Messori talks
Gleanings from a new book about the world’s
most widely-read Catholic lay author
Translated from
December 15, 2017
“These days, even for so many faithful who have become unsure about the Christian afterlife, what I am about to say may seem strange, but the ‘project’ which dominates everything in my life now is to close my earthly adventure well. In short, to say it clearly: I wish above all to have a good death, in the Gospel sense”.
Do you know who said these unusual words? Not a cardinal, a bishop, a parish priest, a religious or a theologian. But a lay Catholic, though not just anyone – namely, Vittorio Messori.
This reflection is found in a beautiful interview with Messori by Aurelio Porfiri at the end of the e-book
Et-Et. Ipotesi su Vittorio Messori (Chora Books, 2017), in which the human, spiritual, religious and professional experience of the celebrated writer and author of
Ipotesi su Gesu and numerous other best-selling books, is presented with a sense of participation and open sympathy.
['Et-et', by the way, is also the title of Messori's website.]
Our friend Porfiri, a multifacted man with manifold initiatives and cultural abilities (as journalist, writer, publisher, composer of sacred music and choir director) will forgive me if I shall concentrate here only on the interview. Moreover, anyone who likes Messori and his work would already be familiar with his life story, and those who are not familiar with it will want to know him better after reading the interview, especially by reading his books.
I will focus on the interview because it seems to me that Messori, a very private man, has opened up his heart in this interview, certainly helped by the humanity and interest of his interviewer.
Death is the dominant theme for Messori at this stage of his life, and he says so without circumlocution and with great naturalness.
Let us try to understand each other – without the hypocrisies of the dominant ideology today – political correctness, a masterpiece of hypocrisy and grotesque denial of everything that could be ‘unpleasant’.
In April, I turned 66, an age at which many bishops are already in retirement. My life expectancy is another six or seven years, going by statistical probability, with which I may not necessarily comply. But Psalm 90 clearly reminds us: “Seventy is the sum of our years, or eighty, if we are strong”. Therefore, I am preparing myself to pass to the ‘other side’.
So, with the journalistic style which had made him famous throughout the world, Messori says what’s what, bluntly. Nothing special, if we think about it. But
they are extraordinary statements in a culture like ours, within which even the Church – in order not to displease the world and not to appear ‘retrograde’ – has stopped for some time now to speak about death and the Four Last Things, including the judgment of God.
But for Messori, that moment is important. Or rather, it is the only thing that ultimately counts. And that is why he is preparing himself to die a good death. That is why, he and his wife Rosanna requested and received that which was once called Extreme Unction, but which after Vatican II, has been called ‘anointing the sick’. He says their request was right and timely, since old age itself is a malady.
In short, Messori, as a Christian and as a Catholic, is
preparing for his future – "that with a capital F", which is to say, “that which will never end”. Which in any case, does not keep him from staying in the game, so to speak. Listen to this:
It is sad to say this, but one has the impression that the present Church hierarchy is simply making a ‘formal’ reverence (i.e., lip service) to the extraordinary teachings of John Paul II. Even without saying so, many of them believe that his great encyclicals have become out of date. One has the impression that within the Church herself, there is an effort to somehow banish the memory of what was certainly a gust of the Holy Spirit in the Church”. [Because, obviously, the current Successor of St. Peter believes that the Holy Spirit speaks through him and only through him, exclusively.]
Messori was a friend to Papa Wojtyla, whom he interviewed for that worldwide bestseller in the mid-1990s,
Crossing the Threshold of Hope. But there is not just understandable nostalgia in his opinions. There is also all the bitter disappointment of someone who sees, in the Church today, a [pro-active] attempt to replace the teaching of John Paul II (Think of Veritatis splendor alone!) and of other great Church teachers and pastors, in the name of a vague
aggiornamento (updating), mostly founded on ambiguity and the desire to be seen as friends of 'the world', even at the price of obfuscating if not betraying eternal divine truths.
Messori knows very well that today, among Catholics, it is almost forbidden to speak about the judgment of God. We are advised to limit ourselves to ‘mercy’ without discussing mercy in depth.
[All the papal talk about mercy has been superficial, really -remaining on the literal level exactly as depicted in the ‘Nativity scene’ that the reigning pope approved for installation in St. Peter’s Square this year.]
But he disagrees and says so:
“By the [additive] Catholic logic of ‘et-et’ (and…both) [as opposed to ‘aut-aut’, either…or], we must not forget that we shall be judged not just by one criterion but by two. Christ will judge us with mercy and with justice: Justice cannot be unjust, nor must it be merciless. There will surely be mercy, but always with justice.
To name just two examples among the infinite possibilities, even with God’s infinite mercy, there could be none for Stalin, as compared to, say Don Bosco. The unilateral emphasis given to just one of God’s attributes, mercy, leads to a crippled Christianity which ignores an essential aspect of the Gospel: Christ’s dutiful severity notwithstanding his tenderness.
The terrible though very beautiful words of the Dies irae [‘Day of wrath’, the 13th century hymn that is part of the Mass for the Dead in the traditional liturgy but which was eliminated in the Novus Ordo] are weighted on the side of justice, omitting the other part. But we cannot, by denial, imagine the celestial Judge to be like an old uncle whom age has rendered sentimental and feeble, and so is ready to forgive his nephews for everything – everything – even those who were undisciplined to the very end”.
Messori was also the great interviewer, of course, of Joseph Ratzinger (the global best-seller in this case was RAPPORTO SULLA FEDE, from 1985).
[It was because of reading it that John Paul II agreed 10 years later to Messori’s request to be interviewed for a book, even if the interview was conducted only in writing... Actually, it began with a TV interview that Messori was to do with the Pope in October 1993 for Italian state TV RAI. But at a meeting in Castel Gandolfo to prepare for the event – which would have been the first-ever papal interview – Messori told the Pope: “Holiness, we need a pope, a teacher who will guide us, not a TV commentator. We are not just in a crisis of the Church, we are in a crisis of faith – people just do not believe in God anymore”. But the pope disagreed forcefully, pounding his fist on the table for emphasis: “I disagree with you”. He did however have second thoughts about it, and eventually cancelled the TV interview. But in the next few months, he gave written answers to Messori’s questions, and these led to the best-selling book first published in 1995.]
About Joseph Ratzinger, Messori told Porfiri:
“I did not just esteem him because he was a Catholic scholar, but I lovd him very much, the Christian Ratzinger. Those who really know him (as I had the good fortune to do) know that he is one of the truly good, most gentle, most understanding of men, besides being the most cultured. He combines the rigor of orthodoxy with mercy, tolerance, and openness.
I met him recently [September 2016] in his residence in the Vatican Gardens, which used to be a nuns’ monastery. It was a very beautiful meeting, and for me, very touching, to find him as lucid as ever but rather frail and needing to support himself with a walker even just to walk a few steps.
And because I loved him, I was rather disheartened when he was elected pope – even for him, it was something that he did not wish to happen. Because above all, he is a scholar, a teacher, a writer of theology. But his moral greatness lay in that he sacrificed his nature and his calling to the Church – his vocation being the tranquility of libraries, of small student circles, of one-on-one conversations, or of learned lectures to specialized congresses.
But he always obeyed the Church, accepting the sacrifice, first when Paul VI ‘yanked’ him out of a quarter-century of university professorship to make him Archbishop of Munich-Freising, and then when he was called to Rome by John Paul II to become Prefect of the CDF, and finally, when he was elected pope at the age of 78, when he had been expecting to return to his studies for the years left to him.”
As for Pope Francis, Messori has decided to keep quiet
[after the disproportionate outcry by Bergoglians against a mildly critical article he wrote before Christmas 2015]. He says ‘his popes’ were John Paul II and Benedict XVI “and now, it is for others to measure other popes and their pontificates”. We respect this decision, but cite nonetheless the perplexity he expressed in
Corriere della Sera in 2013 and reiterated three years later to Bruno Volpe in an interview for
La Fede Quotidiana:
“This pope has made a unilateral choice for ‘mercy’, and I ask myself: What should we do – rip out the pages from the Gospel in which Jesus was severe and sometimes even hard?... So many things perplex me at this time, and because of this and a sense of responsibility, I am keeping quiet. Of course, as a Catholic, I am alarmed and concerned, but I have chosen a different course from other authoritative colleagues and journalists. I could say 'Who am I to judge the pope?' but I am convinced – and I say this again – that this pope has very little interest in doctrine”.
In any case, the distinction Messori makes between the person of the pope and the papacy is interesting. Since when, thanks to communications technology, the pope has become a very central figure in the world’s spotlights, all of the interest has been centered on the person of the pope, which Messori thinks makes little sense.
“I am not interested in whether a pope is sympathetic or disagreeable, if he is black, white or red. I am not interested in his every tic, his obsessions, his private views. I am interested in the fact that, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, a man has become the Successor to St. Peter and is therefore also Christ’s Vicar on earth. And therefore, I cannot say it too often: What interests me – and what I think should interest everyone – is the very institution of the papacy, the fact that we have been given this gift, because from the viewpoint of faith it is a gift. Everything else [that does not have to do with how a pope carries out his mission and his task] is nothing but a matter of curiosity that we could even ignore”.
Finally, a last statement by Messori on the present state of the Catholic world:
"I think that what remains of the Catholic world now thinks that the only duty is to be engaged as actively as one can in social works, to relieve every kind of material need. It is right, and it is beautiful, but one must remember that one does not need faith to do this: the world is full of social work volunteers, often admirable, who are atheists or agnostics.
Yet in their obsession for social do-gooding, ‘adult’ believers have forgotten that 'the highest work of charity’ is interceding for the departed, a central aspect of that splendid reality that Tradition calls ‘the communion of saints’: the living help the dead by invoking divine mercy for them, just as the dead intercede with God for us the living. What could be more ‘social’ than that? But it is also the most forgotten fact.”
On Messori’s preparation for the afterlife, Marco Tosatti writes in an affectionate Foreword to the book:
“Prepare yourself as you wish, but not in silence. And please, do not pull back your oars from the boat!
In a Church where we are assailed with ‘aut-aut’ (either-or) every five minutes, we really need your pen to remind us, again and frequently, of the richness of ‘et-et’, the splendor and the greatness of what it has meant for the Church and Rome.
More than ever, we need you and your rationality, that which has convinced so many people that to believe in God is the most logical thing, especially at a time when the Superior-General of the Jesuits says we really don’t know what Jesus said because there were no tape recorders in his time… Would you really want to put the sails down now?”
I agree with Tosatti.
[Let us all pray Messori will listen to his friends!]
[I totally missed it but in May this year when the book on Messori first came out, Tosatti reproduced n his blog the Foreword he wrote for 'ET-ET'. I shall translate and post it here as an addendum later.]