Thanks to Lella's blog
for leading me to this item.
The secret of Professor Ratzinger
by Fr. Piero Gheddo
Translated from
July 18, 2010
As summer reading, I have chosen, among others,
Ratzinger professore by Gianni Valente (San Paolo 2008, 208 pp). It is a most interesting text for getting to know Joseph Ratzinger in his younger years and therefore to better understand Pope Benedict XVI today. Its subtitle is "The years of study and teaching as recalled by his students and colleagues (1946-1977)".
In a blog entry, it is impossible to synthesize the richness of this reconstruction of the youth and maturation of the man whom the Lord Jesus has chosen to be his Vicar on earth for our time. I will simply note two points that show the continuity between Joseph Ratzinger as student and priest and as Supreme Pontiff of the universal Church.
First, the
lectio magistralis he gave on June 24, 1959, to start his professorship at the University of Bonn was entitled "The God of faith and the god of the philosophers".
The 'urgent question' that the 32-year-old professor confronted was the modern divorce between faith and reason, between a religion confined to the personal and private realm, intimate and sentimental, and rational search which from Kant onwards has denied the possibility of ever knowing God, much less having access to him.
Citing St. Thomas, Ratzinger said it was possible to overcome every deleterious opposition between the language of faith and that of reason. The God who manifests himself gradually in the Old and New Testaments coincides at least in part with the 'god of the philosophers", that is, the search for God that modern men undertakes. The problem is that of language.
The Fathers of the Church achieved an admirable synthesis between Biblical faith and the Hellenic spirit. In the same way, the young Ratzinger said, "If today it is essential to emphasize that the Christian message that is not a secret esoteric message for a limited circle of initiates but the message of God addressed to all men, then it is equally essential to translate it for the outside world in the common language of human reason".
But the young German professor (a priest since 1951) had no illusions. In a 1958 article, the 31-year-old Ratzinger wrote that to consider Europe as a continent 'that is almost wholly Christian' is 'statistical deception'.
"This Europe", he wrote [in the article “Die neuen Heiden und die Kirche” (The new pagans and thee Church) for the magazine
Hochland], "nominally Christian, has been for forty years the cradle of a new paganism, which is growing steadily in the very heart of the Church and threatens to demolish it from within".
The Catholic Church after World War II seemed to him to have become "increasingly and in a totally new way, a Church of pagans. No longer, as before, a Church of pagans turned Christians, but a Church of pagans who still call themselves Christian but who have really become pagans".
The second point is the profundity of thought along with the clarity of how Prof. Ratzinger taught theology which drew him a great following at his universities, and not just among his own students. The recollections of his contemporaries are numerous and consistent.
At a time when 'the barons of the professorial chairs' often spoke a difficult language and were not concerned about making themselves understood by their students, Ratzinger introduced a new way of lecturing.
"He would read his lectures in the kitchen to his sister Maria, who was an intelligent person but had never studied theology. If she showed her appreciation, it was a sign for him that he had prepared the lecture well," says the book (pp 64-65).
One student from that time adds: "The lecture hall was always filled to overflowing. The students adored him. He had such beautiful but simple language. The language of a believer".
Prof. Ratzinger did not make a display of his academic erudition nor did he use the oratorical tones that professors habitually took in those days. He presented his lectures plainly, with a language of limpid simplicity even for the most complex of subjects.
Many years later, he would explain the 'secret' of his lessons: "I never sought to create my own system, my own personal theology. Specifically,
I simply sought to think with the Church, and this meant, above all, with the great thinkers of our faith".
His students perceived through his lectures not only that they were receiving academic knowledge but that they were making contact with something great - with the heart of the Christian faith itself.
(I wish to greet and thank the friends who have followed this blog, to say I am concluding the biography of Fr. Augusto Colombe (1927-2009), the missionary of the Pontifical Foreign Missions who was one of the most outstanding representatives in the Church of India for promoting the development of the pariahs who number about 160 million in India. I will resume the blog, God willing, around the end of August.]
Fr. Gheddo (born 1929) is currently the head of the history division of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME, from its Italian acronym) since 1994. Before that, he was the editor of the magazine Mondo e Missioni for 35 years (1959-1994) and founded AsiaNews in 1987. He has travelled and lived with local people in 80 countries and has written some 70 books about the work of missions, also writing for many secular publications. He is also the postulator for the causes for canonization of four contemporary missionaries.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/07/2010 10:56]