December 15, 2011
Editor's note: The following essay is the second of two pieces by Fr. Schall on Pope Benedict XVI's historical visit to Germany in late September 2011. The first essay, "No Small Matter", reflected on what the Holy Father said in Germany about Martin Luther, sin, salvation, and the grace of God.
The Church’s mission has its origins in the mystery of the triune God, in the mystery of the creative God, in the mystery of his creative love. And love is not just somehow within God, it is God, he himself is love by nature.
And divine love does not want to exist only for itself, by nature it wants to point itself out. It has come down to humanity, to us, in a particular way through the incarnation and self-offering of God’s Son: by virtue of the fact that Christ, the Son of God, as it were, stepped outside the framework of his divinity, took flesh and became man, not merely to confirm the world in its worldliness and to be its companion, leaving it to carry on just as it is, but in order to change it.
— Pope Benedict XVI
Concert Hall, Freiburg, Germany
September 25, 2011
I.
Many reflections on Benedict XVI’s third German visit are worth particular attention. Benedict is in his home turf in Germany. It is a place to which he hoped to return after his service to the Church in Rome after the death of John Paul II.
Here I want to comment briefly on three of Benedict’s addresses in Freiburg, one to the lay faithful, one to young people, and one to German Catholic leaders.
The pope recalls various “exposure programmes” in which groups of experts are sent to various countries in the world to report back on the conditions found there. Suppose that a similar group would come to Germany to find out what the religious condition of the country might be. What would they find?
“They would find much to admire here, for example the prosperity, the order and the efficiency. But looking on with unprejudiced eyes, they would also see plenty of poverty, poverty in human relations and poverty in the religious sphere.”
We live in an atmosphere of relativism. We notice that this relativism now becomes “aggressive” when it is suggested, against it, that the truth is possible and the “meaning of human life” can be found.
The reason for this aggressiveness is because the denial or critique of relativism undermines the societal and personal justifications for lives based on it as if were beyond criticism about its very validity. The observers would notice the increasing influence of relativism.
“It is reflected in the inconstancy and fragmentation of many people’s lives and in the exaggerated individualism.” How does this manifest itself in human lives? “Many no longer seem capable of any form of self-denial or of making a sacrifice for others.” That is really a devastating consequence.
Besides Christian charity, our culture has had a tradition of “benevolence” or “altruism” which also seems to be dying. “People can hardly find the courage now to promise to be faithful for a whole lifetime; the courage to make decisions and say: now I belong to you, or to take a firm stand for fidelity and truthfulness and sincerely to seek a solution to their problems.”
When it is said that cultures first rot from inside, we sometimes wonder that it means. But the inability to make lifetime decisions is surely the heart of what it means.
The Pope also understands that the German Catholic Church has been very generous to many places in the world though its financial and technical support. On the surface, it might look like all is well.
“The Church in Germany is superbly organized. But behind the structures, is there also a corresponding spiritual strength, the strength of faith in the living God?” We all know of the decline in religious attendance and belief in Germany and Europe. What is the problem?
“The real crisis facing the Church in the western world is a crisis of faith. If we do not find a way of genuinely renewing our faith, all structural reforms will remain ineffective.”
Many writers have wondered if the day of the large Church is over. What might be the alternative, at least in outline? People “need places where they can give voice to their inner longing. And here we are called to seek new paths of evangelization. Small communities could be one such path where friendships are lived and deepened in regular communal adoration before God.”
The ways the laws are going in many political society, it may well be that the Church will be legally and forcibly excluded from any direct contact with the civil order. The Pope’s brief suggestion may be more important than we realize.
II.
Benedict, like John Paul II, is very good with audiences of young people. The Pope spoke to the young people at the Freiburg Trade Fair. He spoke of light. The relation of light, intelligence, and the good is an ancient theme, one mindful both of Plato and of the service of the Easter Vigil. Christ says that He is the Light of the world. It is from this light that we ourselves reflect a light that is not simply ours.
The Holy Father does not hesitate to tell the young men and women about what they face. He does not lie to them. “It is not our human efforts or the technical progress of our era that brings light into this world. Again and again we experience how our striving to bring about a better and more just world hits against its limits. Innocent suffering and the ultimate fact of death awaiting every single person are an impenetrable darkness which may perhaps, through fresh experience, be lit up for a moment… In the end, though a frightening darkness remains.”
Yet, a light shineth in the darkness. Christ has “conquered death.” No doubt, “those who believe in Jesus do not lead lives of perpetual sunshine, as though they could be spared suffering and hardship.”
Grace is still present. “Nobody can believe unless he is supported by the faith of others, and conversely through my faith, I help to strengthen others in their faith.”
The Pope in recent lectures has often stressed both the witness of saints and the relation of the faith of others to ours. We are not alone. If we believe in Christ, what He did, we can see that He is light. Yet, in spite of technical progress the “world in which we live does not seem to be getting better.”
Almost every rejection of Christianity is proposed in its own terms, as a formula to make the world better by getting rid of the Christian influence.
To this, Benedict responds: “Those figures in our history who saw themselves as ‘bringers of light,’ but without being fired by Christ, the one true light, did not manage to create an earthly paradise, but set up dictatorships and totalitarian systems, in which even the smallest spark of true humanity is choked.”
The consequences of unbelief are not neutral. “We cannot remain silent about the existence of evil.” We see it in many places, including “in our own lives.”
“Truly within our hearts there is a tendency toward evil, there is selfishness, envy, aggression. Perhaps with a certain self-discipline all this to some degree be controlled.” Yet, many of our most unsettling problems are somewhat hidden to us, “sloth and laziness in doing good.”
What is even more sobering is this: “In history keen observers have pointed out that damage to the Church comes not from her opponents, but from uncommitted Christians.”
There is no doubt from our recent experience, the most damaging blows to the Church have come from within, self-inflicted, from unfaithful clergy and laity, from politicians who claim to be Catholic but make possible basic attacks on human life and dignity.
With all this sober commentary on our disorders, the Pope seems to be telling us that we need to straighten out our lives. And he does cite the word “repent.”
The Pope here reminds us, however, that Christ does not expect the members of the Church to sinless, a people with nothing to confess. God’s presence in the Church is not directly dependent on the exemplary lives of its members. If it were, He would have departed long ago. The very structure of the Church uses sinful men.
Paul calls every baptized person a “saint.” Children and every baptized person are already sanctified. It does not depend on our works. God “does not call you because you are good and perfect, but because he is good and he wants to make you his friends. You are the light of the world because Jesus is your light.”
This reflection of Benedict puts a new “light,” as it were, on our weak and unbelieving souls in the Church. The Church does not cease to be the locus of light just because of its members who are unfaithful. It is just the opposite. As Peter said to Christ, “To where else should be go?” We are in the Church in part to rid ourselves of our sins.
III.
In the Freiburg Concert Hall, Benedict frankly told the German leaders: “For some time now we have been experiencing a decline in religious practice and we have been seeing substantial numbers of the baptized drifting away from church life.”
Benedict is a realist. So demands for change arise, changes almost always modeled on secular institutions and not on the sources of the original founding of the Church. Such radical changes would never work. The Church is of divine, not human law, in its essence.
Here, Benedict recalls that someone once asked Mother Teresa this same question about what needs to be changed in the Church. Her answer was “you and I.”
Chesterton was once asked a similar question. “What’s wrong with the world?" He answered with wonderful brevity and profundity, “I am.” Mother Teresa meant by this response that the Church is not “other people.”
“Every Christian and the whole community of the faithful are called to constant change,” change away from sin, change to accept what is revealed, to accept what is true.
What sort of change? “The fundamental motive for change is the apostolic mission of the disciples and the Church herself.” Why is this? It is because ultimately this mission is not of our own making and arises from God’s presence in the world.
The Church is to keep its mission in mind. Christians are told: “You are witnesses.” They are not, at bottom, originators. They are to pass along what is heard, what is witnessed to every age and place.
All nations, all times, and all places are in the original intention of the Church’s founding. This means that we must not think as the world, for something less than what we are. The Church must be rather in a way “unworldly.”
It is here where Benedict cites the passage that I placed at the beginning of these reflection. The Church’s mission to the world does not begin in the Church herself or in the world. It begins in the inner life of the Trinity, in the original intention of creation. It begins in the fact that God is love and in the fact that love is, if it wills, outgoing.
“Divine love does not wait to exist only for itself.” The Second Person is “sent” into the world. This means that the world itself contains this sending. It is still present. Its end is its source, that is, to live eternal life.
“The Christ event included the inconceivable fact of what the Church Fathers call a
sacrum convivium, an exchange between God and man.” What might such an exchange include? It obviously implies that something reciprocal is here, not just one-sided.
“The Fathers explain it in this way: We have nothing to give God; we have only our sin to place before him. And this he receives and makes his own, while in return he gives us himself and his glory, a truly unequal exchange, which is brought to completion in the life and passion of Christ.”
The return to the inner life of God thus comes through the life and passion of the Lord. “He becomes, as it were, a ‘sinner,’ he takes sin upon himself, takes what is ours and gives us what is his.” The Church is the locus of this unequal exchange.
“The Church is immersed in the redeemer’s outreach to men. When she is truly herself, she is always on the move.” The Church is not allowed by God Himself to be satisfied, content that it has done enough. Moreover, if the Church is restrained or persecuted, it survives.
“Secularizing trends — whether by expropriation of Church goods, or elimination of privileges or the like - have always meant a profound liberation of the Church from forms of worldliness, or in the process by which she, as it were, sets aside her worldly wealth and once again completely embraces her worldly poverty.”
When the Church is less worldly, she is usually more missionary; in that essential mission she reaches back to her Trinitarian origins.
The Pope concludes by returning to the idea that the faith is always about others, even when it is about ourselves. “Faith always includes as an essential element the fact that it is shared with others. No one can believe alone. We receive the faith — as Saint Paul tells us — ‘through hearing,’ and hearing is part of being together, in spirit and in body. Only within the great assembly of believers of all times, who found Christ and were found by him, am I able to believe.”
Ultimately we thank God for our belief, not our own genius. He first approaches us. Our approach to Him is always first a response to God in His providence. He alone can tell us who we finally are and that to which our souls tend, to that very inner life of the Trinity in which we are initially created by the free love of God. He sent His Son into the world “for us men and for our salvation.”
In the end, Benedict XVI told his countrymen the truth about ultimate things in a way no one else could. The image of a German scholarly Pope speaking about the truth of faith to the Germans is something this world has needed to witness all through the modern age. It is happening among us. We too can listen.
[And we can only pray that enough Germans are listening!]