“Understood?” Pope Francis at a certain point asked in English to the young people of various religions gathered around him on September 13 in Singapore, during the last leg of his recent trip to Asia and Oceania (see photo).
The response (at minute 44:42 of the Vatican video recording) was a mix of laughter and applause, as if they appreciated what he had said, but without taking it too seriously.
And just before this, what had the pope said in Italian, translated into English sentence by sentence? Here is the transcription of his words, which have gone down among the official acts of his pontificate:
“One of the things that has impressed me most about the young people here is your capacity for interfaith dialogue. This is very important because if you start arguing, ‘My religion is more important than yours…,’ or ‘Mine is the true one, yours is not true….,’ where does this lead? Somebody answer. [A young person answers, ‘Destruction.’] That is correct. All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine. But God is for everyone, and therefore, we are all God’s children. ‘But my God is more important than yours!’ Is this true? There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian. Understood?”
About ten days have gone by since Francis said these things, and yet nothing has happened, as if even within the Church no one takes his words seriously anymore, perhaps in the hope that “what he said is not quite what he meant,” as archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia Charles Chaput has written in “First Things.”
Whereas just a few decades ago the theses formulated in Singapore by Francis ignited in the Church one of the most radical clashes over the very identity of the Christian faith, a clash broken off — but evidently not resolved — by the declaration “Dominus Iesus” issued in August 2000 by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith headed by Joseph Ratzinger, in full and public agreement with then pope John Paul II.
To understand the gravity of what is at stake, it is helpful to reread what such an accomplished cardinal and theologian as Giacomo Biffi said to his fellow cardinals on the eve of the conclave in 2005 that would elect Ratzinger as pope:
“I would like to point out to the new pope the incredible phenomenon of ‘Dominus Iesus.’ That Jesus is the only necessary savior of all is a truth that for over twenty centuries — beginning with Peter’s discourse after Pentecost — it was never felt necessity to rest. This truth is, so to speak, the minimum threshold of the faith; it is the primordial certainty, it is among believers the simple and most essential fact. In two thousand years this has never been brought into doubt, not even during the crisis of Arianism, and not even during the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation. The fact of needing to issue a reminder of this in our time tells us the extent of the gravity of the current situation.”
But let us read what is written in “Dominus Iesus.” The threat it was meant to respond to was “relativism,” the consideration of all religions on equal terms, with the consequence of sucking the meaning even out of the mission of evangelization:
“The Church’s constant missionary proclamation is endangered today by relativistic theories which seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure (or in principle).”
A relativism that asserts as outdated “truths like the unicity and salvific universality of the mystery of Jesus Christ,” staunchly professed since the apostolic age.
By Peter:
“In his discourse before the Sanhedrin, Peter, in order to justify the healing of a man who was crippled from birth, which was done in the name of Jesus (cf. Acts 3:1–8), proclaims: ‘There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by whom we must be saved’ (Acts 4:12).”
By Paul:
“Paul, addressing himself to the community of Corinth, writes: ‘Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth — as in fact there are many gods and many lords — yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and through whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist’ (1 Cor 8:5–6).”
Without prejudice to a respectful dialogue between the religions:
“This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another.’ […] Equality, which is a presupposition of inter-religious dialogue, refers to the equal personal dignity of the parties in dialogue, not to doctrinal content, nor even less to the position of Jesus Christ — who is God himself made man — in relation to the founders of the other religions.”
“Dominus Iesus” met with a very troubled reception. Those who opposed it fleshed out for years the fake news that it had been written by incompetent second-rate prelates of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, with Cardinal Ratzinger and John Paul II leaving them be out of timidity and laziness, indifferent to the damage done to the openness of Vatican Council II and to the prophetic “spirit of Assisi” of the interreligious meetings.
These falsehoods were still circulating at the beginning of Francis’s pontificate. To the point of inducing Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, in March 2014, a year after his resignation as pope, to publish a note of clarification on how things had really gone.
First of all, with the recognition of the “courage of the truth” of pope Karol Wojtyla:
“John Paul II did not ask for applause, nor did he ever look around in concern at how his decisions would be received. He acted on the basis of his faith and convictions, and he was also ready to take fire. The courage of the truth is to my eyes one of the main criteria of holiness.”
And then with this never-before-published reconstruction of how fully John Paul II endorsed “Dominus Iesus”:
“In the face of the firestorm that had developed around ‘Dominus Iesus,’ John Paul II told me that he intended to defend the document unequivocally at the Angelus. He invited me to write a text for the Angelus that would be, so to speak, airtight and not subject to any different interpretation whatsoever. It had to be completely unmistakable that he approved the document unconditionally.
“So I prepared a brief address: I did not intend, however, to be too brusque, and so I tried to express myself clearly but without harshness. After reading it, the pope asked me once again: ‘Is it really clear enough?’ I replied that it was. But those who know theologians will not be surprised that in spite of this there were later some who maintained that the pope had prudently distanced himself from that text.”
The Angelus at which John Paul II read the words written for him by Ratzinger was that of October 1, 2000, two months after the publication of “Dominus Iesus.”
And it is helpful to reread them:
“With the declaration ‘Dominus Iesus’ — ‘Jesus is Lord’ — approved by me in a special way, I wanted to invite all Christians to renew their fidelity to him in the joy of faith and to bear unanimous witness that the Son, both today and tomorrow, is ‘the way, and the truth, and the life’ (Jn 14: 6). Our confession of Christ as the only Son, through whom we ourselves see the Father’s face (cf. Jn 14: 8), is not arrogance that disdains other religions, but joyful gratitude that Christ has revealed himself to us without any merit on our part. At the same time, he has obliged us to continue giving what we have received and to communicate to others what we have been given, since the Truth that is has been given and the Love which is God belong to all people.
“With the Apostle Peter, we confess that ‘there is salvation in no one else’ (Acts 4: 12). The declaration ‘Dominus Iesus,’ following the lead of the Second Vatican Council, shows us that this confession does not deny salvation to non-Christians, but points to its ultimate source in Christ, in whom man and God are united. God gives light to all in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation, granting them salvific grace in ways known to himself (‘Dominus Jesus,’ VI, nn. 20–21). The document clarifies essential Christian elements, which do not hinder dialogue but show its bases, because a dialogue without foundations would be destined to degenerate into empty wordiness.
“The same also applies to the ecumenical question. If the document, together with the Second Vatican Council, declares that ‘the single Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church,’ it does not intend thereby to express scant regard for the other Churches and Ecclesial Communities. This conviction is accompanied by the awareness that it is not due to human merit, but is a sign of God’s fidelity, which is stronger than the human weaknesses and sins solemnly confessed by us before God and men at the beginning of Lent. The Catholic Church — as the document says — suffers from the fact that true particular Churches and Ecclesial Communities with precious elements of salvation are separated from her.
“The document thus expresses once again the same ecumenical passion that is the basis of my encyclical ‘Ut unum sint.’ I hope that this declaration, which is close to my heart, can, after so many erroneous interpretations, finally fulfill its function both of clarification and of openness.”
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Getting back to the words Pope Francis spoke to the young people of Singapore, it is clear how abyssal is the distance that divides them from the teaching of “Dominus Iesus” and of the two popes who preceded him on the chair of Peter.
But the distance becomes even more dramatic if those words are compared with the reasons for the existence of the Church of all time and with “the supreme and fundamental priority of the Church and of the successor of Peter at the present time,” which Benedict XVI brought to light in this memorable passage from his letter to the bishops of the world of March 10, 2009:
“In our days, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel, the overriding priority is to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God. Not just any god, but the God who spoke on Sinai; to that God whose face we recognize in a love which presses ‘to the end’ (cf. Jn 13:1) — in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.
“The real problem at this moment of our history is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with increasingly evident destructive effects. Leading men and women to God, to the God who speaks in the Bible: this is the supreme and fundamental priority of the Church and of the successor of Peter at the present time.”
It can also be noted that Pope Francis went to say those words of his in one of the few regions of the world where the missionary expansion of the Catholic Church is most lively, without realizing that by putting all religions on equal terms he was sucking the meaning out of the mandate of the risen Jesus to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:18–20).
(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.
