As mentioned previously, Damian is not a theology student, nor is he an italian student, but here is his translation of a letter that Pope Francis wrote to Eugenio Scalfari, one of the founders of the Italian daily La Repubblica which he edited from 1976-1996. He was a founder memer of the Italian Radical Party which persued policies of anti-clericalism and social liberalism. He was an independant member of the Chamber of Deputies during which time he was associated with the Socialist party. He is, as you may have guessed, also an atheist.
~~~
4th September 2013
Dear Mr Scalfari
It is with an attitutude of profound respect that I wanted to answer, even if
only in broad terms, the letter which you addressed to me dated the 7thJuly in The Republica and which you
later embellished in the same paper on the 7th August, by drawing on
some of personal reflections.
Thank you, first
of all, for the attention with which you read the encyclical letter Lumen fidei
. Indeed, the intention of my beloved
predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who conceived and drafted most of it, and from
whom, with gratitude, I inherited it, is directed not only to confirm the faith
of those who already believe in Jesus Christ but also to provoke a sincere and
rigorous dialogue with those who, like the letter’s author, call themselves “a
non-believer for many years concerned and fascinated by the preaching of Jesus
of Nazareth”. I therefore feel it is only positive to pause to talk about
something as important as faith, not only for us individually but also for the
society in which we live, which draws on the preaching and figure of Jesus.
I think that there
are two factors in particular which mean it is our duty to engage in this
valued dialogue. Besides, as is well known, this dialogue was one of the main
goals of the Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII, and the
ministry of the popes who, each with their own concerns and contributions,
since then until today have followed the way laid out by the Council.
The first factor -
as the first pages of the encyclical recall - stems from the fact that, across
recent centuries, there has been a paradox: the Christian faith, whose novelty
and impact on human life from the beginning have been expressed precisely
through the symbol of light, has often been branded as the darkness of
superstition which is opposed to the light of reason. So the Church, caught
between and the culture of Christian inspiration on the one hand, and of the modern
culture of the Enlightenment on the other, has become uncommunicative. Now the
time has come [to resolve this problem], and Vatican II has infact opened this period
with an open minded and unbiased reopening of the doors for a serious and
fruitful meeting.
The second
circumstance, for those seeking to be faithful to the gift of following Jesus in
the light of faith, comes from the fact that this dialogue is not an accessory of
secondary importance to the believer, it is instead an intimate and
indispensable expression of faith. Allow me to quote from the encyiclical on
this very important matter, since the truth to which the faith testifies is
that of love, "clearly faith is not intransigent, but
grows in respectful coexistence with others. One who believes may not be
presumptuous; on the contrary, truth leads to humility, since believers know that,
rather than ourselves possessing truth, it is truth which embraces and
possesses us. Far from making us inflexible, the security of faith sets us on a
journey; it enables witness and dialogue with all. ". It is this spirit that animates the words that I
write to you.
My faith was born
from a personal encounter with Jesus, who has touched my heart and gave a purpose
and a new meaning to my existence. But at the same time this meeting was made
possible by the community of faith in which I lived and through which I gained
access to the intelligence of Sacred Scripture, the new life that flows like
water gushing from Jesus through the sacraments, the fraternity with all people
in the service of the poor, the true image of the Lord. Whilst I am aware that
the immense gift which is faith is preserved in the fragile clay pots of our
humanity, believe me when I say that without the Church, I would not have been
able to encounter Jesus.
It was precisely
from this position, from this personal experience of faith lived within the
Church, that I am comfortable in listening to your questions and to seek, alongside
you, the paths along which we can perhaps begin to make a little progress
together.
Forgive me if I do
not recount step by step the arguments you proposed in the editorial of July 7.
It seems to me more fruitful - or at least is more congenial to me - to get to the
heart of his considerations. I will not go into an explanation of the methods
behind the encyclical, in which you see a lack of a section on the historical
figure of Jesus of Nazareth.
To begin with, I
note that such analysis is not unimportant. The logic that guides the unfolding
of the encyclical is in fact intended to focus attention on the meaning of what
Jesus said and did, and so, ultimately, of what Jesus was and is for us. The letters
of St Paul and the Gospel of John, to which particular reference is made in the
Encyclical, are in fact built on the solid foundation of the messianic ministry
of Jesus of Nazareth: culminating in its completion in his sacrificial death
and resurection.
So we need to be
faced with Jesus, I would say, in the reality and harshness of his story, as
recounted particularly by the oldest gospel, that of Mark. Thus, we note that
the "scandal" that the words and the practices of Jesus caused around
him stem from his extraordinary “authority”, a word taken from the Gospel of
Mark which is not easily translated into Italian. The Greek word is
"exousia", which literally refers to what "comes from being".
Thus, this is not something external or forced, but something that emanates
from within rather than imposing itself. Actually, Jesus strikes and breaks
with what went before him, takes us by surprise with his innovations, starting -
as he himself says - with his relationship with God, whom he familiarly called
Abba, which gives him this "authority" so that he may be sacrificed
for the good of man.
So Jesus preached
"as one who had authority": healed, called his disciples to follow
him, forgave... In the Old Testament all of these things belong to God, and to God
alone. The question that Mark’s Gospel repeats - "Who is this that?"
- comes about because the identity of Jesus is born from the finding of an
authority different from that of the world, an authority that is not intended
to exert power over others, but to serve, to give others freedom and fullness
of life and to do this to the point that people are willing to stake their own
lives, to the point of the experience of misunderstanding, of betrayal, of rejection,
the point of condemnation to death, up to be sealed in the state of abandonment
on the cross. But Jesus remained faithful to God to the end.
And it is
precisely then in Mark’s Gospel, as the Roman centurion exclaims at the foot of
the cross, that Jesus is shown, paradoxically, as the Son of God! Son of a God
who is love and who wants with all his heart, for man, every man, to discover
and live as his true son as well. This, according to Christian belief, is
certified by the fact that Jesus rose: not in order to triumph over those who
rejected him, but to bear witness that God's love is stronger than death, God's
forgiveness is stronger than all sin, and for that message, it is worth spending
one's life, to the end, as a witness to this great gift.
The Christian
faith believes this: that Jesus is the Son of God who came to give his life in
order to open way of love to all. It is for this reason that you are right,
dear Mr. Scalfari, that the Incarnation of the Son of God is the cornerstone of
the Christian faith. Tertullian wrote, "the flesh [of Christ] is the hinge
of salvation". The incarnation, that is the fact that the Son of God
has taken on our flesh and has shared our joys and sorrows, the victories and
defeats of our existence, even to the cries of the cross, experiencing
everything in love and fidelity to Abba, testifies to the incredible love that
God has for every man, in whom he recognizes inestimable value. Each of us,
therefore, is called to turn our gaze on the choice of the love of Jesus, to make
it his way of being, thinking and acting. This is the faith which I described
with all the expressions in my recent encyclical.
In the editorial
of July 7, you ask me also how to understand the originality of the Christian
faith as it hinges precisely on the incarnation of the Son of God , as compared
to other faiths that revolve instead around the absolute transcendence of God.
The originality, I would say, lies in the fact that faith gives us a share in
Jesus, in the relationship he has with God who is Abba and, in this light, the
relationship that he has with all other men, including enemies, in sign of
love. In other words, the sonship of Jesus, as presented in the Christian faith,
is not intended to be an insurmountable obstacle to mark a separation between
Jesus and everyone else, but to tell us that, in Him, all are called to be
children of the Father and brothers amongst ourselves. The uniqueness of Jesus
is for communication, not for exclusion.
Of course, - and this
is not a small thing - the distinction between the religious sphere and the
political sphere that is enshrined in Jesus’s affirmation that we are to "give
to God what is God's and to Caesar what is Caesar's” upon which the history of
the West was laboriously built following from this. The Church, in fact, is
called to sow the yeast and the salt of the Gospel, the love and mercy of God
that reach all men, pointing to the afterlife and the final destination of our
own destiny, whereas civil society and politics approaches the daunting task of
articulating and embodying justice and solidarity, in law and in peace, making
life more humane. For those who live the Christian faith, that does not mean
escaping from the world or research of any hegemony, but it does mean service
to mankind to the whole of mankind and
to all men, starting from the periphery of history and keeping awake the sense
of hope that drives us to do good in spite of everything and to always look further ahead.
At the conclusion
of his first article, you also ask me what to say to our Jewish brothers about
the promise made to them by God: has it come to nothing? It is - believe me - a
question that challenges us radically, as Christians, because, with the help
of God and especially taking the lead from the Second Vatican Council, we have
discovered that the Jewish people is still, the root from which Our Lord was
germinated. During the course of the friendship that I have cultivated along
all these years in Argentina with our Jewish brothers, many times I questioned
God in prayer, especially when reflecting on the memory of the terrible Shoah.
What I can say, with the Apostle Paul, is that never has God's faithfulness to
his covenant with Israel failed, and, through the terrible trials of these
centuries, the Jews have preserved their faith in God. For this, we as a church
but also as the human race, can never be sufficiently grateful to them. It is
precisely by preserving the faith of the God of the Covenant, that they roused
all, along with us Christians to the fact that we are always waiting, like the
pilgrims, for the Lord's return, and that we must therefore always be open to
Him and never hide behind what we have already achieved.
And so I come to the three questions that you put to me in the article of
August 7. It seems to me that, in the first two, what is in your heart is to
understand the Church's attitude toward those who do not share the faith of Jesus.
First of all , you asked if the Christian God forgives those who do not believe
and those who do not seek to do so. Given that - and this is the key thing -
God's mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart,
the solution for those who do not believe in God is to obey their consciences.
Sin happens when one goes against one’s conscience, even for those who have no
faith. To listen to it and to obey it means, in fact, is to make a choice when
faced with what one perceives as good or as bad. And on this decision rides the
goodness or evil of our actions.
Second, you asked me if the belief that there is no absolute at all and
therefore no absolute truth, but only a series of truths relative and
subjective, is an error or a sin. To begin with, I would not speak, not
even to those who believe, of “absolute” truth in the sense that absolutism is
what is untied , what is lacking in any relationship. Now, the truth, according
to Christian belief, is the love of God for us in Jesus Christ. So, the truth
is a relationship! So much so that each of us takes the truth, and expresses it
from within ourselves, from our history and culture, from the situation in which
we lives and so on. This does not mean that truth is subjective and variable,
far from it, but it does mean that it is always given to us but only as a way and
a life. Did not Jesus himself say "I am the way, the truth and the
life"? In other words, the truth is ultimately being one with love, it
requires humility and an openness in order to be sought, welcomed and
expressed. Therefore, we must understand each other according to these terms
and, perhaps, leave the confines of antagonism, of absolutism to post the
question again in depth. I think that there is currently a compelling need to
engage in the peaceful and constructive dialogue for which I hoped at the
beginning of my response.
The last question
asks me if, with the disappearance of man on earth, the ability to think of God
would also disappear. Man's greatness certainly lies in being able to think about
God in order to live in a conscious and responsible relationship with Him, but
the relationship is in between two realities. God - this is my thought and my
experience of this, but how many, yesterday and today, share it! - is not an
idea, however high, or the result of man's thought. God is Reality with the 'R'
capitalized. Jesus reveals it, as does living in a relationship with Him as the
Father of infinite goodness and mercy. God does not depend, therefore, on our thoughts.
Moreover, even with the end of human life on earth - and for the Christian
faith, in any case, this world as we know it is destined to fail - humanity
will not cease existing and will not end, and also, in a manner we do not
understand, even the created universe will persist alongside him. The scriptures
speak of "new heavens and a new earth" and states that, in the end,
in the where and the when which is beyond us, but which we approach in faith, with desire and expectation, God will be "all in all".
Thus, Dear Mr.
Scalfari , I conclude my reflections, stirred by what you wanted to tell me and
to ask me. Welcome them as the tentative and provisional answer, but a sincere
and trusting one, to the invitation to take a walk together. The Church, believe
me, despite all the delays, infidelities, mistakes and sins she may have
committed and can still commit in those who compose it, has no other meaning
and purpose than to live and bear witness to Jesus: He who is was sent from
Abba "to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives
and sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim
the acceptable year of the Lord".
With fraternal closeness,
Damian:
My first response is that it's what Benedict XVI would have said but in soundbytes.
You could see his influence very heavily in the bit about the historical Jesus. It was Ratzinger's exegesis which comprehensively united the Christ of the gospels with the historical Jesus. The talk of scandal is a reminder that today Catholics have to stand up and say unpopular things because we have no choice but to defend Jesus like we would any other brother of ours. His talk about suffering is intensely human and must touch every person who reads it, even in my clunky translation.
As with everything he says, there is nothing new in it, he is faithful to Christ who is unchanging, but the way he says it is decisively new and fresh. Whilst he discusses this explicitly later, it is most clearly demonstrated by his words on Judaism. The idea that our Christian faith benefits from the experience of being in contact with Jews faithful to the Old Covenant is a new paradigm as far as I'm aware and one that I look forward to thinking about further. There's a great American nun, Rosalind Moss, who converted from Judaism who says that the most Jewish thing a Jew can do is become a Catholic. Maybe a closer reexamining of this relationship will teach us more about our Catholic faith and identity. Dom Abihu is fond of saying that we live in a post-Christian Christian society, but maybe in fact we live in a post-Christian Judeo-Christian society and need to relate to it more in terms of judaism than of Christianity to get our universally applicable messages on social justice, abortion, gay marriage, poverty and so forth. I recently found out that we don't use the name of the God liturgically and should not do so in speech out of respect for our jewish brothers, but maybe we could internalise the practice as our own to get a sense of respect for the Holy Name. The Catholic priests actions are echoes of those of the priests in the temple, maybe remembering that would give a fuller understanding of the mass as the sacrifice of Calvary and what that sacrifice means. Maybe a clearer understanding of why we need to do good deeds can come from their concept of "Mitzvah" and thus refute sola fideism.
His emphasis on dialogue as an essential part of our faith reminds me of something Fr Timothy Radcliffe said during a talk that Cosmas and I went to last year. He said that when Jesus is presented with a quandary in the Gospels he pauses and talks to people about it. Obviously he is all knowing so why did he bother to do that? So that we could learn from his doing it that when we don't know what to do we need to engage in dialogue to work it out. This is not something first called for by Vatican II, it was Jesus Himself who did so.
I particularly liked his response to the third question from the August editorial in which humans had ceased to be. He makes it clear that the second coming might happen some time after the extinction of our species and illustrated nicely that we depend on God, not vice versa. The answer to the second question which touched on the nature of truth made me think of one of the antiphons at the Office of Readings for Trinity Sunday which runs "the Father speaks the Truth, the Son is the Truth he speaks and the Holy Spirit is Truth; O blessed Trinity. He also made an important about the nature of truth. I for one certainly believe there to be an absolute truth, but know that I do not have the mind to comprehend it. Since all things in existence and experience are interconnected, it would require an infinitely large mind to do so and there is only one of those in existence. The first of the August questions also outlined a subtle theological point in very approachable terms: that it is possible for there to be objective evil without the perpetrator of that sinning.
His responses to the questions posed in the July article were just as interesting and much more detailed. He makes it clear that we cannot compromise our beliefs when we encounter people of opposing views, but that this should not stand in the way of the fraternity that should come from the common bond of humanity if not from the fact (whether the other person agrees or not) that we are brothers and sisters in Christ because we share a Father. I find it very easy to relate to the birth of his faith, it's certainly where I've found mine.
His discussion of authority was genuinely though provoking and I haven't come to the end of the thought processes it's sparked yet. It is a deeply attractive Catholicism and of course that's as it should be. It is proactive and in the world and on the streets and doing good.
~~~
Cosmas, instead of giving his response to Francis, will respond to Mr Scalfari's question regarding the historicity of the gospels, in a post coming soon.
