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ROME . lastampa
“Holy Saturday: the day God was buried; is not this the
day we are living now, and formidably so? Did not our century mark the
start of one long Holy Saturday, the day God was absent, when even the
hearts of the disciples were plunged into an icy chasm that grows wider
and wider?”. So Joseph Ratzinger opened his three famous “meditations”
on Holy Saturday, which many years before his papal election were
already widely used during Holy Week as a precious aid to enter the
mystery of the passion, death and resurrection of Christ
This year, another text signed by Joseph Ratzinger is
projecting its effects on the days of the Easter Triduum. It has been
spread all over the world, with an operation planned, by a media network
largely coinciding with the network of newspapers that on 28 August
last gave rise to the so-called "Operation Viganò", with the request for
resignation presented by Archbishop Viganò himself to Pope Francis
together with the infamous accusations of having "covered up" for the
then US Cardinal Theodor McCarrick, a serial abuser.
Yet, the timing of the circulation of the signed text by
Ratzinger doesn’t seem to fit the modus operandi of the one who is
indicated as the author. The solicitude with which Joseph Ratzinger,
even as Pope, insisted on the centrality of liturgical action in the
life of the Church seems hardly compatible with the idea of placing on
the threshold of Holy Week a text bound in every way to distract and
even upset just so many faithful waiting to celebrate with devotion and
recollection the central mysteries of the Christian faith.
The potential questions about the "notes" attributed to
Ratzinger on the themes of paedophilia and clerical sexual abuse are not
limited to the timing of its spread. The text contains formulas,
memories, references, images (such as that comparing the Church to a
fishing "net" full of good and bad fish) that certainly belong - at
different times - to the memory and past preaching of Joseph Ratzinger.
But only in the final part do there seem to be traces of the prophetic
gaze and of the words of unsettling and comforting spiritual
intelligence - nourished by the Fathers of the Church - with which
Ratzinger has so often looked at the anguish of the fading of faith in
our present time.
Ratzinger was not yet thirty when he realized that the young
people in the parish of Munich, where he was vice-parish, were
attending the church with a substantial strangeness to faith and
Christianity, even though disguised in participation in rites and
practices imposed by social convention. In those years, although marked
by the "ecclesial triumphalism" phenomena, Ratzinger already recognized
that the face of the new paganism was not that of "Eastern atheism", but
that of an "intra-ecclesial paganism", developed in situations in which
the Church was perceived as "an a priori datum of our Western
existence", with a sense of belonging that no longer had anything to do
with the expectation of happiness and the hope of eternal salvation.
In 1969, immediately after the Council, immune from the
newly born triumphalism, the young Council theologian had already
outlined on the microphones of a German radio his "prophecy" on the
future of the Church. With a critical and penetrating outlook at what
was happening (the effects of 1968 were in their rampant phase) he had
foretold a time of crisis, in which the Church would lose "a large part
of its social privileges", would no longer be a "dominant social force"
and would no longer be able "to inhabit many of the buildings it had
built in prosperity". But he had also prefigured this passage as a time
of purification, which would have made the church poor, spiritual and
simplified, easing her way into recognizing her total dependence on the
grace of Christ. To the point of making it "the Church of the
destitute", freed from "sectarian narrow-mindedness" and pompous
stubbornness", to show herself in a more transparent way as "the house
of man, where to find life and hope beyond death". Not "the Church of
political worship, which is already dead, but the Church of faith".
In the "notes" signed by the Pope Emeritus, there is no such
powerful glance at the abyss of clerical sexual abuse. The references
and evaluations - from the most shareable to the most subjective - seem
largely to belong to the genre of the doctrinal "dispute" between
academics. The legitimate and questionable canonical digressions, the
catch phrases, the references to personal polemics offer themselves to
the take-your-stand-game played within the ecclesial debate. Yet they
appear out of register when compared to the apocalyptic – i.e. revealing
- gaze and words with which Joseph Ratzinger, even as Pope, recounted
the de-Christianization of time, combining dizzying realism, clarity of
analysis and comforting hope, against all hope.
Joseph Ratzinger seems in fact unreachable. The chances and
requests to approach him - and to be able to ask him to explain the
"notes" and other recent texts attributed to him – must undergo an
unquestionable selection with extremely effective filters. In the
growing fragility of his body, also witnessed by his last publicly
circulated photos, he lives in the "enclosure of Saint Peterˮ with his
heart and eyes fixed in the mystery that makes the Church live. Only his
most merciless tormentors do not leave him at peace: the gangs, the
apparatuses and the characters - including archbishops and cardinals -
who insist on tugging at him to frame him in the ideological and power
wars with which they are tearing the flesh of Christ apart. In the past
they tried in vain to pull him into their attack on Pope Bergoglio,
trying to pass him off as the "godfather" of the operation-Viganò. They
quickly needed a "manifesto" attributable to Ratzinger to perpetuate
their Continuous Struggle. A manifesto that can be traced back to their
stature, to the reach of their petty and biased guerrillas.
The unholy ferocity with which self-styled
"Ratzinger-supporters" mistreat the Pope Emeritus, using him as the flag
of their operations of power and ecclesiastical politics, is also a
dizzying sign of the condition of the faith and of the Church in the
world, that has made Joseph Ratzinger's heart throb throughout all his
life.
In this context, Pope Francis, in his homily on Palm Sunday,
also placed the time lived by the Church in the light of the mystery of
the Passion of Christ. He recalled the "impressive" silence of Jesus on
the cross, and recalled that in moments of great tribulation it is
necessary to have "the courage to remain silent", holding before the
devil who comes out into the open "the same attitude of Jesus. He knows
that the battle is between God and the prince of this world and that
what is important is not putting our hand to the sword but remaining
firm in faith. It is God’s hour. At the hour that God comes forth to
fight, we have to let him take over. Our place of safety will be beneath
the mantle of the holy Mother of God. As we wait for the Lord to come
and calm the storm, by our silent witness in prayer we give ourselves
and others “an accounting for the hope that is within us".
The Bishop of Rome from Argentina and his Bavarian
"emeritus" share - each in his own way - the same concern and the same
look of faith on the time the Church is living. The people of God are
aware of this through their elective affinity. The People of God protect
with their prayers both the elderly shepherds from the maneuvers of the
clerical cliques and from the "dogs" (St. Paul), including those in
high ecclesiastical uniform. The people of God will also do so during
the rites of Holy Week, when they will see the Lord descend into hell,
into the abyss of death, and then rejoice in the triumph of his
Resurrection. "God is dead", Ratzinger wrote again in his meditations on
Holy Saturday, "and we killed him: are we really aware that this phrase
is taken almost literally from Christian tradition and that often in
our viae crucis we have made something similar resound without realizing
the tremendous gravity of what we said? We killed him, by enclosing him
in the stale shell of routine thinking, by exiling him in a form of
pity with no content of reality, lost in the gyre of devotional phrases,
or of archaeological treasuries (…). When the storm passes we will
realize just how much this small faith of ours was charged with
stupidity. And yet, O Lord, we cannot help shaking you, God, you who
persist in keeping your silence, in sleeping, and we cannot help crying
to you: Wake up, can’t you see we are sinking? Stir yourself, don’t let
the darkness of Holy Saturday last for ever, let a ray of Easter fall,
even on these times of ours, accompany us when we set out in our
desperation towards Emmaus so that our hearts may be enflamed by the
warmth of your nearness".
