Retired Pope Benedict XVI attends the opening of the Holy Door of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican Dec. 8, 2015. (CNS photo/Stefano Spaziani, pool)
In a recently published
interview on issues of justification and faith, Benedict XVI has addressed
issues of mercy and our need for forgiveness, salvation through the cross, the
necessity of baptism, and the importance of sharing in Christ's redeeming love.
The
discussion with Fr. Jacques Servais, SJ, took place ahead of an October, 2015
conference in Rome studying the doctrine of justification by faith.
Benedict's
answers, originally in German, were read aloud as a text at the conference by
the Prefect of the Pontifical Household, Archbishop Georg Gänswein.
They were
later published as the introduction to a book in Italian on the conference
texts and conclusions, titled “Through Faith: Doctrine of Justification and
Experience of God in the Preaching of the Church and the Spiritual Exercises,”
by Fr. Daniel Libanori, SJ.
The
emeritus Pope began by noting that faith has both a personal and a communal
nature, saying that “the encounter with God means also, at the same time, that
I myself become open, torn from my closed solitude and received into the living
community of the Church.”
He
emphasized that both faith and the Church come from God, and are neither
self-generating nor man-made.
“The
Church must introduce the individual Christian into an encounter with Jesus
Christ and bring Christians into His presence in the sacrament,” Benedict
remarked.
He then
focused on modern man's tendency to ignore any personal sin and need for
justification, and to focus instead on the suffering in the world, believing that
God has to justify himself for this suffering.
“However,
in my opinion, there continues to exist, in another way, the perception that we
are in need of grace and forgiveness,” he said, pointing to the recent emphasis
on mercy in the pontificates of both St. John Paul II and Pope Francis.
Pope
Francis' “pastoral practice is expressed in the fact that he continually speaks
to us of God's mercy,” he said. “It is mercy that moves us toward God, while
justice frightens us before Him.”
“In my
view, this makes clear that, under a veneer of self-assuredness and
self-righteousness, the man of today hides a deep knowledge of his wounds and
his unworthiness before God. He is waiting for mercy.”
Benedict
suggested that the popularity of the parable of the Good Samaritan expresses
this underlying desire for God and his mercy, adding that “it seems to me that
in the theme of divine mercy is expressed in a new way what is means by
justification by faith.”
He
discussed how an old understanding of the Cross, articulated by St. Anselm, is
difficult for modern man to relate to because of its focus on justice and its
apparent juxtaposition of the Father and the Son.
The
emeritus Pope reflected that God “simply cannot leave 'as is' the mass of evil
that comes from the freedom that he himself has granted. Only He, coming to
share in the world's suffering, can redeem the world.”
In the
Cross, he said, one perceives “what God's mercy means, what the participation
of God in man's suffering means. It is not a matter of a cruel justice, not a
matter of the Father's fanaticism, but rather of the truth and the reality of
creation: the true intimate overcoming of evil that ultimately can be realized
only in the suffering of love.”
The
discussion then turned to the missionary impulse, which was once informed by
the conviction that all who died unbaptized would certainly go to hell.
Benedict
noted, “there is no doubt that on this point we are faced with a profound
evolution of dogma” and that since the 1950s “the understanding that God cannot
let go to perdition all the unbaptized … has been fully affirmed.”
He noted
that the great missionaries of the 1500s were compelled by their belief in the
absolute necessity of baptism for salvation, and that the changing
understanding of this necessity led to “a deep double crisis”: a loss of
motivation for missionary work, and a loss of motivation for the faith itself.
The
emeritus Pope addressed both the theory of the 'anonymous Christian' and
indifferentism as inadequate solutions to the crises, and offered instead the
idea that Christ's loving suffering for the world is the solution, which must
become our model.
He
concluded by again emphasizing that the true solution to evil is the love of
Christ: “The counterweight to the dominion of evil can consist in the first
place only in the divine-human love of Jesus Christ that is always greater than
any possible power of evil.”
“But it
is necessary that we place ourselves inside this answer that God gives us
through Jesus Christ,” he added, saying that receiving the sacrament of
confession “certainly has an important role in this field.”
Receiving
confession, he said, “means that we always allow ourselves to be molded and
transformed by Christ and that we pass continuously from the side of him who
destroys to the side of Him who saves.”
Below please find L’Osservatore Romano’s full English
translation of the interview:
Servais: Your
Holiness, the question posed this year as part of the study days promoted by
the rectory of the Gesu (the residence for Jesuit seminarians in Rome) is that
of justification by faith. The last volume of your collected works highlights
your resolute affirmation: “The Christian faith is not an idea, but a life.”
Commenting on the famous Pauline affirmation in Romans 3:28, you mentioned, in
this regard, a twofold transcendence: “Faith is a gift to the believers
communicated through the community, which for its part is the result of God's
gift” (“Glaube ist Gabe durch die Gemeinschaft; die sich selbst gegeben wird,”
gs iv, 512). Could you explain what you meant by that statement, taking into
account of course the fact that the aim of these days of study is to clarify
the pastoral theology and vivify the spiritual experience of the faithful?
Benedict XVI: The
question concerns what faith is and how one comes to believe. On the one hand,
faith is a profoundly personal contact with God, which touches me in my
innermost being and places me in front of the living God in absolute immediacy
in such a way that I can speak with Him, love Him and enter into communion with
Him. But at the same time this reality which is so fundamentally personal also
has inseparably to do with the community. It is an essential part of faith that
I be introduced into the “we” of the sons and daughters of God, into the
pilgrim community of brothers and sisters. The encounter with God means also,
at the same time, that I myself become open, torn from my closed solitude and
received into the living community of the Church. That living community is also
a mediator of my encounter with God, though that encounter touches my heart in
an entirely personal way. Faith comes from hearing (fides ex auditu), St. Paul
teaches us. Listening in turn always implies a partner.
Faith is
not a product of reflection nor is it even an attempt to penetrate the depths
of my own being. Both of these things may be present, but they remain
insufficient without the “listening” through which God, from without, from a
story He himself created, challenges me. In order for me to believe, I need
witnesses who have met God and make Him accessible to me. In my article on
baptism I spoke of the double transcendence of the community, in this way
causing to emerge once again an important element: the faith community does not
create itself. It is not an assembly of men who have some ideas in common and
who decide to work for the spread of such ideas. Then everything would be based
on its own decision and, in the final analysis, on the majority vote principle,
which is, in the end it would be based on human opinion. A Church built in this
way cannot be for me the guarantor of eternal life nor require decisions from
me that make me suffer and are contrary to my desires. No, the Church is not
self-made, she was created by God and she is continuously formed by him. This
finds expression in the sacraments, above all in that of baptism: I enter into
the Church not by a bureaucratic act, but through the sacrament. And this is to
say that I am welcomed into a community that did not originate in itself and is
projected beyond itself. The ministry that aims to form the spiritual
experience of the faithful must proceed from these fundamental givens.
It is
necessary to abandon the idea of a Church which produces herself and to make
clear that the Church becomes a community in the communion of the body of
Christ. The Church must introduce the individual Christian into an encounter
with Jesus Christ and bring Christians into His presence in the sacrament.
Servais: When you
were Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, commenting on
the Joint Declaration of the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation
on the Doctrine of Justification of Oct. 31, 1999, you pointed out a difference
of mentality in relation to Luther and the question of salvation and
blessedness as he had posed it. The religious experience of Luther was
dominated by terror before the wrath of God, a feeling quite alien to modern
men, who sense rather the absence of God (see your article in Communio, 2000,
430). For these, the problem is not so much how to obtain eternal life, but
rather how to ensure, in the precarious conditions of our world, a certain
balance of fully human life. Can the teaching of St. Paul of justification by
faith, in this new context, reach the “religious” experience or at least the
“elementary” experience of our contemporaries?
Benedict XVI: First of
all, I want to emphasize once again what I wrote in Communio (2000) on the
issue of justification. For the man of today, compared to those of the time of
Luther and to those holding the classical perspective of the Christian faith,
things are in a certain sense inverted, or rather, is no longer man who
believes he needs justification before God, but rather he is of the opinion
that God is obliged to justify himself because of all the horrible things in
the world and in the face of the misery of being human, all of which ultimately
depend on Him. In this regard, I find it significant that a Catholic theologian
may profess even in a direct and formal this inverted position: that Christ did
not suffer for the sins of men, but rather, as it were, had "canceled the
guilt of God." Even if most Christians today would not share such a
drastic reversal of our faith, we could say that all of this reveals an
underlying trend of our times. When Johann Baptist Metz argues that theology
today must be “sensitive to theodicy” (German: theodizee empfindlich), this
highlights the same problem in a positive way. Even rescinding from such a
radical contestation of the Church's vision of the relationship between God and
man, the man of today has in a very general way the sense that God cannot let
most of humanity be damned. In this sense, the concern for the personal
salvation of souls typical of past times has for the most part disappeared.
However,
in my opinion, there continues to exist, in another way, the perception that we
are in need of grace and forgiveness. For me it is a “sign of the times” the
fact that the idea of the mercy of God should become more and more central and
dominant – starting from Sister Faustina, whose visions in various ways reflect
deeply the image of God held by the men of today and their desire for the
divine goodness. Pope John Paul II was deeply impregnated by this impulse, even
if this did not always emerge explicitly. But it is certainly not by chance
that his last book, published just before his death, speaks of God's mercy.
Starting from the experiences which, from the earliest years of life, exposed
him to all of the cruel acts men can perform, he affirms that mercy is the only
true and ultimate effective reaction against the power of evil.
Only
where there is mercy does cruelty end, only with mercy do evil and violence
end. Pope Francis is totally in agreement with this line. His pastoral practice
is expressed in the fact that he continually speaks to us of God's mercy. It is
mercy that moves us toward God, while justice frightens us before Him. In my
view, this makes clear that, under a veneer of self-assuredness and self-righteousness,
the man of today hides a deep knowledge of his wounds and his unworthiness
before God. He is waiting for mercy.
It is
certainly no coincidence that the parable of the Good Samaritan is particularly
attractive to contemporary man. And not just because that parable strongly
emphasizes the social dimension of Christian existence, nor only because in it
the Samaritan, the man not religious, in comparison with the representatives of
religion seems, so to speak, as one who acts really so in conformity with God,
while the official representatives of religion seem, as it were, immune to God.
This clearly pleases modern man. But it seems just as important to me,
nevertheless, that men in their intimate consciences expect the Samaritan will
come to their aid; that he will bend down over them, pour oil on their wounds,
care for them and take them to safety. In the final analysis, they know that
they need God's mercy and his tenderness. In the hardness of the technologized
world in which feelings no longer count for anything, the expectation however
increases of a saving love that is freely given. It seems to me that in the
theme of divine mercy is expressed in a new way what is means by justification
by faith. Starting from the mercy of God, which everyone is looking for, it is
possible even today to interpret anew the fundamental nucleus of the doctrine
of justification and have it appear again in all its relevance.
When
Anselm says that Christ had to die on the cross to repair the infinite offense
that had been made to God, and in this way to restore the shattered order, he
uses a language which is difficult for modern man to accept (cfr. Gs 215.ss
iv). Expressing oneself in this way, one risks likely to project onto God an
image of a God of wrath, relentless toward the sin of man, with feelings of
violence and aggression comparable with what we can experience ourselves. How
is it possible to speak of God's justice without potentially undermining the
certainty, deeply established among the faithful, that the God of the
Christians is a God “rich in mercy” (Ephesians 2:4)? The conceptuality of St.
Anselm has now become for us incomprehensible. It is our job to try again to
understand the truth that lies behind this mode of expression. For my part I
offer three points of view on this point:
a) the
contrast between the Father, who insists in an absolute way on justice, and the
Son who obeys the Father and, obedient, accepts the cruel demands of justice,
is not only incomprehensible today, but, from the point of view of Trinitarian
theology, is in itself all wrong. The Father and the Son are one and therefore
their will is intrinsically one. When the Son in the Garden of Olives struggles
with the will of the Father, it is not a matter of accepting for himself a cruel
disposition of God, but rather of attracting humanity into the very will of
God. We will have to come back again, later, to the relationship of the two
wills of the Father and of the Son.
b) So why
would the cross and the atonement? Somehow today, in the contortions of modern
thought we mentioned above, the answer to these questions can be formulated in
a new way. Let's place ourselves in front of the incredible amount of evil,
violence, falsehood, hatred, cruelty and arrogance that infect and destroy the
whole world. This mass of evil cannot simply be declared non-existent, not even
by God. It must be cleansed, reworked and overcome. Ancient Israel was
convinced that the daily sacrifice for sins and above all the great liturgy of
the Day of Atonement (Yom-Kippur) were necessary as a counterweight to the mass
of evil in the world and that only through such rebalancing the world could, as
it were, remain bearable. Once the sacrifices in the temple disappeared, it had
to be asked what could be opposed to the higher powers of evil, how to find
somehow a counterweight. The Christians knew that the temple destroyed was
replaced by the resurrected body of the crucified Lord and in his radical and
incommensurable love was created a counterweight to the immeasurable presence
of evil. Indeed, they knew that the offers presented up until then could only
be conceived of as a gesture of longing for a genuine counterweight. They also
knew that in front of the excessive power of evil only an infinite love was
enough, only an infinite atonement. They knew that the crucified and risen
Christ is a power that can counter the power of evil and save the world. And on
this basis they could even understand the meaning of their own sufferings as
inserted into the suffering love of Christ and included as part of the
redemptive power of such love. Above I quoted the theologian for whom God had
to suffer for his sins in regard to the world. Now, due to this reversal of
perspective, the following truths emerge: God simply cannot leave “as is” the
mass of evil that comes from the freedom that he himself has granted. Only He,
coming to share in the world's suffering, can redeem the world.
c) On
this basis, the relationship between the Father and the Son becomes more
comprehensible. I will reproduce here on this subject a passage from the book
by Henri de Lubac on Origen which I feel is very clear: “The Redeemer came into
the world out of compassion for mankind. He took upon himself our passions even
before being crucified, indeed even before descending to assume our flesh: if
he had not experienced them beforehand, he would not have come to partake of
our human life. But what was this suffering that he endured in advance for us?
It was the passion of love. But the Father himself, the God of the universe, he
who is overflowing with long-suffering, patience, mercy and compassion, does he
also not suffer in a certain sense? 'The Lord your God, in fact, has taken upon
himself your ways as the one who takes upon himself his son' (Deuteronomy 1,
31). God thus takes upon himself our customs as the Son of God took upon
himself our sufferings. The Father himself is not without passion! If He is
invoked, then He knows mercy and compassion. He perceives a suffering of love
(Homilies on Ezekiel 6:6).”
In some
parts of Germany there was a very moving devotion that contemplated the Not
Gottes (“poverty of God”). For my part, that makes pass before my eyes an
impressive image representing the suffering Father, who, as Father, shares
inwardly the sufferings of the Son. And also the image of the “throne of grace”
is part of this devotion: the Father supports the cross and the crucified,
bends lovingly over him and the two are, as it were, together on the cross. So
in a grand and pure way, one perceives there what God's mercy means, what the
participation of God in man's suffering means. It is not a matter of a cruel
justice, not a matter of the Father's fanaticism, but rather of the truth and
the reality of creation: the true intimate overcoming of evil that ultimately
can be realized only in the suffering of love.
Servais: In
the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola does not use the Old Testament
images of revenge, as opposed to Paul (cfr. 2 Thessalonians 1: 5-9);
nevertheless he invites us to contemplate how men, until the Incarnation,
“descended into hell” (Spiritual Exercises n. 102; see. ds iv, 376) and to
consider the example of the “countless others who ended up there for far fewer
sins than I have I committed” (Spiritual Exercises, n. 52). It is in this
spirit that St. Francis Xavier lived his pastoral work, convinced he had to try
to save from the terrible fate of eternal damnation as many “infidels” as
possible. The teaching, formalized in the Council of Trent, in the passage with
regard to the judgment of the good and the evil, later radicalized by the
Jansenists, was taken up in a much more restrained way in the Catechism of the
Catholic Church (cfr. § 5 633, 1037). Can it be said that on this point, in
recent decades, there has been a kind of “development of dogma” that the
Catechism should definitely take into account?
Benedict XVI: There
is no doubt that on this point we are faced with a profound evolution of dogma.
While the fathers and theologians of the Middle Ages could still be of the opinion
that, essentially, the whole human race had become Catholic and that paganism
existed now only on the margins, the discovery of the New World at the
beginning of the modern era radically changed perspectives. In the second half
of the last century it has been fully affirmed the understanding that God
cannot let go to perdition all the unbaptized and that even a purely natural
happiness for them does not represent a real answer to the question of human
existence. If it is true that the great missionaries of the 16th century were
still convinced that those who are not baptized are forever lost – and this
explains their missionary commitment – in the Catholic Church after the Second
Vatican Council that conviction was finally abandoned.
From this
came a deep double crisis. On the one hand this seems to remove any motivation
for a future missionary commitment. Why should one try to convince the people
to accept the Christian faith when they can be saved even without it? But also
for Christians an issue emerged: the obligatory nature of the faith and its way
of life began to seem uncertain and problematic. If there are those who can
save themselves in other ways, it is not clear, in the final analysis, why the
Christian himself is bound by the requirements of the Christian faith and its
morals. If faith and salvation are no longer interdependent, faith itself
becomes unmotivated.
Lately
several attempts have been formulated in order to reconcile the universal
necessity of the Christian faith with the opportunity to save oneself without
it. I will mention here two: first, the well-known thesis of the anonymous
Christians of Karl Rahner. He sustains that the basic, essential act at the
basis of Christian existence, decisive for salvation, in the transcendental
structure of our consciousness, consists in the opening to the entirely Other,
toward unity with God. The Christian faith would in this view cause to rise to
consciousness what is structural in man as such. So when a man accepts himself
in his essential being, he fulfills the essence of being a Christian without
knowing what it is in a conceptual way. The Christian, therefore, coincides
with the human and, in this sense, every man who accepts himself is a Christian
even if he does not know it. It is true that this theory is fascinating, but it
reduces Christianity itself to a pure conscious presentation of what a human
being is in himself and therefore overlooks the drama of change and renewal
that is central to Christianity. Even less acceptable is the solution proposed
by the pluralistic theories of religion, for which all religions, each in their
own way, would be ways of salvation and in this sense, in their effects must be
considered equivalent. The critique of religion of the kind exercised in the Old
Testament, in the New Testament and in the early Church is essentially more
realistic, more concrete and true in its examination of the various religions.
Such a simplistic reception is not proportional to the magnitude of the issue.
Let us
recall, lastly, above all Henri de Lubac and with him some other theologians
who have reflected on the concept of vicarious substitution. For them the
“pro-existence” (“being for”) of Christ would be an expression of the
fundamental figure of the Christian life and of the Church as such. It is
possible to explain this “being for” in a somewhat more abstract way. It is
important to mankind that there is truth in it, this is believed and practiced.
That one suffers for it. That one loves. These realities penetrate with their
light into the world as such and support it. I think that in this present
situation it becomes for us ever more clear what the Lord said to Abraham, that
is, that 10 righteous would have been sufficient to save a city, but that it
destroys itself if such a small number is not reached. It is clear that we need
to further reflect on the whole question.
Servais: In the
eyes of many secular humanists, marked by the atheism of the 19th and 20th
centuries, as you have noted, it is rather God – if he exists – not man who
should be held accountable for injustice, the suffering of the innocent, the
cynicism of power we are witnessing, powerless, in the world and in world
history (see. Spe Salvi, n. 42) ... In your book Jesus of Nazareth, you echo
what for them – and for us – is a scandal: “The reality of injustice, of evil,
cannot be simply ignored, simply put aside. It absolutely must be overcome and
conquered. Only in this way is there really mercy” (Jesus of Nazareth, ii 153,
quoting 2 Timothy 2:13). Is the sacrament of confession, one of the places
where evil can be “repaired?” If so, how?
Benedict XVI: I
have already tried to expose as a whole the main points related to this issue
in my answer to your third question. The counterweight to the dominion of evil
can consist in the first place only in the divine-human love of Jesus Christ
that is always greater than any possible power of evil. But it is necessary
that we place ourselves inside this answer that God gives us through Jesus
Christ. Even if the individual is responsible for a fragment of evil, and
therefore is an accomplice of evil's power, together with Christ he can
nevertheless "complete what is lacking in his sufferings" (cfr.
Colossians 1, 24). The sacrament of penance certainly has an important role in
this field. It means that we always allow ourselves to be molded and
transformed by Christ and that we pass continuously from the side of him who
destroys to the side of Him who saves.
