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Featured Article
Aug
17
When we read the newspaper or watch television we discover very quickly that only one theme is dominant: soccer and the soccer championship. Soccer has become a global event that, irrespective of boundaries, links humanity around the world in one and the same state of tension: in its hopes, its fears, its emotions, its joys. This tells us that some primeval human instinct is at play here and raises the question as to the source of the spell this game exerts.
The pessimist will say that it was the same in ancient Rome: panem et circences: bread and circus. Even if we accept this explanation, we must still ask: Why is this game so fascinating that it ranks on an equal with bread? To find an answer we might look once more to ancient Rome: the cry for bread and games was in reality the expresssion of a longing for the paradisal life - an escape from the wearisome enslavement of daily life. It has, moreover, another characteristic that is especially pertinent in the case of children: it is a training for life.
It seems to me that the fascination of soccer consists essentialy in the fact that it links these two aspects in a very convincing manner. It teaches us first to be disciplines and fair in competition. As they watch, people are caught up in the game and so share in the togetherness and competition it engenders. All this can, of course, be destroyed by money and the spirit of commercialism. Perhaps as we ponder it, this game can really teach us anew what life is: human freedom lives by rules, by self-discipline. The game is life in miniature; when we consider it in depth, the phenomenon of a world enthralled by soccer can give us more than just entertainment.
From: Deutsche Tagespost, June 7, 1978
Aug
16
Co-Workers of the Truth 8/16
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There is taking place at the present time a silent exodus from the Church. The inner consensus of belief seems, somehow, to have lost the power to control it that it would perhaps have had a generation ago…One problem here is that the Church can present to us only what she has and what she is. But we cannot begin with the way she presents herself; we must go to the roots. If there do not exist in the Church strengths that have something to offer us today, then her presentation of herself will be of little value to us.
These strengths undoubtedly do exist in the Church, for the Gospel has not become void and Christ has not departed from us. We do not place our hope in strategies; on the contrary, Christ is our hope. We must proceed to and from his presence. What is central must remain central.
The Church erred when she yielded to a perhaps half-hearted desire to prove that even without the good news of God and his Christ she was still a good and useful philantropic organization. Granted, the philanthropic contribution of the Church is of enormous importance - a task imposed on her by the Lord. But we must realize that she is not just one welfare organization among others that wants to assure her place in the social scene, but that her activity springs from the deeper power of a love that wants only to communicate itself, that she is active, not because she wants to be in the limelight, but because “the love of Christ urges us on”. It must be evident that God is something of which humanity stands in need.
The Church must proclaim her belief courageously and without embarassment, must confess what she knows is salvific: that she has to do with God and God has to do with us; that she can therefore bring humanity into contact with him…It would be a great error, however, to think we are reflecting the views of Pope John XXIII and the Council merely because we follow every fashion that is considered modern.
To be courageous can also mean to be nonconformist, to oppose something that everyone else accepts and so in a moment’s time to find oneself suddenly in the minority. In the last analysis, the world is ultimately governed by courageous minorities that really have something to offer, not by some superficial mass phenomenon.
From: Deutsche Tagespost, July 29, 1989
Aug
15
Co-Workers of the Truth 8/15
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The dogma of the assumption of Mary, body and soul, into the glory of the heavenly Kingdom is more confusing than otherwise for us today. Practically every word of it sounds foreign to our ears and without comprehensible meaning: Mary - heaven - glory. The only word we can really understand is body. What is said here constitutes a recognition of the body and consequently of the earth, a recognition of matter and of the future of all of these. Read more
Aug
14
Co-Workers of the Truth 8/14
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The holy day, which is something quite different from the holiday, is the Church’s gift to man. The mere not-having-to-work does not constitute a holy day. This is one of the problems of contemporary society: that it is, on the one hand, thoroughly sated with the worship of work but, on the other hand, cannot find the alternative - which would be freedom, a break with routine - and hence comes gradually to find freedom more threatening and more uncomfortable than work.
But what makes a day a holy day? Precisely the fact that it is not dependent on our own decision; that it is, as it were, not homemade but ordained; that it is based on a precept we have not decreed. There is nothing arbitrary about a holy day. We do not make it; we receive it. Even more: a holy day possesses a reality that is lasting and by reason of which it is transformed from a pause in our occupations into a reality of another kind.
A third fact must be mentioned here: a holiday can become a holy day, in the true sense of the word, only if it stems from a precept that it be celebrated as such. The holy day, on the other hand, is an expression of the fact that we receive our time not just from the movement of the stars but from those who have lived, love, and suffered before us - in other words, that man’s time is human time. Even more significantly, it is an expression of the fact that we receive our time from him who sustains the universe. It is the invasion of the quite Other into our lives - the sign that we are not alone in this world. For its part, the the holy day has engendered art, beauty for its own sake, which we find so endlessly comforting precisely because it has no compulsion to be useful, because it does not owe its existence to a leisure that we have devised for ourselves.
We might begin here to reach into history and to ask: What would a world be like if the prescribed holy days man does not ordain for himself were to disappear in favor of the holidays he did so ordain? What would a world be like in which there no longer existed that beauty that was awakened by faith? But let us speak of the present. Every liturgy ought, in reality, to be a kind of holy day, should have about it something of the cheerful, liberating purposelessness of a geuine holy day, liberation from the compulsion of what we plan for ourselves in favor of the answer that already awaits us and that we have only to hear and accept. If that is the case, we must surely say: the Church will have to learn again how to celebrate holy days, how to radiate the brightness of a holy day. Her obeisance to t he rational world has been much too deep in latter years; she has thereby let herself be robbed of a piece of herself. The Church should invite us to the holy days she has preserved in faith. In doing so, she will enable those to rejoice for whom her glad tidings are inaccessible because they are viewed too rationally.
See: Principles of Catholic Theology, pp. 82-83
Aug
13
One who sees the deserts of stone in our growing metropolitan areas, who detects the surrender to that anonymity and manipulation that all but suffocate both physically and psychically those who live in them, such a one might well say: if there did not already exist the idea of cathedrals, of a space for reflection, for stillness, if there did not already exist a finger pointing to the mysterious, the eternal - then we should have to invent them because we have need of them.
As Christians, we need a place for recollection, which, generally speaking, cannot exist unless we ourselves are interiorly recollected. If Christians are to pray together, they must first be able to separate themselves from all the distractions of this world and to enter into the stillness that does not separate but unites. For nowhere is man so totally near to self and to the manifestation of self to others, as in shared silence then yields to meaningful speech.
Where the silent prayer of the faithful no longer exists, we might as well close the churches because they are becoming unsafe. Open churches were once the common property of all Christendom, the breath of the Eternal One in the midst of our busy world; they benefited the whole Church in a way that is indefinable but real. A church that merely “functions”, that is merely “functional”, no longer provides what was special to it: a space in which to be, a space in which to leave the world of goals and to enter ino the freedom of God. To erect such spaces is, especially today, a rewarding task that becomes all the more pressing the more we are isolated in the towering domiciles of our cities.
From: Dogma und Verkundigung, pp.266ff.
Aug
12
Co-Workers of the Truth 8/12
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Luke tell us (Acts 1:1-3) that in the forty days after his Ressurection Jesus manifested himself to the eyes and ears of the apostles and explained to them the things that pertained to the Kingdom of God. In describing the companionship of those days, Luke employs a phrase - a somewhat unusual one - that the ecumenical translation renders as “a meal in common”.
Literally, however, the words mean that the Lord “ate salt with them”. Salt was the most precious gift by which a host could express his hospitality. For that reason, it was also an expression of the concept of hospitality as such. A better translation would: He bestowed this hospitality on them - not simply an external gesture of hospitality, but a hospitality that meant participation in his own life.
Salt is a symbol of the Passion. It is also a spice, a preservative, that counteracts death and decay. Whatever this mysterious word may mean its purport here is relatively clear: Jesus makes the mystery perceptible to the sense and heart of the apostles. It is no longer just a concept, it incorporates very little of what can be known by the intellect, but their very bodies are affected by its essential content. They no longer know Jesus and his message solely from without; rather, that message lives in them.
Another comment of the evangelist seems important to me. He says that Jesus stretched our his hands and blessed the apostles. He blesses them as he departs from them. But the reverese is also true: he blesses them as he remains with them. That is perhaps the ultimate nature of his relationship with the world and with each of us. He blesses, and he has himself become a blessing for us.
From Bavarian radio broadcast, 05/16/1985
Aug
11
Co-Workers of the Truth 8/11
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In the last century, during the excavations of the buried Roman world in North Africa, there was discovered in the marketplace of Fimgad in Algeria an inscription from the second or third century that bore the words: “Hunt, Bathe, Play, Laugh - that is life”. This inscription comes to my mind every year when the streams of tourists begin to head south - in search of life. In some future age, when the posters of our holiday undertakings are unearthed, they will reveal a similar portrayal of life. Obviously, most of us experience the year spent in the office, in the factory, or in some other workplace as a kind of non-life. During vacation, we leave all that behind in order at last to be free, to live. Bathe, Play, Laugh, that is life.
This hope of finding relaxation , freedom, release from the pressures of daily life is extremely human; given the bustling activity of the technological world, such pauses for breath are simply necessary. Granted all that, we must nevertheless admit that we have our problems with regard to our freedom, with regard to the freedom of our free time. We suddenly realize that we really do not know how to live. We discover that life is not just bathing, playing, laughing. The question of what to do with our holidays, with our free time, is beginningto become a science in its own right.
In this context, I recall that Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote a specific treatise on the means of overcoming sadness. It is typical of his realism that he, too, names bathing, sleeping, playing, as suitable means to this end. Even more emphatically, however, he adds that the company of friends, which disperse the loneliness that is the foundation of our unhappiness, should be included among the means of dispelling sadness: free time should be above all a time to be with other people. Thomas, insists, however, that the most indispensable means of dispelling sadness is association with truth, that is, with God - contemplation in which we come into contact with true life.
If we exclude it from our vacation schedule, then our free time will continue to be non-free time.; then our search for the life we have lost will certainly not end in success. The search for God id the most exciting mountain trip, the most refreshing bath that a man can find. Bathe, Play, Sleep - all these have their place in our vacation plans. But, like Thomas Aquinas, we must also include in them the encounter with God to which our beautiful churches and God’s beautiful world invite us.
From: Bavarian radio broadcast, 08/02/1980
Aug
5
Co-Workers of the Truth 8/5
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In not a few religious sects, music is associated with frenzy, with ecstasy. The subjugation of human nature, which is the goal of that hunger for infinity that is proper to all mankind is to be achieved by a holy intoxication, by the frenzy of the rhythm and the instruments. Such music breaks the bonds of individuality and personality; it frees the individual from the burden of consciousness. Music becomes ecstasy, liberation form the I, oneness with the universe.
We experience the profane recurrence of this kind of music in rock ‘n’ roll and pop music, whose festivals are an anticult with similar aims - a craving for destruction, a banishment of the inhibitions of everyday life, and an illusion of redemption through liberation from the I and in the wild intoxification of noise and excess.
There is a question here of redemptive practices that are formally related to narcotics and totally contrary to the Christian dogma of redemption. It is to be expected, therefore, that there should appear in these groups today more and more Satanic cults and Satanic music, whose dangerous power for the intentional derangement and disintegration of the person is not yet regarded with sufficient seriousness.
This is not the kind of conflict between Dionysian and Apollonian music that Plato described, for Apollo is not Christ. But the question that Plato raised concerns us in a very significant manner. In a way that we could have not anticipated a generation ago, music has become for us today a critical vehicle for a counter-religion and hence for the discernment of the spirits. Because rock music seeks redemption through liberation from personality and its responsibilities, it incorporates every precisely the anarchistic ideas of freedom that today are more undisguisedly dominant in the West than in the East.
For that very reason it is fundamentally opposed to the Christian concept of redemption and freedom, is its real antithesis. It is not because of aesthetic reasons, not because of conservative stubborness, not because of historical inflexibility, but because of its very nature that music of this kind must be excluded from Church.
From: L’Osservatore Romano 16, no.6 (1986), pp.10ff
Jul
31
Co-Workers of the Truth 7/31
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Should we not once again realize and admit to one another that no age should be a cause of shame for us if we accept it interiorly and live it as it should be lived? Should we not, at this jucture of time past and time renewed, learn once again that to be what we should be we need the fullness of the time allotted to us from childhood to old age? Should we not - each of us - try to accept with better grace the entire span of our human ife and to find tolerance - no, recognition - for the time of life other people are experiencing because we know that all of us have something to give one another?
To state the matter more concretely, let us ask ourselves what a world and a Church would be like without the cheerful, guileless, and infeigned by a premature puberty as is so often the case today. What would a world and a Church be like without the urgent restlessness and questioning of young people as they strive toward their future? What would they be like without the strength and determination of those who are at the height of their powers? What would they be like without the mature experience, the quiet patience, and the resigned serenity of the elderly? And what would all of us be like without trust in one another, without the readiness to see and accept one another as we are?
At this time, when the future is our dominant concern and when, for that very reason, we would like to stop the clocks at a definite time, perhaps the most important thing we can do is, by far, to learn to say Yes to older people and to our own growing old and, in doing so, to accept time and the future.
From: Dogma und Verkungdigung, pp. 400-401
Jul
30
Co-Workers of the Truth 7/30
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Men expect redmption from themselves, and they seem quite prepaired to provide it. Thus there is linked to the primacy of the future the primacy of practice, the primacy of human activity above all other activities. Theology, too, shows itself more and more open to this concept - orthopraxis replaces orthodoxy.
“Eschatopraxis” seems more important than eschatology. If in earlier days it was left to popular enlightenment to tell the lower class that artificial fertilizer was more effective than prayer, now, after a suitable interval, we can read similar commentaries in the kind of “religious” literature that strives to reflect the argument that under certain circumstances prayer itself will have to be “refunctioned”: it can hardly be considered any longer an appeal for divine assistance; on the contrary, it must be regarded as a period of quiet composure in preparation for the practice of human self-help.
Belief in progress, which has often been declared dead, has taken a new hold of life, and the optimistic confidence that the human race will eventually be able to build the city of man is finding new believers. The city of man - for many the words were the symbol of all their desires; for others, they have a melancholy sound. For along with hope, fear is also beginning to spread. The anxiety that seemed almost banished by the optimism of the post-war years is reappearing. When, for the first time, men set foot on the moon, no one could help feeling the excitement, the pride, the joy at this enormous achievement of mankind. Their success was regarded, not as the victory of one nation, but as a victory for the human race.
But there was felt as well, in the moment of victory, a deep sadness that the same men who were capable of such a magnificent feat were not able to prevent thousands, perhaps millions, of their fellow men from starving to death year after year; that they were not able to provide for other millions, lives characterized by human dignity; that they were not able to put an end to war or to stem the flow of crime. The way to the moon is easier to find than the way to the human heart and mind. Technical ability does not necessarily include the ability to deal with men. The ability to govern one’s self is quite clearly on a very different plane from that of technical achievement.
From: Glaube und Zukunft, pp. 100-101
