CNA Newsroom, Sep 27, 2022 / 12:33 pm (CNA).
The president of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Georg Bätzing, said that the shortest definition of religion is “interruption,” and that some forms of continuity people seek from religion are “frankly suspect.”
Bätzing spoke in a live-streamed Mass on Tuesday on the occasion of the bishops’ plenary assembly, which is being held in the central German town of Dulda from Sept. 26–29, reported CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner.
In his homily the bishop of Limburg said, “all too surely asserted continuities, i.e., seamless connections according to the motto ‘that has always been so; that has always been believed so; what was wrong yesterday cannot be right today’ … are frankly suspect.”
Bätzing spoke of the “great images in which God’s people spelled out their historical experiences with faith and recognized God’s guidance in them.”
The German prelate, who expressed his disappointment in Pope Francis in May, said it was indeed “in our human nature to seek bridges between yesterday and tomorrow, to draw temporal lines and discover meaningful connections — which is often only possible in retrospect. We seek continuity. But the shortest definition of religion is and remains ‘interruption,’ as Johann Baptist Metz put it.”
Metz was an influential German priest and theologian who died in 2019.
This year’s fall plenary meeting of the German bishops is overshadowed by the recent turbulent meeting of the Synodal Way and the abuse report in the Osnabrück diocese with strongly incriminating statements about Bishop Franz-Josef Bode.
Bode announced he refused to resign despite a report published Sept. 20 saying he mishandled abuse cases.
The 71-year-old bishop has been vice president of the German bishops’ conference since 2017. He is also vice president of the German Synodal Way.
He has publicly supported women deacons and the development of a Church ceremony for blessing same-sex unions. At the latest meeting of the Synodal Way, participants voted to change the Church’s teaching on a number of related topics, including homosexuality and the ordination of women.
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We read: “…Bishop Georg Bätzing, said that the shortest definition of religion is ‘interruption,’ and that some forms of continuity people seek from religion are ‘frankly suspect.’”
The man is a mental midget: First, he discounts the radical difference between ‘religion’ as a system of belief, and Christian “faith” in the actual person of Jesus Christ, Second Person of the self-disclosing Triune God. And, Second, he muddles the very singular event of this historical Incarnation… which is, yes, a discontinuity, but also and more so, a continuity (with the anticipatory revelation to the Chosen People; otherwise, Montanism).
Worse than “suspect,” then, is inventive disruption by supposed Successors of the Apostles, who would paper over the uniquely-singular “interruption” in all of human history—”Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb 13:8). Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI does allow, of course, for discontinuity…but he is theologically precise, and therefore pastoral (!), by specifying “discontinuity WITHIN continuity.” Not much room there for the magic tricks conjured up by the sin-nod in post-Catholic and now post-Christian Germania.
The siren call of constantly regressive change is the most rigid and deepest rut of all.
Well, it seems that the “Communion of Saints”, which is about the continuity of belief and unity among the faithful has been dumped.
The communion of saints (communio sanctorum), when referred to persons, is the spiritual union of the members of the Christian Church, living and the dead, but excluding the damned. They are all part of a single “mystical body”, with Christ as the head, in which each member contributes to the good of all and shares in the welfare of all.
The communion of saints exists in the three states of the Church, the Churches Militant, Penitent, and Triumphant. The Church Militant (Latin: Ecclesia militans) consists of those alive on earth; the Church Penitent (Latin: Ecclesia poenitens) consists of those undergoing purification in purgatory in preparation for heaven; and the Church Triumphant (Latin: Ecclesia triumphans) consisting of those already in heaven.
It looks as though this has now been replaced by a new doctrine of divine “interruption”!
Huh?