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ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI
I am happy to see Fr. De Souza seems to have regained his sense of equilibrium with regard to Benedict XVI. He was one of those whom I had always considered a primary 'reliable' on Benedict XVI, but who completely threw the former Pope overboard like yesterday's trash - as did everyone else on the EWTN staff and their guests from March 13 to the coverage of the inaugural Mass and the initial events of Pope Francis's Pontificate - in their hyperbolic enthusiasm for the new Pope. This time, Fr. De Souza does give credit most generously where credit is due, and does so unabashedly, not bothering to cover his gesture with all sorts of bending-backwards as others have done to underscore that this is Francis's first encyclical, as if anyone disputes that, and that Benedict just gave him some material to work on.
The worst culprit in this respect is Mons. Fisichella, whom Benedict XVI had named president of the new Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization. He was one of three presentors of Lumen Fidei at the Vatican Press Hall on Friday, July 8, and his presentation was so blatantly skewed against Benedict's role in the encyclical that, I surmised later, it must have been the reason that the Vatican Bulletin that day (and Vatican Radio) did not carry the text of his intervention, though they promptly posted those of Cardinal Ouellet and Mons Mueller, complete with translations to other languages. I thought my inference was confirmed when, the following day, L'Oservatore Romano only published the texts of Ouellet and Mueller. Vatican Radio's English service did have a later report about
Fisichella's intervention but it pointedly excerpted only some generalized comments which did not touch at all on Pope Francis's contributions to the encyclical.
But that Friday, when I finally found a report on Fisichella's intervention in a CNA story,
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/vatican-archbishop-encyclical-offers-insight-into-francis-style/
I felt I had been felled by a ton of bricks while reading the stark untruthfulness of his statements regarding the authorship of the encyclical. Consider just these statements, whose sycophantic falsehoods thoroughly revolt me:
“Lumen Fidei, while recovering some insights and some content of the teaching of Benedict XVI, is totally a text of Pope Francis,” the archbishop said at the Holy See’s press office during the encyclical’s release on July 5.
“Here we find his style, and the peculiarity of the content to which we have become accustomed in the first months of his pontificate, especially with his daily homilies,” he added.
Archbishop Fisichella stressed that “the usage of expressions, the wealth of images to which he makes reference, and the peculiarity of some quotations from ancient and modern authors make this text a true introduction to his teaching and allow a better understanding of the pastoral style that makes him unique.”
Really puke-provoking, excuse my language! I would have loved to see how those present - Vatican officials and media reps alike - reacted while the monsignor was mouthing his claptrap! Unless they are all sycophants to the degree that he is, 'embarrassed for him' would be a gross under-statement...
I thought to myself - What is Fisichella trying to do? Getting back at Benedict XVI because he did not make him a cardinal in the last consistory? [Neither did he make Mons. Mueller one, and the CDF Prefect would surely be primus inter pares in the Curia for a red hat if he did not already have one!] At the same time, is he currying favor openly so that Francis will be sure to give him a red hat in his first consistory? Will the Pope reward such overt careerism after all he has inveighed against it in his caustic 'Shame on you' homilies? Either way, or both, what does it say of the nominal leader of the New Evangelization that he is so ready to bend the truth - unnecessarily - for whatever reason?
Anyway, Fr. Di Souza more than makes up for Fisichella's 'treachery' (and his own unbridled Francis-euphoria-cum-Benedict-amnesia last March) in this commentary on Lumen fidei:
A faith-full light:
Benedict’s brilliance illuminates
Pope Francis's first encyclical
With 'Lumen fidei', the Pope facilitates the completion
of his predecessor’s trilogy about the theological virtues.
by FATHER RAYMOND J. DE SOUZA
July 10, 2013
On the eve of his election to the papacy in 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spoke of the “dictatorship of relativism.”
He spent the following eight years returning to the theme, explaining how, if nothing is acknowledged as objectively real, then competing views cannot be evaluated against the standard of truth, to judge which is valid. Instead, the only way to resolve disputes becomes an assertion of power — whether tyrannical or clothed in democratic processes — and, hence, the door to dictatorship is opened.
What, then, can liberate us from this dictatorship? The truth can set us free, and to know the fullness of truth about man and his place in the world requires faith or knowledge of those truths which need to be revealed to us.
At the end of his pontificate, Benedict XVI was working on an encyclical on faith, to complete the “trilogy” on the theological virtues, having written previous ones on love (Deus Caritas Est, 2005) and hope (Spe Salvi, 2007).
After his renunciation of the papacy, he left the text to his successor, and Pope Francis, having made some minor emendations, published it as his first encyclical under the title Lumen Fidei (The Light of Faith).
'Lumen Fidei' is clearly Benedict’s work, written in the sublime style perfected by Joseph Ratzinger over a lifetime of limpid theological work and biblical preaching. It is “Benedict’s” finest encyclical, even though it carries Francis’ name.
Much has been made of Pope Francis’ humility in irrelevant things, like what shoes he wears or whether he does tasks his staff could handle for him. A more impressive mark of humility is publishing as his first encyclical the work of another man, a man whose writing and insight is singular in his generation. {A most obvious point which none of the garden-variety sycophants have completely chosen to ignore, for all their exhaustive paeans to Francis's humility cued up at the drop of a hat. Why? Because they cannot bear to chip away at all from the 'peerfect Pope' image they have constructed, and certainly not by conceding any 'plus' marks at all to his 'unspeakable' predecessor, he-who-must-not-be-named, or only if it is to anathematize him.]]
Lumen Fidei first sketches the bleak landscape left by the dictatorship of relativism, which regards faith with suspicion, as it sees as a threat any claim to know the truth with certainty.
“It would become evident that the light of autonomous reason is not enough to illumine the future; ultimately, the future remains shadowy and fraught with fear of the unknown,” the Holy Father writes. “As a result, humanity renounced the search for a great light, Truth itself, in order to be content with smaller lights which illumine the fleeting moment yet prove incapable of showing the way. Yet, in the absence of light, everything becomes confused; it is impossible to tell good from evil or the road to our destination from other roads which take us in endless circles, going nowhere.”
If, in the absence of truth, there can only be conflict between those wandering in confusing and contradictory directions, what can liberate us from the limits of our own reason and depredations of our will?
“There is an urgent need, then, to see once again that faith is a light, for once the flame of faith dies out, all other lights begin to dim,” Lumen Fidei continues.
The light of faith is unique, since it is capable of illuminating every aspect of human existence. A light this powerful cannot come from ourselves, but from a more primordial source: In a word, it must come from God. Faith is born of an encounter with the living God who calls us and reveals his love, a love which precedes us and upon which we can lean for security and for building our lives. Transformed by this love, we gain fresh vision, new eyes to see; we realize that it contains a great promise of fulfilment and that a vision of the future opens up before us. Faith, received from God as a supernatural gift, becomes a light for our way, guiding our journey through time.
Here, the Holy Father weaves together the three theological virtues as part of one vision. Faith is born from an encounter with God, which in turn provides confidence for our journey through history. Faith is not a mere shortcut to knowledge, a quicker way to assemble dry facts. It embraces the whole person, as it arises from meeting the God who is love and, therefore, provides a future full of hope.
Taking up a theme articulated by Blessed John Paul in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, that “at the heart of every culture is the attitude that man takes toward the greatest mystery: the mystery of God,” Lumen Fidei makes the observation that every person and every culture has to live by faith in something. Faith is knowledge that we accept because we trust the one passing it on to us, without the capacity to verify it entirely on our own. We cannot choose to live without faith, but we can choose in what or whom we put our faith.
“In many areas in our lives, we trust others who know more than we do,” observes Lumen Fidei. “We trust the architect who builds our home, the pharmacist who gives us medicine for healing, the lawyer who defends us in court. We also need someone trustworthy and knowledgeable where God is concerned. Jesus, the Son of God, is the one who makes God known to us.”
The specific difference of Christian faith is that we trust not because of credentials or expertise or authority, but because of the revelation of God’s love. God is love, and because he loves us — fully revealed on the cross — then we can trust him to teach us the truth. Everyone needs faith in something, but only Christian faith proceeds from a perfectly reliable love.
Faith that proposes truth without love is not reliable, which is why the world is suspicious of it, and for good reason, given the experience of recent centuries.
“Truth nowadays is often reduced to the subjective authenticity of the individual, valid only for the life of the individual,” notes Lumen Fidei, explaining why relativism might be attractive. “A common truth intimidates us, for we identify it with the intransigent demands of totalitarian systems.”
Christian faith is not this threatening truth, though, as Lumen Fidei explains in perhaps the passage that is most directly addressed to a world afraid to believe and afraid of religious believers:
Lumen Fidei makes an attractive and compelling contribution to that dialogue. Whether a world that is suspicious of faith is interested remains to be seen. Suspicion and fear are the allies of dictatorships, including the dictatorship of relativism, from which Benedict, and now Francis, wishes to free us.
Father Raymond J. de Souza is editor in chief of Convivium magazine. He was the Register’s Rome correspondent from 1998-2003.
Initial thoughts on
reading 'Lumen fidei'
July 11, 2013
Last night, I finally read through Lumen fidei, not once but twice. And I was struck at how it read Benedict XVI all the way, except obviously in the parts where Pope Francis referred to him.
And consequently, how strained all the commentaries are that claim to see 'exactly' where Pope Francis is speaking in his own voice. Because all the parts they cite are familiar Benedettian themes, stated in familiar Benedettian language, as we heard him affirm and reiterate these truths during his eight years as Pope - the image of faith as a journey (which recurs in the encyclical from start to finish; it could not have been inserted wholesale into a text that did not use the image, an image fir faith that Benedict XVI, like the Church Fathers, has always used), or the part about applying the faith to obtaining justice in the world (surely, Benedict who wrote Deus caritas est and Caritas in veritate would not have left that out in his encyclical on faith!), or the concluding references to Mary (using language and concepts that Benedict XVI has used in the books he wrote about Mary before anyone ever thought he eould ever became Pope, and a loving recurrence in his Magisterium as Pope).
Pope Francis refers to the material he got from Benedict as a 'first draft'. That's a pretty impressive first draft! But as every Benaddict knows, 'Goldmund' [I prefer the Greek form, Chrysostomos] Ratzinger was famous since his early days as a theology professor for speaking in print-ready paragraphs, so even a 'first draft' from Joseph Ratzinger is a print-ready document.
It certainly took much less time for the Vatican translators to get the document into its official versions than the time they took to do that for each of Benedict XVI's preceding three encyclicals. Just a little over four weeks, if we count from March 23, the day on which, presumably, B16 turned over the documents he wanted his successor to have.That says volumes about the print-readiness of his 'first draft'. So, forgive me, Pope Francis, for referring to Lumen fidei throughout this little ‘essay’ as Benedict’s encyclical, even if it is your encyclical and yours alone, for all intents and purposes.
The second overwhelming impression I had was that this was the simplest of Benedict's encyclicals: He was not breaking new ground for an encyclical, as he did with his fascinating disquisition on the various forms of love in Deus caritas est, nor exploring the multiple theological facets of hope in unexpected ways as he did in Spe salvi, nor navigating the jungle of social philosophy and the practical implications (and potential application) of Catholic doctrine to a new ethical model of world development, as he did with Caritas in veritate.
Here the encyclical keeps a laserlike focus on the idea of faith as light, a focus that paradoxically bathes us, as readers and as Catholic faithful, in a flood of light. Every point he makes is like a fountain of light spurting up to dispel the darkness of our forgetfulness or neglect of the faith. Its brilliance is in its utter simplicity compared to the earlier encyclicals.
I have seen it referred to as dense, which was not meant negatively. Because it is not dense as to be opaque or require special tools to approach it, other than the ability to read simple words presented simply. But Benedict XVI, in his usual methodical way, presents it as a progressive induction into all the aspects of faith, so that each re-statement of material is not mere repetition but carries the accrued significance of all that went before.
And so it is dense only in the sense that each line is like a quantum packet of dynamic content that has the dynamic force of conviction, of that very faith that is the topic of the encyclical - and the dynamo for the New Evangelization. I use the quantum as an appropriate image because in physics, it conveys the ultimate equivalence of matter and energy, in this case, manifested as light.
Paragraph 4 sums up what the encyclical develops over the remaining 53 paragraphs: Faith is a light that can illumine every aspect of human existence, and it can do so only because it is a gift from God himself, whose love transforms us, so that faith becomes the light that guides us in our journey through time.
But God himself is light, who sent his Son as a light to the world, and whose Spirit enkindles in us the fire of divine love. The imagery is compelling - ever ancient and ever new, as the mystery, the adventure, the human experience, of God is.
It is the simplest of the Benedettian encyclicals because it is primarily catechetical - it drives the message home in a very effective 'pedagogical' way, a teaching way. Almost every paragraph is structured as a statement, followed by a development that explains the statement, and then a re-statement that encompasses the explanation. The principle of teaching effectively is much like the principle of musical structure. Statement-development-restatement. In which systematic repetition leads to familiarity and eventually knowledge, the way we learn a piece of music.
It is a structure in which Pope Francis would feel very much at home, because it is the structure he follows in his own homilies. The difference between his homiletic style and that of Benedict's is that Benedict takes more time and opens up new insights in his expository development of his theme. And Benedict's tone is gently persuasive, where Francis is openly prodding and provoking, even downright caustic.
The encyclical first presents faith as mankind has experienced it through salvation history and the rest of human history. Other than citations that we may not have been familiar with, we are presented with nothing that even non-Christians are not aware of about Christianity.
Non-Christians seeking for ultimate Truth know about Abraham, know about Israel. know about the trials that God 'imposed' on his chosen people throughout history, know about Jesus and the Christian belief that he is the Son of God sent to the world to redeem mankind from its sins and lead them back to the Father, even if they reject the Christian truth - for now.
And those of us Christians who are not well-versed in salvation history know enough about it to accept without question that it reached its peak and fulfillment in the Incarnation of Christ and his glorious Resurrection, the unique event that is the core of our faith.
And that is why it says from the start that lumen fidei is a light to be rediscovered - by us, to begin with, whose lives have been dimmed immeasurably by ever-weakening faith or outright loss of faith. But it is also waiting to be discovered by those who have not yet accepted the Gospel.
Our faith in Jesus is a light which makes us "see with the eyes of Jesus and share in his mind, his filial disposition, because (we) share his love which is the Spirit".
And so, faith is presented as necessarily 'lived in the Church' - that 'vital union of Christ with believers, and of believers among themselves', a 'concrete communion... that opens the individual Christian to all others'. Faith is, therefore, not a phenomenon that is meant to be private and individual, but open and communal. Therefore, catholic and universal.
Through Baptism, we become God’s children, ‘sons in the Son’, he ‘who makes God known to us’, and Jesus’s own relationship with his ‘Abba, Father’ becomes the core of the Christian experience. St Paul tells us: “By grace you have been saved through faith – not of your own doing: it is the gift of God” (which one might read as ‘a gift from God’, but even better, that God himself is the gift).
And that’s where we are at the end of Chapter One...With more treasures to come in the remaining three chapters, as I am sure those of you who have read the entire encyclical have savored by now. But which I will not attempt to synthesize because it goes into the multiple aspects of faith and its implications and applications in the life of individuals, the Church and society.
In short, a Benedict encyclical, whoever signs it, is much better read in full than reduced to a synthesis.[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/07/2013 15:25] |