After Verona: How to “Restore Full Citizenship to the Christian Faith”

After Verona: How to “Restore Full Citizenship to the Christian Faith”
Pope Ratzinger and his vicar, Ruini, see in Italy “a rather favorable terrain” for the public rebirth of Christianity in Europe and the world, too. But many do not accept their view. And the archbishop of Milan, Tettamanzi, has placed himself at the head of the opposition

ROMA, October 26, 2006 – After the five-day conference in Verona, the uniqueness of the Italian Church will be the highly envied object of study in the episcopal sees of Europe and America, especially where Christianity is most in decline.

From October 16-20, the Italian Church gathered in Verona the full spectrum of its members: bishops, priests, and faithful. And the German pope placed his bet precisely on what distinguishes Christian Italy: its being, not a minority Church, but a Church of the people, “a very lively reality, which retains a grassroots presence among people of every age and condition.”

For Benedict XVI, Italy’s uniqueness is not residual, but the forerunner of the Christian rebirth of the West, for which he hopes intensely. He assigned a very demanding project to Italian Catholics. “If we are able to do this,” he said, “the Church in Italy will render a great service not only to this nation, but also to Europe and to the world.”

But in the meantime, broad sections of the apparatus of this same Italian Church are looking at Benedict XVI’s program with fear and amazement. They politely greeted the pope’s arrival in Verona on Thursday the 19th; they punctuated his monumental address with applause; but it did not win them over. Of the 2,700 delegates, a good third of them kept their arms crossed – the same ones who, the next day, refused to applaud for cardinal Camillo Ruini, who for more than fifteen years straight has been the head of the Italian bishops’ conference, by the mandate of this pope and the previous one.

Ruini, who has turned 75, is for reasons of age at the end of his long premiership. He was the man handpicked by John Paul II, in 1985, at the conference of the general membership of the Italian Church in Loreto that year, to restore to that Church “its role as a guide and its drawing power” that he, Karol Wojtyla, saw instead as diminished and denied by the “religious choice” that was the rallying cry for the heads of the Church at the time, foremost among these cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, archbishop of Milan and president of the organizing committee for the conference.

The “religious choice” was synonymous with a Church that would be docile and friendly toward modernity, silently mixed together with the forces of progress, invisible like “yeast in the dough,” concentrated on the spiritual and on the primacy of the individual conscience. This was an unacceptable choice for a pope who had come from the beleaguered and combative popular Catholicism of Poland: a pope, in effect, seen as a “barbarian” by much of the Italian Catholic intellectual class at the time.

These views on pope Wojtyla are expressed in an authoritative book: an interview with Fr. Giuseppe Dossetti, collected by Pietro Scoppola and Leopoldo Elia and issued by the publisher “il Mulino” after Dossetti’s death. Now professor Scoppola, in commenting on the Verona conference, is sparing Benedict XVI from similar criticisms, but he does so by wrongly attributing to the reigning pope the very same “religious logic” and “conciliar” spirit that remain the dream and the language of those disappointed by the “restoration” of Wojtyla and Ruini.

In Verona, this dream was burnished by Martini’s successor to the see of Milan, cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi. The inaugural address fell to him, as president of the preparatory committee for the conference. And Tettamanzi, true to form, turned this into an address on the succession – and opposition – to Ruini.

To those who think (such as Church historian Alberto Melloni, in the book “Chiesa madre chiesa matrigna [Mother Church, Church Stepmother”) that the long, theatrical pontificate of John Paul II simply concealed the Church’s real problems, which have remained the same for the past forty years – new ministries for laymen and women, new sexual morality, etcetera: the issues listed by cardinal Martini in 1999, invoking a new Council – Tettamanzi promised a return to the source, to the “deliberately optimistic” spirit with which Vatican Council II looked at the modern world in the 1960’s, sowing, “instead of depressing diagnoses, encouraging remedies; instead of gloomy forecasts, messages of confidence.”

On the interpretation of the Council itself, Tettamanzi highlighted a statement by Paul VI in 1965, but completely passed over the theses illustrated by Benedict XVI in one of his most significant addresses, the one he gave to the Roman curia on December 22, which was highly critical of the idea of Vatican II as a “new beginning” for Church history across the board.

For those who cherish “a Church that listens before speaking” (see the brief book “La differenza cristiana [Christian distinctiveness]” by the prior of Bose, Enzo Bianchi) the archbishop of Milan asserted that “it is better to be Christian without saying so than to proclaim this without being so.” The following day, the major Italian newspapers interpreted these words as a slam against the “devout atheists,” like Oriana Fallaci or Giuliano Ferrara, who were and are estranged from the faith but strongly aligned in defense of Christian civilization, and great admirers of Pope Benedict. Tettamanzi, when questioned on this, was very careful not to reject this interpretation, but in reality he’s looking more within the Church than outside of it. It doesn’t seem to matter that the real author of this statement, the sainted second-century bishop and martyr Ignatius of Antioch, was anything but taciturn, and on the contrary proclaimed his faith in such a loud voice that this brought him to martyrdom.

At the Requiem Mass for Gianni Versace, in 1997, Elton John played and sang “Candle in the Wind” in the middle of the Duomo.

The “cathedra of the non-believers” created by cardinal Martini has hosted highly popular secular personalities, not to praise Christianity, but to reawaken within Christians as well “the non-believer within us.”

During Lent, for meditation on the “last words of Christ on the cross,” the readings in the Duomo were not from the four Gospels, but selections from the writings of Oscar Wilde, Marguerite Yourcenar, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Jack Kerouac, with an audience that had its back turned to the altar, watching videos projected on the back front of the church, with a musical stage beneath it.

At Pentecost, there were recitations from the works of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, with the debut of a musical composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen and a video display by the Japanese abstract artist Tatsuo Miyajima.

Finally, in the crypt beneath the main altar, beside the relics of saint Charles Borromeo, who together with saint Ambrose is a patron of Milan, a cubbyhole was set up with the title “Via dolorosa,” within which, in darkness, one could watch an 18-minute video of images with no sound and almost entirely in black. The stated aim: “to bring the visitor into a cloud of unknowing, in which he finally faces the free decision to believe or not believe.”

During the first three days in Verona, the Tettamanzi effect had stunning success. In the absence of Benedict XVI and with the silence of cardinal Ruini, the dominant words among the delegates, divided into dozens of groups for parallel discussions, were “welcoming,” “listening,” “dialogue,” “oblation”: words imbued more with passion than with analysis of the epochal changes that have taken place in the world and in the Church over the past twenty years. The pope was almost completely ignored, even by the official speakers. His lecture in Regensburg was cited only once: by the rector of the Catholic University of Milan, Lorenzo Ornaghi, a dyed-in-the-wool disciple of Ruini.

That was until Benedict XVI arrived and pulverized what had held the stage until then. “L’Osservatore Romano,” on the mark for once, printed the papal address beneath a full-page headline: “To restore full citizenship to the Christian faith.” This means the public citizenship, equivalent in secular terms, of Christians capable of saying ‘no’ (and the pope omitted nothing of what he sees as obligatory for the defense of human life from conception to natural death, the family, freedom of education) but above all of saying ‘yes’ “to everything that is right, true, and pure in cultures and civilizations,” in short, “that great ‘yes’ that, in Jesus Christ, God has spoken to man and to his life.” This is, in essence – the pope said – the “cultural project” conceived and implemented for the Italian Church by cardinal Ruini.

To those who contrast the hidden purity of Christianity during the early centuries with the visible role that the Church of today wants to assign to the faith, Benedict XVI replied that “Christianity and the Church, from the beginning, have also had a public dimension and value,” and that the “king’s highway” of the missionary expansion of Christianity remains the same today as it was then: “a practice of life characterized by reciprocal love and solicitous attention toward the poor and suffering,” but at the same time “a faith friendly toward intelligence.” Or again, a Church “always ready to give an answer to anyone who asks us the reason for our hope.”

Bolstered by the strength of the papal seal, the following morning, Friday October 20, a radiant Ruini surveyed, point by point, the many accomplishments during his years as president of the Italian bishops’ conference, and the many things still to be done. These will be taken care of by his successor, who will probably be a cardinal, and perhaps cardinal Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice. The appointment belongs to the pope.

The first of those out of the running, Tettamanzi, will still be able to draw strength from the Catholic sector of “conciliar” bent, made up of some bishops, many priests, and a great many laypeople in Church employ, who had a strong presence in Verona and count among their mentors Scoppola, Bianchi, and Melloni.

But that’s not where the Church of the people, upon which Benedict XVI and Runi have placed their bet, is to be found. As a theologian, Joseph Ratzinger said he wanted to defend “the faith of ordinary people.” The real followers of Ratzinger in Italy are among the ordinary Catholics, those who listen to Radio Maria, those who support the Movement for Life, the millions of faithful who go to Mass on Sunday and are asking this pope, not to remain silent, but to speak as he knows so well how to do.

The interweaving of Christianity and modernity so dear to Tettamanzi is not purely theoretical. It has been put into practice for years in the very heart of his Milan archdiocese, in the cathedral church, the famous Duomo.
At the Requiem Mass for Gianni Versace, in 1997, Elton John played and sang “Candle in the Wind” in the middle of the Duomo.
The “cathedra of the non-believers” created by cardinal Martini has hosted highly popular secular personalities, not to praise Christianity, but to reawaken within Christians as well “the non-believer within us.”

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Thank God for Pope Benedict.

Very interesting. It is not accidental that some of the first efforts of the self-annointed reformers after VatII were aimed at destroying public popular devotions. They attempted to destroy processions, devotions to various saints and the celebration of their feast days, pilgrimages, etc.

In some places, people fought back. In Spain, for example, the tradition of Holy Week processions was basically revived and kept alive by lay groups, often against the opposition of the local modernist clergy.

It's interesting to see the effect of being able to make public expressions of Christianity. The current Archbishop of Madrid made it one of his priorities to revive popular devotions and encourage new ones, and I think it has had a great effect on the Church in Madrid, which was definitely weakening. This is all paying off now that there is a government that is actively anti-Catholic, because the Church now has the popular support to oppose the government, at least in some areas. That's not to say the Church will win, but it has made the Spanish government back off at least a little on some of its more aggressively anti-Catholic measures. So all of these things are really tied together, in terms of the life of the Church in the world.

"At the Requiem Mass for Gianni Versace, in 1997, Elton John played and sang “Candle in the Wind” in the middle of the Duomo"

A quick glance through pointed out this glarrring error. The author is confusing that funeral with Princess Diana's where John did sing. Which was a big deal and people still talk about it.....don't ask me why.

But, if the author was this careless about a fact I know, I have to wonder if his other allegations are suspect as well. So I will take this article with a few grains of salt.

Maybe he should hire you as a fact checker. Close, but no cigar for Candle In The Wind.

Associated Press
Wednesday, July 23, 1997; Page C02

MILAN, July 22—A mournful rendition of the 23rd Psalm, "The Lord Is My Shepherd," performed by Sting and Elton John brought celebrities and other mourners to tears today at a memorial Mass for Gianni Versace.

More than 2,000 people gathered in Milan's Gothic cathedral to honor the fashion designer, who was gunned down July 15 in front of his mansion in Miami Beach.

The celebrity-filled service might have resembled a night at the Oscars except there was no glitz, only grief. Many wept openly.

The mourners included Princess Diana, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, models Naomi Campbell and Eva Herzigova, designers Giorgio Armani and Valentino, choreographer Maurice Bejart and Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue America

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/versace/versace.htm

Thank you for the ping!

I find the folding of the arms troubling and subtly so the use of Pope Benedict’s birth name, Ratzinger, and Pope John Paul II’s birth name, Wojtyla - when it was not necessary in the article.

Perhaps the key to Pope Benedict’s being in that office at this time is contained in the last paragraph:

The “faith of the ordinary people” as it is described here is the “ears to hear” “calling” “drawing” or “movement of the Holy Spirit” in the parlance of non-Catholic Christians. It is the same thing – the true body of Christ – and the only effective antidote to a “falling away” among those who consider themselves to be religious.

My two cents...

The “faith of the ordinary people” as it is described here is the “ears to hear” “calling” “drawing” or “movement of the Holy Spirit” in the parlance of non-Catholic Christians.

This is one of the components of what Catholics refer to as "Tradition," which does not mean only the acts of councils or popes, but the faith of the people as transmitted and the practices as handed on. I think we (in the Catholic Church, at least) suffer from a shallow understanding of that concept.

This was not always the case; for example, dogmas (such as the Immaculate Conception) have been defined citing the fact that the position held in them had always been the belief of the people. But in our time, partly as an attempt to explain and defend the dramatic liturgical changes imposed by the 2nd Vatican Council, the faith and practice of the people has been shoved to the side. I think Benedict XVI is bringing it back to where it belongs, that is, the center.

A minor but consoling point - use of the pope's last name has long been common in the European press and in fact in European writings prior to the mass media. I don't think it's really meant to be disrespectful, although obviously, at times that could be the intention. Generally, it just reflects European stylistic practice.

Thank you so much for your replies!

Indeed, I pray for Pope Benedict and pray that the "ears to hear" "calling" "movement of the Holy Spirit" or "faith of the people" as it used in the article will become a priority within the Catholic church.

On the other point, I believe the European media's not recognizing the Catholic community's attitude towards the Pope by using his new name, e.g. Pope Benedict - actually contributes strongly to the agnosticism on the continent. It is, IMHO, roughly the equivalent of calling pro-abortion, pro-choice - or terrorists, freedom fighters. They are loading bias into the words being used.

I am not Catholic, btw, it just seems to me a journalist ought to refer to a person by his official title when the subject matter is religious news.

Yes, we see many things in the same way vis a vis the " faith of ordinary people".

I too noted the "arms folded across chest" comment. I find that gesture so very helpful in recognizing the enemy,hope they (the enemy)doesn't catch on and that they continue to expose their arrogant contrariness so publicly. Saves my time analyzing their words since it takes one step out of the analytic process,I know from the get-go where they are coming from and only need to read to determine what issue they are considering.

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