Seven years of Papa Ratzinger:
'The simple faith of a very fine theologian'
by Marina Corradi
Translated from the 4/19/12 issue of
He knew him long before he became Pope. But in the 1980s, Joseph Ratzinger was, to Cardinal Ersilio Tonini, 98 this year and the world's oldest living cardinal, not just the Prefect of the Vatican's premier dicastery, but also "the German cardinal with a kind face who was never absent at any important meeting or seminar at the Vatican".
"He was always attentive and kind, but a man of few words - someone who preferred to listen instead of putting in his word," he adds.
At one of the first General Audineces held by Benedict XVI in 2005, Cardinal Tonini famously showed his affection for the Pope. It reminded me of a Chinese patriarch giving his blessing to a younger though more eminent man....
For the emeritus Archbishop of Ravenna-Cervia, who marks his 98th birthday on July 20, the Pope is almost like a younger brother. Listening to him speak about Benedict XVI, one senses not just a great sympathy but almost an affinity between them - Tonini, born to peasant parents in Piacentina, and Joseph Ratzinger, born to lower middle-class parents in rural Bavaria.
"I liked his gentleness and his south German amiability," he continues. "And his spontaneous way of drawing people to him. The year I was asked to preach the Lenten spiritual exercises to the Roman Curia, I would use German expressions once in a while, since I know the language. He would smile at me from his seat, as if to encourage me or perhaps just happy to hear his native tongue spoken in an unlikely setting.".
Or perhaps the two already shared another common language - the popular piety that both had inherited from their parents , a faith that is profound and is tenacious even through crisis and testing.
In 2005, Tonini did not take part in the Conclave because he was 11 years over voting age.
[In fact, John Paul II only made him a cardinal in 1994, after his 80th birthday]. But he attended the general congregations of the cardinals who met daily in the two weeks preceding the Conclave, with Cardinal Ratzinger presiding as Dean of Cardinals.
"He synthesized for us the overall situation of the universal Church and the challenges that the new Pope would have to confront. As I listened to him, I considered how competent and measured and lucid his interventions were. And i said to myself, 'The new Pope could very well be him'."
As he is. Seven years have passed. Yesterday (April 18), Tonini celebrated his 75th year as a priest. He was ordained in 1937 when the future Pope was just 10 years old. (One feels light-headed to hear the words of someone who is among the very few in the Church hierarchy older than the Pope, who at 85 almost seems young.]
In the relative quiet of the Istituto Santa Teresa [the retirement home in Ravenna where Tonini lives], the cardinal goes on: "He is a gentle person, the Pope, but courageous. Not one to speak in thunderous tones, but when he has to say something, he says it clearly. As he demonstrated in the way he confronted the pedophile-priest scandal. With clear unequivocal words, but never accusatory, rather, with a tone of sorrow."
"In the 1980s, I read one of his first books,
Introduction to Christianity, and was struck by his limpid logic and writing, devoid of any rhetorical artifice. It is the same style I find in JESUS OF NAZARETH - a sim0licity that goes with great theological depth".
One says to him: "Eminence, those two volumes on Jesus seem to find their ideal
incipit [opening statement] in one of the first lines in Benedict XVI's first encyclical,
Deus caritas est: 'Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction'. One hears the urgency to bear witness to men all over about the concrete historicity of Jesus and what is narrated in the Gospels".
"Yes, it is the foundation of Christianity itself, for all time, but every generation needs to see it being testified to all over. The more so with our generation, with its experience of positivism, rationalism/ That is why, in 2005, the Church needed not just a pious man [to be Pope] but someone who also had the pulse, the precise perception of the historical situation, of the challenges of the third millennium, so that Christianity can be embodied, as it must, always and ever anew, in human history".
That professor and theologian of few words, that cardinal who was "much listened to and favored by John Paul II", has reminded men once again of ancient truths, Tonini observed.
"First of all, a Pope from Germany is better able to judge the level of secularization which has been growing in Europe, of the need to repropose the faith in words that are comprehensible today - and that has been the great objective in everything he does.
"That passionate conjugation of faith and reason that he taught us in Regensburg; the splendid discourse to the secular intelligentsia of France in the College des Bernardins, when he compared our time to that in Greece when St. Paul spoke at the Areopagus - that even if the streets today are no longer filled with images of multiple gods, it is even worse that for many, God is unknown. Or, as the Pope said then, 'The actual absence of God is tacitly beset by the questions raised about him'."
"Thus,
quaerere Deum - seek God - as the Pope reiterated in Paris, invoking an existential urgency in that medieval convent which goes back to the roots of Western Christianity. To seek God with faith and reason, while warning, us in a common thread that goes on to
Caritas in veritate, that reason without faith is destined to lose itself in the illusion of its own omnipotence"
And this seems to be a theme dear to Tonini, who is a passionate follower of developments in bioethics and assisted reproduction, in which he sees a hubris, a defiance of man's own nature, namely, the fact that he is God's creature.
He points out that there is here "an echo of our similar provenance, which is popularly rooted but profoundly Christian, which is why Cardinal Ratzinger, though he is not Italian, always seemed very familiar to me".
It's a Christian matrix inherited from centuries of tradition, which, for Tonini, also explains a fundamental trait of this Pope: "He is a man who fears nothing - he trusts God and the Church, he has firm confidence in Providence."
He sees the basic origins of the Pope's faith illustrated also in his choice of the Curate of Ars as the inspiration and model for the Year for Priests: "Consider that parish priest, that humble country priest - what an enlightened and profound conscience he had! So, you see how Ratzinger's roots keep flowering forth during his Pontificate."
But he also notes that this Pope who has centuries of tradition and popular faith behind him, also wrote
Spe salvi in which he asks himself and us, almost provocatively, "whether Christian hope truly works in us today, if that hope is concrete enough to begin to transform the present".
"The urgency that this man feels to announce today that everything is true: the birth, the death, the resurrection of Jesus. The urgency of impressing those truths on us... You see, the Spirit truly breathed on the Conclave. We needed a Christian like him - a theologian but a simple one, a professor but a son of the people. One of those, I am convinced, who is particularly dear to God, because they trust in him and are fearless because of this".
Left photo, Tonini at 90; Center and right, Tonini on his 96th birthday in 2010.
In an interview that the cardinal gave on his 96th birthday in July 2010, he said this of Benedict XVI:
He is one of the most learned men in the world, one of the best prepared, even if he almost dissimulates his immense competencies. It is a great virtue. I first met him in Rome when I gave the Lenten exercises for bishops and cardinals, and he was a bishop. I am very proud of his commitment. He is a great man, like John Paul II was. He is attentive, reserved, with a very quick and acute intelligence - he is a saint who has always given his neighbor primacy.
And about Cardinal Tonini himself, this is what he told 30 GIORNI when he turned 90 in 2004:
Today I am born again, I celebrate my birth. But to tell the truth, every morning I am always born again. And the wish that I make for myself is to hold on to this serenity until the end, because I’m happy to be in the world…
I’ve had the good luck because my mother taught me to wake up full of astonishment. I’m very happy to be in the world, it’s a great miracle. I wish that the people I meet had the same joy I do.
BTW, between Cardinal Tonini, soon to be 98, and Mons. Loris Capovilla (John XXIII's private secretary) who is 96, a shoutout to all nonagenarians who remain as sharp-minded as they are, and the perennial wish that Benedict XVI too will be blessed with 'multos annos' more!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/04/2012 11:23]