Since in seeking you, my God, I seek a happy life, let me seek you so that my soul may live, for my body draws life from my soul and my soul draws life from you.
—Saint Augustine, Confessions 10, 20
NICOLAS DIAT: At the end of his pontificate, in 2012, Benedict XVI insisted on celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II. Why are there so many divisions over the last Council, even today?
ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH: Indeed, on the subject of Vatican Council II, we will never be able to thank Pope Benedict XVI enough for his hermeneutical work and his authentic interpretation of the will of the Council Fathers. The fact that I refer to his analysis goes to show that the intention of the Council has not been understood fully.
Joseph Ratzinger grasped quite accurately the fact that John XXIII wanted first of all to respond to a major challenge for the modern world: receiving God as he manifested himself in Jesus Christ. Here are the words of Pope John at the opening of Vatican Council II: “The serious problems confronting the world after almost two thousand years remain unchanged. Jesus Christ is ever resplendent as the center of history and of life. Men are either with Him and His Church, and then they enjoy light, goodness, order, and peace. Or else they are without Him, or against Him, and deliberately opposed to His Church, and then they experience confusion, bitterness in human relations, and the danger of fratricidal wars.”
From the start of Vatican II, although concerned about aggiornamento, the renewal of the Church, and the reunion of Christians, the pope had strongly emphasized that the Council’s chief task was to reveal God to the world, to defend and promote doctrine. That is why the Church, while rejoicing in the admirable inventions of human genius and in the progress of science and technology, had to remind mankind that beyond the visible aspect of things the primordial duty remains to turn to God. For John XXIII, the Council was first of all an encounter with God in prayer, with Mary, like the apostles in the upper room on the eve of Pentecost.
As he announced in that same opening speech, the Holy Father also wanted to determine what place was still reserved for God in the hearts of men and to “examine more fully and in greater depth the modern conditions of faith and religious practice and of Christian and Catholic vitality”.
At the end of the Council, on December 7, 1965, Paul VI also declared: “And so this council can be summed up in its ultimate religious meaning, which is none other than a pressing and friendly invitation to mankind of today to rediscover in fraternal love the God ‘to turn away from whom is to fall, to turn to whom is to rise again, to remain in whom is to be secure. . . to return to whom is to be born again, in whom to dwell is to live.’ ”
God therefore came first in all the conciliar reflection. This view of the Council remained central to the concerns of Benedict XVI until the final days of his pontificate. On February 14, 2013, he presented to the clergy of Rome a lectio divina (spiritual reading) that will always be one of the fundamental documents of his theological and pastoral legacy. In it he distinguished the true Council of the Fathers from that of the journalists and media. Now what does it mean to implement the Council if not to show that the Church’s first preoccupation was to restore God’s primacy in the hearts of men and of societies? Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus caritas est, has no other explanation than that.
Given the worldwide economic and financial crisis, Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in veritate, his second encyclical: “Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is” (78). The crisis involves not just the economy, but mankind. The social question has become a radically anthropological question; it also touches on the serious question of “the eclipse of God”.
In order to help us see that everything at the heart of the conciliar documents was centered on and oriented toward God, Benedict XVI invited us to focus our attention on the way in which they are ordered. He says that the architecture of these documents has an essentially theocentric orientation. Let us begin with the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum concilium. The fact that it is the first document to be published indicates that there were dogmatic and pastoral reasons of the utmost importance. Before all else, in the Church, there is adoration; and therefore God. This beginning, says Benedict XVI, corresponds to the first and chief concern of the Rule of Saint Benedict: “Nihil operi Dei praeponatur” (Nothing should be preferred to the work of God). Now, if there is one reality too often left out of consideration, it is certainly the consubstantial relation between the liturgy and God. The foundation of the liturgy must remain the search for God. We can only be dismayed by the fact that this intention of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and of the Council Fathers as well, is often obscured and, worse yet, betrayed. . . .
And does the same go for the documents that follow?
Yes, because the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, the second document of the Council, begins with these words: “Lumen gentium cum sit Christus” (Christ is the Light of nations). The first sentence of the constitution clearly presents a theological vision of the Church. Benedict XVI always tried to demonstrate that the heart of the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council is a fundamentally theological ecclesiology.
During a talk on the ecclesiology of the constitution Lumen gentium, at the International Congress on the implementation of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council organized by the Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, quoting a conference given in 1933 by Father Johann Baptist Metz, he said: “The crisis reached by European Christianity is no longer primarily or at least exclusively an ecclesial crisis. . . . The crisis is more profound: it is not only rooted in the situation of the Church: the crisis has become a crisis of God.” Joseph Ratzinger recalled that the Second Vatican Council was not only an ecclesiological council but, much more than that, a discourse about God, and not just within the Christian world, but directed to the whole world. The Council spoke to mankind about this God who is the God of all, who saves all and is accessible to all. Vatican II intended to subordinate its discourse about the Church to its discourse about God and to propose an ecclesiology along theological lines. The Council does not consider the Church as a self-enclosed reality but sees her in terms of Christ.
The Church is like the moon. She does not shine with her own light but reflects the light of Christ. Indeed, just as the moon without the sun is dark, opaque, and invisible, so too is the Church if she separates herself from Christ, true God and true man. Ecclesiology shows that it depends on Christology and is connected to it.
It is likewise easy to see the close connection between the two constitutions that follow and support one another. The Church allows herself to be led by an intense life of prayer, praise, and adoration and by her mission of glorifying God in the midst of nations. Ecclesiology is thus inseparable from the liturgy. The Church is made to praise and adore God; she is nothing without God.
It is understandable that right after that comes the third dogmatic constitution, Dei Verbum, on the Word of God, who calls the Church together to nourish and renew her and to enlighten her path. For the Word of God is the heart of the message that the Church must reveal and transmit to the world.
The fourth document, the pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes, on the Church in the Modern World, shows how the glorification of God appears in the active life of the Church. The Word of God is like a light that the Church receives and brings to the world so that it might emerge from the darkness and become a glorification of God.
Unfortunately, right after the Council, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was understood, not in terms of the fundamental primacy of adoration, of the Church humbly kneeling before the greatness of God, but rather as a book of formulas. . . . We have seen all sorts of “creative” liturgical planners who sought to find tricks to make the liturgy attractive, more communicative, by involving more and more people, but all the while forgetting that the liturgy is made for God. If you make God the Great Absent One, then all sorts of downward spirals are possible, from the most trivial to the most contemptible.
Benedict XVI often recalled that the liturgy is not supposed to be a work of personal creativity. If we make the liturgy for ourselves, it moves away from the divine; it becomes a ridiculous, vulgar, boring theatrical game. We end up with liturgies that resemble variety shows, an amusing Sunday party at which to relax together after a week of work and cares of all sorts. Once that happens, the faithful go back home, after the celebration of the Eucharist, without having encountered God personally or having heard him in the inmost depths of their heart. What is missing is this silent, contemplative, face-to-face meeting with God that transforms us and restores our energies, which allows us to reveal him to a world that is increasingly indifferent to spiritual questions. The heart of the eucharistic mystery is the celebration of the Passion and tragic death of Christ and of his Resurrection; if this mystery is submerged in long, noisy, elaborate ceremonies, we have to fear the worst. Some Masses are so hectic that they are no different from a county fair. We have to rediscover the fact that the essence of the liturgy will eternally be characterized by care in seeking God as his sons and daughters.
Finally, do you, like Benedict XVI, consider that the absence of God from society was at the heart of the reform intended by the Council Fathers?
Absolutely! Although the religious crisis of the West was less visible at the beginning of the Council than it is today, many Fathers sensed the urgent need to bring their faithful back to God, who for them was becoming a more and more distant reality. During his various missions as apostolic nuncio, John XXIII had come to understand how distant contemporary societies were from God. In France, where he had represented the Holy See, he was able to observe how the “Eldest Daughter” of the Church, and many other Western countries, were little by little turning away from Christian ideals. Pope Roncalli wanted to go back to the basics so as to combat this crisis by placing the relation between God and mankind at the center of the Council’s work. In particular, he fostered a great devotion to the beauty of the liturgy. The successor of Pius XII knew that when man is in the presence of God, he enters into the mystery of what is sacred; then a relation is established that once again gives him a profoundly divine structure. Finally, John XXIII wanted to restore to man his dignity, so that he might attain the unfathomable grandeur of God. He wished to offer the contemporary world the possibility of rediscovering its capacity for praise, adoration, and wonder in the presence of God. The major message of the Council remains that of affirming in a new way that God dwells among us.
With deep bitterness, Pope John deplored the fact that much of the world’s population was distant from the Church and indifferent toward her. In his address at the opening of the Council, he said: “It is a source of considerable sorrow to see that the greater part of the human race—although all men who are born were redeemed by the Blood of Christ—does not yet participate in those sources of divine grace which exist in the Catholic Church.” Fifty years later, how right Benedict XVI and Francis are to insist on the tragedy of societies that want to get rid of God so as to live without him! The elimination of God within Western cultures is a tragedy with unsuspected consequences. John Paul II was the first pope to experience the disaster of societies arbitrarily deprived of God, through the cynicism of atheistic Communism in Eastern Europe and then its brutal replacement by unfettered materialism. The lack of a connection with God has remained the major concern of all the popes since John XXIII, an abyss that continues to yawn ever deeper.
Can the “crisis of God”, so to speak, cause a crisis in the very notion of Church? In The Ratzinger Report,1 Joseph Ratzinger saw at the root of the crisis of faith a defective understanding of the idea of Church.
If the tie between God and Christians is weakened, the Church becomes simply a human structure, one society among others. With that, the Church becomes trivial; she makes herself worldly and is corrupted to the point of losing her original nature. Indeed, without God we create a Church in our own image, for our little needs, likes, and dislikes. Fashion takes hold of the Church, and the illusion of sacredness becomes perishable, a sort of outdated medication. To return to our earlier discussion, the same goes for the liturgy. If man claims to adapt the liturgy to his era, to transform it to suit the circumstances, divine worship dies. The development of some liturgical symbols is necessary sometimes; however, if man goes so far as to confuse the temporal and the eternal, he turns his back on the essential justification for the liturgy. The Church is the people of God that becomes the Body of Christ. She is born from the opened side of Christ, for our salvation. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega of the Church. Without God, the Church is nothing but a storm-tossed boat. History shows that the crisis of the Church can never be separated from a crisis of God. Without God, she is eclipsed, like a body separated from the light that illuminates it. Today there is a serious problem because we are no longer aware of the supernatural bond that exists between Christ and his Church. For example, those who are so bold as to criticize the bishops or to pit some of them against others just because they do not agree with their own petty, more or less opportunistic inspirations forget that they are the successors of the apostles chosen by Christ. We must continue to build up the Church willed by the Son of God, and not a Church modeled on our incidental desires. . .
Consequently, is it a crisis of the Church or a “crisis of God”?
Contrary to what we may think, the greatest difficulty of men is not in believing what the Church teaches at the moral level; the most difficult thing for the postmodern world is to believe in God and in his only Son.
This is why Benedict XVI defends the thesis of the “crisis of God”. The absence of God from our lives is more and more tragic. The Council’s intention—not the “spirit” of those who misinterpret it—was to give back to God all his primacy. This is why the Council Fathers wished for a deepening of the faith, which was losing its savor in the ever-changing society of the postwar era. In this sense, the problem of the Council remains entirely unsolved in some regions of the world where the absence of God has unceasingly widened.
I wonder sometimes whether even we clerics are really living in the presence of God. . . . Can we speak about the “Treason of the Intellectuals”? My reflection may seem severe, but I could mention many examples of priests who seem to forget that their life is centered solely on God. They devote only a little time to him during the day because they are swamped in what I would call the “heresy of activism”. How can we not be deeply moved, then, by the final message of Benedict XVI? Here is a pope who, like Jesus in the Garden of Olives, after praying for a long time and trying to discern God’s will, decides to renounce the “office and authority of Peter”. He retires into solitude, silent adoration, so as to pass the rest of his earthly life as a monk, in a permanent face-to-face meeting and intimate union with God. He stays close to the Cross, as he said during one of his last catecheses.
His decision reminds me of one by an eighty-year-old African prelate, Bishop Silas Silvius Njiru, Bishop Emeritus of Meru, in Kenya, who wanted to enter the Trappist Monastery of Tre Fontane in Rome. Because of his episcopal status, he could be accepted only as a permanent guest, yet with the privilege of sharing the same life and the rigors of the Rule of the Trappist brothers. He told me: “I spent my whole life speaking about God. Now I will spend the rest of my life speaking with God, doing penance for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.” The service of prayer that Benedict XVI is now performing is an exceptional example to the world. For his whole life he spoke about God; now he devotes his time to speaking with God and staying constantly before his face. It is not possible to believe the Church unless we fix our hearts on God.
Well, then, in such a complex era, where is the best path for the Church?
I am repeating myself, but I think that the major concern must continue to be God. The circumstances and developments in the world surely do not help us to give God his proper place. Western societies are organized and live as though God did not exist. Christians themselves, on many occasions, have settled down to a silent apostasy. If the concerns of contemporary man are centered almost exclusively on the economy, technology, and the immediacy of material happiness that has been wrongly sentimentalized, God becomes distant; often in the West the last things and eternity have unnecessarily become a sort of psychological burden. . . .
Well, then, given this existential abyss, the Church has only one option left: she must radiate Christ exclusively, his glory and his hope. She must immerse herself more deeply in the grace of the sacraments, which are the manifestation and the continuation of God’s salvific presence in our midst. Only then will God be able to find his place again. The Church proclaims the Word of God and celebrates the sacraments in the world. She must do this with the utmost honesty, a genuine rigor, a merciful respect for human miseries that she has the duty to lead toward the “splendor of truth”, to quote the opening words of an encyclical by John Paul II.
Some commentators speak up often, calling for a new and authentic application of collegiality in the Church. How do you see this problem?
The social changes in the world caused by progress and technological advances, the many questions that concern the Church, such as the harmonization of her internal discipline, the transmission of Christian doctrine, the implementation of catechetical methods, the evangelization of an increasingly complex world, the crisis affecting the family and marriage, the formation of the laity and of future priests, the education of young people, today go beyond the limits of any one diocese. No merely diocesan solution is sufficient. In order to respond to the development of a globalized society, it is necessary to analyze phenomena together and to offer solutions that enlighten and involve the episcopate of a nation or of several countries or even of a continent.
This is nothing new. In the Church there has always been a willingness to consult with one another at the hierarchical level to examine important questions with a view to arriving at a common position of the bishops. Today such measures are taken with regard to everyday situations and questions.
The competencies and the validity of the decisions of episcopal conferences are surely defined by canon law or by a special mandate of the Holy See. Nevertheless, the doctrinal responsibility is incumbent on each bishop in his diocese and on the See of Peter for the whole Church, while at the same time each successor of the apostles bears some responsibility with regard to the whole Church.
Necessary collegial consultation therefore does not abolish the autonomy and responsibility of the bishop in his own diocese. No one should feel obliged or forced by the collegial decision of the episcopate, especially when pressures and campaigns are organized to exert influence on certain persons for the purpose of imposing a point of view that is not spiritual but ideological. Episcopal collaboration becomes deficient if it is biased because of political aims. Each bishop is responsible before God for the way in which he fulfills his episcopal responsibilities toward the flock that the Holy Spirit has entrusted to his protection.
Collegiality ought to be affective and effective at the same time. Certainly the worst thing is indifference to the advice of others, when a bishop shuts himself up in his diocese without taking into account the expertise of his brother bishops. Synods, which are a highly successful form of implementing collegiality, are great moments in the life of the Church. But the various forums must not demobilize the bishops or give them the sense that their powers of evaluation are diminished. Nor can the major assemblies listen to the fine speakers only, the more “intelligent” ones, the experts who impress, stifle, and impose. The fear of the possibility of seeing ideological ideas and positions being imposed has rather ironically caused opponents of collegiality to say that the apostles never acted in a collegial fashion. The one and only time when they practiced collegiality was in Gethsemane. . . . The Gospels tell us that “then all the disciples deserted [Jesus] and fled” (Mt 26:56). Nevertheless, the Acts of the Apostles describe for us their consultative activity, especially after Pentecost. They go to prison together; they remain in Jerusalem during the persecution. Similarly, they convoke the first council of Jerusalem to examine the question about circumcision for pagans who have become Christians (Acts 15:6).
Pope Francis would like to increase collegiality, and I think that he is right. Roman centrality has made important achievements possible, but it can also lead to a form of sclerosis. For if the bishop’s responsibility is weakened, there is a problem of trust. Trust is essential but fragile, and it must be preserved like a treasure.
Although it is necessary to promote the responsibility of the bishops and the episcopal conferences, Rome absolutely must keep the management of the apostolate as a whole. Of course, as the Council recalls, every baptized person may participate in the apostolate without any need of a hierarchical mandate. Yet because of the diversity of opinions on some serious questions and the loss of values and the disorientation caused by relativism, we would commit a grave sin against the unity of the Body of Christ and of the doctrine of the Church by giving episcopal conferences any authority or decision-making ability concerning doctrinal, disciplinary, or moral questions. During an address to cardinals and bishops on November 2, 1954, Pius XII called for policies whereby Church “government is made more uniform, the wonder of the faithful is avoided, for often they do not understand why in one diocese a certain policy is followed, while in another, which is perhaps adjacent, a different or even a quite contrary policy is followed.” In addition to consultation among brother bishops, “there should be added close union and frequent communication with this Apostolic See. The custom of consulting the Holy See not only in doctrinal matters, but also in affairs of government and discipline, has flourished from the earliest days of Christianity.” Pius XII concluded: “This union and harmonious communication with the Holy See arises, not from a kind of desire to centralize and unify everything, but by divine right and by reason of an essential element of the constitution of the Church of Christ. The result of this is not detrimental but advantageous to the Bishops to whom is entrusted the governing of individual flocks.” John Paul II clearly gave his opinion on these points in his apostolic letter Apostolos suos, in the form of a Motu proprio, dated May 21, 1998, while spelling out certain norms concerning bishops’ conferences.
In your opinion, would Francis like to make the government of the Church more flexible?
I think that Francis wants to give on-the-ground pastoral experiences a fair place in the reflection by the central government of the Church. And so, in choosing a cardinal from each continent for his council for the reform of curial operations, the pope intends to gather in all the riches of the Catholic world. Similarly, the pope’s desire to foster synodal reflection is a fortunate initiative. Indeed, the synod should become a new Emmaus experience during which the heart of the Church is burning with the fire of the Scriptures. For in each one of our synodal assemblies, Jesus joins us and walks with us toward the inn and the breaking of the bread. There, he reveals his risen face and sends us back so that we can find the other apostles and rebuild the Church in terris [in many lands] where she has been abandoned or disfigured by our disappointed ambitions and frustrated hopes. Once we reach the Cenacle again, the place of the first Eucharist, Jesus then breathes on us so that we can announce to the world that he is alive. The “little hope”, as Charles Péguy used to say, then revives in us.
What are the most worrisome signs today, in your opinion, for the future of the Church?
As I see it, the current difficulty is threefold and one at the same time: the lack of priests, gaps in the formation of the clergy, and an often erroneous idea about the meaning of mission.
There is a missionary trend that emphasizes political involvement or struggle and socio-economic development; this approach offers a diluted interpretation of the Gospel and of the proclamation of Jesus. The shortage of priests, the defects in their missionary activities, and a troubling absence of interior life, for lack of a prayer life and frequent reception of the sacraments can eventually cut the Christian faithful off from the wellsprings from which they ought to quench their thirst. I sometimes have the sense that seminarians and priests are not doing enough to nourish their interior life by founding it on the Word of God, the example of the saints, on a life of prayer and contemplation, all rooted in God alone. There is a form of impoverishment or aridity that comes right from the interior of the Lord’s ministers. Very often Benedict XVI and Francis have denounced careerism among the clergy. Recently, in speaking to various university communities, Pope Francis spoke these strong words: “Your intellectual commitment, in teaching and in research, in study and in the most comprehensive formation, will be all the more fruitful and effective the more fully it is animated by love for Christ and for the Church, the more the relationship between study and prayer is strengthened and made more harmonious. This is not outdated, this is the center! This is one of the challenges of our time: transmitting knowledge and offering a key for vital comprehension, not a heap of notions unconnected to one another.”
The adequate formation of seminarians, revolving around the maturation of faith and leading to personal adherence to Christ, remains fundamental. Today’s world and our egocentric, ever-changing societies scatter us by their turbulence. We are too weighed down with possessions; if we wish to create for the seminarians an atmosphere conducive to an encounter with Christ, silence and the edification of the interior man are indispensable. The fact that the issue is almost invisible makes it all the more serious. We might very well look into the seminaries that, in a number of countries, particularly in the West, are insufficiently provided for. But although this problem is indisputable, the crucial point is elsewhere.
Indeed, a true seminary must be a school that leads to the “brook Cherith” (1 Kings 17:1-6), to the source of the Word of God, a place where one learns to develop a genuine interior life. A man formed by that school to become a priest prepares to pray well so as to speak about God better, for one can find words about God only after having encountered him and established personal ties with him. . . . Prayer is always the first thing. Without the vitality of prayer, the priest’s motor and that of the Church idles as a result.
We must combine prayer with ongoing work on ourselves. The Church is made solely to adore and pray. Those who are the blood and the heart of the Church must pray or else they will dry up the whole body of the institution willed by Christ. This is why seminarians, priests, and bishops have no alternative but to maintain a personal relationship with God. If this intimate relationship with Jesus is not firmly established from the beginning and all through the years of seminary formation, the seminarians run the risk of becoming mere functionaries; and on the day of their ordination they will not be struck to the very core, they will not perceive the seriousness and the consequences of the words that Jesus speaks to them: “Non jam dicam servos, sed amicos” (No longer do I call you servants. . . but I have called you friends) (Jn 15:15). What is at stake is simple: it is about identification with and configuration to Christ. And so our priestly intentions and God’s will must coincide more and more perfectly. We will be able to say, as Christ said to his Father: “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Lk 22:42; Mk 14:36).
Of course intellectual, theological, philosophical, exegetical formation and diplomas are important, but the treasure does not lie in knowledge. . . . The real treasure is our friendship with God. Without a priesthood according to God’s Heart, cleansed of human ways, the Church has no future. I am not minimizing the role of the baptized people, the people of God. But by the will of God, these souls are entrusted to priests. If the latter obey merely human rules, without heavenly charity, the Church will lose her sense of mission. The crises in the Church, as serious as they may be, always have their origins in a crisis of the priesthood.
Does that mean that there are books on the one side and prayer on the other?
Certainly not. But the interior life is without a doubt the light and the salt of priestly life. It is not a question of neglecting the intellectual preparation of seminarians. Nevertheless, this aspect must not be the sole concern.
A priest who has interiorized his priestly life is careful to communicate his encounter with God in a comprehensible way. He will be capable of speaking simply. Some have intellectualized and complicated the Christian message so much that a great number of people are no longer touched by or interested in the teaching of the Church. God is not a rational argument, for the Father is in the heart of every man. That is where he waits to reveal himself to us: “You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you”, Saint Augustine writes in his Confessions. The Fathers of the Church knew how to express themselves in a moving way and succeeded in converting whole populations to Christ. Through vivid expressions and beautiful images, they merely communicated their own spiritual experiences.
Even today, pastors must speak in a way that their sheep can understand. We are insistently invited to follow the great example given to us by Pope Francis, with his simple, concise, direct language. A hermetic Christianity that claims to be “scientific” would be an aberrant Christianity. And yet, how many self-assured, empty, and arrogant formulas do we hear so often in our churches. . . .
Nowadays the unity of the Church is threatened at the level of revealed doctrine, for there are many who consider their own opinion to be the real doctrine!
One of the major difficulties at present is found in ambiguities or personal statements about important doctrinal points, which can lead to erroneous and dangerous opinions. These bad habits disorient many of the faithful. Sometimes contradictory answers to very serious questions are given by the clergy and the theologians. How can the people of God help but be disturbed by such behavior? How can the baptized be certain of what is good or bad? Confusion about the right direction to take is the worst malady of our era.
The Church is holy in her mystery. But if she resembles a tower of Babel, there is no chance that she will manage to meet the major challenge of contemporary relativism. We can thank Benedict XVI for his keen discernment of what he named “the dictatorship of relativism”. Contrary to the surrounding subjectivism, the Church must know how to tell the truth, with humility, respect, and clarity. I think that men, like trees, need roots that can be nourished by the best soil, which is quite simply the heritage and millennial tradition of Christianity. The variety of opinions in a society that is flooded with news ought not to make us forget the centuries-old tradition of the Church. The best way to understand and transmit it is the interior life in God!
The men who have received a responsibility from God himself through their vocations must not lose their souls, for that would be an incalculable betrayal. God did not ask us to create personal projects but to transmit the faith. Men of God are conveyors, not interpreters; they are faithful messengers and stewards of the Christian mysteries. Much will be demanded of those who have received much.
Do you sometimes have the sense that the faithful are disoriented?
If I take the example of the new evangelization desired by John Paul II, I see that we all agree on the need to give fresh impetus to our missionary life. On the other hand, when it is a question of understanding how the Gospel applies in everyday life, then disagreements loom on the horizon. We Catholics are divided on what is or is not a moral good.
God alone should be our point of reference. However, there is great discontent. Concerning internal Church questions, we have different concepts of the liturgy that go so far as to cause mutual rejection, hostility, or even a cold war. But this is about giving worship to God. So we ought to be especially united.
Too often we are opposed, each one enclosed in his little chapel. When ideology replaces adoration, how can we not detect the worrisome symptom of a crisis of unsuspected depth? If we are torn apart, then what about the new evangelization to which we all seem so attached? If the new evangelization means an authentic return to Christ, why so much scattered effort, so many divergent opinions, so many politicized views?
Do you think, then, about the Holy Ghost Fathers with whom you were acquainted in your youth?
The first missionaries never separated the proclamation of the Word of God, the celebration of the sacraments, and charitable service. These three tasks call for one another and are closely united. Today, we have the tendency to emphasize socio-political involvement and economic development, while excluding evangelization.
We are misusing the social doctrine of the Church without understanding it correctly. It becomes a tool for political action. Benedict XVI perfectly spelled out the place and the role of social doctrine; in Deus caritas est, he wrote: “Catholic social doctrine. . . has no intention of giving the Church power over the State. Even less is it an attempt to impose on those who do not share the faith ways of thinking and modes of conduct proper to faith. Its aim is simply to help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just. The Church’s social teaching argues on the basis of reason and natural law, namely, on the basis of what is in accord with the nature of every human being. It recognizes that it is not the Church’s responsibility to make this teaching prevail in political life. Rather, the Church wishes to help form consciences in political life and to stimulate greater insight into the authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly, even when this might involve conflict with situations of personal interest” (DCE 28). In other words, the Church must never abandon her mission of teaching, sanctification, and government, which consists of enlightening minds and purifying consciences and hearts by the light of the Gospel. The Church would betray Jesus by becoming actively involved in political life. We can tell that the vision of Benedict XVI is correct just by looking at and meditating on the life of Jesus.
The Holy Ghost Fathers of my parish had this unique assurance; they were giving their life and their health for the cause of Jesus, devoting themselves as much to evangelization as to education, charitable service, and health care. My parents believed in God because they were dazzled by the strength of the testimony of the French missionaries. Today, when a Jesuit remains in Syria, in spite of all opposition, what a magnificent, concrete image it is of fidelity to Christ alone! Ultimately, one question matters: What do we want to say about God? What do we want to hand on as God’s love? It is necessary to proclaim God in season and out of season, by finding the most human methods, the most respectful language, but without stinting on the truth.
The place of women in the Church is a very important subject. How are their roles to be understood?
It is necessary to respect women, which is not the case in some countries. The dignity and the rights of women can be put seriously at risk by dangerous practices. In Africa, girls ought to be able to pursue their studies as far as boys. Similarly, it is necessary to fight vigorously against forced marriages. When I travel to the four corners of the world, I realize that the real problem is not an illusory equality, but respect for the dignity and the very freedom of women. The images of women that the Western media present are too often degrading and humiliating. A woman’s body is treated as merchandise for the depraved pleasure of certain men. Through organized prostitution, women become objects with commercial value. Yet the West falsely claims to champion and defend women’s rights. . . .
There are small groups of women who demand ordination to the priesthood and the episcopate. Along this line, aberrations have been perpetrated in some Protestant communities. People accuse the Catholic Church of insufficiently respecting the place of women. If I may make a remark, it seems to me that the relevance of this question is very restricted geographically. . . Unfortunately, I have the sense that the West is still trying to influence other cultures. In many regions of the world, I do not think that ideological egalitarianism in relations between men and women is the model being sought.
The extravagance of the feminist ideology goes so far as to try to eradicate some words from the vocabulary: father and mother, husband and wife. God created us as complementary and different. If I look in the Gospels at how Jesus treated women, I see that he had great respect for them. The Church’s only model must be this gentle, respectful way that Christ had of associating women with his mission. In this regard, it is a shame that some are trying to blame the pope, the cardinals, or the bishops by suggesting that their positions are reactionary.
The idea of a woman cardinal is as ridiculous as the idea of a priest who wanted to become a nun! The Church’s point of reference remains Christ, who behaved justly toward women and men, giving to each person his or her appropriate role. Jesus was followed by some women from Galilee who were happy to be at his service. At the foot of the Cross, he had Mary Magdalen and some other sorely wounded women who watched the terrible scene of the crucifixion. According to the Gospels, Mary Magdalen was the first person to see the risen Jesus on Easter morning. She asked for nothing else but to serve the Lord in her specific role as a woman, in the purity that she had regained and consecrated.
In the world there are societies that are matriarchal or patriarchal. In them everyone plays his role, in terms of his nature. Following God’s plan, the woman is mother and the man is father. Women ought to fight so that their bodies, which are sacred, will not be utilized and commercialized, because they are God’s temple and the sanctuary of new life. In the Church, women can have a very important role, starting with the most prestigious ideal, aspiring to sanctity.
How can we not mention the endless host of daughters of God, starting with the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, the Mother of God, and then Saint Monica, mother of Saint Augustine, Jeanne de Chantal, Teresa of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux, Maria Goretti, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Blessed Clementine Anwarite, virgin and martyr, or Josephine Bakhita. For a long time the Church has known how to exalt and appreciate the specific genius of women. Saint John Paul II spoke about them as sentinels of the invisible; he was quite right. The Church must not allow herself to be impressed by that ideological feminism that can be seemingly generous in its intentions yet false in its deeper aims. Above all, we must not consider these problems in terms of function. God asks us to place ourselves at the service of the Church. It is not a question of making a career for oneself. Careerism already affects too much of the clergy; therefore we must not spread that virus to women!
The idea of reserved positions may be a political objective, but it does not seem to be a criterion of the Holy Spirit. I understand what a big trap it would be to entrust a dicastery of the Roman government to a woman just because she is a woman. The first criterion must not be a person’s sex, but fidelity to the will of Jesus as it has always been understood by the Church’s tradition. Then, if a woman theologian is in close union with the Magisterium and she wishes to place herself at the service of Christ, like the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalen, there is no problem with her offering her full collaboration to the mission of a given dicastery, provided that it is in keeping with her competence.
In Africa there are many catechists, both men and women; the Christian communities praise them and are grateful for their great work of evangelization. Women carry out this mission with their own sensitivity and maternal sensibility, just like the specific presence that is reserved to them in our families. It would never occur to any man with common sense to try to accomplish this maternal task or to acquire a woman’s prodigious power of transmitting life. . . . Likewise, how can we imagine that the Church lived for centuries according to erroneous anthropological paradigms? I see in these feminist demands great arrogance and a rigid form of status-seeking. In the Gospel, Mary holds one of the highest positions. There is our true model.
Our world is familiar with spiritualities that are easy and sometimes fashionable. How should we characterize these trends, which may enter into direct competition with Catholicism?
Actually there are many people who have a tendency to take from each spirituality the part that suits them, syncretically, so as to devise a comfortable subjective religion; that leaves us far from the truth in its totality as promoted by the Church. In Africa I see also that the traditional cults are still very much alive. Likewise, in Latin America, the evangelical groups have launched a merciless war of competition against the Catholic Church, with the idea of winning some of the “market share”.
Man’s natural tendency is always to look for places and ideas in which he can find health, wealth, and satisfaction in an almost miraculous way. In the ancient world, the Jewish authorities, or the priests among the early Christians, had to fight against the temptation to go over to the idols and enjoy sweet dreams. The major heresies of the Low Middle Ages often corresponded to a similar logic, exploiting fears, passions, and fantasies. Even today it is still about a search for immediate happiness. Modern man observes more or less correctly the limits of materialism, and to him Christianity seems exhausted or sometimes paralyzed. Here we see the lack of depth to our faith: often a Christian no longer knows what he believes in and is not sufficiently fastened to the Cross. Now, if we move away from God, the snare is never far. The catechetical, biblical, and spiritual formation of the faithful, the priests, and the religious remains the main response to such threatening lack of commitment.
Yes, the Church has only one method: the search for God in prayer and an in-depth, contemplative knowledge of his Word. Without a personal connection with God, there is neither constancy nor perspective.
Spiritual drifting is also encouraged by the surrounding relativism. In the winds of passing fashions, having no spiritual roots and without the nourishment of prayer, every Christian is in danger. When I see young African Catholics going back to the traditional cults, which still have the practice of offering sacrifices, I can tell that the priests have been unable to quench a great thirst. Weakness in the life of faith can lead to trends that are sometimes difficult to stop. What breaks my heart is the deep wound caused by the African Catholic priests who have abandoned the grace of their priesthood to enter the sects and to perform in them a sort of sacrilegious priestly ministry. What a loss! What a dagger in the Heart of Jesus! My only response is still prayer.
How would you describe this life of prayer that you speak about so often?
Each one of us absolutely must schedule time for prayer each day and build up his prayer life. How? I will tell you a little story that offers food for thought.
One day an elderly professor was hired to provide training in efficient time management to a group of fifteen heads of major businesses. This course was one of the five workshops of their training day. The elderly professor therefore had only one hour. While standing, he looked at them one by one, slowly, and then told them: “We are going to do an experiment.” From beneath the table, the professor brought an enormous pot holding several gallons, which he gently placed in front of him. Then he held up a dozen rocks, each about the size of a tennis ball, and gently placed them one by one into the big pot. When the pot was filled to the brim and it was impossible to add another rock, he looked up at his students and asked them, “Is the pot full?” They all answered, “Yes.” He waited a few seconds and added: “Really?” Then he bent down again and brought out from under the table a container filled with gravel. He meticulously poured this gravel onto the big rocks and then gently stirred the pot. The bits of gravel filtered between the rocks down to the bottom of the pot. The old professor looked up again at his listeners and repeated his question: “Is the pot full?” This time his brilliant students were beginning to understand his scheme. One of them answered: “Probably not!” “Right!” the old professor replied. Again he bent down and this time brought some sand from under the table. He poured it into the pot. The sand settled into the spaces between the big rocks and the gravel. Once again he asked: “Is the pot full?” This time, in chorus and without hesitating, the students answered: “No!” “Right!” the old professor replied. And as the students expected, he took the pitcher of water that was on the table and filled the pot to the very brim. Then the old professor said: “What important truth does this experiment demonstrate for us?” The boldest of the students, who was no slouch, thought of the subject of the course and answered: “It demonstrates that even when we think that our agenda is completely full, we can always add more meetings and more things to do if we really want to.” “No,” the old professor replied, “that is not it! The important truth that this experiment demonstrates for us is the following: if you do not put the big rocks into the pot first, you will never be able to make them all fit later.” There was a profound silence, each one becoming aware of the obvious truth of these remarks. The old professor then told them: “What are the big rocks in your life? Your health, your family, your friends, your dreams, your professional career? What you need to remember is the importance of putting the big rocks into your life first; otherwise you run the risk of failing to do so. If we give priority to junk—the gravel, the sand—we will fill our life with futility, with unimportant, worthless things, and we will no longer have the time to devote to the important things. So do not forget to ask yourself the question: What are the big rocks in my life? Then, put them first into the pot of your daily routine.” With a friendly gesture of his hand, the old professor saluted his listeners and slowly left the room.
Is prayer one of the big rocks in my life? I answer without hesitation: Prayer truly must be the big rock that has to fill the pot of our life. It is the time when we do nothing else but be with God. It is the precious time in which everything is done, everything is regenerated, and God acts to configure us to himself.
Saint Paul often exhorts us to live in prayer and supplication: “Pray at all times in the Spirit. . . ,” he says, “keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints” (Eph 6:18). But at the same time he insists on our inability to know what to ask for in order to pray as we ought; nevertheless, the Holy Spirit comes to our aid and intercedes for us himself “with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26).
Prayer is, in the first place, the work of the Holy Spirit, who prays in us, reshapes us interiorly, and plunges us into the depths of the One and Triune God. This is why it is essential to keep silence and to listen, to agree to be stripped of our possessions and to give ourselves up to God, who is present in us. Prayer is not a magical moment in which we present some grievance or other so as to improve our well-being. Interior silence allows us to hear the prayer of the Holy Spirit, which becomes our own prayer. The Spirit intercedes in place of us. What matters in prayer is not our talking but managing to be silent so as to let the Holy Spirit speak, to listen to him sighing and interceding on our behalf. If we enter into the mysterious silence of the Holy Spirit, our prayers will certainly be heard because we have a listening heart. God does not respond as we would have liked insofar as we often ask for impossible things, like children who wish for thousands of presents. Nonetheless, that must not turn us away from God when we have real problems that torment us and we are experiencing the dark night of doubt. Indeed, prayer is not an extraordinary act but, rather, the silence of a child who turns his gaze completely toward God. Prayer is allowing God a bit of freedom within us. We have to be able to wait for him in silence, abandonment, and confidence, with steadfast perseverance, even when it is dark in our interior night.
Prayer, like all friendship, takes time to establish. Prayer is therefore a school that is sometimes difficult. To persist in silence can be like crossing a long, arid desert, without water or food, where we might happen to say with Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: “I do not even know any more whether I believe in what I am chanting.” A believer who prays is one who walks in the dark and often remains like a pilgrim searching for light. To pray is to enter into God’s will. Sometimes, when we are in the black night of suffering and confronted with hatred, we may shout as Jesus did: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani” (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?) (Mk 15:34). No one will understand the meaning of our shout, because it is a prayer, a cry of faith to our God and Father: it is the cry of Jesus on the Cross, a cry of filial abandonment to the will of the Father alone, as though to confirm the total submission already made in the Garden of Gethsemane. While he was praying, seized with anguish, and his sweat became like big drops of blood that fell to the ground, he declared: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this chalice from me; yet not what I will but what you will” (Mk 14:36).
God loved us first. To pray is to allow oneself to be loved and to love oneself. To pray is to look at God and to allow oneself to be looked at by him; it is truly knowing how to prepare to look at God, who dwells and lives within us in a trinitarian way. This is not just imagery; in truth, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit live in us. They dwell in us in unity and trinitarian communion. One God in three distinct Persons—that is the heart of our baptismal faith. We really are God’s dwelling place. Saint Athanasius explains this magnificently in his Letter to Serapion, bishop of Thmuis: “When the Spirit is in us, the Word who gives the Spirit is also in us, and the Father is in the Word. So it is that ‘I and my Father will come and make our dwelling in him’ (Jn 14:23), as it is said. For where the light is, there is the radiance; and where the radiance is, there is its active energy and luminous grace.”
The soul is the place of prayer. However, in this sanctuary reserved for God, in this house of God, solitude and silence must reign. For in prayer it is essentially God who speaks and we who listen attentively, while seeking his will. To pray is to seek God and to allow him to unveil his face and to reveal his will to us. Certainly we believe that God dwells and lives in us, but very often we never allow him the freedom to live, act, move, and express himself. We occupy all the ground of our interior landscape, all day long and endlessly. We always persist in doing a lot of things, talking a lot, thinking a lot. We fill God’s house with so much noise. . . .
We have to learn that silence is the path to close personal encounter with the silent but living presence of God within us.
God is not in the storm, the earthquake, or the fire, but in the murmur of a light breeze. True prayer requires us to cultivate and preserve a certain virginity of the heart; in other words, we must not live and grow in interior or exterior commotion, in dissipation and worldly distractions; some pleasures divide, tear apart, separate, and scatter the center of our life. Spiritual virginity, interior silence, and a necessary solitude are the most suitable rocks on which to build a life with God, in an intimate face-to-face encounter with him.
We emerge from this encounter with the brilliant splendor of God’s face on the skin of our face, like Moses when he came back down from the mountain after speaking with the Almighty.
Benedict XVI often insisted that the liturgy was a moment when divine realities descended into the life of men. How do you understand this perspective?
The liturgy is a moment when God, out of love, desires to be in profound union with men. If we truly experience these sacred moments, we can encounter God. We must not fall into the trap that tries to reduce the liturgy to a simple place of fraternal conviviality. There are plenty of other places in life in which to enjoy each other’s company. The Mass is not a place where men meet in a trivial spirit of festivity. The liturgy is a great door that opens onto God and allows us symbolically to step beyond the walls of this world. The Holy Mass must be treated with dignity, beauty, and respect. The celebration of the Eucharist requires first a great silence, a silence inhabited by God. It is necessary to pay attention to the material circumstances in order for this encounter to take place fruitfully. I am thinking, for example, of the dignity and exemplary character of the liturgical vestments and furnishings. The place where Mass is celebrated must be marked with a beauty that can foster recollection and encounter with God. Benedict XVI contributed much to the Church in reflecting on the meaning of the liturgy. His book The Spirit of the Liturgy2 is the fruit of mature theological thinking. If the liturgy becomes impoverished and loses its sacred character, it becomes a sort of profane space. We live now in an era that is intensely seeking what is sacred; but because of a sort of dictatorship of subjectivism, man would like to confine the sacred to the realm of the profane. The best example of this is when we create new liturgies, the result of more or less artistic experiments, that do not allow any encounter with God. We claim somewhat arrogantly to remain in the human sphere so as to enter into the divine.
For many years now, it seems that the liturgy has been divided, so to speak, along the lines of two different schools that are even opposed: the classical and the modern. What do you think?
The liturgy is God’s time, and it tends to become the heart of an ideological pitched battle between different concepts. It is sad to enter God’s house with one’s shoulders loaded with weapons of war and one’s heart filled with hatred. If this division exists, do those who wage the battle really know what they are experiencing in the liturgy? Divine worship is an encounter with supernatural realities, through which a human being should be transformed and not reduced to vain, sterile endeavors. Does the God whom I encounter in the liturgy permit me to “cling” to one rite to the exclusion of the others? The liturgy can be nothing other than a relation with the divine. The lack of understanding between different ways of thinking about the liturgy can be explained by legitimate cultural factors, but nothing can justify its transformation into anathemas hurled by either side. Benedict XVI ardently wished to reconcile the different liturgical schools. He put a lot of energy and hope into that endeavor, and yet it has not arrived at its noble goal.
Indeed, beyond the rite, God looks first for human hearts. In the liturgy, Jesus gives us his Body and Blood to configure us to himself and to make us one with him. We become Christ, and his Blood makes us his kin, men and women immersed in his love, with the Holy Trinity dwelling in us. We become one family: God’s family.
If a person respects the ancient rites of the Church but is not in love, that individual is perishing. I think that this is the situation of the most extremist adherents of the various liturgical schools. Strict, almost fundamentalist ritualism or the modernist-type deconstruction of the rite can cut people off from a true search for the love of God. There is no disputing the fact that this love is born and grows in respect for [liturgical] forms; but the tensions lead sooner or later to nothingness.
As I speak to you, I hear the voice of Saint Ambrose, who, in his commentary on Cain and Abel, warns us, saying: “The Lord Jesus asked you to pray attentively and frequently, not so as to prolong your prayer in boredom, but rather to renew it in regularity. When prayer goes on too long, it very often drifts into emptiness, but when it becomes rare, negligence invades our heart.”
In Africa, when I attend Masses that last six hours, I see only a celebration that suits personal preferences. I strongly doubt that there is a true encounter with God in such moments of continual excitement and dances that are not very conducive to the encounter with the mystery. God is horrified by forms of ritualism in which man satisfies himself. Even though it is necessary to give thanks to God for the real vitality of our African liturgies and the full participation of the Christian people, when the mystery of the death and Resurrection is encumbered by additional elements that are foreign to the Eucharist, it gives the impression that we are celebrating ourselves. We absolutely must strive to do again what Jesus did. Let us remember his Word: “Do this in memory of me.”
The Catholic Church should reflect and take action in response to scandalous liturgical phenomena. Other people of faith, especially Muslims, are shocked to see the debasement of some celebrations.
This can be the case with processions, which lead us to the celebration of the great mystery of our faith but are made without any recollection, without any sense of wonder, without any religious “awe” at being face to face with God. The celebrants chat and discuss all sorts of trifling things while walking up to the altar of the Lord!
This type of behavior cannot be observed in a mosque, because Muslims have more respect for the sacred than many Christians do.
How are we to understand the future of the priesthood?
The future of the priesthood can be found in the example of the saints. Its survival and fruitfulness are guaranteed by Jesus’ promise to be with us always until the end of time. In the life of John Paul II, the Cross of Christ was absolutely central. From the first year of his pontificate, he believed it was essential to give a wooden cross to young people; he asked them to plant it throughout the world, in the hearts of men and in societies. I think that his example is all the more important given the fact that priests are bound up forever with the mystery of the crucifixion. The priest is a man who is crucified with Christ; he celebrates Mass not only to perpetuate, commemorate, and make present the crucifixion, but also in order to experience his own crucifixion; then the priest is Christ himself.
The Curé of Ars always carried out his priestly ministry deep in prayer and lost in God. He was like a bridge that leads men to the Lord. For Saint John Vianney, the priest is the witness to the vertical dimension of existence; he puts others in communication with God and tirelessly repeats his message, so that it might be heard in the noise and commotion of the world. The priest possesses the divine power to bring God and his Word down among men. He used to say: “The priest is a man who takes the place of God, a man who is vested with all the powers of God.”
The second central reality in the life of John Paul II was the Eucharist. Our configuration to Christ is accomplished through an intense life of prayer, adoration, and silent contemplation. Without prayer, a priest runs the risk of falling into activism, superficiality, or worldliness. It is by contemplating the face of Christ in prayer that a priest can acquire the generosity to give himself, body and soul, as Christ did, to his priestly ministry.
Before every apostolic appointment, every morning, the priest must enter into the mystery of the Eucharist. This little Host, which carries within it the entire universe and the history of mankind, must be the center of our life. As priests, we must become this white Host, allow ourselves to be “transubstantiated”, and resemble Christ himself in every feature. In The Spirit of the Liturgy,3 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger writes that the Eucharist transforms us down to the inmost depths of our being: “Becoming contemporary with the Pasch of Christ in the liturgy of the Church is also, in fact, an anthropological reality. The celebration is not just a rite, not just a liturgical ‘game’. It is meant to be indeed a logikt latreia, the ‘logicizing’ of my existence, my interior contemporaneity with the self-giving of Christ. His self-giving is meant to become mine, so that I become contemporary with the Pasch of Christ and assimilated unto God. . . . The liturgy does indeed have a bearing on everyday life, on me in my personal existence. Its aim, as St. Paul says in the text already referred to, is that ‘our bodies’ (that is, our bodily existence on earth) become ‘a living sacrifice’, united to the Sacrifice of Christ (cf. Rom 12:1).”
This is why the priesthood has a future: it is the greatest gift that God gave to mankind. The Words of Jesus are eternal. In a supernatural order, the future of the priesthood is assured.
Nevertheless, doubts arise as to the receptiveness of many of our contemporaries and their willingness to respond wholeheartedly to God’s call. Of course, situations vary from one continent to another; everyone knows that vocations are very plentiful in Africa, Asia, and many countries of Latin America. But how can we not be saddened by the sight of all the young men in Europe who hesitate to respond to the Lord’s urgent appeal, “Come and follow me”?
God is still calling as many men as in the past; it is the men whose hearing is not what it used to be.
Finally, the priestly vocation is inseparable from the Virgin Mary. This is one great lesson from the life of John Paul II. The life of a priest is inconceivable without a filial bond with Mary. The Mother of Christ supports priests in their fidelity to their commitments. Thanks to the Blessed Virgin, I am convinced that the priesthood will never disappear.
At the risk of startling you, I think that the number of priests is not such a fundamental problem. Besides, Saint Gregory the Great says the same thing. . . . Paradoxically, the historical context of the late sixth century is rather similar to our era. In a homily given to the bishops gathered at the baptismal fonts of the Lateran Basilica on March 31, 591, Saint Gregory commented on Jesus’ saying: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” He wrote as follows: “We can speak only with a heavy heart of so few laborers for such a great harvest, for although there are many to hear the good news, there are only a few to preach it. Look about you and see how full the world is of priests, yet in God’s harvest a laborer is rarely to be found; for although we have accepted the priestly office, we do not fulfill its demands. . . . We accept the duties of office, but by our actions we show that we are attentive to other things. We abandon the ministry of preaching and, in my opinion, are called bishops to our detriment, for we retain the honorable office but fail to practice the virtues proper to it. Those who have been entrusted to us abandon God, and we are silent. They fall into sin, and we do not extend a hand of rebuke. But how can we who neglect ourselves be able to correct someone else? We are wrapped up in worldly concerns, and the more we devote ourselves to external things, the more insensitive we become in spirit.” We need priests who are men of the interior life, “God’s watchmen” and pastors passionately committed to the evangelization of the world, and not social workers or politicians.
What matters most is the quality of a priest’s heart, the strength of his faith, and the substance of his interior life. Intense and lasting fidelity requires a profoundly spiritual interior life and solid human maturity. Thanks to an authentic interior life and proven maturity, a priest can detach himself from what is merely superficial and transitory so as to be more fully present to what is essential. Fidelity often demands a long struggle.
When Christ inaugurated the priesthood, he had twelve apostles around him; they turned the whole world upside down. Today, there are more than four hundred thousand of us priests. Well, then, everything is possible. . . . We will never be more overwhelmed with work than the apostles were! The most important thing is the interior transformation of the men who have chosen to follow Christ.
We must not fear the shortage of priests but, rather, hope that there will be good, holy priests, men of God and men of prayer; on the other hand, the worst thing is the behavior of unfaithful priests, who are always agitated because they never take the time to be with God in prayer. Saint John of the Cross exhorts us to be constantly in prayer and adoration in the presence of God, so as to arm ourselves against activism, especially of the ideological sort, which produces nothing lasting that can raise us up to God. He wrote in his Spiritual Canticle: “Let those, then, who are singularly active, who think they can win the world with their preaching and exterior works, observe here that they would profit the Church and please God much more, not to mention the good example they would give, were they to spend at least half of this time with God in prayer, even though they may not have reached a prayer as sublime as this. They would then certainly accomplish more, with less labor, by one work than they otherwise would by a thousand. For their prayer they would merit this result, and themselves be spiritually strengthened. Without prayer, they would do a great deal of hammering but accomplish little, and sometimes nothing, and even at times cause harm.”4
Are ideological façades and sources of division that important in the Church?
Benedict XVI used to say that ideologies will not save the world but, rather, the saints and their great, gentle insights. Ideologies coarsen, crush, and destroy men, because they are not intrinsically oriented to their advantage. In Guinea, I was personally acquainted with Communism, which was so full of generous promises. On fraudulent pretexts it put many of my compatriots to death. The ideological spirit is the opposite of the Gospel spirit. That is why priests who choose to follow or to propagate political ideas are necessarily on the wrong path, since they make sacred something that is not supposed to be. Ideology is by nature disconnected from reality, and it is necessarily a source of division, since it cannot win the lasting allegiance of people who are still anchored in reality, in good times and bad.
Following Vatican Council II, some tried with all their might to give a political reading to the work of the Council Fathers. That was a serious error. But, alas, that phenomenon was not new. Down through the centuries, the Church has always had to confront ideologies; the heresies themselves were of an ideological nature. There is always a combat between light and darkness, a confrontation between the Church, with her view of man and the world, and political fashions that soon grow dull. John Paul II dared to fight Communism; historians agree in saying that he had a preeminent role in the fall of the Soviet empire.
I am not afraid to say that the Church will always have to confront ideological lies. Today, she must address gender ideology, which John Paul II did not hesitate to describe as a “new ideology of evil”. Moreover gender, the product of reflection by American structuralists, is a deformed child of Marxist thinking. In his last book, Memory and Identity,5 John Paul II had already written: “I am thinking. . . of the strong pressure from the European Parliament to recognise homosexual unions as an alternative type of family, with the right to adopt children. It is legitimate and even necessary to ask whether this is not the work of another ideology of evil, more subtle and hidden, perhaps, intent upon exploiting human rights themselves against man and against the family.”
Gender ideology conveys a crude lie, since the reality of the human being as man and woman is denied. The lobbies and the feminist movements promote it with violence. It has rapidly been transformed into a battle against the social order and its values. Its objective does not stop just at the deconstruction of the [human] subject; it is interested above all in the deconstruction of the social order. It is about sowing discord over the legitimacy of social norms and introducing a suspicion over the model of heterosexuality; for [proponents of] gender [theory], it is necessary to abolish Christian civilization and construct a new world.
And so I think of the American sociologist Margaret Sanger, who admittedly engaged in an ongoing struggle for the moral deconstruction of the West. A woman, she said, must be able to control her body and her sexuality. Since she is its owner, she must be able to do as she likes with it, to enjoy the freedom of her body and of its rights, and to manage her life. She must freely choose to be a mother or not. Every child from now on must be “wanted”, “chosen”, “planned”. No religious morality, no dogma, no cultural tradition can prevent women from achieving their goals. No one should prevent or forbid women from having access to contraception and abortion.
In the same way, Simone de Beauvoir, like Jean-Paul Sartre and atheistic existentialism, wanted to liberate the individual from the living conditions that God established. In order to exercise his rights, the individual must be committed to the denial of what exists outside of himself or of what is given by nature and divine revelation. A radical feminist, Simone de Beauvoir asserted: “One is not born a woman, one becomes so.” Hence, if a woman remains passive and submits to traditions, she becomes a “wife” and “mother”. This is what theoreticians of gender studies call the stereotype or the repressive social construct that must be “deconstructed”. Conversely, if a woman is committed to constructing herself in a way that is radically autonomous with respect to others and to God, she “liberates” herself; the woman becomes herself and lives for herself. She can thus own herself and control her destiny.
In December 2012, during his last address on the occasion of Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia, Benedict XVI decided to reflect on Simone de Beauvoir’s statement, “One is not born a woman, one becomes so”: “These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term ‘gender’ as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: ‘male and female he created them’ (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female—hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned.”
In a completely different area, what are we to think about the dialogue between the Church and the various Christian denominations and also the other religions?
This question is extremely important and delicate. There is a widespread idea today that religions have equal value and that the mission of evangelizing all nations is a thing of the past; that we should let everybody follow his own religion. After all, the argument goes, a person would be saved by following his own religious tradition.
John Paul II, wishing to study in greater depth the permanent meaning of mission, declared in his encyclical Redemptoris missio that although the Church recognizes the importance of other religions, she must consider it her priority to proclaim Christ as the one Savior of the world. The solemn introduction to that encyclical shows clearly that only an erroneous understanding of religious liberty and respect for other peoples can restrain the force of the missionary impulse.
A book by Father Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism,6 and the philosophical study by the Presbyterian John Hick, who argues for relativizing various religious positions as a prerequisite for any interreligious dialogue, led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to publish on January 24, 2001, the Notification on Father Dupuis’ book. In this document, the congregation denounces “notable ambiguities and difficulties on important doctrinal points, which could lead a reader to erroneous or harmful opinions. These points concerned the interpretation of the sole and universal salvific mediation of Christ, the unicity and completeness of Christ’s revelation, the universal salvific action of the Holy Spirit, the orientation of all people to the Church, and the value and significance of the salvific function of other religions.”
The christological statement in the Acts of the Apostles that “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12) and the Vatican Council II, in its declaration on the relations of the Church with non-Christian religions, Nostra aetate, are clear. The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true in other religions; she considers with sincere respect ways of acting and living that may reflect a ray of the truth that enlightens all mankind. Nevertheless, she proclaims and is obliged to proclaim that Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6), in whom men and women must find the fullness of religious life.
The Spirit is the one who prompts us to proclaim the great works of God. I always feel the duty to repeat the exclamation of Saint Paul, in the name of the whole Church: “If I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16).
How can we not feel a certain uneasiness, given the negative tendency manifested in the weakening of missionary efforts toward nonChristians? This decline is the sign of a crisis in faith and the result of the relativism that has very profoundly invaded the Church herself.
Could the desire to continue asserting the place of Christ and of the Church within mankind cause us to be described as intolerant fundamentalists? In the search for truth, I think that it is necessary to acquire the ability to come to terms with oneself as “intolerant”, in other words, to have the courage to tell someone else that what he does is bad or wrong. Then we will be able to take someone else’s criticism when it is meant to open our eyes to the truth. A little while ago I was struck by the remarks of the philosopher Thibaud Collin, who forcefully declared during a conference: “The guarantee of future progress in one’s personal search for the truth is the keenness with which one assigns weight to what each person says about reality. All this presupposes that man is not the measure of reality and that he therefore has to receive the true and the good.” Then, turning his attention to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he added: “Because the last two popes are lucid about the depth of the crisis of postmodern civilization, they therefore invite Catholics to practice a downright Socratic boldness. Socrates, indeed, is the one who sought the truth his whole life long. He unceasingly questioned people about their custom so as to arouse in them the desire for the true and the good. But far from being undecided, he always subjected himself fully to the force of reason within him. It is necessary to reread his dialogue with Crito a few hours before his death in order to grasp the reasons for his death. So as to remain faithful to the end to the consistency of the divine calling that he had received, he refused to compromise with the Athenian people and with his childhood friend, who was nevertheless begging him to escape. Far from reveling in the Sophistical use of reason, Socrates bears witness to its enlivening freshness. Maybe that was why Cardinal Ratzinger, in commenting on the encyclical Fides et ratio, ventures to make this comparison: ‘I would say that in it the pope [John Paul II] is attempting what Vatican II attempted also: to come to terms with the Socratic function of restlessness, the challenge not to be resigned to the weakness of reason, which no doubt exists, and to try to take a step farther toward the truth.’ ”
Finally, the great strength of contemporary nihilism comes from a certain political consensus that ceaselessly fosters it. We must not be conformed to this world but allow ourselves to be transformed by renewing our way of thinking, so as to be able to discern God’s will. Often the media present speaking out against the Church’s Magisterium as a form of courage. In reality, no courage is needed for that, because then we can always be sure of the applause of the public. It takes courage, rather, to adhere to the faith of the Church, even if that contradicts the scheme of the modern world. Following Saint Paul, Benedict XVI called for a “mature” faith. This is the faith of the Christians who die every day for Christ in Nigeria, in Pakistan, in the Middle East, and throughout the world. . . . It is the magnificent faith of Assia Bibi, a [Pakistani Christian] woman who is threatened with death for blasphemy and is fighting for her life.
In the name of truth, we must proclaim and announce Jesus Christ, the only Savior of the world, to all nations. This proclamation is in no way an obstacle to dialogue among the different religions.
Relations among various confessions must not be a stumbling block in mission work. On the contrary, it should reinforce it. John Paul II, then Benedict XVI, and now Francis are only reaffirming the faith of the Church. The missions are the diamond in the rough of the Bride of Christ. The Son of God is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one can go to God except by him. Jesus is the one gate to heaven: there is neither intolerance nor religious fundamentalism in this loving proclamation. In a commentary on Psalm 85, Saint Augustine made this clear statement about the Church: “Our Lord Jesus Christ alone, the Son of God, is the savior of his body; he prays for us, he prays in us, and we pray to him.”
Again, as always, your reflections and your concerns go back to the absence of God in our world.
Again, as always, because man understands himself only through Jesus Christ! At another level, the absence of God is the result of an absence of the Church.
Inasmuch as God has lost his primacy among man’s preoccupations, inasmuch as man himself gets in the way of God, we are experiencing an eclipse of God. Consequently, there is increasing obscurity and incomprehension as to the true nature of man, for he is defined only in relation to God.
We no longer know who man is once he detaches himself from his Creator. Man intends to recreate himself; he rejects the laws of his nature, which become contingent. Man’s rupture with God obscures his way of looking at creation. Blinded by his technological successes, his world view disfigures the world: things no longer possess ontological truth or goodness but, rather, are neutral, and man is the one who must give them meaning. This is why it is urgent to emphasize that the abandonment of God by contemporary societies, especially in the West, affects not only the teaching of the Church but also the foundations of anthropology.
Do your travels, as well as your African roots, allow you to look differently at ecumenism?
You have to recognize that the emphasis on interreligious dialogue and ecumenism is very recent. The Second Vatican Council paid particular attention to these questions. Although the results seem meager, there is better understanding now between the different religions. Sometimes we can be very disappointed by the use of religion and of God to satisfy the violence that slumbers within every man.
Although there was real progress made with the Anglicans, some theological developments and the decision to go ahead and ordain women as priests and bishops are now an insurmountable obstacle. This mutation of Anglicanism has led a significant number of Protestant pastors to seek admission as priests in the Catholic Church.
Let us turn then to Orthodoxy. I know that Benedict XVI did great work to promote unity among Christians. Relations between the Orthodox and the Catholics are going forward; the question of the primacy and the jurisdiction of the pope could be accepted by Orthodoxy without great difficulty at the doctrinal level. Benedict XVI rightly recalled that Orthodoxy acknowledges that the bishop of Rome is the Protos, the First; this had already been enacted at the Council of Nicaea, in 325. It remains to be seen whether the bishop of Rome has specific functions and missions.
Certainly, the pontificate of Benedict XVI was too short to accomplish major progress. On March 14, 2010, he made a historic gesture of great ecumenical importance when he visited the Lutheran church in Rome that John Paul II himself had visited in 1983.
How can we forget, finally, that the Polish pope was the first successor of Peter to go into a synagogue? In the Holy Land, that man, who could not forget that many of his Ashkenazy friends from Wadowice had perished in the Nazi death camps, did not hesitate to declare that the Jews are our elder brothers in the faith. His successor, Benedict XVI, stressed in his Petrine ministry an appreciation for the spiritual heritage common to Jews and Christians. For they share much: both religions pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and they have the same roots. As a symbolic action, Benedict XVI decided to plant an olive tree at the residence of Shimon Peres, the president of the State of Israel. In his farewell speech at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel-Aviv, the pope mentioned this gesture and recalled that the apostle Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, had described the Church of the Gentiles as a branch “from a wild olive tree, grafted into a cultivated olive tree” that is, the People of the Covenant (see Rom 11:17-24). The pilgrimage of Francis to the Holy Land was then a magnificent witness promoting peace.
What about interreligious dialogue?
With Islam, there can be no theological dialogue, because the essential foundations of the Christian faith are very different from those of the Muslims: the Trinity, the Incarnation, namely, the fact that “Jesus Christ has come [among us] in the flesh” (1 Jn 4:1-10), the Cross, the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and consequently the Eucharist are rejected by the Muslims. But we can promote a dialogue that might lead to an effective collaboration at the national and international level, particularly in the context of defending human life, from conception to natural death. For example, like the Church, the various authorities of Islam vehemently reject the new gender ideology.
However, in Africa, with different accents depending on the country, for instance, Sudan, Kenya, or Nigeria, to mention a few, Christian-Muslim relations have recently become very difficult, almost impossible; in Sudan, a Christian is considered a slave by the Muslims. My remarks, however, ought to be nuanced; generally speaking, relations between Christians and Muslims, at least in West Africa, have always been harmonious and quite friendly.
But in the countries that were the cradle of Christianity, in the Near East and the Middle East, it distresses me to see the development of the relations between the different religious communities. In Iraq, for example, the results of Western and American policies are catastrophic for the Christians, who are being driven by Muslim extremists from the lands that their forefathers occupied since time immemorial. In the Syrian refugee camps that I visited, set up in Lebanon or in Jordan, how can one not be struck by the profound misfortune of the Christians who are condemned to a diaspora that will not speak its name? I heard the Syrian bishops, during our meeting in December 2013 in Beirut, voice their suffering and their fear that one day the Middle East will be devoid of any Christian presence. Their communities are undergoing considerable trials and are experiencing a demographic decline that is so significant that the future of Christianity in its cradle of origin is thereby threatened. According to leaders of the Churches of the various rites, the exodus of Christians has reached alarming proportions. Given the uncertainty that weighs heavily on their life as baptized believers, the kidnapping or assassination of priests, brothers, and nuns, and of bishops too, Christians easily give in to the temptation to emigrate—when they are not brutally driven from their homes, as has been the case in Iraq since the violent American military invasion in 2003.
I would like to report the anguished cry of a great pastor, Archbishop Basil Casmoussa, archbishop of the Syriac Catholics of Mosul, who during the Special Synod of Bishops for the Middle East in October 2010 deplored “the unjust accusation against Christians of being troops hired or led by and for the so-called Christian West and thus considered as a parasitical body in the nation”. Continuing his speech, he added that Christians were “present and active here well before Islam, [but now] they feel undesired in their own home, which becomes more and more a Dar el-Islam [a house of Islam]. . . The Eastern Christian in Islamic countries is condemned be it to disappear or to go into exile. What is happening in Iraq today makes us think back to what happened in Turkey during the First World War. It is alarming!” This suffering of our brethren in faith breaks our heart and invites us to prayer and communion with the Churches of the Middle East, which today, to borrow the words of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, are “God’s wheat, ground by the teeth of beasts, that [they] may become the pure bread of Christ”. Yes, I can say emphatically that some Western powers will have perpetrated, directly or symbolically, a crime against humanity.
In the dicastery that I headed for several years, Cor unum, we promoted dialogue, to the extent we could, inasmuch as our aid was destined for all people, without distinction as to race or religion; material difficulties, wars, famines, droughts, and earthquakes can strike any human being, whether he is Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, animist, or atheist. I regarded projects designed to assist Muslims in the same way I did the requests submitted by Christians. For example, the John Paul II Foundation for the Sahel offers assistance mostly to countries where the population is overwhelmingly Muslim. To put it quite simply, our model is still God; he is the Father, and he is concerned about all his children.
It is necessary to believe in dialogue while thinking always about the example of God himself. Our Father never tires of engaging us in dialogue, of coming to us despite our oft-repeated infidelities. He comes again, as always. In the same way, despite the difficulties, which are often excruciating, we have to go back a hundred times to the drawing board in our dialogue with our brethren who profess another belief. But without personal conversion, without true union with God, reconciliation with other religions remains an empty exercise.
In our plan for interreligious dialogue, we can run several risks. Postmodern ideology, which is everywhere today, is fundamentally soft, fluid, indeterminate, and for that very reason receptive to all “truths” that have lost their vitality. . . . Therefore, we must never lose sight of the fact that dialogue has meaning and legitimacy only because of a more basic relation to the truth being sought and to an objective good, namely, the dignity of persons that is manifested precisely in this search for truth. There are no truths about God that are inconsistent with each other. There is only one truth that must be sought, attained, and proclaimed: it is Jesus Christ.
The second danger is that of a falsely happy syncretism, which comes precisely from our lack of faith in God. If we are sincerely in God’s hand, we can be optimistic about ecumenism; if it does not make sufficient progress, it is because our sin is still great and our faith too tepid. The division of Christians remains a major scandal. We must be one body so that the world might believe.
Have there always been peaceful relations among the different religions in Guinea?
Yes, indeed, even in everyday life we have a long tradition of inter-religious dialogue. The religions have always lived peacefully with each other. The Muslims are in the majority, but they respect the Christians. We stimulate each other in our fidelity to prayer, to the truth, and to the depth of our religious practice; it is important for us to love one another and to walk together in the light of the truth, as Saint John says in his Third Letter addressed to Gaius.
This was an opportunity that left its mark on me. Personally, I was very impressed by the depth of the Muslim practices in my country. In every locality, at the hour for prayer, the Muslims stop and pray. It is the greatest sign that they love a God who is part of their lives. The Islam in Guinea is spiritual, devoted to rather moving practices. I am not afraid to say that the Islam in my country is a fraternal, peaceful religion. The possibility of conversion exists, and the newly baptized are not obliged to hide, as in other countries. Overall, this religious approach is the one found throughout West Africa.
How would you describe the nature of Cor unum, the dicastery to which you devoted several years of your life, in its fight against all sorts of poverty? Furthermore, why do you speak so often about the close relation between God and the poor?
The Gospel is not a slogan. The same goes for our activity to relieve people’s suffering; it is not a matter of talking or holding forth, but of working humbly and having a deep respect for the poor. For example, I remember being disgusted when I heard the advertising slogan of a Catholic charitable organization, which was almost insulting to the poor: “Let us fight for zero poverty”. . . Not one saint—and God alone knows the tremendous number of saints of charity that the Church has brought forth in two thousand years—ever dared to speak that way about poverty and poor people.
Jesus himself had no pretention of this sort. This slogan respects neither the Gospel nor Christ. Ever since the Old Testament, God has been with the poor; and Sacred Scripture unceasingly acclaims “the poor of Yahweh”. A poor person feels dependent on God; this bond is the foundation of his spirituality. The world has not favored him, but all his hope, his sole light, is in God. The exhortation of Psalm 107 is particularly significant: “Let them thank the Lord for his merciful love, for his wonderful works to the sons of men! For he satisfies him who is thirsty, and the hungry he fills with good things. Some sat in darkness and in gloom, prisoners in affliction and in irons. . . . But [God] raises up the needy out of affliction, and makes their families like flocks.”
Poverty is a biblical value confirmed by Christ, who emphatically exclaims: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:3). Saint Paul also says that “our Lord Jesus Christ,. . . though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9).
Yes, poverty is a Christian value. The poor person is someone who knows that, by himself, he cannot live. He needs God and other people in order to be, flourish, and grow. On the contrary, rich people expect nothing of anyone. They can provide for their needs without calling either on their neighbors or on God. In this sense, wealth can lead to great sadness and true human loneliness or to terrible spiritual poverty. If in order to eat and care for himself, a man must turn to someone else, this necessarily results in a great enlargement of his heart. This is why the poor are closest to God and live in great solidarity with one another; they draw from this divine source the ability to be attentive to others.
The Church must not fight against poverty but, rather, wage a battle against destitution, especially material and spiritual destitution. It is critical to make a commitment so that all men might have the minimum they require in order to live. From the earliest centuries in her history, the Church has sought to transform hearts so as to push back the frontiers of destitution. Gaudium et spes invites us to fight against different kinds of destitution, not against poverty: “The spirit of poverty and charity is the glory and witness of the Church of Christ” (88).
There is a fundamental distinction between destitution and poverty. Francis, in his yearly Lenten message in 2014, distinguishes between moral destitution, spiritual destitution, and material destitution. The pope says that spiritual destitution is still the most serious because man is cut off from his natural source, which is God. Thus he writes that “we experience. . . spiritual destitution. . . when we turn away from God and reject his love. If we think we don’t need God who reaches out to us through Christ, because we believe we can make do on our own, we are headed for a fall. God alone can truly save and free us.” In contrast, material destitution leads in fact to a subhuman sort of life that is the source of great suffering. It seems that there are no prospects left.
But we do not have the right to confuse destitution and poverty, because in doing so we would seriously be going against the Gospel. Recall what Christ told us: “The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me” (Jn 12:8). Those who want to eradicate poverty make the Son of God a liar. They are mistaken and lying.
The pope wanted to espouse what Saint Francis called “Lady Poverty”. The Poverello of Assisi recommended to his friars that they wear poor habits, live by their own work to support the community, and never claim a salary as something due. He asked them to acquire no material goods but rather to be in every place “pilgrims and strangers in this world, serving the Lord in humility”. Saint Francis of Assisi wanted to be poor because Christ chose poverty. If he calls poverty a royal virtue, it is because it shone brilliantly in the life of Jesus, the King of kings and Lord of lords, and in the life of his mother, Mary of Nazareth. Let us not forget the magnificent, heartfelt cry of our pope when he declared to journalists from all over the world on March 16, 2013, at the dawn of his pontificate: “Oh, how I wish for a Church that is poor and for the poor!”
Similarly, I often think about the vow of poverty taken by religious; does our world still know that the men and women who pronounce it do so in order to be as close as possible to Christ? The Son wanted to be poor so as to show us the best path by which we can return to God. The “zero poverty” program liquidates and physically eliminates the vows of religious and priests. . . . I know that not all priests necessarily take a vow of absolute poverty. But I firmly believe, in contemplating Christ, that the priesthood is linked to poverty. The priest is a man of God, a man of prayer and humility, a contemplative who seeks to help his brethren to penetrate the mystery of the love of God. To be a priest is to behave as Jesus did, to have nothing, to desire nothing, and to belong to God alone: “Mihi vivere Christus est et mori lucrum” (For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain) (Phil 1:21).
As president of the Pontifical Council Cor unum, I devoted my days to fighting against destitution, particularly on the most distressing fronts in the world. This was a demanding struggle to bring first aid to those who no longer had anything: no food or clothing or medications. In my prayer, I often think of the destitution of loneliness and of those who have no human consideration.
Mankind has never been so rich, yet it reaches astounding heights of moral and spiritual destitution because of the poverty of our interpersonal relationships and the globalization of indifference. In the fight against destitution, there is one fundamental dimension, which consists of restoring to man his vocation as a child of God and his joy in belonging to the family of God. If we do not include the religious aspect, we fall into a kind of philanthropy or secular humanitarian activity that forgets the Gospel. There you have the distinction between Christian charity and the activity of civil organizations; the difference is Christ!
The Son of God loves the poor; others intend to eradicate them. What a lying, unrealistic, almost tyrannical utopia! I always marvel when Gaudium et spes declares: “The spirit of poverty and charity is the glory and witness of the Church of Christ” (GS 88).
We must be precise in our choice of words. The language of the UN and of its agencies, who want to suppress poverty, which they confuse with destitution, is not that of the Church of Christ. The Son of God did not come to speak to the poor in ideological slogans! The Church must banish these slogans from her language. For they have stupefied and destroyed peoples who were trying to remain free in conscience.
Are you not afraid of being misunderstood in employing this sort of distinction?
It is a lack of charity to shut one’s eyes. It is a lack of charity to remain silent in the face of confusing words and slogans!
We must not be afraid to assert that the Church’s battle to relieve human needs is inseparable from the Gospel. It will only make our struggle more intense. If you read the Latin text of Gaudium et spes carefully, you will immediately notice this distinction. Well, then, are they going to think me naïve? Certainly I can make a mistake. It is not always easy to distinguish a poor person from a crook who is disguising his wealth beneath his rags. . . . Nevertheless, if I really listen to the teachings of Jesus, I would rather be robbed than lack charity.
I remember an incident that I experienced at the beginning of my episcopal ministry in Conakry. A woman originally from Ivory Coast came to see me at my residence to tell me that she had been the victim of a robbery. I was in a hurry because I had to prepare a conference and I was getting ready to travel to Abidjan. She was weeping because her mission was to buy some loincloths to bring them back to her country. A large part of the sum of money belonged to friends of hers, women who had asked her to make similar purchases for them. If she brought back nothing, she feared that she would be suspected of having diverted the money to her personal use. I asked the diocesan purchasing agent to give her a sum that would set her mind at ease. The next day at the airport I again met that woman who was taking the plane, just as I was. She had assured me that she had nothing left; obviously she had fooled me. But if I had not responded to her tears, I would not have responded to the appeal of Christ, who asks us to help those in distress. I was certain that I had acted according to the words of Saint Paul: “Love. . . believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13:7). It was up to that woman to deal with her conscience. Indeed, discernment of the intentions of others must not prevent us from living a life of charity. In heaven, we will be judged on love, as Saint John of the Cross used to say. Let us never forget the words from the Gospel of Matthew: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40).
In Latin America, liberation theology intended precisely to help the poorest of the poor in societies with great inequalities. What do you think about that movement?
I heard about liberation theology when I was still in Africa. As I began my reading, I was interested by this way of putting the poor at the center of attention. In my country, and in many other African regions, we were experiencing economic difficulties similar to those in Latin American countries. In Africa, however, our search was more cultural, inasmuch as we wanted to understand the best way to connect our traditional heritage to Christianity. Still, liberation theology was not without a certain charm. Personally, when I understood the Marxist origins of some proponents of that theology, I immediately distanced myself from it. I saw too well in my country the consequences of the Communist ideology. The theory of class struggle was central to the politics of Sékou Touré. This bleak view of social realities was at the origin of many of the social ills in Guinea. In claiming to help those who are destitute, without promoting their freedom and responsibility, they were only aggravating the distress of the population. I did not see how the word “struggle” itself could become the center of Christian doctrine.
The Church’s battle is focused on the conversion of hearts. This is possible only if there is human soil ready to be sown by God’s grace. Finally, in Africa, liberation theology had limited repercussions. I would even say that the deviations in that theology did not suit the African soul.
Today what are the stakes in the new evangelization?
In his apostolic exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi, dedicated to evangelization in the modern world, Paul VI had already tried to address this major topic. Then John Paul II again gave the necessary impetus to the Church with his very extensive teaching on the subject. When the peoples in Eastern Europe had just regained their freedom, he decided to give to the world the encyclical Redemptoris missio in order to set a demanding horizon, in particular an urgent call to conversion.
Indeed, when we observe today the many deficiencies of faith, the eclipse of the sense of God and of man, the lack of real familiarity with the teaching of Jesus Christ, the detachment of some countries from their Christian roots, and what John Paul II called a “silent apostasy”, it is urgent to think about a new evangelization. This movement presupposes that we go beyond mere theoretical knowledge of the Word of God; we must rediscover personal contact with Jesus.
It is important to give individuals the opportunity for the experience of close encounters with Christ. Without such a heart-to-heart conversation, we are fooling ourselves if we think that people will follow the Son of God in the long term.
The importance of this personal experience reminds me of a saying of the Desert Fathers that left a deep impression on me during my biblical studies in Jerusalem. Translated from Coptic, it expresses the importance of the indispensable interior life in being a Christian: “One monk met another and asked him: ‘Why do so many abandon the monastic life? Why?’ The other monk replied: ‘Monastic life is like a dog chasing a rabbit. It runs after the rabbit, barking; many other dogs, hearing the bark, join it, and they all run together after the rabbit. But after a while, all the dogs that run without seeing the rabbit wonder: Where are we going? Why are we running? They become tired, get lost, and stop running, one after the other. Only the dogs that see the rabbit continue to pursue it to the end, until they catch it.’ ” The moral of the story is: Only those whose eyes are fixed on the person of Christ on the Cross persevere to the end. . . .
Many circumstances and deep motives, or the people around us, may have led us to follow Jesus. Then comes the moment of maturity, when only our personal experience of Christ guides us. This personal encounter is decisive for the rest of our life. Saint Paul experienced this moment on the road to Damascus, just as Saint Augustine did under a fig tree in Cassiciacum. And so the former could say: “To me to live is Christ” (Phil 1:21). He added: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).
The Gospel is not a theoretical path; it must not become a sort of school reserved for the elite. The Church is a plainly evident path to the Risen Lord.
Without this union with Christ, it will not be possible to bridge the gap between his Word and the people, especially in Western countries. New laws take as their point of departure anthropological foundations that are opposed to the teaching of Jesus; they are the clear indication of the burning questions that now separate men from Christ.
I think that the immense economic, military, technological, and media influence of a godless West could be a disaster for the world. If the West does not convert to Christ, it could end up making the whole world pagan; the philosophy of unbelief feverishly seeks followers in new parts of the globe. In this sense, we are facing an atheism that is proselytizing more and more. The pagan culture is determined to extend the domain of its struggle against God. In order to bring about their rebirth, the former countries of the old Christian tradition need to reenergize by embarking on a new evangelization.
When I think of the Holy Ghost missionaries of my childhood, I have no doubt that they were men who had given everything. For them, intellectual knowledge of Christ was not enough in itself. They had totally abandoned themselves into God’s hands and considered themselves merely clumsy, inadequate instruments of his Son. They were certain that evangelization remains essentially the work of God.
The Father acts and wants to involve us in such a way that our activities, our concerns, and our missionary labors are theandric, so to speak, done by God with our commitment and the involvement of our whole being.
In reality, when we commit ourselves to the new evangelization, it is always a form of cooperation with God. Saint Paul says the same thing: “God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil 2:13). Evangelization lies in our will and our ability to be together with God, while generously offering him our humble collaboration. It is founded on prayer and on the real presence of God in us: “The Lord himself has spread [the] gospel throughout the world”, and “all who belong to the Lord are to drink it in, each according to his capacity”, Saint Augustine says in his Commentary on the Gospel of John.
Benedict XVI established a close connection between love and faith in all missionary work. At the start of the Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the new evangelization, commenting on the hymn for Terce, he made a connection between confessio (profession of faith) and caritas. The confessio involves our being, our heart, our lips, and our intellect. But the confessio is not something purely abstract and intellectual. And so he said: “St. Bernard of Clairvaux told us that God, in his revelation, in the history of salvation, gave our senses the possibility to see, to touch, to taste revelation. God. . . has entered the world of the senses, and our senses must be filled with this taste, with this beauty of God’s Word, which is true. . . [Thus] we must be penetrated by the ‘confessio’, which has to ‘personare’; the melody of God must [set the tone for] our being in its entirety.” And so confessio and caritas are the two pillars of the new evangelization.
In the current situation, there is a burning question on our lips. How can we help people to rediscover the faith? With the utmost vigor, Saint John solemnly proclaims: “What we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon and touched with our hands, what we have contemplated, we proclaim also to you” (cf. 1 Jn 1:1). We cannot say who Christ is by means of intellectual concepts; what is needed is an experience that is both spiritual and “physical” at the same time. Of course, the catechism for children and theology for seminarians are phases of basic apprenticeship. Therefore, to prepare for the new evangelization, John Paul II decided to issue a Catechism of the Catholic Church, entrusting the project to Joseph Ratzinger as editor-in-chief. The entire doctrine of the Church is found in this document. And we have an urgent obligation, says Saint Athanasius, to study “the ancient tradition, teaching, and faith of the Catholic Church, which was revealed by the Lord, proclaimed by the apostles, and guarded by the Fathers. For upon this faith the Church is built, and if anyone were to lapse from it, he would no longer be a Christian either in fact or in name.” But the faith is strengthened by way of the heart, through a personal encounter with and experience of Jesus. Every day we must once again choose Christ as our guide, our light, and our hope. Baptism demands some sort of daily actualization. I am not afraid to recall that spiritual combat is first of all a war against the evil that is within us.
In this struggle, I think that bishops have a primordial role; I am completely in agreement with Pope Francis when he asks the successors of the apostles to be permanently on the front lines of evangelization. The Holy Father rightly thinks that Rome should not replace the bishops in certain matters. They always have a threefold responsibility in the implementation of the new evangelization: to sanctify, govern, and teach. For example, there was a time when the means of communication were very slow; Rome was very far away, and the bishops had to go ahead fearlessly, while taking their risks. Let us not forget that at a time when a brush with martyrdom was an everyday experience for Christians, Saint Paul told Timothy to exhort in season and out of season. . . Think also of Saint Augustine, who taught every day!
My God, how right Francis is to denounce “airport bishops”! Incidentally, missionary congregations ought to reflect on the dangers to which they expose their young members by making them fly like butterflies from one country to another. These young religious could settle down to superficiality and tourism, having no roots, incapable of establishing real ties with any Christian community. They accumulate experiences, but they could not be the pastors of any flock.
You seem to be very critical, perhaps even a bit harsh, with regard to the development of the old Christian Europe.
I know very well that not all the aspirations permeating the Western world are bad. I would never dare to contradict John Paul II, who sought reasons for hope and encouraging signs in our world. Following Benedict XVI, I am convinced that one of the most important tasks of the Church is to make the West rediscover the radiant face of Jesus. Europe must not forget that its entire culture is imbued with Christianity and the fragrance of the Gospel. If the Old Continent cuts itself off from its roots definitively, I fear that it will cause a major crisis for all mankind, and I see some beginnings of it here and there. Who can fail to deplore the legalization of abortion and euthanasia, the new laws about marriage and the family?
I do not forget that together with my family I came to know about Christ thanks to some French missionaries. My parents and I believed thanks to Europe. My grandmother was baptized by a French priest as she was leaving this world. I might never have left my village if the Holy Ghost Fathers had not spoken about Christ to some poor villagers. How can we Africans comprehend the fact that Europeans no longer believe what they gave us so joyfully, in the worst possible conditions? Allow me to repeat: without the missionaries who came from France, I might never have known God. How can we forget this sublime heritage that the Westerners seem to leave to gather dust?
I am not the only one critical of the West. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had harsh words for those who perverted the meaning of liberty and set up a lie as a rule of life. In 1980, in his book L’erreur de l’Occident,7 he wrote: “The Western world has arrived at a decisive moment. Over the next few years, it will gamble the existence of the civilization that created it. I think that it is not aware of it. Time has eroded your notion of liberty. You have kept the word and devised a different notion. You have forgotten the meaning of liberty. When Europe acquired it, around the eighteenth century, it was a sacred notion. Liberty led to virtue and heroism. You have forgotten that. This liberty, which for us is still a flame that lights up our night, has become for you a stunted, sometimes disappointing reality, because it is full of imitation jewelry, wealth, and emptiness. For this ghost of the former liberty, you are no longer capable of making sacrifices but only compromises. . . Deep down, you think that liberty is won once and for all, and this is why you can afford the luxury of disdaining it. You are engaged in a formidable battle, and you behave as though it were a ping pong match.” This man who experienced repression in the gulags of the former USSR can use such language. He knows firsthand what true liberty is.
Today in Europe, there are forces in the world of finance and in the media that are trying to prevent Catholics from exercising their liberty. In France, the “Manif pour tous” [a demonstration supporting traditional marriage] offers an example of the necessary initiatives. It was a manifestation of the spirit of Christianity.
The Church is always reforming herself: Ecclesia semper reformanda, according to the adage. But what should we understand by reform? Is reform necessarily a sort of progress or is it instead a hope?
Reform is an ongoing necessity. We are the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Saint Paul called all baptized persons “the saints”. If we really read the Gospel, we find that one saying recurs constantly: “Convert and believe the Good News!” It is also the first thing that Jesus calls for in the Gospel of Mark. Reform, therefore, is this interior work that everyone must accomplish, at both the personal level and the ecclesial level, in order to correspond better to what Christ expects of us. It is not just a matter of reorganizing structures, because organizations may be perfect, but if the persons who run them are bad, the work will be vain and illusory. We all must march to the same drum as Christ. The Church is reformed when the baptized march more resolutely toward holiness, allowing themselves to be recreated in the likeness of God by the power of the Holy Spirit. Only the contagion of sanctity can transform the Church from within. From the earliest Christian times, there has always been a call to reform, understood as a greater closeness to God. Reform is a way of corresponding more perfectly to the absolute demands of the Christian vocation. Christ gives us just what we need for this reform, through his Word and prayer, which are the core of all regeneration; the Gospel brings God’s life and grace to our souls. The sacraments are the means of constant healing, reform, and renewal.
Nostalgia and the search for God have never been so insistent, because our world is going through an unprecedented moral crisis. At the same time, the forces that want to reject God are so powerful that the Church has difficulty responding to this search. The great challenge lies in this unquenchable thirst for the beyond.
I often think of the Greeks who came to Jerusalem and said to Philip: “We want to see Jesus.” Indeed, the world has not changed; our contemporaries still expect Christians to show them Christ. And so the baptized ought to live out their faith joyfully. The times of great troubles for the Church are precisely the eras in which Christians live in a way contrary to Gospel principles. I think that I am not too far from the truth in saying that both the clergy and the laity today are in urgent need of conversion. I know that many are not living the Gospel message. This is why the most ambitious reform is the one that leads the Church to be more fiercely determined in her march toward sanctity and her proclamation of the Good News. The world’s pleas, as feeble as they may be, to go beyond false materialistic and ideological values are opportunities that the Church cannot afford to miss. Through these opportunities, men are turning their attention toward God. In this busy world, in which there is no time for family or for oneself, much less for God, true reform consists of rediscovering the meaning of prayer, the meaning of silence, the meaning of eternity.
Prayer is the greatest need of the contemporary world; it remains the tool with which to reform the world. In an age that no longer prays, time is, so to speak, abolished, and life turns into a rat race. This is why prayer gives man the measure of himself and of the invisible world. I wish that we would not forget the path that Benedict XVI decided to take for the Church on the day of his resignation from the See of Peter. He chose a way dedicated exclusively to prayer, contemplation, and listening to God. This is the most important route, because it grasps the meaning of God’s glory. Finally, Francis’ plan to reform the Roman Curia consists of putting it face to face with God. . . .
How would you describe precisely what Francis intends for the government of the Church?
The institutional framework of all interior reform is important. If structures become obstacles to evangelization and the Church’s mission, one must not pretend to look elsewhere; I think that this goes to the heart of the governmental reform courageously desired by Francis. It had become apparent that some aspects of the life of the Roman Curia would have to be the object of real reflection.
We addressed these issues a lot during the discussions that preceded the beginning of the conclave, in March 2013. Personally, I think that it must be stressed that the members of the Curia are not high-ranking officials; they are laymen, priests, bishops, and cardinals who must not forget their vocation. Today, the pope’s difficult job is to clean up the structures. But above all the Holy Father wants to restore a greater interior dynamism to those who work alongside him. This is why he wanted the Curia to make a long spiritual retreat in Lent of 2014, outside of Rome and far from everyday activities.
At another level, I think that the reform he envisages has to do with our relationship to power, money, and wealth. In this regard, there is a big job ahead that extends beyond the Roman Curia alone; the whole Church, alas, is concerned about the problem of careerism, that frantic search for power, privileges, honors, social status, and political and financial power. Only a true conversion will make it possible to get beyond these failings, which are nothing new.
True power in the Church is essentially humble and joyful service in imitation of Christ, who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mt 20:28). If we ignore Christ’s poverty, forgetting that he reminded us that we cannot serve two masters, God and the golden calf, no reform will be possible. Once again, the only solution is found in prayer that pastors might place themselves once more facing Christ and their vocation; in this sense we must not let apathy and weariness obscure the promises of our priestly ordination or of our religious profession.
Since the origins of the Church, prayer is often combined with fasting; our body must be completely involved in the search for God in the silence of prayer. It would be false to put God first in our lives if our bodies were not really involved. If we are not capable of denying this body not only foods but also certain pleasures and basic biological needs, out of love for God, we will lack an interior disposition. This is why, from the beginning of Christian tradition, chastity, virginity, consecrated celibacy, and fasting became indispensable expressions of the primacy of God and of faith in him.
Concerning this connection to the body and to sexuality, I am not forgetting that some members of the clergy, worldwide, have been accused of genuine crimes. The Holy See has been the subject of publicity campaigns of unprecedented violence, as though old enemies who are still ready to kill were seeking to take advantage of a great weakness. But I am perfectly aware of the abominable acts that have been committed by some priests.
The abandonment of sexuality is one of the promises made by a priest, except in the Eastern Church, where the ordination of married men is possible, even though the most ancient tradition seemed to retain abstinence as a rule. We understand then that reform involves the whole man, including his corporeal nature. The Holy Ghost Fathers I knew had a real mastery of their body, the result of a solid formation and a real contact with God that filled their heart.
When I think back to my seminary years, I remember a large number of rules that helped us to control our instincts. For example, it was positively forbidden to take even the smallest snack outside of meals. In the superiors’ view, someone who could not obey that strict dietary rule did not have a vocation; indeed, he was not capable of controlling one of his natural needs. This discipline of the body was essential in the discernment of future priests. I have not forgotten, either, that it was absolutely forbidden to go to the dormitory outside of the hours prescribed by the rule. Our entire days were considered in terms of a discipline of the mind and body. This asceticism was understood as a path of sanctification and an imitation of Jesus.
All the seminarians desired to make progress in sanctity. They had to have a spiritual director who could help them at any moment to confront a crisis situation. In life, we are like the creepers in the forest. In Africa, a creeper is a flexible stem that is incapable of lifting itself up. Therefore it creeps along the ground until it meets a hardy tree. Then it latches on to this support and climbs to the top. For it, too, would like to see the sun. It is the same with us. If we do not find a solid tree whose roots are nourished by God, so as to ascend toward heaven, there is no chance of our being able to see the light. Recall also the proverb in the Mossi language: “The desert creeper, finding no tree around which to wind, winds around God.”
In the desert, and at certain times in our life, we can count on God alone.
Of course, I am not unaware of the fact that a wolf can always get into the sheepfold. In my formation I had the chance to learn from professors and priests who transformed us by their example and led us daily to Christ.
One of the reasons for the moral crisis no doubt had its origins in the hedonistic sexual revolution of the 1970s. When confronted with that “liberation” of the body, which was directed toward its impulses and rejected all restraints, and given the eroticization of entire sectors of society, the Church made no effort to form her ministers more thoroughly. The start of the reform must concentrate on Catholic schools and seminaries.
I know that what I say may sound controversial; I do not mean to offend anybody, much less pass judgment on anyone at all, but how can we deny that the reform desired by Francis is urgent?