THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD
Pope’s TV broadcast urges Germans to open their eyes to God
Christa Pongratz-Lippitt
SHORTLY BEFOREhis 22-25 September visit to his native Germany, Pope Benedict XVI set out in a national television broadcast the resolutely evangelical purpose of his journey. Speaking on Wort am Sonntag (Word on
Sunday), a long-running programme on the main German state television channel, ARD, the Pope stressed that the purpose of his visit was to bring God back into his fellow coun- trymen’s field of vision. “All this is not religious tourism and even
less some kind of show.” (He used the English word.) “What this visit is about is best expressed in its motto: ‘Where God is, there is the future’ [“Wo Gott ist, da ist Zukunft”].” It is a matter of bringing God back into our field of vision, God who is so often completely absent but whom we are so direly in need of.” The Pope went on to explain how people could bring God back into their lives: “We must develop anew the perceptive faculties for God that lie in each one of us. We can get an inkling of God’s greatness in the greatness of the cosmos. We can make use of the world technically because it has been built rationally. In this great rationality we sense something of the Creator Spirit from whom it comes.” He then reminded Germans that beauty can be a path to God: “And in the beauty of creation we can see something of God’s beauty, greatness and goodness. In the words of the Gospel we can hear words of eternal life which do not just come from human beings but
which come from him, in which we hear his voice,” he said. Finally, he made the point that our fellow human beings can offer us a path to God. “We can perceive God when we meet people who have been touched by him,” he said. “I’m not thinking only of the great and famous like St Paul or St Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa, but of the many simple people whom no one talks about – and yet, when we meet them, something of their goodness, their purity and their joy comes over and we know God is there and is touching us.” The Pope concluded by inviting his fellow
Germans to allow themselves to be channels for God’s love: “So let us in the coming days try hard to perceive God once again so that we are able to lighten the world with a ray of hope which comes from God,” he urged. In this way we would be a light for others but also find “such help in our own lives”. Pope Benedict said he was particularly look- ing forward to addressing the German Bundestag (parliament), to praying with rep- resentatives of the German Protestant Church at Erfurt, to visiting the small Catholic enclave of Eichsfeld in former Communist eastern Germany which had remained Catholic over so many centuries, and to his visit to Freiburg, especially to his Vigil with young people there. The Vatican’s spokesman, Fr Federico
Lombardi SJ, has told reporters that the expected protests and boycotts against Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Germany were of no great worry to church officials. “If someone has objections, it is their concern rather than
A banner titled
‘Welcome’ at St Johannes Cathedral in Berlin. Photo: Reuters
ours or the Pope’s,” the spokesman said. This week’s edition of the weekly Der Spiegel ded- icatedthe cover to an attack on the Pope, with the headline “the hopeless one”, blaming Pope Benedict for Germans abandoning the faith. At least 100 of the 620 members of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, had earlier announced they would not attend the special session on Thursday at which the Pope was to speak. Other groups, including secularists and gay activists, announced street protests. The Vatican spokesman noted that the 17 addresses and nearly two dozen meetings the 84-year-old Pope will hold in Germany mark one of the most intense and busy of his 21 pastoral journeys abroad. But Fr Lombardi said there was “no need to expect that the Pope will enter into details” on what he called a “dialogue, reflection and debate in the Church in Germany”, in which there is dis- agreement on matters such as priestly celibacy. Rather, he said, the Pope would “go back to the essentials, because the Church depends on belief in God and Jesus Christ, dead and risen, and not on celibacy”.
SSPX ‘may be given room for manoeuvre on Vatican II’
AN ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE Italian website has claimed to have seen a non-published document that it says will allow the schismatic Society of St Pius X (SSPX) back into full communion with Rome as long as its mem- bers tone down their anti-Vatican II rhetoric, write Robert Mickens and Christa Pongratz- Lippitt. The site, Messa in latino (Latin Mass), said the “doctrinal preamble” that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith gave to SSPX leaders on 14 September, as a basis for future discussions, would permit the so-called Lefebvrists legitimately to throw into discussion the binding nature of docu- ments of the Second Vatican Council. “The object of this discussion, which is expressly recognised as legitimate, is not the
interpretation of the documents, but the very texts of the latter,” an anonymous author wrote this week on the site. A brief Vatican com- muniqué on 14 September said only that the preamble listed the essential criteria for inter- preting Catholic doctrine, while leaving “to legitimate discussion the study and theological explanation of individual expressions or for- mulations” of the council documents. The article on the Messa in latino blog sug- gested that the preamble was deliberately kept secret to allow the SSPX to study it with- out having others “breathing down their necks” and to “possibly allow some limited changes, where a passage or adjective might appear less than appetising” to the Lefebvrists. The website backed up its claims by quoting
a 1988 address that the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger gave to bishops in Chile: “The truth is that [Vatican II] did not define any dogma and deliberately chose to remain at a modest level as only a pastoral council,” the future Pope said. “But many treat it as if it were trans- formed into a sort of super dogma.” However, Professor Wolfgang Beinert, who is close to the Pope and a member of the Ratzinger Schülerkreis, or scholars’ circle, told Münchner Kirchenradio this week that agreement between the Vatican and the SSPX would be “theological suicide for one of the parties concerned”. The Pope could not go back on the Second Vatican Council, neither could the SSPX recognise the council, as it would lose its grounds for existence, he said.
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