How a Train Whistle Brought a Search for God

By Carmen Elena Villa, from Zenit

ROME, DEC. 11, 2009.- Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi has a powerful memory, such that thinking about the discovery of his vocation leads him to a recollection from age four.

ZENIT spoke with the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture for this week's installation of "God's Men." Asked how he discovered his call to the priesthood, the 67-year-old prelate recounted an incident from right after World War II had ended.

Four-year-old Gianfranco saw how the sun was dropping behind a hill and heard a train whistle as it passed by.

"That sound is something melancholic: It makes one think of the idea of departure," he said. "And I remember with extreme mental clarity the experience of a profound sense of the fragility of things. It was something that made me understand the meaning of death, or in any case the fact of not having definitive security here. I believe that element was important in the search for God."

Discerning his vocation during his seminary years, Ravasi recalled how he began to understand his nostalgia for the infinite, which he had always taken as a call to participate in eternity, and as a priest, to bring others to do the same.

"Then, by this time, I felt the choice for God as the choice for the ultimate meaning of life," he explained.

Faith through culture

Ravasi inherited from his mother his passion for reading. From his earliest youth he read Plato, St. Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky: "One sees a fundamental line of those who exalt intuition, illumination more than acquisition," he observed.

The archbishop is also a great music lover, particularly Bach and Mozart, but also Baroque and contemporary styles.

He contends that there is a strong connection between art and spirituality, "because they have the ultimate purpose of discovering through finite instruments -- the word, images, sounds -- and representing the infinite."

So, he noted, "If I wish to understand Christ's passion better, with Bach's 'Passion According to Matthew,' I enter profoundly into a spiritual dimension."

The prelate also confessed his admiration for visual arts, though his inability to create them. "I have so much respect and admiration for the genius that I cannot, I do not want to imitate it because it would be a clumsy thing," he said.

Penning his thoughts

Archbishop Ravasi said he has lost count of the books he has written, but believes in all, they number about 150.

He explained that he likes to write at night: "I don't sleep much -- four hours are enough and it is as if I had rested for eight."

And, the prelate continued, he writes by hand, not with a computer. He confessed that he does not know much about technology (though on Facebook there is a group of his admirers). He is a great researcher but he never uses Google.

Here, too, his memory comes in handy. He admits he can remember the page on which to find something he's read 10 years ago.

"People search on Google for something on hope," the prelate noted, by way of example "and find 58,000 possibilities. What do they do [with those]? Instead, I have perhaps only 300 possibilities, but I know which ones to choose and where."

Called by God

The president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, ordained a priest in the Diocese of Milan in 1966, says he has lived his priestly vocation in three stages: his youth, during which he taught theology for 20 years; the period in which he was prefect of the Ambrosian Library of Milan; and finally the position he now holds in the Roman Curia.

Archbishop Ravasi confessed his current appointment to the Pontifical Council for Culture was a great joy. "It was a new prospect, no longer of Italy but of the universal Church."

When asked what elements cannot be lacking in the life of a priest, the archbishop suggested symbolic places.

The first is a kneeler, he said, because "invocation, prayer, the primacy of grace is essential." Then there is "the work table," where the first book must always be the Bible. Only with these elements can the priest "go out to the square."

Archbishop Ravasi said he considers his temperament to be pessimistic and acknowledged that he tends to dissatisfaction with human fragility, but he affirmed that serving Christ through culture is a mission that fulfills him entirely, and an excellent instrument to dialogue with the secular world.

Because of this, he describes his priesthood as "very serene, very joyful, despite the difficulties."

"More beautiful than the beach" -- Volunteering at the Meeting in Riminit

by Brandon Vaidyanathan

domenica 17 gennaio 2010

Why would people pay good money to spend a week of their vacations working long, tiring hours, often in mundane tasks such as sweeping floors or waiting tables?

I had wondered about this ever since, a few years ago, I came across descriptions of the curiously-titled Meeting for Friendship Among the Peoples. A week-long cultural festival of massive proportions. 700,000 plus attendees. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists, Agnostics. Renowned personalities: Pope John Paul II, Josef Ratzinger, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama , Emmanuel Levinas, Lech Walesa, José Carreras, Simone Weil, George Smoot, Steven Beckwith, and more. Exhibitions and presentations on an extraordinarily vast array of topics—astronomy, agriculture, chemistry, economics, history, international development, literature, medicine, politics, theology. Soccer tournaments and bicycle races. And all supported by the dedication of more than 3000 volunteers. But what, I wondered, generates such a commitment?

“Come and see,” people would tell me. And so I did. I attended the Meeting in 2008, and in the process, interviewed nearly 100 volunteers between ages 18 to 80, in an attempt to understand what the event means to the people who sustain it.

One curious finding was the difference in the ways in which younger and older volunteers spoke about why they volunteered.

Younger folks I spoke to primarily insisted on the pragmatic value of volunteering at the Meeting. For example, many claimed that the choice to volunteer was merely a way to organize their time at the Meeting: there are so many events and exhibitions that without structure, one would very easily feel exhausted. So volunteering gives you structure and routine, forcing you to make choices only with your limited free time.

I found this reason odd. While nearly everyone I spoke to said they were struck—even deeply moved—by exhibits and “encounters” they attended, many volunteers said that they didn’t get to see all the presentations and exhibits they wanted to. Many, during their breaks, were so exhausted that they would lie sprawled on couches or on the floor. Some said the hotels they were staying in were ghastly, sometimes with roaches and no running water, so they were left very exhausted by the end of the event. Yet, they insisted, it was all worth it. But why?

It is not that such gratitude and faith were absent among younger volunteers. Rather, such factors were more common in the responses of older volunteers, who perhaps had less need to defend their decisions in pragmatic ways.

Most volunteers emphasized the universality of the Meeting—it was an event for everyone—and most of them insisted that it was not a “religious” event, but rather, a “cultural” or “human” event. Yet, they also stressed that it was distinctly Christian. “It is a beautiful and visible form of a culture that is distinctly Christian… The fact of Christ touches all factors of life—all the exhibits,” said one student. As a result, as one middle-aged woman put it, volunteering at the Meeting, year after year, was “more beautiful than going to the beach.”

Younger volunteers offered another pragmatic reason: spending time with one’s friends. They themselves had often been first motivated to volunteer at the event because other friends they trusted had invited them. “Friendship among peoples” surely was being generated at the event—for example, in conversations between Israeli and Palestinian foreign ministers, or between Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist theologians. But the people I spoke to said that they rarely ever made new friendships at the event. It was mainly an occasion to deepen existing friendships, which plausibly could happen anywhere else.

A more telling reason might lie in their insistence that their participation was “not altruism”; they wanted to downplay any allure of selflessness that volunteering might suggest. Rather, each one insisted, there was something in it “for me”—something which benefitted them personally. Volunteering at this event contributed to their growth, to their happiness; it was enriching; it broadened their horizons. But it was not simply the experience of different cultural events and activities. They also learned something about how to work—a different attitude towards work that they could take back into their daily lives. Many said they had learned to see work at the Meeting as “building a cathedral,” where the simplest actions done out of love and fidelity contributed to something great.

It was this sense of building something great together, of sharing something with the world that was the fruit of “the experience of a people,” that older volunteers were more quick to emphasize. There was no attempt to provide pragmatic justification. More prominent among older volunteers was a sense of gratitude and their desire to communicate it. One elderly gentleman, constructing one of the stages before the event (during what is called the Pre-Meeting), said that he was building “la nostra casa.” This was their home, into which they wished to receive the world with hospitality. What they were building, they were willing to say more explicitly, was a space in which to encounter Christ, who was at the source of their friendships, and who had generated their companionship and their culture.

The key to understanding their commitment may lie in one factor that young and old volunteers alike agree on as characteristic of their experience of the event: “la bellezza.” Beauty. They would refer to the beauty of art or astronomy, the beauty of harmony in diversity, the beauty of people who share their deepest struggles and passions, the beauty of friendship, or the beauty of Christ.

Beauty, unlike other pleasures we experience, is something we never tire of. It is perhaps this inexhaustible quality that serves to sustain both its attraction and commitment to it. For these volunteers, it also serves as a constant provocation, inciting them to seek its origin, which is something about which they have little uncertainty. In the words of one student, “In the meeting, the Christian experience is made concrete through works: meetings, exhibits, etc. This strikes people. The first aspect is aesthetic. From here, we can arrive at the root: it is Christ who generates all this.”

reprinted from Il Sussidiario

Christian Experience

The Christian experience and that of the Church are one, single, vital act, in which a triple factor is at work, as follows:

a) An encounter with an objective fact which has an origin independent of the person having the experience. The existential reality of this fact or event is a community that can be documented, like every reality which is fully human. This community has an authority expressed through a human voice in judgments and directives, constituting criteria and meaning.

All forms of Christian experience, even those lived in the innermost recesses of the soul, refer in some way to an encounter with the community and to its authority.

b) The ability to properly perceive the meaning of that encounter. The value of the fact which we encounter transcends our power to understand so much so that an act of God is required for an adequate understanding. The same gesture by which God makes His presence known to humanity in the Christian event also enhances a person's potential for knowledge, raising him up to the exceptional reality to which God attracts him. We call this the grace of faith.

c) An awareness of the correspondence between the meaning of the fact that we encounter and the meaning of our own existence, between the reality of Christ and the Church and the reality of our own person, between the encounter and our own destiny. It is the awareness of this correspondence that brings about the growth of the self, an essential component of experience.

Above all, in the Christian experience one sees clearly that in an authentic experience, human self-consciousness and capacity for criticism are engaged, and that this is very different from a mere impression or a sentimental echo.

It is within this verification of Christian experience that the mystery of the divine initiative exalts human reason. Freedom is at work in this verification. We cannot register or recognize the glorious correspondence between the presence of the mystery and our dynamism as human beings unless we have first accepted and are fully aware of our own radical dependence, of the fact that we are "made." This awareness constitutes our simplicity, purity of heart, the poverty of spirit.

The drama of our freedom is entirely contained in this poverty of spirit, a drama so deep that when it happens, it is nearly hidden. (from Chapter 3, pp. 98–102, of The Risk of Education by Monsignor Luigi Giussani)

Greater than sin

Traces - Communion and Liberation International Magazine - April 2010, Editorial

POPE LETTER

There would be much to discuss about the events that led Benedict XVI to
write his Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, and we could do this by
starting from the facts, the numbers, and the data that, if looked at
attentively, reveal a reality much less enormous than appears in the
ferocious media campaign. Or, we could start from the contradictions of
those who, in the same newspaper, denounce certain wicked deeds, but
after a few pages justify everything and everybody, especially in matters of
sex. We could do this, and perhaps it would help to understand the context
of a Church really under attack, whatever its errors may be. Only the
Pope’s humble and courageous gesture pointed attention toward the heart
of the question.

Clearly, there is a wound, a very serious one, one of the kind that provoked
Christ (and His vicars, too) to use fiery words (“Whoever causes one of
these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him to
have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the
depths of the sea.”).

There is filth in the Church. Joseph Ratzinger himself said so during the
Way of the Cross at Rome’s Coliseum five years ago, shortly before being
elected Pope and, realistically, he has never stopped recalling the fact
since. Sin is there, grave sin. Evil is there, along with the abyss of pain that
evil carries with it, and everything possible has to be done, and with
firmness, to stem the evil and to make amends for that pain. The Pope is
already doing this, and his letter reiterates it strongly when it asks the
guilty to “answer for it before Almighty God and before properly
constituted tribunals.”

This is precisely why the true heart of the question, the forgotten focus,
lies elsewhere. Alongside all the limitations and within the Church’s
wounded humanity, is there or is there not something greater than sin,
something radically greater than sin? Is there something that can shatter
the inexorable weight of our evil? Is there something that, as the Pope
writes, “has the power to forgive even the greatest of sins, and to bring
forth good even from the most terrible evil”?

“This is the point: God was moved by our nothingness,” Fr. Giussani said
in the phrase quoted on the CL Easter Poster. “Not only that. God was
moved by our betrayal, by our crude, forgetful, and treacherous poverty,
by our pettiness... It’s compassion, pity, passion. He had pity on me.” This
is what the Church brings to the world, and certainly not because of its
members’ merit, goodness, or even less because of their coherence: God’s
compassion for our pettiness, something greater than our limitations, the
only thing infinitely greater than our limitations. If we don’t start from
here, we cannot understand at all; everything goes mad, literally.

We, too, have had moments when we have dodged that compassion, and
run away from it. At times, it is in the Church itself that faith is reduced to
ethics, and morality is reduced to an impossible lonely recourse to laws, as
if the need of that embrace were something to be ashamed of. But if we
forget Christ, if we do away with the wholly different measure that He
introduces into the world now, through the Church, then we no longer
have the terms on which to judge the Church.

Then it becomes easy to mistake attention for the victims and regard for
their history for a conniving silence, and prudence toward the guilty
parties, true or presumed–perhaps accused on the basis of rumors
emerging after decades–for the will to “cover up” (sadly, this has
sometimes been the case). Then, it is almost inevitable to keep arguing
about celibacy without even touching on the real value of virginity. And it
becomes impossible to understand why the Church can be hard and
motherly at the same time with the priests who go wrong. It can punish
them severely and ask them to serve their sentence and make amends for
the evil (it has already done so in the past, and will always do so), but
without snapping, if possible, that thread that binds them, because it is the
only thing that can redeem them. It can ask its children to “be perfect as
your heavenly Father is perfect, not so as to demand of them an impossible
reprehensibility, but so as to remind them of a tension to live the same
mercy with which God embraces us” (“be merciful as your heavenly
Father is merciful”).

This is why the Church can educate, which, in the end, is the real question
being challenged by those who are accusing it (“See, even the priests do
wrong, and badly wrong. How can we trust them with our children?”), as if
the Church’s being a teacher all depended on the behavior of her children,
and not on Christ, on that Presence which–amidst all the errors and horrors
committed–makes possible in the world an embrace like that of Chagall’s
Prodigal Son that appears on the Easter Poster. There, alongside Fr.
Giussani’s phrase, there is another, by Benedict XVI: “Conversion to
Christ ultimately means this: to exit the illusion of self-sufficiency in order
to discover and accept one’s own need–the need of His forgiveness and
His friendship.”

This is the embrace of Christ, in our wounded and needy humanity, far
greater than the evil we can do. If the Church, with all its limitations, had
not this to offer to the world, especially to the victims of those barbarities,
then we would be lost—because the evil would still be there, but it would
be impossible to overcome it.

Ours is the Church of the saints

from The Heroic Face of Innocence, "Joan, Heretic and Saint," by Georges Bernanos:

"Who does not long for the strength to set out on so glorious an adventure? For sanctity is an adventure; it is indeed the only adventure. Those who have once realized this have found their way to the very heart of the Catholic faith; they have felt in their mortal flesh the shuddering of another terror than the terror of death: the shudder of supernatural hope. Our Church is the Church of the saints. But who worries about the saints? We want them to be old, full of experience and worldly wisdom; and most of them are children. And childhood is alone against everyone. The know-alls shrug their shoulders and smile: what saint ever had much to say for the Churchmen? But what have the Churchmen got to do with it? What contact with the most heroic among mankind has Mr. So-and-so, who is convinced that the Kingdom of Heaven can be won like a seat in the French Academy, by treating everyone tactfully? God did not make the Church for the prosperity of the saints, but that she might hand down their memory; He made her that the world might not lose, with the divine miracle, a torrent of honor and poetry. What saints have the other churches? Ours is the Church of the saints. Whom would you entrust with the charge of this flock of angels? History alone, if left to itself, would have crushed them with its harsh, restricted realism and its summary methods. Our Catholic tradition, without harming them, sweeps them into the full flood of its universal rhythm. They are all there -- St. Benedict with his raven, St. Francis with his lute and his Provençal songs, Joan with her sword, Vincent with his shabby soutane -- and the newcomer, so strange, so hidden, invoked by contractors and simoniacs, and smiling her incomprehensible smile -- Teresa of the Child Jesus. Would one have wished them, during their lifetime, to be kept in glass cases, addressed in rounded periods, knelt to, honored with incense? Such things are all right for Canons. But the saints lived and suffered like us. They bore the full weight of their load, and many of them, without relinquishing it, lay down under it to die. Those of us who dare not yet take to ourselves what was holy and divine in their example, can at least find in it a lesson in heroism and honor. But is there one among us who would not blush to stop short so soon and leave them to follow the endless stretch of road alone? Is there one who could wish to spend his life pondering the problem of evil rather than dashing forward? Who will refuse to liberate the earth? Our Church is the Church of the saints. The whole vast machinery of wisdom, strength, supple discipline, glory and majesty, is of itself nothing unless it is animated by love. Yet the lukewarm turn to it only for a guarantee against the risks of the divine. No matter! The smallest little boy in the catechism class knows that the blessing of all the Churchmen put together can only bring peace to those who are ready to receive it -- the souls of good will. No rite can dispense us from loving. Our Church is the Church of the saints. Nowhere else could one even imagine the adventure -- an adventure so human! -- of a little heroine who one day passed quietly from the stake of the Inquisition to Paradise, under the noses of a hundred and fifty theologians. "If we have reached the point" (wrote Joan's judges to the Pope) "where sorceresses who prophesy falsely in the name of God, like a certain female taken prisoner within the diocese of Beauvais, are better received by the thoughtless populace than are their pastors and doctors, then all is lost: religion will perish, faith will fail, the Church will be trodden underfoot, and the iniquity of Satan will prevail throughout the earth!" ... And behold, rather less than five centuries later, the image of the sorceress was exposed for veneration in St. Peter's in Rome -- painted, it is true, as a warrior, and without tabard or divided skirt! -- while a hundred feet below her, Joan might have seen, lying prostrated, the tiny figure of a man in white, who was the Pope himself. Our Church is the Church of the saints. From the Pope down to the little altar-boy drinking the wine left over from the cruets, everyone knows that there are not many famous preachers in the Calendar -- not many priest-diplomatists. The only people to question this are the respectable believers with stomachs and gold chains, who think that the saints are in far too much of a hurry, and who would like to go to Heaven with decent deliberation, just as they walk up to the church-wardens' pew, with the parish priest for company. Our Church is the Church of the saints. We may respect the Commissariat Service, the Provost Marshal, the staff officers and the cartographers, but our hearts are with the men on ahead; our hearts are with those who get killed. There is not one of us shouldering his burden -- his country, his job, his family -- not one of us with our grief-worn faces and our roughened hands, with the unending boredom of our daily life, of daily bread to be fought for, and the honor of our homes to be defended -- there is not one who will ever have enough theology to become even a Canon. But we have enough to become saints. We can leave it to others to administer the Kingdom of God in peace. We have our hands full already, wresting each hour from the day, one by one, with vast labor -- each hour of the interminable day, until that looked-for hour, that unique hour, when God will deign to breathe upon His exhausted creature. O radiant Death, O true dawn! Let others look to the spiritual side of things, argue about it, legislate about it; it is the temporal that we hold in both our hands: we hold in both hands the temporal Kingdom of God. We hold the temporal heritage of the saints. For there were blessed along with us the corn and the wine, the stone of our thresholds and the roof where the dove build her nest; with us were blessed our poor beds full of dreams and forgetfulness; the highroad down which the country carts go squeaking; the young men with their pitiless laughter, and the maidens weeping at the fountain's brink. And ever since then -- ever since God Himself has visited us -- is there anything in this world which our saints should not have taken back: is there anything at all which they cannot give?"

"A decadent Christianity and one of its own children"

Moses and the Burning Bush, by Marc Chagall

from The Priority of Christ, by Fr. Robert Barron (pp 12-16):

There have in recent years been numerous accounts of the etiology of modernity. Jürgen Habermas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Milbank, Colin Gunton, and Louis Dupré, among many others, have offered explanations of the transition from the premodern to the modern. I subscribe to the proposal that liberal modernity can best be seen as an energetic reaction to a particular and problematic version of nominalist Christianity. Early modernity saw itself as a salutary response to oppressive and obscurantist strains in Christian culture, but since it was reacting to a corruption of true Christianity, it itself became similarly distorted and exaggerated. As a result, the two systems settled into a centuries-long and terribly unproductive warfare. Even when the two attempted a reconciliation (as in all forms of liberal Christianity in the past two centuries), the results were less than satisfactory, precisely because each party was itself a sort of caricature.

The trouble began with Duns Scotus’s option for a univocal conception of being in contradistinction to Thomas Aquinas’s analogical understanding. For Thomas, God, as the sheer act of to-be itself (ipsum esse subsistens), is that through which all creatures exist. What follows epistemologically from this metaphysical claim is that the meaning of “to-be,” in reference to God and creatures, must be analogical, with God as primary analogue and created things as secondary. In accord with this intuition, Aquinas maintained consistently throughout his career that God is inescapably mysterious to the human intellect, since our frame of reference remains the creaturely mode of existence, which bears only an analogical resemblance to the divine mode of being. We may say that God exists, but we’re not quite sure what we mean when we say it; the “cash value” of the claim that God exists is that there is a finally mysterious source of the to-be of finite things.

In an effort to make the to-be of God more immediately intelligible, Duns Scotus proposed a univocal conception of existence, according to which God and creatures belong to the same basic metaphysical category, the genus of being. Though God is infinite and therefore quantitatively superior to any creature or collectivity of creatures, there is nevertheless no qualitative difference, in the metaphysical sense, between the supreme being, God, and finite beings. Whereas Aquinas insisted that God is categorizable in no genus whatsoever, Scotus held that God and creatures do belong together to a logical category that, in a real sense, transcends and includes them. The implications of this shift are enormous and, to my mind, almost entirely negative. If the analogical conception of being is rejected, creatures are no longer seen as participating in the divine to-be; instead, God and creatures are appreciated as existing side by side, as beings of varying types and degrees of intensity. Furthermore, unanchored from their shared participation in God, no longer grounded in a common source, creatures lose their essential connectedness to one another. Isolated and self-contained individuals (God the supreme being and the many creatures) are now what is most basically real.

Scotus’s intuition was confirmed a generation later by his Franciscan successor William of Occam. Congruent with his nominalism, which denied ontological density to the unifying features of being, Occam held that there is nothing real outside of disconnected individual things illas partes absolutas nulla res est. As for Scotus so for Occam, God and creatures are set side by side, joined only through a convention of logic that assigns them to the category of “beings.” A consequence of this conception is that God and finite things have to be rivals, since their individualities are contrastive and mutually exclusive. Just as a chair is itself precisely in the measure that it is no other creaturely thing, so God is himself only inasmuch as he stands over and against the world he has made, and vice versa. Whereas in Aquinas’s participation metaphysics the created universe is constituted by its rapport with God, on Occam’s reading it must realize itself through disassociation from a competitive supreme being. A further concomitant of this individualistic ontology is voluntarism. Since the metaphysically dense and natural link between God and creatures has been attenuated, any connection between the divine and the nondivine has to be through will. God’s relation with his rational creatures is therefore primarily legalistic and arbitrary. This understanding of divine power influenced Occam’s conception of the human will as well. Finite freedom is, for him, absolute spontaneity, an action prompted by nothing either interior or exterior to the subject. Accordingly, human power is a distant mirror of divine power: both are self-contained, capricious, absolute, and finally irrational. The most obvious practical consequence of this nominalist and voluntarist metaphysics is that divine and human freedom find themselves pitted against one another, God imposing himself arbitrarily on a necessarily reluctant and resentful humanity.

Both Martin Luther and John Calvin were formed according to the principles of late-medieval nominalism, and one does not have to look far to see evidence of that formation in their writings. A distant and majestic God who chooses, apparently in complete arbitrariness, that some be saved and others be damned is on clear display in Calvin’s Institutes, and a God whose power effectively trumps the freedom and integrity of the human will is readily apparent in Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will. Was the Reformation, at least to some degree, a radical ratification of the breakdown of an analogical conception of being?

From at least the time of Étienne Gilson, a number of scholars have acknowledged the important relationship between early modernity and medieval culture. I follow Colin Gunton and John Milbank’s suggestion that the modern can be viewed as a sharp reaction to precisely the elements in late-medieval Christianity that I have been highlighting. Many of the early modern philosophers called for a Heraclitean revolt of the many individuals against the Parmenidean imposition of divine demands, especially as those were made concrete in the church and in traditional culture. Martha Nussbaum, one of the most articulate contemporary defenders of the liberal/modern perspective, says that liberalism is essentially the valorization of the prerogatives of the individual subject, more precisely, an affirmation of that subject’s right to choose, even the meaning of his or her own life. What is the enemy of this freedom? For many of the fathers of modernity, it is nothing other than those traditional institutions (supported by the voluntarist conception of God) that bind the will and quash individual initiative and imagination.

We can see this paradigmatically in Descartes’s affirmation of the epistemological primordiality and meaning-creating capacity of the cogito. Dupré has remarked that subjectivism as such is not a distinctive quality of the modern, for no one was more subjective than Plato, Plotinus, or Augustine. Rather, it is the claim that the subject is itself the ground and measure of meaning and value. This is what we find in René Descartes’s insistence that all sense experience, all received ideas and traditions, and the very existence of God be brought before the bar of subjectivity for adjudication and evaluation. And we can see it, too, in Immanuel Kant’s claim that the moral life is grounded neither in the objectivity of nature nor in any hetereonomous law, but rather in the self-legislation of the categorical imperative. It is furthermore apparent in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conviction that the only legitimate form of government is a democracy so pure that obedience to law is coincident with obedience to self. It comes to perhaps clearest expression in Friedrich Nietzsche’s uncompromising elevation of the prerogatives of the will (a perfect mirror of the voluntarist divine will in Occam) and the concomitant need of that heroic will to put the competitive God to death.

Lest all of this seem too abstractly philosophical, the modern preference for the freedom of the individual is no more baldly and forcibly defended than in the U.S.Supreme Court’s judgment in the case of Casey v. Planned Parenthood : “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” This judicial formulation is an almost perfect exemplification of Jean-Paul Sartre’s archetypically modern dictum that existence (concrete freedom) precedes essence (meaning and value).

In all of this modern assertiveness, we see the reaction of the many against the one, of individuals against the tyranny of institutions and of that threatening Other lurking, acknowledged explicitly or not, behind them. In my judgment, this tension is the finally unproductive warfare between the grandmother and the Misfit [in Flannery O'Connors short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"], between a not very convincing form of Christianity and the opponent to whom it naturally gave rise. Modernity and decadent Christianity are enemies in one sense, but in another sense, they are deeply connected to one another and mirror one another. In most of the disputes between Christianity and modernity, we have advocates of the prerogatives of the voluntarist God facing down advocates of the voluntarist self. A central argument of this book amounts to “a plague on both your houses,” for I am convinced that both need to be saved, precisely by that person who throws everything off, including and especially the competitive understanding of God and the world that produced the conflict between them in the first place.

Nizhny Novgorod Burning bush.jpg Неопалимая Купина. Nizhny Novgorod, The Virgin of the Burning Bush.

Memory Anchored in the sign

from Morality: Memory and Desire, by Luigi Giussani:

The Christian life depends upon the eucharistic sacrament as a spring or a source out of which can be drawn a motivation that is sufficient for real moral commitment (cf. 1 Corinthians 10:14-22). It is from within the context of such an offering that a correct Christian attitude on morality is formed (cf 1 Corinthians 11:17-26).

However, the great sign that is the Eucharist is caught up and enlarged in an even greater sign, the Church, the only truly adequate sign of the Presence of "the fullness of him who fills all in all" (Ephesians 1:23).

This "body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, grows and upbuilds itself in love" (Ephesians 4:16). This Body is the place where morality arises and is nourished and grows in love.

To awaken the moral conscience of somebody is a reality that belongs totally to the unity in which all Christians live as brothers through baptism (cf Galatians 3:26-27 : "For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ"). This unity is preserved and developed by authority (cf. Ephesians 2:20 : "built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets") and its purpose is to stimulate a kind of self-expression that is exercised for the good of the whole community. All this is the true basis for a real pedagogy in Christian morality.

The immanence of the mystery of community, to the extent that it is recognized, loved, and participated in, penetrates our being as if by osmosis with new moral standards and new moral sensitivity (pp 172-173)

Bono, theologian

The following exchange between Bono and Assayas took place just days after the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, an act of terrorism that left 191 dead and more than 1,800 wounded. The two men were discussing how terrorism is often carried out in the name of religion when Bono turned the conversation to Christianity, expressing his preference for God's grace over "karma," offering an articulate apologetic for the deity of Christ, and giving a clear presentation of the gospel message.

Bono: My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ. Christ teaches that God is love. What does that mean? What it means for me: a study of the life of Christ. Love here describes itself as a child born in straw poverty, the most vulnerable situation of all, without honor. I don't let my religious world get too complicated. I just kind of go: Well, I think I know what God is. God is love, and as much as I respond [sighs] in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that's my religion. Where things get complicated for me, is when I try to live this love. Now that's not so easy.

Assayas: What about the God of the Old Testament? He wasn't so "peace and love"?

Bono There's nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is. I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery. The children of God are running amok, wayward. Maybe that's why they're so relatable. But the way we would see it, those of us who are trying to figure out our Christian conundrum, is that the God of the Old Testament is like the journey from stern father to friend. When you're a child, you need clear directions and some strict rules. But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross.

Assayas: Speaking of bloody action movies, we were talking about South and Central America last time. The Jesuit priests arrived there with the gospel in one hand and a rifle in the other.

Bono I know, I know. Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building. [laughs] A list of instructions where there was once conviction; dogma where once people just did it; a congregation led by a man where once they were led by the Holy Spirit. Discipline replacing discipleship. Why are you chuckling?

Assayas: I was wondering if you said all of that to the Pope the day you met him.

Bono Let's not get too hard on the Holy Roman Church here. The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there. The physical experience of being in a crowd of largely humble people, heads bowed, murmuring prayers, stories told in stained-glass windows …

Assayas: So you won't be critical.

Bono No, I can be critical, especially on the topic of contraception. But when I meet someone like Sister Benedicta and see her work with AIDS orphans in Addis Ababa, or Sister Ann doing the same in Malawi, or Father Jack Fenukan and his group Concern all over Africa, when I meet priests and nuns tending to the sick and the poor and giving up much easier lives to do so, I surrender a little easier.

Assayas: But you met the man himself. Was it a great experience?

Bono … [W]e all knew why we were there. The Pontiff was about to make an important statement about the inhumanity and injustice of poor countries spending so much of their national income paying back old loans to rich countries. Serious business. He was fighting hard against his Parkinson's. It was clearly an act of will for him to be there. I was oddly moved … by his humility, and then by the incredible speech he made, even if it was in whispers. During the preamble, he seemed to be staring at me. I wondered. Was it the fact that I was wearing my blue fly-shades? So I took them off in case I was causing some offense. When I was introduced to him, he was still staring at them. He kept looking at them in my hand, so I offered them to him as a gift in return for the rosary he had just given me.

Assayas: Didn't he put them on?

Bono Not only did he put them on, he smiled the wickedest grin you could ever imagine. He was a comedian. His sense of humor was completely intact. Flashbulbs popped, and I thought: "Wow! The Drop the Debt campaign will have the Pope in my glasses on the front page of every newspaper."

Assayas: I don't remember seeing that photograph anywhere, though.

Bono Nor did we. It seems his courtiers did not have the same sense of humor. Fair enough. I guess they could see the T-shirts.

Later in the conversation:

Assayas: I think I am beginning to understand religion because I have started acting and thinking like a father. What do you make of that?

Bono: Yes, I think that's normal. It's a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma.

Assayas: I haven't heard you talk about that.

Bono I really believe we've moved out of the realm of Karma into one of Grace.

Assayas: Well, that doesn't make it clearer for me.

Bono You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It's clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I'm absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that "as you reap, so you will sow" stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff.

Assayas: I'd be interested to hear that.

Bono That's between me and God. But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep s---. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.

Assayas: The Son of God who takes away the sins of the world. I wish I could believe in that.

Bono But I love the idea of the Sacrificial Lamb. I love the idea that God says: Look, you cretins, there are certain results to the way we are, to selfishness, and there's a mortality as part of your very sinful nature, and, let's face it, you're not living a very good life, are you? There are consequences to actions. The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That's the point. It should keep us humbled… . It's not our own good works that get us through the gates of heaven.

Assayas: That's a great idea, no denying it. Such great hope is wonderful, even though it's close to lunacy, in my view. Christ has his rank among the world's great thinkers. But Son of God, isn't that farfetched?

Bono No, it's not farfetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn't allow you that. He doesn't let you off that hook. Christ says: No. I'm not saying I'm a teacher, don't call me teacher. I'm not saying I'm a prophet. I'm saying: "I'm the Messiah." I'm saying: "I am God incarnate." And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet, we can take. You're a bit eccentric. We've had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don't mention the "M" word! Because, you know, we're gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no. I know you're expecting me to come back with an army, and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he's gonna keep saying this. So what you're left with is: either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase. I mean, we're talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. This man was like some of the people we've been talking about earlier. This man was strapping himself to a bomb, and had "King of the Jews" on his head, and, as they were putting him up on the Cross, was going: OK, martyrdom, here we go. Bring on the pain! I can take it. I'm not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me, that's farfetched …

Bono later says it all comes down to how we regard Jesus:

Bono: … [I]f only we could be a bit more like Him, the world would be transformed. …When I look at the Cross of Christ, what I see up there is all my s--- and everybody else's. So I ask myself a question a lot of people have asked: Who is this man? And was He who He said He was, or was He just a religious nut? And there it is, and that's the question. And no one can talk you into it or out of it.

From Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas www.penguin.com

(Note: While the book includes numerous passages of Bono discussing his Christian faith, it also includes occasional salty language from both parties.)

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The charism of Communion and Liberation

“A charism,” Fr Giussani has written, “is an ultimate terminal of the Incarnation, that is, it is a particular way in which the Fact of Jesus Christ Man and God reaches me, and through me can reach others.”

The essence of the charism given to Communion and Liberation can be signaled by three factors.

• first of all, the announcement that God became man (the wonder, the reasonableness, the enthusiasm for this): “The Word was made flesh and dwells among us.”
  
• secondly, the affirmation that this man – Jesus of Nazareth dead and risen – is a present event in a “sign” of “communion,” i.e., of unity of a people guided, as a guarantee, by a living person, ultimately the Bishop of Rome;
  
• thirdly: only in God made man, man, therefore only in His presence and, thus only through – in some way – the experienceable form of His presence (therefore, ultimately only within the life of the Church) can man be truer and mankind be truly more human. (from the CL website)
  

This photo, and the one above, were taken on Saturday, March 24, 2007, during an audience with the Pope on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the pontifical recognition of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation. More photos of this event may be found here.