations Maciel founded with a view of bringing the evil to light and to correct it.
For a change, no cover-up to avoid scandal, but the truth. Not just from the Christian point of view, only the truth allows mortification by those who sinned, and therefore purification.
But there can be no purification without pain, without public acknowledgement of the evil done. So it is for the pedophile priests and complicit bishops, as it is for non-transparent financial dealings that allow lay cronies to make dishonest profits from dealing with the Vatican.
Benedict XVI has courageously chosen this path, and for this, he has chosen for some key positions people who do not belong to established interests within the Vatican and outside its walls, charging them with the mission of bringing out everything in total honesty and transparency.
Was it not therefore likely that his actions would provoke protests and counteractions by any possible means?
Anyone who thinks the Pope is nothing but an aged man who has been reduced to powerlessness, ignores that he undertook this process of purification deliberately and consciously. One cannot possibly think that he himself does not realize how much it would cost him personally. him and his closest associates, in retribution from those who oppose any such cleansing. Nor that he has chosen the harder path of carrying out such work despite its obvious costs instead of constantly evading the issue by using 'diplomatic' means.
Only his way is is it possible to carry out true purification that can produce results. And so, those that are often called 'errors' or 'deficiencies' of governance by the Pope should rather be seen as conscious decisions with the end of bringing conflicts out in the open in order to arrive at the truth.
Having become accustomed to think that the whole world is irremediably nothing more than a 'sea of mud'
[I cannot think of an appropriate English equivalent for that metaphor], we can no longer see it as the stage for the eternal battle between good and evil, which also takes place within the Church herself.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/02/2013 15:03]