(s.m.) The as-yet-unpublished text reproduced below is the final part of one of the handwritten works that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI wanted published only after his death. He wrote it between Christmas and Epiphany in the winter of 2019–2020, and on January 9 handed it over to Fr. Livio Melina, co-editor with José Granados of the volume “La verità dell’amore. Tracce per un cammino,” now out in bookstores from the presses of Cantagalli, which for the first time is publishing it in its entirety.
The title of the volume is also the title of the “Veritas Amoris Project,” a theological and pastoral research program conceived and founded in 2019 by the two aforementioned scholars, the former a past head of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, and both professors of dogmatic and moral theology at the same institute until it was gutted, precisely in 2019, with the expulsion of scholars among the most eminent and the changing of its aims, at the behest of Pope Francis and at the hands of Grand Chancellor Vincenzo Paglia.
This upheaval was met with fruitless opposition from numerous professors, in part the same ones, from various nations, who are now working on the “Veritas Amoris Project” and have signed the twelve theses that develop it, in as many chapters of the volume.
Benedict XVI himself “considered that measure unjust and unacceptable, and sought by various means to get those responsible to reconsider,” Melina writes in the introduction to the newly published text by the late pope. Who “instead welcomed with great enthusiasm the idea of looking ahead and undertaking new research and training initiatives within the ‘Veritas amoris’ project that was maturing and taking shape within our group of friends and colleagues. ‘Ein neuer Anfang’: a new beginning!”
From August 2019 to January 2020, Benedict XVI welcomed Melina seven times to his residence in the Vatican gardens (see photo), discussing with him precisely the project then in its startup phase.
The reality from which the project takes its bearings is that the current crisis of the Christian faith is to a large extent a losing sight of the truth of that supreme love which God revealed in offering his Son made man, and therefore also of the love between human beings. The tragedy of today is that love has only the quite fragile truth that each one cares to attribute to it.
With everything that follows from this, as Benedict XVI had brought into focus several times, for example in his last great Christmas address to the Roman curia in 2012, on the current “attack on the authentic form of the family.” Melina comments: “If the experience of being son and daughter, brother and sister, husband and wife, father and mother is lost, this will also bring about the destruction of the natural basis of the language for speaking about God, who revealed himself as the bridegroom of Israel, whom we invoke as our Father, who sent us Jesus as his Son and our brother, and who gave us the Church as mother.”
To what extent “the relationship between truth and love was central to the whole of Benedict’s teaching” is also brought to light by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, his former secretary, in a preface to the volume.
But let’s hear from the late pope. What follows is the final part of the twelve handwritten pages of his contribution to the “Veritas Amoris Project.”
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THE CHRISTIAN IMAGE OF MAN
by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI
The atmosphere that spread widely throughout Catholic Christianity after Vatican II was at first unilaterally conceived of as a demolition of walls, as a “tearing down of bastions,” such that in some circles the very end of Catholicism was feared, or awaited with joy.
The firm determination of Paul VI and the equally clear but joyfully open determination of John Paul II were able to secure for the Church — humanly speaking — its own space in subsequent history. When John Paul II, who came from a country dominated by Marxism, was elected pope, there were certainly circles that believed that a pope who came from a socialist country must necessarily be a socialist pope, and that he would therefore bring reconciliation to the world as a “reductio ad unum” of Christianity and Marxism. Yet in short order all the folly of this position became evident, as soon as it was seen that precisely a pope who came from a socialist world knew perfectly well its injustice, and was thus able to contribute to the surprising pivot that occurred in 1989 with the end of Marxist rule in Russia.
Nonetheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that the downfall of the Marxist regimes is far from having signified the spiritual victory of Christianity. Radical worldliness is instead revealed ever more to be the authentic dominant vision that increasingly reduces Christianity’s room to maneuver.
Right from the start, modernity begins with the appeal to human freedom: from Luther’s emphasis on Christian freedom and from the humanism of Erasmus of Rotterdam. But only in the historical moment put in disarray by two world wars, with Marxism and liberalism becoming dramatically more extreme, were two new movements set in motion that brought the idea of freedom to a radicalism previously unimaginable.
In fact, it is now denied that man, as a free being, is in some way bound to a nature that determines the space of his freedom. Man now no longer has a nature, but “makes” himself. No more does there exist a nature of man: it is he himself who decides what he is, male or female. It is man himself who produces man, and so determines the destiny of a being that no longer comes from the hands of a creator God, but from the laboratory of human inventions. The abolition of the Creator as an abolition of man thus becomes the authentic threat to faith. This is the great task facing theology today, which will be able to see it through only if the example of the lives of Christians is stronger than the power of the denials that surround us and that promise a false freedom.
The awareness of the impossibility of resolving, on the purely theoretical level, a problem of this order of magnitude certainly does not exempt us from seeking to propose a solution for it also on the level of thought.
Nature and freedom seem at first to be irreconcilably opposed: and yet the nature of man is ideated, that is, it is a creation, and as such it is not simply a reality devoid of spirit, but itself bears the “Logos” within it. The Fathers — in particular Athanasius of Alexandria — conceived of creation as the coexistence of uncreated “sapientia” and created “sapientia.” Here we touch the mystery of Jesus Christ, who unites in himself created and uncreated wisdom and, as wisdom incarnate, calls us to be together with him.
But in this way his nature — which is given to man — becomes one with man’s history of freedom and bears within itself two fundamental aspects.
On the one hand, we are told that the human being, the man Adam, began his history badly from the start, so that on the human being, on the humanity of each person, his history now bestows a flawed original attribute. “Original sin” means that every single action is put in advance on a wrong track.
But added to this is the figure of Jesus Christ, the new Adam, who paid in advance the ransom for us all, thus setting a new beginning in history. This means that the “nature” of man is on the one hand sick, in need of correction (“spoliata et vulnerata”). This puts it in conflict with the spirit, with freedom, as we continually experience. But in general terms it is also already redeemed. And this in a twofold sense: because in general enough has already been done for all sins, and because at the same time this correction can always be given anew to everyone in the sacrament of forgiveness. On the one hand, the history of man is a history of ever new sins; on the other, healing is at the ready ever anew. Man is a being in need of healing, of forgiveness. It is part of the core of the Christian image of man that this forgiveness exists as a reality and not just as a beautiful dream. Here the doctrine of the sacraments finds its proper place. What becomes clear is the need for Baptism and Penance, for the Eucharist and the Priesthood, as well as for the sacrament of Matrimony.
Starting from here, the question of the Christian image of man can be addressed concretely. Important first of all is the observation expressed by Saint Francis de Sales: there is not just one Christian image of man, but many possibilities and paths in which the image of man is presented: from Peter to Paul, from Francis to Thomas Aquinas, from Brother Conrad to Cardinal Newman, and so on. Where there is undeniably present a certain accent that speaks in favor of a predilection for the “little ones.”
Of course, in this context consideration should also be given to the interaction between the “Torah” and the Sermon on the Mount, about which I have said something in my book on Jesus.
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(s.m.) The book to which Ratzinger refers in these last two lines is the first volume of his trilogy on “Jesus of Nazareth,” published in the spring of 2007.
In the fourth chapter of the book, dedicated to the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus appears as the “new Moses” who brings the “Torah,” the law, to fulfillment. The Beatitudes are the cornerstones of the new law and, at the same time, a self-portrait of Jesus. The law is he himself: “This is the point that demands a decision, and consequently this is the point that leads to the Cross and the Resurrection.”
In this same chapter, a good fifteen pages are dedicated to an exchange with the American rabbi Jacob Neusner, who in a previous book of his from 1993 imagined that he too had been among the hearers of the Sermon on the Mount, but that he had not believed in Jesus, remaining faithful to what he called “the eternal Israel.”
Neusner commented on Benedict XVI’s book in the “Jerusalem Post” on May 29, 2007. In a “reasoning with the pope” that remains one of the highlights of the dialogue between Jews and Christians.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
