A new interview with Emeritus Pope Benedict is not an everyday event so it seems a good idea to post a thread here about the interview published today in Osservatore Romano with a translation in Robert Moynihan's newsletter. The full interview is not yet available on Mr Moynihan's 'Inside the Vatican' magazine but I copy the introduction from the newsletter below: March 17, 2016, Thursday -- Emeritus Pope Benedict Grants an Interview on Justification and God's Mercy “What the human person needs for salvation is the intimate openness to God.” —Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, in a 2015 interview with Jesuit theologian Father Jacques Servais. The interview was conducted during 2015 for a book on the doctrine of justification, and it was read out to a conference in Rome in October of 2015 by Archbishop Georg Gaenswein. This week the book itself was released in Italy, sparking a number of newspaper articles. The full text of the interview is being published today, March 17, in Italian, in the Vatican's newspaper, the Osservatore Romano “Faith is a deeply personal communication with God, which touches my very core and places me in direct contact with the living God so that I can talk to Him, love Him and enter into communion with Him. At the same time, this highly personal experience is inextricably linked to the community: becoming one of God’s children in the community of pilgrim brothers and sisters is part of the essence of the faith." —Ibid. "No, the Church was not made by herself, she was created by God and she is continuously formed by Him." —Ibid. ============================= On December 8, 2015, the first day of the Jubilee of Mercy, Pope Francis, before opening the Holy Door (seen behind him), went up to Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI and embraced him. Ratzinger had wanted to be there despite his aching legs. "Paul teaches us that faith comes from listening (fides ex auditu)," Emeritus Pope Benedict tells us in a recent interview which has just been published in a book in Italy. Since Benedict has spoken very little in public since his resignation three years ago, it seems important to consider what he said on this occasion. "Listening," Benedict said, "involves having a partner... In order for me to believe, I need witnesses who have met God and make Him accessible to me.” We sometimes forget this fundamental fact -- a fact which the common wisdom of our time opposes: that we come to a relationship with God, and to faith in God, by means of witnesses. It is almost as if life is a great courtroom, and we are each members of a jury trying to discern truth from falsehood, right from wrong, justice from injustice, reality from illusion. And we must listen to the testimony of witnesses in order to form our judgments and come to our conclusions. Therefore, we need to listen intently to the witnesses we see before us. One such witness is precisely Emeritus Pope Benedict himself... (On Deember 8, 2015, after Pope Francis (left) passed through the Holy Door in St. Peter's Basilica, Emeritus Pope Benedict followed, helped by his personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein)
I want to take just one question and answer from the interview as it contains a matter that gets people 'running to the barricades' if mentioned in connection with Pope Francis but here we have Benedict speaking without such inhibitions. I have highlighted the sentence in question! Fr. Servais: In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola does not use the Old Testament images of revenge, as opposed to Paul (cfr. 2 Thessalonians 1: 5-9); nevertheless he invites us to contemplate how men, until the Incarnation, "descended into hell" (Spiritual Exercises n. 102; see. ds iv, 376) and to consider the example of the "countless others who ended up there for far fewer sins than I have I committed" (Spiritual Exercises, n. 52). It is in this spirit that St. Francis Xavier lived his pastoral work, convinced he had to try to save from the terrible fate of eternal damnation as many "infidels" as possible. The teaching, formalized in the Council of Trent, in the passage with regard to the judgment of the good and the evil, later radicalized by the Jansenists, was taken up in a much more restrained way in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (cfr. § 5 633, 1037). Can it be said that on this point, in recent decades, there has been a kind of "development of dogma" that the Catechism should definitely take into account? Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI: There is no doubt that on this point we are faced with a profound evolution of dogma. While the fathers and theologians of the Middle Ages could still be of the opinion that, essentially, the whole human race had become Catholic and that paganism existed now only on the margins, the discovery of the New World at the beginning of the modern era radically changed perspectives. In the second half of the last century it has been fully affirmed the understanding that God cannot let go to perdition all the unbaptized and that even a purely natural happiness for them does not represent a real answer to the question of human existence. If it is true that the great missionaries of the 16th century were still convinced that those who are not baptized are forever lost -- and this explains their missionary commitment -- in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council that conviction was finally abandoned. From this came a deep double crisis. On the one hand this seems to remove any motivation for a future missionary commitment. Why should one try to convince the people to accept the Christian faith when they can be saved even without it? But also for Christians an issue emerged: the obligatory nature of the faith and its way of life began to seem uncertain and problematic. If there are those who can save themselves in other ways, it is not clear, in the final analysis, why the Christian himself is bound by the requirements of the Christian faith and its morals. If faith and salvation are no longer interdependent, faith itself become unmotivated. Lately several attempts have been formulated in order to reconcile the universal necessity of the Christian faith with the opportunity to save oneself without it. I will mention here two: first, the well-known thesis of the anonymous Christians of Karl Rahner. He sustains that the basic, essential act at the basis of Christian existence, decisive for salvation, in the transcendental structure of our consciousness, consists in the opening to the entirely Other, toward unity with God. The Christian faith would in this view cause to rise to consciousness what is structural in man as such. So when a man accepts himself in his essential being, he fulfills the essence of being a Christian without knowing what it is in a conceptual way. The Christian, therefore, coincides with the human and, in this sense, every man who accepts himself is a Christian even if he does not know it. It is true that this theory is fascinating, but it reduces Christianity itself to a pure conscious presentation of what a human being is in himself and therefore overlooks the drama of change and renewal that is central to Christianity. Even less acceptable is the solution proposed by the pluralistic theories of religion, for which all religions, each in their own way, would be ways of salvation and in this sense, in their effects must be considered equivalent. The critique of religion of the kind exercised in the Old Testament, in the New Testament and in the early Church is essentially more realistic, more concrete and true in its examination of the various religions. Such a simplistic reception is not proportional to the magnitude of the issue. Let us recall, lastly, above all Henri de Lubac and with him some other theologians who have reflected on the concept of vicarious substitution. For them the "pro-existence" ("being for") of Christ would be an expression of the fundamental figure of the Christian life and of the Church as such. It is possible to explain this "being for" in a somewhat more abstract way. It is important to mankind that there is truth in it, this is believed and practiced. That one suffers for it. That one loves. These realities penetrate with their light into the world as such and support it. I think that in this present situation it becomes for us ever more clear what the Lord said to Abraham, that is, that 10 righteous would have been sufficient to save a city, but that it destroys itself if such a small number is not reached. It is clear that we need to further reflect on the whole question.
Although this is not the full interview, the Vatican Insider website has now published an item about the interview: Benedict XVI: “It’s mercy that steers us towards God” An interview between Jesuit theologian Jacques Servais and the Pope Emeritus has been published in a book: "Only where there is mercy does cruelty cease to exist, do evil and violence cease to exist. Pope Francis fully shares this line. His pastoral practice finds expression in his continuous references to God’s mercy” The Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI. 16/03/2016 ANDREA TORNIELLI VATICAN CITY “I believe it is a ‘sign of the times’ that the idea of God’s mercy is becoming increasingly central and dominant.” Benedict XVI says so in a book on sale now, titled “Per mezzo della fede. Dottrina della giustificazione ed esperienza di Dio nella predicazione della Chiesa” (“Through the faith. Doctrine of the justification and experience of God in the preaching of the Church” (rough translation), San Paolo editore, pp. 199, €20). The volume, which is edited by the Jesuit Daniele Libanori, contains the conference proceedings from a theological meeting held in Rome last October. At that meeting, Archbishop Georg Gänswein read out the text of an interview between Jesuit theologian Jacques Servais and Ratzinger, on “what faith is and how one comes to believe.” In the interview, Benedict XVI mentions his successor and explores the concept of mercy. Ratzinger starts off by emphasising what the Church is and the fact that the Church did not build itself. “It is about asking the question: what is the faith and how does one come to believe. On the one hand, faith is a deeply personal communication with God, which touches my very core and places me in direct contact with the living God so that I can talk to Him, love Him and enter into communion with Him. At the same time, this highly personal experience is inextricably linked to the community: becoming one of God’s children in the community of pilgrim brothers and sisters is part of the essence of the faith. Paul teaches us that faith comes from listening (fides ex auditu). Listening, meanwhile, involves having a partner. Faith is not a result of reflection, nor is it an attempt to penetrate the inner depths of my being. Both can be present but are insufficient without the act of listening through which, God from the outside calls me, staring with a story created by Him. In order for me to believe I need witnesses who have met God and make Him accessible to me.” “The Church did not build itself,” Ratzinger points out, “it was created by God and is continuously moulded by Him though the sacraments, particularly baptism: I enter the Church not by means of a bureaucratic act but through the sacrament. This means I am received by an outward looking community that did not create itself. These factors must form the basis of pastoral care, which aims to shape the spiritual experience of faithful. It must abandon the idea of a self-producing Church, emphasising the fact that the Church becomes a community in communion with the body of Christ. It must prepare for the encounter with Jesus Christ and bring about His presence in the sacrament.” Responding to another question, the Pope Emeritus speaks about the central importance of mercy. “Mankind today has this vague sensation that God cannot let the majority of humanity take the road of perdition. As such, the concerns people once had regarding salvation have for the most part disappeared. In my opinion, however, there is still a perception that we are all in need of grace and forgiveness, it just exists in a different way. I believe it is ‘a sign of the times’ that the idea of God’s mercy is becoming increasingly central and dominant – starting with Sister Faustina, whose visions in various ways deeply reflect God’s image among today’s mankind and its desire for divine goodness.” “Pope John Paul II,” Ratzinger continues, “felt this impulse very strongly even though this was not always immediately apparent. But it is certainly no coincidence that his last book, which was published just before his death, talks about God’s mercy. Inspired by his experience of human cruelty right from his younger days, he states that mercy is the only true and ultimately efficient reaction against the force of evil. Only where there is mercy does cruelty cease to exist, do evil and violence cease to exist.” “Pope Francis,” Benedict XVI continued, referring to his successor, fully shares this line. His pastoral practice finds expression in his continuous references to God’s mercy. It is mercy that steers us towards God, while justice makes us fearful in his presence. I believe this shows that beneath the veneer of self-confidence and self-righteousness, today’s mankind conceals a profound knowledge of its wounds and unworthiness before God. It awaits mercy. It is certainly no coincidence that people today find the parable of the Good Samaritan particularly attractive. And not just because it strongly highlights the social aspect of human existence, nor just because in it the Samaritan, a non-religious man, seems to act according to God’s will towards religious representatives, while official religious representatives have become immune, so to speak, to God.” “Clearly the people of today like this,” Benedict XVI observes. “But I also find it equally important that deep down, humans expect the Samaritan to come to their rescue that he will bend down and poor oil on their wounds, take care of them and bring them to safety. Essentially, they know they need God’s mercy and gentleness. In today’s tough and technified world where feelings no longer count for anything, expectations are growing for a redeeming love that is given freely. It seems to me that in divine mercy, the meaning of justifying faith is expressed in a new way. Through God’s mercy – which everyone seeks -, it is possible even today to interpret the crux of the doctrine of justification, fully ensuring its relevance.” http://www.lastampa.it/2016/03/16/v...owards-god-tK2kdh2mTaRezhy5HgibEL/pagina.html
This is not Pope Benedict Interview but some comments from the Pope Emeritus dating from September 2015, it is strange that these comments from the Emeritus Pope are online today just few days before Pope Francis Apostolic Exhortation, in no way these comments should be used out of context.
You are mistaken, Aviso. The quotes are from a long 2015 interview with Father Jacques Servais. The interview was conducted during 2015 for a book on the doctrine of justification, and it was read out to a conference in Rome in October of 2015 by Archbishop Georg Gaenswein. This week the book itself was released in Italy and the full text of the interview has been published today, March 17, in Italian, in the Vatican's newspaper, the Osservatore Romano. Robert Moynihan has published the text of the full English translation but it is too long to insert into the forum.
No David and as I said, those are comments,from the Pope Emeritus in September 2015, 6 months ago and they cannot be used out of context, I know Tornielli myself and he was front of me, I would tell to him, Zitto mio frattello, I will not add anything else about this topic, thank you.
The translation of the interview (as published today in Osservatore Romano) is by Robert Moynihan of 'Inside the Vatican' magazine (not to be confused with the 'Vatican Insider' website). The 'Inside the Vatican' website has now posted the full text of the interview at: http://insidethevatican.com/news/newsflash/letter-16-2016-emeritus-pope-benedict-grants-an-interview
