Pope Benedict XVI

Pope Benedict XVI
The Ratzinger Report
[Interview with Vittorio Messori
(August 18, 1982)]
ch. 6-7 (ed.)

Edited from: The Ratzinger Report An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori, tr. Salvator Attanasio and Graham Harrison Ignatius Press San Francisco. Tr. from the authorized German manuscript. Italian version published under the title Rapporto Sulla Fede, ©1985, Edizioni Paoline, Milan, Italy. German title: Zur Lage des Glaubens. Ein Gespräch mit Vittorio Messori (Broschiert)

“In a world like the West, where money and wealth are the measure of all things, and where the model of the free market imposes its implacable laws on every aspect of life, authentic Catholic ethics now appears to many like an alien body from times long past, as a kind of meteorite which is in opposition, not only to the concrete habits of life, but also to the way of thinking underlying them. Economic liberalism creates its exact counterpart, permissivism, on the moral plane.” [Accordingly] “it becomes difficult, if not altogether impossible, to present Catholic morality as reasonable. It is too distant from what is considered to be obvious, as normal by the majority of persons, conditioned by the dominant culture with which not a few ‘Catholic’ moralists have aligned themselves as influential supporters.”

[The following is taken from a report read in Bogota, at the meeting of the bishops who preside over the doctrinal commissions and episcopal conferences of Latin America

[1] “In the culture of the ‘developed’ world it is above all the indissoluble bond between sexuality and motherhood that has been ruptured. Separated from motherhood, sex has remained without a locus and has lost its point of reference: it is a kind of drifting mine, a problem and at the same time an omnipresent power.”

[2] “After the separation between sexuality and motherhood was effected, sexuality was also separated from procreation. The movement, however, ended up going in an opposite direction: procreation without sexuality. Out of this follow the increasingly shocking medical-technical experiments so prevalent in our day where, precisely, procreation is independent of sexuality. Biological manipulation is striving to uncouple man from nature (the very existence of which is being disputed). There is an attempt to transform man, to manipulate him as one does every other ‘thing’: he is nothing but a product planned according to one’s pleasure.”

If I am not mistaken, I observe, our cultures are the first in history in which such ruptures have come to pass.

“Yes, and at the end of this march to shatter fundamental, natural linkages (and not, as is said, only those that are cultural), there are unimaginable consequences which, however, derive from the very logic that lies at the base of a venture of this kind.” [we will atone in our day for] “the consequences of a sexuality which is no longer linked to motherhood and to procreation. It logically follows from this that every form of sexuality is equivalent and therefore of equal worth.”

“It is certainly not a matter of establishing or recommending a retrograde moralism, but one of lucidly drawing the consequences from the premises: it is, in fact, logical that pleasure, the libido of the individual, become the only possible point of reference of sex. No longer having an objective reason to justify it, sex seeks the subjective reason in the gratification of the desire, in the most ‘satisfying’ answer for the individual, to the instincts no longer subject to rational restraints. Everyone is free to give to his personal libido the content considered suitable for himself.”

“Hence, it naturally follows that all forms of sexual gratification are transformed into the ‘rights’ of the individual. Thus, to cite an especially current example, homosexuality [activity] becomes an inalienable right. (Given the aforementioned premises, how can one deny it?) On the contrary, its full recognition appears to be an aspect of human liberation.”

There are, however, other consequences of “this uprooting of the human person in the depth of his nature”. He elaborates: “Fecundity separated from marriage based on a life-long fidelity turns from being a blessing (as it was understood in every culture) into its opposite: that is to say a threat to the free development of the ‘individual’s right to happiness’. Thus abortion, institutionalized, free and socially guaranteed, becomes another ‘right’, another form of ‘liberation’.”

“The now dominant mentality attacks the very foundations of the morality of the Church, which, as I have already said, if she remains true to herself, risks appearing like an anachronistic construct, a bothersome, alien body. Thus the moral theologians of the Western Hemisphere, in their efforts to still remain ‘credible’ in our society, find themselves facing a difficult alternative: it seems to them that they must choose between opposing modern society and opposing the Magisterium. The number of those who prefer the latter type of opposition is larger or smaller depending on how the question is posed: consequently they set out on a search for theories and systems that allow compromises between Catholicism and current conceptions. But this growing difference between the Magisterium and the ‘new’ moral theologies leads to unforeseeable consequences, also precisely for the reason that the Church with her schools and her hospitals still occupies an important social role (especially in America). Thus we stand before the difficult alternative: either the Church finds an understanding, a compromise with the values propounded by society which she wants to continue to serve, or she decides to remain faithful to her own values (and in the Church’s view these are the values that protect man in his deepest needs) as the result of which she finds herself on the margin of society.”

[...]“Today the sphere of moral theology has become the main locus of the tensions between Magisterium and theologians, especially because here the consequences are most immediately perceptible. I should like to cite some trends: at times premarital relations, at least under certain conditions, are justified. Masturbation is presented as a normal phenomenon of adolescence. Admission of remarried divorced couples to the sacraments is constantly demanded. Radical feminism—especially in some women’s religious orders—also seems to be gaining ground noticeably in the Church (but we will speak about that later). Even as regards the question of homosexuality, attempts at its justification are in the making. Indeed, it has come to pass that bishops—on the basis of insufficient information or also because of a sense of guilt among Catholics toward an ‘oppressed minority’—have placed churches at the disposal of ‘gays’ for their gatherings. Then there is the case of Humanae vitae, the encyclical of Paul VI, which reaffirmed the ‘no’ to contraceptives and which has not been understood. Instead it has been more or less openly rejected in broad ecclesial circles.”

“It’s true that at the beginning of the great debate following the appearance of the encyclical Humanae vitae in 1968, the demonstrative basis of the theology faithful to the Magisterium was still relatively slim. But, in the meantime, it has been broadened through new experiences and new reflections so that the situation is beginning to reverse itself. In order to understand the whole problem correctly, we are here obliged to take a look at the past.

“In the thirties or forties, some Catholic moral theologians had begun to criticize the onesidedness of the orientation of Catholic sexual morality toward procreation from the point of view of personalist philosophy. Above all they called attention to the fact that the classic treatment of marriage in Canon law, based on its ‘ends’, did not do full justice to the essence of marriage. The category ‘end’ is insufficient to explain this peculiarly human phenomenon. In no way did these theologians deny the importance of fecundity in the complex of values of human sexuality. But they assigned a new place to it within the framework of a more personalistic perspective in the way of considering marriage.

“These discussions were important and have produced a significant deepening of the Catholic doctrine on matrimony. The Council accepted and confirmed the best aspects of these reflections. But at this point in time a new line of development began to materialize. Whereas the reflections of the Council were based on the unity of person and nature in man, personalism began to be understood in opposition to ‘naturalism’ (as if the human person and its needs could enter into conflict with nature). Thus an exaggerated personalism led some theologians to reject the internal order, the language of nature (which instead is moral of itself, according to the constant teaching of the Catholic Church), leaving to sexuality, conjugal included, the sole point of reference in the will of the person. This indeed is one of the reasons that Humanae vitae was rejected and that it is impossible for many theologies to reject contraception.”

“Immediately after the Council, discussions were begun as to whether specifically Christian moral norms, as such, existed. Some came to the conclusion that all the norms can also be found outside the Christian world and that, de facto, the greater part of Christian norms came from other cultures, particularly from ancient classic culture, especially the stoic. From this erroneous point of departure, they arrived unavoidably at the idea that morality was to be constructed solely on the basis of reason and that this autonomy of reason was also valid for believers. Hence no more Magisterium, no more God of Revelation with his Decalogue. In fact, many espoused the view that the Decalogue on which the Church has based her objective morality is nothing but a ‘cultural product’ linked to the ancient Semitic Middle East. Hence a relative norm dependent on an anthropology and on a history that is no longer ours. And so here we again find the denial of the unity of Scripture, the resurfacing of the old heresy which held that the Old Testament (the locus of the ‘law’) was surpassed and replaced by the New (kingdom of ‘grace’). But for Catholics, the Bible is a unitary whole; the beatitudes of Jesus do not annul the Decalogue, which had been given by God to Moses and through him to men of all times. Instead, according to these new moral theologians, since we are ‘now adult and liberated’, we ought to seek other behavioral norms by ourselves.”‘

“As I have already indicated,” he replied, “it is known that in the final analysis for genuine Catholic morality there are actions that reason will never be able to justify, since they contain in themselves rejection of the Creator God and therefore a denial of the authentic good of man, his creature. For the Magisterium there have always been fixed points of reference, landmarks which can neither be removed nor ignored without breaking the bond that Christian philosophy sees between Being and the Good. By proclaiming, instead, the autonomy of human reason alone, now detached from the Decalogue, one is forced to embark on a search for new fixed points: to what shall one adhere, how are moral duties to be justified if they are no longer rooted in divine Revelation, in the commandments of the Creator?”

“Well, one has arrived at the so-called ‘morality of ends’—or, as it is preferred in the United States where it is particularly developed and diffused—of ‘consequences’, ‘consequentialism’: Nothing in itself is good or bad, the goodness of an act depends entirely upon its end and upon its foreseeable and calculated consequences. After becoming aware of the problematic character of such a system, some moralists have attempted to tone down ‘consequentialism’ to ‘proportionalism’: moral conduct depends upon the evaluation and weighing of the proportion of goods that are involved. Again it is a matter of individual evaluation, this time an evaluation of the ‘proportion’ between good and evil.”

“The error lies in constructing a system on what was only an aspect of the traditional morality which certainly—in the final analysis—did not depend upon the personal evaluation of the individual, but upon the Revelation of God, upon the ‘instructions for use’ inscribed by him objectively and indelibly in his creation. Accordingly, nature, and with it precisely also man himself, so far as he is part of that created nature, contain that morality within themselves.”

“If we turn from the affluent societies of the West, where these systems cropped up for the first time, we find that in the moral convictions of many liberation theologies, a ‘proportionalist’ morality also often stands in the background. The ‘absolute good’ (and this means the building of a just socialist society) becomes the moral norm that justifies everything else, including—if necessary—violence, homicide, mendacity. It is one of the many aspects that show how mankind, when it loses its mooring in God, falls prey to the most arbitrary consequences. The ‘reason’ of the individual, in fact, can from case to case propose the most different, the most unforeseeable and the most dangerous ends. And what looks like ‘liberation’ turns into its opposite and shows its diabolic visage in deeds.

“Actually, all this has already been described with precision in the first pages of the Bible. The core of the temptation for man and of his fall is contained in this programmatic statement: ‘You will be like God’ (Gen 3:5). Like God: that means free of the law of the Creator, free of the laws of nature herself, absolute lord of one’s own destiny. Man continually desires only one thing: to be his own creator and his own master. But what awaits us at the end of this road is certainly not Paradise.”

[...] “It is precisely woman who most harshly suffers the consequences of the confusion, of the superficiality of a culture that is the fruit of masculine attitudes of mind, masculine ideologies, which deceive woman, uproot

her in the depths of her being, while claiming that in reality they want to liberate her.”

“At first sight it seems that the demands of radical feminism in favor of a total equality between man and woman are extremely noble and, at any rate, perfectly reasonable. It also seems logical that the demand that women be allowed to enter all professions, excluding none, should transform itself within the Church into a demand for access also to the priesthood. To many, this demand for the ordination of women, this possibility of having Catholic priestesses, appears not only justified but obvious: a simple and inevitable adaptation of the Church to a new social situation that has come into being.”

“In reality this kind of ‘emancipation’ of woman is in no way new. One forgets that in the ancient world all the religions also had priestesses. All except one: the Jewish. Christianity, here too following the ‘scandalous’ original example of Jesus, opens a new situation to women; it accords them a position that represents a novelty with respect to Judaism. But of the latter he preserves the exclusively male priesthood. Evidently, Christian intuition understood that the question was not secondary, that to defend Scripture (which in neither the Old nor the New Testament knows women priests) signified once more to defend the human person, especially those of the female sex.”

The matter requires, I remark, a further clarification: it still remains to be seen in what way the Bible and the tradition

that has interpreted it attribute “equality” to women and at the same time exclude her from the priesthood.

“Certainly,” he concedes, “but it is further necessary to get to the bottom of the demand that radical feminism draws from the widespread modern culture, namely, the ‘trivialization’ of sexual specificity that makes every role interchangeable between man and woman. When we were speaking of the crisis of traditional morality, I indicated a series of fatal ruptures: that, for example, between sexuality and procreation. Detached from the bond with fecundity, sex no longer appears to be a determined characteristic, as a radical and pristine orientation of the person. Male? Female? They are questions that for some are now viewed as obsolete, senseless, if not racist. The answer of current conformism is foreseeable: ‘whether one is male or female has little interest for us, we are all simply humans’. This, in reality, has grave consequences even if at first it appears very beautiful and generous. It signifies, in fact, that sexuality is no longer rooted in anthropology; it means that sex is viewed as a simple role, interchangeable at one’s pleasure.”

“What follows with logical necessity is that the whole being and the whole activity of the human person are reduced to pure functionality, to the pure role: depending on the social context, for example, to the role of ‘consumer’ or the role of ‘worker’; at any rate to something that does not directly regard the respective sex. It is not by chance that among the battles of ‘liberation’ of our time there has also been that of escaping from the ‘slavery of nature’, demanding the right to be male or female at one’s will or pleasure, for example, through surgery, and demanding that the State record this autonomous will of the individual in its registry offices. Incidentally, one must realize that this so-called sex

change alters nothing e , estig_constitution of the fie - son involved It is only an external ar‘tifâct which resolves no problems but onl constructs fictitious realif e . Nor is it by chance t at the aws imme fate y a pte t emselves to such a demand. If everything is only a culturally and historically conditioned ‘role’, and not a natural specificity inscribed in the depth of being, even motherhood is a mere accidental function. In fact, certain feminist circles consider it ‘unjust’ that only the woman is forced to give birth and to suckle. And not only the law but science, too, offers a helping hand: by transforming a male into a female and vice-versa, as we have already seen, or by separating fecundity from sexuality with the purpose of making it possible to procreate at will, with the help of technical manipulations. Are we not, after all, all alike? So, if need be one also fights against nature’s ‘inequity’. But one cannot struggle against nature without undergoing the most devastating consequences. The sacrosanct equality between man and woman does not exclude, indeed it requires, diversity.”

From a general discussion of the problem-complex, let us pass on to what interests us most. What happens when these trends of thought gain entry into the religious, Christian sphere?

“What happens is that the interchangeableness of the sexes, viewed as simple ‘roles’ determined more by history than by nature, and the trivialization of male and female extend to the very idea of God and from there spread out to the whole religious reality.”

Pope has recently recalled it) that God is beyond the categories of his creation. Hence he is Mother as well as Father.

“This is in fact correct”, he replies, “insofar as we place ourselves on a purely philosophic, abstract point of view. But Christianity is not a philosophical speculation; it is not a construction of our mind. Christianity is not ‘our’ work; it is a Revelation; it is a message that has been consigned to us, and we have no right to reconstruct it as we like or choose. Consequently, we are not authorized to change the Our Father into an Our Mother: the symbolism employed by Jesus is irreversible; it is based on the same Man-God relationship that he came to reveal to us. Even less is it permissible to replace Christ with another figure. But what radical feminism—at times even that which asserts that it is based on Christianity—is not prepared to accept is precisely this: the exemplary, universal, unchangeable relationship between Christ and the Father.”

If these are the positions confronting one another, I remark, dialogue seems impossible.

“I am, in fact, convinced”, he says “that what feminism promotes in its radical form is no longer the Christianity that we know; it is another religion. But I am also convinced (we are beginning to see the deep reasons of the biblical position) that the Catholic Church and the Eastern Churches will defend their faith and their concept of the priesthood, thereby defending in reality both men and women in their totality as well as in their irreversible differentiation into male and female, hence in their irreducibility to simple function or role.”

“Besides,” he continues, “what I shall never tire of repeating also applies here: for the Church the language of nature (in our case, two sexes complementary to each other yet quite distinct) is also the language of morality (man and

woman called to equally noble destinies, both eternal, but different). It is precisely in the name of nature—it is known that Protestant tradition and, in its wake, that of the Enlightenment mistrust this concept—that the Church raises her voice against the temptation to project persons and their destiny according to mere human plans, to strip them of individuality and, in consequence, of dignity. To respect biology is to respect God himself, hence to safeguard his creatures.”

According to Ratzinger, this, too, is the fruit “of the opulent West and of its intellectual establishment.” Feminine radicalism “announces a liberation that is a salvation different from, if not opposed to, the Christian conception.” But, he warns: “The men and above all the women who are experiencing the fruits of this presumed post-Christian salvation must realistically ask themselves if this really signifies an increase of happiness, a greater balance, a vital synthesis, richer than the one discarded because it was deemed to be obsolete.”

So, I ask, in your opinion, appearances would be deceiving? Rather than being beneficiaries, women are victims of the “revolution” in progress?

“Yes,” he replies, “it is precisely woman who is paying the greatest price. Motherhood and virginity (the two loftiest values in which she realizes her profoundest vocation) have become values that are in opposition to the dominant ones. Woman, who is creative in the truest sense of the word by giving life, does not ‘produce’, however, in that technical sense which is the only one that is valued by a society more masculine than ever in its cult of efficiency. She is being convinced that the aim is to ‘liberate’ her, ‘emancipate’ her, by encouraging her to masculinize herself, thus bringing her into conformity with the culture of production

and subjecting her to the control of the masculine society of technicians, of salesmen, of politicians who seek profit and power, organizing everything, marketing everything, instrumentalizing everything for their own ends. While asserting that sexual differentiation is in reality secondary (and, accordingly, denying the body itself as an incarnation of the spirit in a sexual being), woman is robbed not only of motherhood but also of the free choice of virginity. Yet, just as man cannot procreate without her, likewise he cannot be virgin save by ‘imitating’ woman who, also in this way, has a surpassing value as ‘sign’, as ‘example’ for the other part of humanity.”

How do things stand, I ask, in that manifold and complex world (often impenetrable to a man, especially if he is a layman), namely, the world of women religious: sisters, nuns and all the others who have consecrated themselves to God?

“A feminist mentality”, he replies, “has also entered into women’s religious orders. This is particularly evident, even in its most extreme forms, on the North American continent. On the other hand, the cloistered contemplative orders have withstood very well because they are more sheltered from the Zeitgeist, and because they are characterized by a clear and unalterable aim: praise of God, prayer, virginity and separation from the world as an eschatological sign. On the other hand, active orders and congregations are in grave crisis: the discovery of professionalism, the concept of ‘social welfare’ which has replaced that of ‘love of neighbor’, the often uncritical and yet enthusiastic adaptation to the new and hitherto unknown values of modern secular

society, the entrance into the convents, at times wholly .unexamined, of psychologies and psychoanalyses of different tendencies: all this has led to the burning problems of identity and, with many women, to the collapse of motivations sufficient to justify religious life. Visiting a Catholic bookshop in Latin America, I noticed that there (and not only there) the spiritual treatises of the past had been replaced by the widespread manuals of psychoanalysis. Theology had made way for psychology, where possible to the one most in vogue. Almost irresistible, moreover, was the fascination for what is Eastern or presumed such: in many religious houses (of both men and women) the cross has at times given up its place to symbols of the Asiatic religious tradition. In some places the previous devotions have also disappeared in order to make way for yoga or Zen techniques.”

It has been observed, and we have have already spoken about it, that many men religious have tried to solve the identity crisis by shifting to the exterior, according to the well-known masculine dynamic, thus seeking “liberation” in society, in politics. Many women religious, instead, seem to have shifted to the interior (following here too a dialectic linked to sex), pursuing that same “liberation” in depth psychology.

“Yes,” he says, “some have turned with great trust to these profane confessors, to these ‘experts of the soul’ that psychologists and psychoanalysts supposedly are. But these can say at most how the forces of the mind function, they cannot say why, to what purpose. Now, the crisis of many Sisters, of many women religious, was determined precisely by the circumstance that their mind seemed to be working in a void, without a discernible direction any more. Precisely through these incessant analyses it has been made very clear that the ‘soul’ does not explain itself by itself, that it

needs a point of reference outside itself. It was almost a ‘scientific’ confirmation of St. Augustine’s passionate perception, ‘Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee’. This searching and experimenting, often entrusting oneself to self-styled ‘experts’, has led to unforeseeable human burdens, at any rate to very great ones for women religious, for those who have remained as well as for those who have left.”

There is a recent and detailed report on the women religious of Quebec, the French-speaking province of Canada. Quebec is an exemplary case: in fact it was the only region in North America which from the very outset was colonized and evangelized by Catholics who established a Christian regime there, administered by an omnipresent Church. In fact, up to twenty years ago at the beginning of the sixties, Quebec was the region of the world with the highest number of women religious in relation to the population, which totaled six million. Between 1961 and 1981, the women religious, as the result of departures, deaths, decline in recruitment, have been reduced from 46,933 to 26,294. Hence a drop of 44 percent with no end in sight. New vocations, in fact, declined 98.5 percent in the same period. It turns out, furthermore, that the greater part of the remaining 1.5 percent does not consist of young people but of “late vocations”, so that, on the basis of a simple projection, all sociologists agree in a gloomy but objective prognosis: “Soon (unless there is a reversal of the trend, which is wholly improbable, at least viewed humanly) women’s religious life as we have known it will be only a memory in Canada.”

The same sociologists who prepared the report describe how, in these twenty years, all the communities had begun every kind of reform imaginable: abandonment of the religious habit, individual stipends, degrees in secular universities, insertion into secular professions, a massive assistance by every type of “specialist”. Nevertheless, the Sisters continued to leave, new ones did not arrive, those who remained—the average age is about sixty—often do not seem to have resolved the identity problem, and in some cases many say they are resignedly awaiting the extinction of their congregations.

The aggiornamento, even the most courageous, was necessary. But it seems not to have functioned properly, especially in North America, to which Rat zinger specifically refers here. Was it perhaps because, by forgetting the evangelical admonition, an attempt was made to pour “new wine” into “old wineskins”, that is, into communities born in another spiritual climate, thus children of a societas christiana that is no longer ours? And so consequently, the end of a religious life does not necessarily mean the end of the religious life, which will incarnate itself in new forms, adapted to our times?

The Prefect certainly does not exclude this, even though the Quebec example confirms that the orders apparently most opposed to the modern mentality and least receptive to change, the cloistered contemplative ones, “have at most registered some problems but have not experienced a real crisis”, if we go along with the words of the sociologists themselves.

Be that as it may, for the Cardinal, “if it is woman who must pay the highest price to the new society and its values, among all women the Sisters were the most affected.” Returning to what had already been pointed out, he remarks:

“The man, even the religious, despite the well-known problems, was able to make his way out of the crisis by throwing himself into work whereby he tried to discover his role anew in activity. But what is the woman to do when the roles inscribed in her own biology have been denied and perhaps even ridiculed? If her wonderful capacity to give love, help, solace, warmth, solidarity has been replaced by the economistic and trade-union mentality of the ‘profession’, by this typical masculine concern? What can the woman do when all that is most particularly hers is swept away and declared irrelevant and deviant?”

He continues: “Activism, the will to be ‘productive’, ‘relevant’, come what may, is the constant temptation of the man, even of the male religious. And this is precisely the basic trend in the ecclesiologies (we spoke about it) that present the Church as a ‘People of God’ committed to action, busily engaged in translating the Gospel into an action program with social, political and cultural objectives. But it is no accident if the word ‘Church’ is of feminine gender. In her, in fact, lives the mystery of motherhood, of gratitude, of contemplation, of beauty, of values in short that appear useless in the eyes of the profane world. Without perhaps being fully conscious of the reasons, the woman religious feels the deep disquiet of living in a Church where Christianity is reduced to an ideology of doing, according to that strictly masculine ecclesiology which nevertheless is presented—and perhaps believed—as being closer also to women and their ‘modern’ needs. Instead it is the project of a Church in which there is no longer any room for mystical experience, for this pinnacle of religious life which not by chance has been, through the centuries, among the glories and riches offered to all in unbroken constancy and fullness, more by women than by men. Those extraordinary women whom the Church has proclaimed

her ‘saints’, and occasionally even her ‘doctors’, never hesitating to propose them as an example to all Christians. An example that today is perhaps of special relevance.”

To the crisis in the understanding of the Church, to the crisis of morality, to the crisis of woman, the Prefect has a remedy, among others, to propose “that has concretely shown its effectiveness throughout the centuries.” “A remedy whose reputation seems to be clouded today with some Catholics but one that is more than ever relevant.” It is the remedy that he designates with a short name: Mary.

Ratzinger is very aware that it is precisely mariology which presents a facet of Christianity to which certain groups regain access only with difficulty, even though it was confirmed by the Second Vatican Council as the culmination of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. “By inserting the mystery of Mary into the mystery of the Church”, he says, “Vatican II made an important decision which should have given a new impetus to theological research. Instead, in the early post-conciliar period, there has been a sudden decline in this respect—almost a collapse, even though there are now signs of a new vitality.”

In 1968, eighteen years after the proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption of Mary in body and soul to heavenly glory, the then professor Ratzinger observed as he recalled the event: “The fundamental orientation which guides our lives in only a few years has so changed that today we find it difficult to understand the enthusiasm and the joy that then reigned in so many parts of the Catholic Church. . . . Since then much has changed, and today that

dogma which at that time so uplifted us instead escapes us. We ask ourselves whether with it we may not be placing unnecessary obstacles in the way of a reunion with our evangelical fellow Christians, whether it would not be much easier if this stone did not lie on the road, this stone which we ourselves had placed there in the so recent past. We also ask ourselves whether with such a dogma we may not threaten the orientation of Christian piety. Will it not be misdirected, instead of looking toward God the Father and toward the sole mediator, Jesus Christ, who as man is our brother and at the same time is so one with God that he is himself God?”

Yet, during the interview he told me, “If the place occupied by Mary has been essential to the equilibrium of the Faith, today it is urgent, as in few other epochs of Church history, to rediscover that place.”

Ratzinger’s testimony is also humanly important, having been arrived at along a personal path of rediscovery, of gradual deepening, almost in the sense of a full “conversion”, of the Marian mystery. In fact, he confides to me: “As a young theologian in the time before (and also during) the Council, I had, as many did then and still do today, some reservations in regard to certain ancient formulas, as, for example, that famous De Maria nunquam satis, ‘concerning Mary one can never say enough.’ It seemed exaggerated to me. So it was difficult for me later to understand the true meaning of another famous expression (current in the Church since the first centuries when—after a memorable dispute—the Council of Ephesus, in 431, had proclaimed Mary Theotokos, Mother of God). The declaration, namely, that designated the Virgin as ‘the;con ueror o all h_eresies’. Now—in this confused perio’ w ere th ruly every typ ôt heretical aberration seems to be pressing upon the doors of the authentic faith—now I

understand that it was not a matter of pious exaggerations, but of truths that today are more valid than ever.”

“Yes”, he continues, “it is necessary to go back to Mary if we want to return to that ‘truth about Jesus Christ’, ‘truth about the Church’ and the ‘truth about man’ that John Paul II proposed as a program to the whole of Christianity when, in 1979, he opened the Latin American episcopal conference in Puebla. The bishops responded to the Pope’s proposal by including in the first documents (the very ones that have been read only incompletely by some) their unanimous wish and concern: ‘Mary must be more than ever the pedagogy, in order to proclaim the Gospel to the men of today.’ Precisely in that continent where the traditional Marian piety of the people is in decline, the resultant void is being filled by political ideologies. It is a phenomenon that can be noted almost everywhere to a certain degree, confirming the importance of that piety which is no mere piety.”

The Cardinal lists six points in which— albeit in a very concise and therefore necessarily incomplete way—he sees the importance of Mary with regard to the equilibrium and completeness of the Catholic Faith.

First point: “When one recognizes the place assigned to Mary by dogma and tradition, one is solidly rooted in authentic christology. (According to Vatican II: ‘Devoutly meditating on hër and contemplating her in the light of the Word made man, the Church reverently penetrates more deeply into the great mystery of the Incarnation and becomes more and more like her spouse’ [Lumen Gentium, no. 651.) It is, moreover in direct service to faith in Christ—not,

therefore, primarily out of devotion to the Mother—that the Church has proclaimed her Marian dogmas: first that of her perpetual virginity and divine motherhood and then, after a long period of maturation and reflection, those of her Immaculate Conception and bodily Assumption into heavenly glory. These dogmas protect the original faith in Christ as true God and true man: two natures in a single Person. They also secure the indispensable eschatological tension by pointing to Mary’s Assumption as the immortal destiny that awaits us all. And they also protect the faith—threatened today—in God the Creator, who (and this, among other things, is the meaning of the truth of the perpetual virginity of Mary, more than ever not understood today) can freely intervene also in matter. Finally, Mary, as the Council recalls: ‘having entered deeply into the history of salvation, . . . in a way unites in her person and reechoes_the..zn .st..iLnportantmysteries .of the Faith’ (Lumen Gentium, no. 65).”

This first point is followed by a second: “The mariology. of the Church comprises the right relationship, the necessary integration between Scripture and tradition. .The four Marian dogmas have their clear foundation in sacred Scripture. But it is there like a seed that grows and bears fruit in the life of tradition just as it finds expression in the liturgy, in the perception of the believing people and in the reflection of theology guided by the Magisterium.”

Third point: “In her very person as a Jewish girl become the mother of the Messiah, Mary binds together, in a living and indissoluble way, the old and the new People of God, Israel and Christianity, synagogue and church. She is, as it were, the connecting link without which the Faith (as is happening today) runs the risk of losing its balance by either forsaking the New Testament for the Old or dispensing with the Old. In_her, instead, we can live the unity of sacred Scripture in its entirety:”

Fourth point: “The correct Marian devotion guarantees to faith the coexistence of indispensable ‘reason’ with the equally indispensable ‘reasons of the heart’, as Pascal would say. For the Church, man is neither mere reason nor mere feeling, he is the unity of these two dimensions. The head must reflect with lucidity, but the heart must be able to feel warmth: devotion to Mary (which ‘avoids every false exaggeration on the one hand, and excessive narrow-mindedness in the contemplation of the surpassing dignity of the Mother of God on the other’, as the Council urges) thus assures the faith its full human dimension.”

Continuing Iïis synt esis, Ratzinger lists a fifth point: “To use the very formulations of Vatican II, Mary is

‘image’ and ‘model’ of the_.Church. Beholding her the Church is shielded against the aforementioned masculinized model that views her as an instrument for a program of social-political action. In Mary, as figure and archetype, the Church again finds her own visage as Mother and cannot degenerate into the complexity of a party, an organization or a pressure group in the service of human interests, even the noblest. If Mary no longer finds a place in many theologies and ecclesiologies, the reason is obvious: they have reduced faith to an abstraction. And an abstraction does not need a Mother.”

Here is the sixth and last point of this synthesis: “With her destiny, which is at one and the same time that of Virgin and of Mother, Mary continues to project a light upon that which the Creator intended for women in every age, ours included, or, better said, perhaps precisely in our time, in which—as we know—the very essence of femininity is threatened. Through her virginitLand her motherhood, the mystery of woman. reselyes a y loft destiny from which she cannot be torn away Mary undauntedly proclaims the

Magn f cat, but she is also the one who renders silence and seclusion fruitful. She is the one who does not fear to stand under the Cross, who is present at the birth of the Church. But she is also the one who, as the evangelist emphasizes more than once, ‘keeps and ponders in her heart’ that which transpires around her. As a creature of courage and of obedience she was and is still an example to which every Christian—man and woman—can and should look.”

One of the four sections of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the so-called disciplinary section) is entrusted with the task of judging Marian apparitions.

I ask: “Cardinal Ratzinger, have you read the so-called ‘third secret of Fatima’, which Sister Lucia, the only survivor of the group of those who beheld the apparition, forwarded to Pope John XXIII, and which the Pope, after he had examined it, passed on to your predecessor, Cardinal Ottaviani, ordering him to deposit it in the archives of the Holy Office?”

Undenied versions are circulating in the world, I continue, which describe the contents of that “secret” as disquieting, apocalyptic, as warning of terrible sufferings. John Paul II himself, in his personal visit to Germany, seemed to confirm (albeit with prudent circumlocutions, privately, to a select group) the undeniably disconcerting contents of that text. Before him, Paul VI, during his pilgrimage to Fatima, also seems to have alluded to the “apocalyptic” themes of the “secret”. Why was it never decided to make it public, if only to counter rash speculations?

“If this decision has not yet been made”, he answers, “it is not because the Popes want to hide something terrible.”

Then there is “something terrible” in Sister Lucia’s manuscript, I insist?

“If that were so”, he replies, avoiding going further, “that after all would only confirm the part of the message of Fatima already known. A stern warning has been launched from that place that is directed against the prevailing frivolity, a summons to the seriousness of life, of history, to the perils that threaten humanity. It is that which Jesus himself recalls very frequently: ‘... Unless you repent you will all perish . . .’ (Lk 13:3). Conversion—and Fatima fully recalls it to mind—is a constant demand of Christian life. We should already know that from the whole of sacred Scripture.”

“The Holy Father deems that it would add nothing to what a Christian must know from Revelation and also from the Marian apparitions approved by the Church in their known contents, which only reconfirmed the urgency of penance, conversion, forgiveness, fasting. To publish the ‘third secret’ would mean exposing the Church to the danger of sensationalism, exploitation of the content.”

Perhaps also political implications, I venture, since it seems that here, also, as in the two other “secrets”, Russia is mentioned?

At this point, however, the Cardinal declares that he is not in a position to go further into the matter and firmly refuses to discuss other particulars. On the other hand, at the time of our interview, the Pope proceeded to reconsecrate the world (with a particular mention of Eastern Europe) to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, precisely in accordance with the exhortation of the Virgin of Fatima, and the same John Paul II, wounded by his would-be assassin, on May 13— anniversary

of the first apparition in the Portuguese locality—went to Fatima in order to thank Mary, “whose hand (he said) had miraculously guided the bullet”, and seemed to refer to the forewarnings that had been transmitted through a group of children to humanity and that seemed to refer also to the person of the Pontiff.

On the same theme, it is well known that for years, now, a village in Yugoslavia, Medjugorje, is at the center of world attention because of reported “apparitions” which—whether true or not—have already drawn millions of pilgrims. But they have also provoked deplorable conflicts between the Franciscans who govern the parish and the bishop of the local diocese. Is a clarifying statement of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the highest court in this matter, to be expected, with, of course, the approval of the Pope, which is indispensable for each one of its documents?

He replies: “In this area, more than ever, patience is the fundamental principle of the policy of our Congregation. No apparition is indispensable to the faith; Revelation terminated with Jesus Christ. He himself is the Revelation. But we certainly cannot prevent God from speaking to our time through simple persons and also through extraordinary signs that point to the insufficiency of the cultures stamped by rationalism and positivism that dominate us. The apparitions that the Church has officially approved—especially Lourdes and Fatima—have their precise place in the development of the life of the Church in the last century. They show, among other things, that Revelation—still unique, concluded and therefore unsurpassable—is not yet a dead thing but something alive and vital. Moreover—prescinding Medjugorje, on which I cannot express a judgment since the case is still being examined by the Congregation — one of the signs of our times is that the announcements of

‘Marian apparitions’ are multiplying all over the world. For example, reports are arriving from Africa and from other continents at the section of the Congregation that is competent to deal with such reports.”

But, I ask, besides the traditional element of patience and prudence, on what criteria does the Congregation base itself for a judgment, in the face of the multiplication of these facts?

“One of our criteria”, he says, “is to separate the aspect of the true or presumed ‘supernaturality’ of the apparition from that of its spiritual fruits. The pilgrimages of ancient Christianity were often concentrated on places with respect to which our modern critical spirit would be horrified as to the ‘scientific truth’ of the tradition bound up with them. This does not detract from the fact that those pilgrimages were fruitful, beneficial, rich in blessings and important for the life of the Christian people. The problem is not so much that of modern hypercriticism (which ends up later, moreover, in a form of new credulity), but it is that of the evaluation of the vitality and of the orthodoxy of the religious life that is developing around these places.”

Whether or not they are recognized as real, the “messages of the Marian apparitions” are problematic also because they seem to go in a direction hardly consonant with certain “post-conciliar spiritualities”.

He interrupts me: “I want to emphasize that I don’t like the terms pre- or post-conciliar. To accept them would be tantamount to accepting a rupture in the history of the Church. In the ‘apparitions’ the inclusion of the body (signs of the cross, holy water, call to fasting) often plays a special role, but all this is fully in line with Vatican II, which insisted upon the unity of man, hence upon the incarnation of the spirit in the flesh.”

That fasting to which you allude seems actually to occupy a central position in many of those “messages”.

“Fasting means to accept an essential aspect of Christian life. It is necessary to rediscover the corporeal aspect of the Faith: abstention from food is one of those aspects. Sexuality and nourishment are among the fundamental elements of the physicality of man. In our time, the decline in the under-standing of virginity goes hand in hand with the decline in the understanding of fasting. And these two declines have a single root: the present-day eclipse of the eschatological

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