Sense and Nonsense: The Hallmark of Truth

In Eric Voegelin’s book Plato and Aristotle we find these words: “The contemporaries of a crisis, however, are reluctant to recognize the magnitude of the problem.”

I had only read snippets of the address that Josef Cardinal Ratzinger had given the American archbishops in March until I received the April issue of 30 Days, which indeed not only carried the Ratzinger talk itself but also an account of how the whole meeting with the Holy Father was down-played by everyone involved, particularly by the press. Well, the Ratzinger speech is really very good and ought not to be passed unnoticed by anyone at all concerned with the real duties of bishops.

Although not exactly an archbishop, Lucy is shown in a park swing with somewhat of a frown on her face as Linus is reading out loud from some learned book: “It says here that the world revolves around the sun once a year.” The next scene centers on Lucy by herself in the swing asking herself with some surprise: “The world revolves around the sun?” Next Linus is busy pushing Lucy in the swing. She obviously has been reflecting on this piece of unwelcome information about the world and the sun. “Are you sure?” she asks Linus. Finally, slowing down in the swing, by herself, while looking at the ground, she objects: “I thought it revolved around me!”

Just what the world revolves around, no doubt, is a proper question. And in Christianity, Lucy is not wholly wrong. The world does revolve around us. We are more important than the sun. Each of us is the center of God’s concern and the object of His love, even though the idea that the “sun revolves around us” usually has a very selfish connotation.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s reflection on the duties of a bishop were extremely brief. He was quite aware that we are reluctant to acknowledge the magnitude of the problem when bishops fail to accomplish that for which they exist. Even though it seems that the Second Vatican Council set out to exalt the bishops, what has happened is that they have more and more become bureaucrats or administrators. They have turned over their teaching duties to “professionals.” Even in theory, theologians have been seeking to take the place of the bishops. The result is that “the contours of the faith are vanishing behind reflections which ought to be illuminating it.”

Needless to say, behind every challenge to the structure of the Church is a theory which justifies that challenge. Even though he is still called pastor or shepherd, the bishop is not on exegetical grounds conceived to be a sort of “moderator” who is not allowed to say anything definite about what the faith might contain. Ratzinger was quite blunt that this situation has come about because bishops have not been doing what they were ordained to do. “Bishops have submitted in large measure to this scheme of things and have little exercised their teaching authority in opposition to theologians.” The result is that bishops have ceased to preach and bring the theologian or the faithful or the citizen of the world to a “point of decision, confronting him with the authority of the truth.”

Ratzinger sketched the biblical and patristic scholarship that has gone into justifying this loss of episcopal function. The modern culture is unable to distinguish between “faith and culture, between culture and the Gospel.” This problem reaches deeper. Thought and action are separated. Authority is only for action and cannot enter into thought. Theology is “thought” and cannot be open to authority from bishop or pope. All bishops are subject to such doctrine from many of their own theologians and academicians who reflect the relativist ethos of the era. Many bishops do not seek to challenge its truth. The result of such a theory is, of course, that the bishop may perhaps give advice, but he “will not be able to bear witness to the truth in a way that is binding and thereby to call people to a commitment.”

“It is the hallmark of truth to be worth suffering for.” These were memorable words that were often cited in the reporting of this meeting. There has to be enough space for “intellectual disputation,” Cardinal Ratzinger held, but still the faithful have a right to know the truth, to know which theologians are right, which wrong. This teaching, this distinction is the job of the bishop, even at the cost of popularity, even “at the cost of martyrdom.” We do not hear such words much anymore, but we do live in a society in which the Church has waged very feeble battles against opposition to the classical issues of faith. Even the avowed enemies of the Church are astonished at how weak it often is on issues it claims to stand for.

In the light of the supposed impossibility of the church to say anything definite about truth or belief, the highest things are left by default to the mass media to say whatever they want. This results, in Ratzinger’s analysis, in the following situation: “Objective moral values, about which there is no agreement anyway, are banished to the realm of the individual where they merit no public defense from the community.” In a blunt, memorable phrase, Ratzinger summed up his point: “There is a right to act immorally but morality itself has no rights.” If one is empowered to witness to the core truth, as a bishop is, “this commission of the Gospel brings one also to suffer for it.”

What Cardinal Ratzinger seemed to be wondering about in his own pensive way is, Why is there so little opposition to the moral evils and their justification among us, why especially from the archbishops who were commissioned to keep the truth of the faith before us? That Catholics are confused, that even the public is confused about what exactly Catholics stand for, is a commonplace.

In the analysis of the German cardinal, the world curiously does revolve around that office which Christ set in his Church through Peter and the Apostles. After this mild and yet incisive address, we go away wondering why this “hallmark of the faith” is not so evident. One explanation could well be, as Cardinal Ratzinger suggested, that the scholarly and academic explanations of the faith no longer correspond to the faith.

The merit of this striking address, then, is that it places responsibility for the situation right where it should be placed in the structure of the Church. This is why so many want to change the structure of the Church so that the content of the faith even in theory will not be defended by those who are commissioned to do so. Indeed, the contemporaries of a crisis are reluctant to see crisis. The world does revolve around the sun. And the sun revolves around us, around our destiny, around the transcendent reason for specifically ourselves existing in this world Christ redeemed. The task of reminding us how and why was given to the Apostles for each age. This is the origin of that hallmark of truth about which we all most need to know. Cardinal Ratzinger was indeed right to have spoken of these duties of bishops.

Author

  • Fr. James V. Schall

    The Rev. James V. Schall, SJ, (1928-2019) taught government at the University of San Francisco and Georgetown University until his retirement in 2012. Besides being a regular Crisis columnist since 1983, Fr. Schall wrote nearly 50 books and countless articles for magazines and newspapers.

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