2019
At the end of November the international theological commission met at the Vatican to celebrate its first half century of life. And Pope Francis, in receiving it in audience, thanked it for having produced in 2018 a document on a theme very dear to him, synodality, explaining that this is not what many think it to be, meaning “holding hands and walking onward, having parties with young people, or conducting opinion surveys on what people think about priesthood for women.”
Few realized, however, that the thirty theologians of the commission had also received a message from another pope, today “emeritus,” named Jospeh Ratzinger, he too a theologian of the highest caliber, who was part of this same commission at its creation in 1969.
The message addressed by Benedict XVI to the international theological commission can be read in its entirety, in Italian, on this page of the official Vatican website:
> Indirizzo di saluto del papa emerito…
It is a text unmistakably written with his own hand. With interesting autobiographical tidbits that intersect with a biography of the Catholic Church at the end of the 1900s.
Here are the main passages.
For starters, Ratzinger expresses appreciation for the autonomy that the theological commission has had, from the beginning, with respect to the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. Of course, the prefect of the congregation is also the president of the commission, but it is like in the “Austro-Hungarian Empire” where “the emperor of Austria and the king of Hungary were the same person, while the two countries live autonomously one beside the other.”
The lack of this autonomy for the commission, Ratzinger observes, “could have dissuaded certain theologians from agreeing to become members.”
The newly created commission, Ratzinger continues, had its first proving ground with the 1971 synod of bishops on the priesthood. It preceded the synod with a book, “Le ministère sacerdotal,” which acted as a preparatory bolster. And during the assembly some theologians of the commission, “thanks to an extraordinary effort, made it so that the synod could immediately publish a document on the priesthood that it had composed.”
“Since then, this has not happened anymore,” Ratzinger laments. The task has been left to the pope of writing a “post-synodal exhortation” that however is his own document, not properly of the synod.
Ratzinger then dwells on the components of the first five-year term of the commission, of which he too was part.
There were those whom he calls “the great figures of Council,” and he mentions the names of Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Jorge Medina Estévez, Philippe Delhaye, Gerard Philips, Cipriano Vagaggini and Carlo Colombo, “considered the personal theologian of Paul VI.”
But there were also “important theologians who curiously at the Council had not found a place,” like Hans Urs von Balthasar and these others:
- Louis Bouyer, “who as a convert and monk was an extremely stubborn personality, and because of his indifferent frankness was not liked by many of the bishops, but was a great coworker with an incredible vastness of knowledge”;
- Marie-Joseph Le Guillou, “who had worked entire nights, above all during the synod of bishops [of 1971], thus making possible in substance the document of that synod, with this radical manner of his of serving”;
- Rudolf Schnackenburg, who “embodied German exegesis, with all the presumption that characterized it”;
- André Feuillet and Heinz Schürmann of Erfurt, “whose exegesis was of a more spiritual cut, like a sort of opposite pole”;
- and finally “Professor Johannes Feiner of Chur, who, as a representative of the pontifical council for Christian unity, occupied a particular role on the commission. The question of whether the Catholic Church should have adhered to the Ecumenical Council of the Churches of Geneva, as a fully-fledged normal member, became a decisive point on the direction that the Church would have to embark upon following the Council. After a dramatic confrontation, the ultimate decision on the question was negative, something that led Feiner and Rahner to leave the commission.”
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In the second five-year term, Ratzinger points out the arrival on the commission of the “young” Carlo Caffarra, of the German Jesuit Otto Semmelroth and the other German Karl Lehmann, this latter of “a new generation whose conception began to assert itself clearly.”
“Under the leadership of Lehmann,” Ratzinger continues, “there emerged the theme of liberation theology, which at that time by no means represented an exclusively theoretical problem, but determined very concretely, and threatened, even the life of the Church in South America. The passion that inspired theologians was equal to the concrete influence, political as well, of the question.”
And in a footnote he adds:
“Allow me to present a little personal recollection here. My friend Fr. Juan Alfaro S.I., who at the Gregorian taught above all the doctrine of grace, for reasons completely incomprehensible to me over the years had become a passionate supporter of liberation theology. I didn’t want to lose the friendship with him, and so that was the only way over the entire period of my membership on the commission that steered the plenary session.”
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But even more than on liberation theology, Ratzinger dwells on the “problem of moral theology,” which came dramatically out into the open at the end of the seventies:
“The contraposition of the sides and the lack of a shared basic orientation, from which we suffer as much now as then, at that time became clear to me as never before. On one side was the American moral theologian Prof. William May, father of many children, who always came to us with his wife and maintained the most rigorous ancient conception. Two times he had to experience the unanimous rejection of his proposal, made otherwise but confirmed. He burst into tears, and I myself could not console him effectively.
“Close to him was, from what I recall, Prof. John Finnis, who taught in the United States and expressed the same outlook and the same concept in a new way. He was taken seriously from the theological point of view, and nonetheless he as well did not succeed in reaching any consensus. In the fifth five-year term, from the school of Prof. Tadeusz Styczen - a friend of Pope John Paul II - came Prof. Andrzej Szoztek, an intelligent and promising representative of the classic position, which in any case did not succeed in creating a consensus. Finally, Fr. Servais Pinckaers tried to develop on the basis of Saint Thomas an ethics of virtue that seemed to me very reasonable and convincing, and nonetheless this too did not succeed in reaching any consensus.
“How difficult the situation is can also be inferred from the fact that John Paul II, who took moral theology particularly to heart, in the end decided to delay the definitive composition of the moral encyclical “Veritatis Splendor,” wanting to wait first for the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He published his encyclical only on August 6 1993, once again finding new coworkers for this. I think that the theological commission should continue to take the problem into account and should fundamentally continue in the effort to seek a consensus.”
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Finally, Ratzinger dwells on the relationship with other cultures and religions:
“To what extent are the young Churches bound to the Western traditions and to what extent can other cultures determine a new theological culture? It was above all theologians from Africa, on the one hand, and from India, on the other, who raised the question, without it having been properly brought into focus until that time. And equally, there had not yet been a thematization of the dialogue with the great religions of the world.”
And he adds another footnote:
“I would like to mention here another curious particular case. A Japanese Jesuit, Fr. Shun’ichi Takayanagi, had become so familiar with the thought of the German Lutheran theologian Gerhard Ebeling as to argue completely on the basis of his thought and his language. But no one on the theological commission knew Ebeling so well as to allow a fruitful dialogue to develop, so that the erudite Japanese Jesuit left the commission because his language and his thought was not able to find a place in it.”