Prof. Fr. Ratzinger in 1969.
In a 1969 Christmas broadcast, Joseph Ratzinger
already saw and understood what was to come
by Gianfranco Morra
Translated from
December 22, 2018
“We are in a profound crisis for the Church. Which will become ever more smaller and would have to start all over. Many of the edificices erected by the faith in the past will no longer serve her and the number of her faithful will diminish… Men will live in a totally programmed world of unspeakable solitude.”
- JOSEPH RATZINGER
Nativity of Christ, 1969
Christmas 1969. Joseph Ratzinger, then a 32-year-old university professor in Regensburg, made five broadcasts for Bavarian Radio on the Church and Christmas. These were later printed in various languages, including Italian (
Fede e Futuro [Faith and the Furure], Queriniana, 1971), a book long out of print.
[How surprising, in any case, that a book was apparently made almost immediately of those broadcasts, if the Italian edition was published in 1971. More surprising because at the time, the book that would first give him international recognition, Introduction to Christianity, had only been published in mid-1968, and the broadcasts were made in December 1969.]
The post-1968 contestations had erupted in Germany, and he synthesized his reflections on the events and foretold consequences which can only be described as devastating. Coming out of Vatican II, of which he was an enthusiast, he had been part of the theologians who set up
Concilium, a post-Vatican II theological journal dominated by the progressivist theologians of the Council.
But he soon realized that ‘the Church’ being advocated by Kueng, Schillebeeckz et al, presented grave dangers for the faith, and with other moderate theologians (Von Balthazar, De Lubac, etc), founded the rival journal
Communio.
[I must mention here a name often bypassed among the founders of Communio – Chilean theologian Jorge Medina Estevez (born 1926), who had been, like Ratzinger, a peritus at Vatican-II, and whom the world would later remember as the Cardinal ProtoDeacon who made the ‘Habemus Papam’ announcement to the world of Benedict XVI’s election. What a journey together the two Vatican-II periti had gone through and how fortuitous that it fell to Cardinal Medina to make that fateful announcement!]
And in the five broadcasts for Bavarian Radio, he made a prophetic judgment on the new situation in the world and the difficulties for the Church.
He understood that the 1968 turning-point was different and far more radical than all other previous historical turning-points that the Church had survived and from which she had come out better: the Renaissance, the Englightenment, the French Revolution. But the cultural revolution that overwhelmed all the Western and Christian countries of the world was different because it effectively demolished,
perhaps even unknowingly [??? Very knowingly so!], the Christian values of the West.
- Liberalism, which was based on Christian tradition (especially about human dignity and natural law), had become relativism and nihilism.
- Matrimony and the family were relativized. “Sexuality and procreation were separated from matrimony. Every form of sexuality was considered equivalent and sexuality itself was banalized. Homosexuality was not only licit, but came to be seen as an aspect of human liberation”.
- The true definition of contemporary culture emerging from the revolution, was nihilism. As Jacques Prevert would express it in one of his songs: “Our Father who art in heaven, stay there!”
Unfortunately, Catholic culture did not know how to react adequately and appropriately – perhaps thinking that these were provisional transitory episodes that would soon be best forgotten. But Joseph Ratzinger predicted reaistially what would happen:
“The future of the Church will not be in those who do nothing but adapt themselves to the present moment, choosing the simplest way – taking the passion out of faith, declaring this to be false and obsolete, tyrannical and legalitic”.
[He might have been describing JMB 50 years ahead of time!]
The fifth and last broadcast on Christmas Day 1969 united a strongly pessimistic forecast with supernatural hope:
“We are within a profound crisis for the Church. Which will become ever smaller and must start from the beginning. Many iof the edifices eretced by the faith in the past will no longer serve her, and the number of her faithful will diminish. She will become a collection of small groups. Unfortunately, men will live in unspeakable solitude within a totally programmed world.
Having lost the sense of God, they will feel the horror of their poverty. Very difficult times are in store for the Church – its true crisis has just begun. It will lose its social privileges, which is not bac, but at the same time, it will no longer appear to many as a home where man can find hope for life and after death. Nonetheless, the Church will have a future which, as always, will be fashioned by saints”.[/dim
But few remembered – and if so, only superficially – the revolution of 1968 on its 50th anniversary this year. [How true! I had expected a year-long explosion of celebratory recollections and endless hosannahs, but instead, virtually nothing. Would psychologists say the very egregious lack of any of that amounts to a desperate wish to deny it ever happened? But why would its architects and mass followers do that – considering that they did succeed overnight in overthrowing traditional values and replacing them with the ‘sex, drugs and rock-and-roll’ obsessions of the new ‘I-myself-me’ generations??? A culture of nihilism that still dominates, if it has not worsened. Is the lack of celebration then an indication of dissatisfaction, to say the least, with whatever they have ‘gained’ from their success? The taste of ashes in the mouth, rather than the continuing headiness of champagne?
Joseph Ratzinger’s evaluation of the closing years of the 20th century, after 1968, can be found in the Foreword he wrote for the 30th anniversary re-publication in 2000 of INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIANITY, in which he rightly places the year 1989 – which marked the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe - as an important counterpoint to 1968, because it showed the world the inherent fallacies and untenability of Marxism and all its derivative systems.
Yet it was Marxist thought that dominated the 1968 revolution, whose icons were led by Mao Zedong (notwithstanding his disastrous homegrown Cultural Revolution of 1966-1968 which took the lives of millions) and more importantly, the Argentine Che Guevara, who took Fidel Castro’s Marxist revolution to Africa and all over Latin America and was executed by government forces in Bolivia in 1967. 1968, of course, facilitated the spread of the Jesus-social reformist-and-guerilla-leader brand of liberation theology throughout Latin America, a theology virtually bereft of God and certainly of Christ. After the Church eventually quelled the further spread of the anti-Catholic, anti-Christian brands of LT in the 1980s, Marxism failed to re-ignite the intelligentsia anywhere, but has been widely instrumentalized to this day by the so-called popular movements so favored by Jorge Bergoglio and other anti-intellectuals of his ilk, but which have yet to really gain any successful foothold. Look what happened to Venezuela! However, the writer of this article interprets the lack of celebration otherwise, as follows:]
Those who saw 1968 as a leap forward for man and his rights consider it a progressive beneficial event which does not need to be commemorated since its ethos has since permeated everything: family, school,culture, the media, popular consciousness. They know that a great part of society today is a child of the 1968 revolution and that the novelties in our era were born out of its destruction of the humanistic-Christian tradition.
Nonetheless, it is still amazing that Catholic culture in Italy
[and elsewhere, for that matter]– or better still, ‘the remnant’ of Catholic culture which still remains intact – has observed almost total silence on the golden jubilee of the greatest revolution that has ever taken place in our country. Of course, that silence has been favored by the bleeding-heart liberalism and unconditional openness introduced and imposed by the reigning pope.
Only a few Catholic anti-conformists (like Socci, De Mattei, Valli and Veneziani) have underscored the disastrous consequences of that revolution and the years since then. Which, on his Christmas Day broadcast in 1969, Joseph Ratzinger, still 36 years away from becoming pope, had perfectly intuited:
that 1968 was a historical caesura which produced “the current crisis of Western civilization and of the Church”.
P.S. In searching for a 1969 photograph of Joseph Ratzinger, I found the following English translation of a substantial part of that 1969 Christmas Day broadcast, posted on June 23, 2016, on the site ROMAN CATHOLIC MAN, by Fr. Richard Heilman.
Fr Ratzinger predicts
the future of the Church
In a 1969 German radio broadcast, Father Joseph Ratzinger offered this prediction of the future of the Church:
“The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith.
- It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods;
- nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves.
To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality.
- Unselfishness, which makes men free, is attained only through the patience of small daily acts of self-denial.
- By this daily passion, which alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved by his own ego, by this daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened.
- He sees only to the extent that he has lived and suffered.
If today we are scarcely able any longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of some pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us. If it is true that a man can see only with his heart, then how blind we are!
How does all this affect the problem we are examining? It means that the big talk of those who prophesy a Church without God and without faith is all empty chatter. We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself.
What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death.
- The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist, who does not stand on the [sidelines], watching the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of man, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future.
Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much.
- She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.
- She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity.
- As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges.
- In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision.
- As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.
- Undoubtedly it will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion.
- Alongside this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly.
But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize the sacraments as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.
- The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right.
- It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy.
- It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek.
- The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time.
The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century.
But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church.
- Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely.
- If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty.
- Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new.
- They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith.
It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.”
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/12/2018 23:31]