Martin Mosebach

[Bernard]

[Bernard]

                     Return to Form

 

The times in which a new form is born are extremely rare in the history of mankind. Great forms are characterized by their ability to outlive the age in which they emerge and to pursue their path through all history’s hiatuses and upheavals. The Greek column with its Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian capitals is such a form, as is the Greek tragedy with its invention of dialogue that still lives on in the silliest soap opera. The Greeks regarded tradition itself as a precious object; it was tradition that created legitimacy. Among the Greeks, tradition stood under collective protection. The violation of tradition was called tyrannis—tyranny is the act of violence that damages a traditional form that has been handed down.

One form that has effortlessly overleaped the constraints of the ages is the Holy Mass of the Roman Church, the parts of which grew organically over centuries and were finally united at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. It was then that the missal of the Roman pope, which since late antiquity had never succumbed to heretical attack, was prescribed for universal use by Catholic Christendom throughout the West. If one considers the course of human history, it is nothing short of remarkable that the Roman Rite has survived the most violent catastrophes unaltered.

Without a doubt, the Roman Rite draws strength and vitality from its origin. It can be traced back to the apostolic age. Its form is intimately connected with the decades in which Christianity was established, the moment in history the Gospel calls the “fullness of time.” Something new had begun, and this newness, the most decisive turning point in world history, was empowered to take shape, take on form. Indeed, this newness came above all in the assumption of form. God the Creator took on the form of man, his creature. This is the faith of Christianity: In Christ all the fullness of God dwells in bodily form, even in that of a dead body. Spirit takes form. From this point on, this form is inseparable from the Spirit; the Risen One and Savior, returning to his Father, retains for all eternity the wounds of his death by torture. The attributes of corporeality assume infinite significance. The Christian Rite, of which the Roman Rite is an ancient part, thus became an incessant repetition of the Incarnation, and just as there is no limb of the human body that can be removed without harm or detriment, the Council of Trent decreed that, with respect to the liturgy of the Church, none of its parts can be neglected as unimportant or inessential without damage to the whole.

It is said that every apparently new thing has always been with us. Alas, this doesn’t seem to be the case. The industrial revolution, science as a replacement for religion, and the phenomenon of the wonderful and limitless increase in money (without a similar increase in its material equivalent) have given rise to a new mentality, one that finds it increasingly difficult to perceive the fusion of spirit and matter, the spiritual content of reality that those who lived in the preindustrial world across thousands of years took for granted. The forces that determine our lives have become invisible. None of them has found an aesthetic representation. In a time that is overloaded with images, they have lost the power to take form, with the result that the powers that govern our lives have an intangible, indeed, a demonic quality. Along with the inability to create images that made even the portrait of an individual a problem for the twentieth century, our contemporaries have lost the experience of reality. For reality is always first seized in a heightened form that is pregnant with meaning.

In a period such as the present, unable to respond to images and forms, incessantly misled by a noisy art market, all experimentation that tampers with the Roman Rite as it has developed through the centuries could only be perilous and potentially fatal. In any case, this tampering is unnecessary. For the rite that came from late antique Mediterranean Christianity was not “relevant” in the European Middle Ages, nor in the Baroque era, nor in missionary lands outside Europe. The South American Indians and West Africans must have found it even stranger, if possible, than any twentieth-century European who complained that it was “no longer relevant”—whereas it was precisely among those people that the Roman Rite enjoyed its greatest missionary successes. When the inhabitants of Gaul, England, and Germany became Catholic, they understood no Latin and were illiterate; the question of the correct understanding of the Mass was entirely independent of a capacity to follow its literal expression. The peasant woman who said the rosary during Mass, knowing that she was in the presence of Christ’s sacrifice, understood the rite better than our contemporaries who comprehend every word but fail to engage with such knowledge because the present form of the Mass, drastically altered, no longer allows for its full expression.

This sad diminution of spiritual understanding is to be expected, given the atmosphere in which the revision of the Roman Rite was undertaken. It was done during the fateful years around 1968, the years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and a worldwide revolt against tradition and authority after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. The council had upheld the Roman Rite for the most part and emphasized the role of Latin as the traditional language of worship, as well as the role of Gregorian chant. But then, by order of Paul VI, liturgical experts in their ivory towers created a new missal that was not warranted by the provisions for renewal set forth by the council fathers. This overreaching caused a breach in the dike. In a short time, the Roman Rite was changed beyond recognition. This was a break with tradition like nothing the Church in its long history has experienced—if one disregards the Protestant revolution, erroneously named “the Reformation,” with which the post-conciliar form of the liturgy actually has a great deal in common.

The break would have been irreparable had not a certain bishop, who had participated in the council (and signed the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy in good faith, assuming that it would be the standard for a “careful” review of the sacred books) pronounced an intransigent “no” to this work of reform. It was the French missionary archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his priestly society under the patronage of Saint Pius X whom we have to thank that the thread of tradition, which had become perilously thin, did not break altogether. This marked one of the spectacular ironies in which the history of the Church is rich: The sacrament, which has as its object the obedience of Jesus to the will of the Father, was saved by disobedience to an order of the pope. Even someone who finds Lefebvre’s disobedience unforgiveable must concede that, without it, Pope Benedict XVI would have found no ground for Summorum Pontificum, his famous letter liberating the celebration of the Tridentine Mass. Without Lefebvre’s intransigence, the Roman Rite almost certainly would have disappeared without a trace in the atmosphere of anti-traditional persecution. For the Roman Rite was repressed without mercy, and that repression, supposedly in the service of a new, “open” Church, was made possible by a final surge of the centralized power of the papacy that characterized the Church prior to the council and is no longer possible—another irony of that era. Protests by the faithful and by priests were dismissed and handled contemptuously. The Catholic Church in the twentieth century showed no more odious face than in the persecution of the ancient rite that had, until that time, given the Church her identifiable form. The prohibition of the rite was accomplished with iconoclastic fury in countless churches. Those years saw the desecration of places of worship, the tearing down of altars, the tumbling of statues, and the scrapping of precious vestments.

If you cannot abide the disobedience of Archbishop Lefebvre—because it is more than a little sinister that something redemptive for the Church should arise directly from the grievous sin of disobedience to ecclesiastical authority—you may comfort yourself with the thought that his act of conscious disobedience on the particular point of the Roman Rite was not that at all. When Pope Benedict had the greatness of soul to issue Summorum Pontificum, he not only reintroduced the Roman Rite into the liturgy of the Church but declared that it had never been forbidden, because it could never be forbidden. No pope and no council possess the authority to invalidate, abolish, or forbid a rite that is so deeply rooted in the history of the Church.

Not only the liberal and Protestant enemies of the Roman Rite but also its defenders, who in a decades-long struggle had begun to give up hope, could barely contain their astonishment. Everyone still had the strict prohibitions of countless bishops echoing in their ears, threats of excommunication and subtle accusations. And one hardly dared draw the conclusion that, in view of Pope Benedict’s correcting of the wrongful suppression of the Roman Rite, Blessed Pope Paul VI had apparently been in error when he expressed his strong conviction that the rite long entrusted to the Church should never again be celebrated anywhere in the world. Benedict XVI did even more: He explained that there was only a single Roman Rite which possesses two forms, one “ordinary” and the other “extraordinary”—the latter term referring to the traditional rite. In this way, the traditional form was made the standard for the newly revised form. The pope expressed the wish that the two forms should mutually fructify and enrich each other. It is therefore natural to assume that the new rite, with its great flexibility and many possible forms of celebration, must draw near to the older, steady, and fixed form of the Roman Rite, which provides no latitude whatsoever for encroachments or modifications of any kind. According to the approach stipulated by Benedict’s letter, the celebrant of the new form of the rite is even required to celebrate the Mass in both forms, and must do so with the same spirit if he does not want to contradict the truth that he is dealing with a single rite in two forms.

Whenever Pope Benedict spoke of a mutual influence and enrichment between the two forms of the rite, he surely did so with an ulterior motive. He believed in organic development in the area of liturgy. He condemned the revolution in the liturgy that coincided with the revolutionary year 1968, and he saw the connection between the liturgical revolution and the cultural one in world-historical terms, for both contradict the ideal of organic evolution and development. He regarded it as a serious offense against the spirit of the Church that the peremptory order of a pope should be taken as warrant to encroach upon the collective heritage of all preceding generations. After decades of use throughout the world, Benedict not only considered it a practical impossibility simply to prohibit the new rite with its serious flaws, but in all likelihood he also perceived that such an act, even if it had been feasible, would have continued along the erroneous path taken by his predecessor, one of reform by fiat. The correct path would be found, so he hoped, in a gradual growing together of the old and new forms, a process to be encouraged and gently fostered by the pope.

This hope of restored liturgical continuity was connected to the concept of a “reform of the reform,” a notion Benedict had already introduced when he was a cardinal. What Ratzinger wished to encourage with the idea of reform of the reform is exactly what the council fathers at Vatican II had in mind when they formulated Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. They wanted to allow exceptions to the use of Latin as the common language of the liturgy, insofar as it should be beneficial to the salvation of souls. That the vernacular was presented as the exception only emphasized the immense significance of Latin as the language of the Church. They imagined a certain streamlining of the rite, such as the elimination of the preparatory prayer at the steps of the altar and the closing Gospel reading, which would have been highly lamentable losses without any noteworthy advantages, but which would not have damaged the essence of the liturgy. Of course they left the ancient offertorium untouched. These prayers over the bread and wine make clear the priestly and sacrificial character of the Mass and are therefore essential. Among these, the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit who will consecrate the offerings, is especially important. According to the apostolic tradition, which includes the eastern Roman Empire, this prayer of consecration is critical.

There can be no question that the council fathers regarded the Roman Canon as absolutely binding. The celebration of the liturgy ad orientem, facing eastward to the Lord who is coming again, was also uncontested by the majority of council fathers. Even those who undertook the Pauline reform of the Mass and who swept aside the will of the council fathers didn’t dare touch this ancient and continuous practice. It was the spirit of the 1968 revolution that gained control of the liturgy and removed the worship of God from the center of the Catholic rite, installing in its place a clerical-instructional interaction between the priest and the congregation. The council fathers also desired no change in the tradition of church music. It is with downright incredulity that one reads these and other passages of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, for their plain sense was given exactly the opposite meaning by the enthusiastic defenders of post-conciliar “development.” One cannot say that Ratzinger’s call for a reform of the reform intended in any way to go back “behind the council,” as the antagonists of Pope Benedict have maintained. As any fair-minded reading of Sacrosanctum Concilium makes clear, the reform of the reform has no goal other than realizing the agenda of the council.

Pope Benedict proceeded very carefully. He pursued his plan through general remarks and observations. While still a cardinal, he let it be known that the demand for celebration of the Eucharist versus populum, facing the congregation, is based in error. He endorsed the scholarly work of the theologian Klaus Gamber, who provided proof that never in her history, aside from a very few exceptions, had the Church celebrated the liturgy facing the congregation. Ratzinger pleaded that, if it is impossible for the altar to be turned around, priests should place a large crucifix on the altar so that they can face it during the prayers of consecration. He fought with varying success for the correction of the words of institution that, with the introduction of the vernacular, had been falsely translated in many places. For example, in contradiction to the wording of the Greek text, one hears from the altar that Christ had offered the chalice of his blood “for all” (a reprehensible presumption of salvation) instead of the correct phrase “for many.” In Germany, the land of the Reformation that most strenuously resisted Ratzinger, the erroneous translation remains uncorrected to this day.

Other attempts at a reform of the reform might have followed these, but all would have had slim chance of success. One of the most important consequences of the Second Vatican Council has been the destruction of the organizational structure of the Church by the introduction of national bishops’ conferences, something entirely alien to classical canon law. This diminishes the direct relationship of each individual bishop to the pope; every Vatican intervention in local abuses shatters when it hits the concrete wall of the respective bishops’ conference. This is what happened recently when the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship called for a return to the celebration of the Eucharist ad orientem. After an outcry of indignation, mainly from English clerics, the request, which was entirely justified, had to be dropped immediately.

Pope Benedict himself undertook no further attempts in this direction. One may well say that he gave up his deeply felt desire for a reform of the reform when he arrived at the decision, in its essence still puzzling, to abdicate. He must have known that few in positions of power in the uppermost reaches of the Church’s hierarchy had pursued the reform of the reform with the same conviction as he did. When he withdrew, he effectively gave up this project. He then had to witness his successor, far from shying away from the issue, actually condemning in quite explicit terms any thought of a reform of the reform. Therefore the greatest achievement of Pope Benedict, at least in a liturgical sense, will remain Summorum Pontificum. With this instrument he accorded the Roman Rite a secure place in the life of the Church, one protected by canon law.

Anyone who thinks that this does not amount to much is simply unaware of the long decades that preceded these official documents. They were, to use the words of Friedrich Hölderlin, “leaden times.” No one who has a clear picture of the state of the present Church and of the world in general could hope that a single pope, during a single pontificate, would be able to correct the defective liturgical development that was encouraged by a mentality antagonistic to spiritual realities. But everyone who worked to keep the Roman Rite alive was aware of the endless obstacles placed in their path. These obstacles have not disappeared everywhere, but it is impossible to ignore the great difference Summorum Pontificum has made. The places where the Tridentine Mass is celebrated today have multiplied. The traditional Roman Rite can now be celebrated in proper churches, which causes many people to forget the cellars and courtyards where those who loved the ancient rite long maintained a fugitive existence. The number of young priests with a love for the Tridentine Mass has increased considerably, as has the number of older priests who have begun to learn it. More and more bishops are prepared to celebrate confirmation and holy orders according to the old rite.

These facts may give little comfort to those who have the misfortune to live in a country where this renewal of the ancient form is nowhere to be seen—and there are more than enough such regions. The time has come to set aside a widespread assumption in the Catholic Church that the liturgy and religious education are in good hands with the clergy. This encourages passivity among the faithful, who believe that they do not have to concern themselves with these matters. This is not so. The great liturgical crisis following the Second Vatican Council, which was part of a larger crisis of faith and authority, put an end to the illusion that the laity need not be involved. We now have a duty to participate in and promote a faithful recovery of the apostolic tradition in all its rich abundance.

The now decades-old movement for the restoration of the Roman Rite has been to a considerable extent a lay movement. The position of priests who support the Roman Rite was and will be strengthened by Summorum Pontificum, and hopefully the cause of the Tridentine Mass will receive further support from the eagerly awaited reconciliation of the Society of St. Pius X with the Holy See. Yet this does not change the fact that it will be the laity who will be decisive in bringing about the success of efforts to reform the reform. The laity of today differs from the laity of forty years ago. They had precise knowledge of the Roman Rite and took its loss bitterly and contested it. The young people who are turning to the Roman Rite today often did not know it as children. They are not, as Pope Francis erroneously presumes, nostalgically longing for a lost time. On the contrary, they are experiencing the Roman Rite as something new. It opens an entire world to them, the exploration of which promises to be inexhaustibly fascinating. It is true that those who discover the Roman Rite today and relish its formal exactness and rigorous orthodoxy are naturally an elite group, yet not in a social sense. Theirs is a higher mystical receptivity and an aesthetic sensitivity to the difference between truth and falsehood. As Johan Huizinga, author of The Waning of the Middle Ages, established nearly a century ago, there exists a close connection between orthodoxy and an appreciation of style.

The vast majority of the faithful have in the meantime never known anything else but the revised Mass in its countless manifestations. They have lost any sense of the spiritual wealth of the Church and in many cases simply are not capable of following the old rite. They should not be criticized on account of this. The Tridentine Mass demands a lifetime of education, and the post-conciliar age is characterized, among other things, by the widespread abandonment of religious instruction. The Catholic religion with its high number of believers has actually become the most unknown religion in the world, especially to its own adherents. While there are many Catholics who feel repelled and offended by the superficiality of the new rite as it is frequently celebrated today, by the odious music, the puritanical kitsch, the trivialization of dogma, and the profane character of new church buildings, the gap that has opened up in the forty years between the traditional rite and the new Mass is very deep, often unbridgeable. The challenge becomes more difficult because one of the peculiarities of the old rite is that it makes itself accessible only slowly—unless the uninitiated newcomer to this ancient pattern of worship is a religious genius. One has never “learned everything there is to learn” about the Roman Rite, because in its very origin and essence this enduring and truly extraordinary form is hermetic, presupposing arcane discipline and rigorous initiation.

If the Tridentine Mass is to prosper, the ground must be prepared for a new generation to receive such an initiation. Pope Benedict disappointed many advocates of the old liturgy because he did not do more for them. He refused the urgent requests to celebrate the Latin Mass at least once as pope, something he had occasionally done while a cardinal. But this refusal stems from the fact that he believed—no matter how welcome such a celebration would have been—that the reinstitution of the old rite, like all significant movements in the history of the Church, must come from below, not as a result of a papal decree from above. In the meantime, the post-conciliar work of destruction has wounded multitudes of the faithful. Unless a change of mind and a desire for a return to the sacred begin to sprout in countless individual hearts, administrative actions by Rome, however well-intentioned and sound, can affect little.

Summorum Pontificum makes priests and the laity responsible for the Roman Rite’s future—if it means a lot to them. It is up to them to celebrate it in as many places as possible, to win over for it as many people as possible, and to disseminate the arcane knowledge concerning its sacred mysteries. The odium of disobedience and defiance against the Holy See has been spared them by Pope Benedict’s promulgation, and they are making use of the right granted them by the Church’s highest legislator, but this right only has substance if it is claimed and used. The law is there. No Catholic can, as was possible not long ago, contend that fostering the Roman Rite runs counter to the will of the Church.

Perhaps it is even good that, despite Summorum Pontificum, the Tridentine Mass is still not promoted by the great majority of bishops. If it is a true treasure without which the Church would not be itself, then it will not be won until it has been fought for. Its loss was a spiritual catastrophe for the Church and had disastrous consequences far beyond the liturgy, and that loss can only be overcome by a widespread spiritual renewal. It is not necessarily a bad thing that members of the hierarchy, in open disobedience to Summorum Pontificum, continue to put obstacles in the way of champions of the Roman Rite. As we learn in the lives of the saints and the orders they founded, the established authorities typically persecute with extreme mistrust new movements and attempt to suppress them. This is one of the constants of church history, and it characterizes every unusual spiritual effort, indeed, every true reform, for true reform consists of putting on the bridle, of returning to a stricter order. This is the trial by fire that all reformers worthy of their name had to endure. The Roman Rite will be won back in hundreds of small chapels, in improvised circumstances throughout the whole world, celebrated by young priests with congregations that have many small children, or it will not be won back at all.

Recapturing the fullness of the Church’s liturgy is now a matter for the young. Those who experienced the abolition and uncanonical proscription of the old rite in the late 1960s were formed by the liturgical praxis of the 1950s and the decades prior. It may sound surprising, but this praxis was not the best in many countries. The revolution that was to disfigure the Mass cast a long shadow ahead of itself. In many cases, the liturgical practice was such that people no longer believed in the mystagogical power of the rite. In many countries, the liturgical architecture of the rite was obscured or even dismantled. There were silent Masses during which a prayer leader incessantly recited prayers in the vernacular that were not always translations of the Latin prayers, and in a number of places Gregorian chant played a subordinate role. Those who are twenty or thirty today have no bad habits of these sorts. They can experience the rite in its new purity, free of the incrustations of the more recent past.

The great damage caused by the liturgical revolution after Vatican II consists above all in the way in which the Church lost the conviction with which all Catholics—illiterate goatherds, maids and laborers, Descartes and Pascal—naturally took part in the Church’s sacred worship. Up until then, the rite was among the riches of the poor, who, through it, entered into a world that was otherwise closed to them. They experienced in the old Mass the life to come as well as life in the present, an experience of which only artists and mystics are otherwise capable. This loss of shared transcendence available to the most humble cannot be repaired for generations, and this great loss is what makes the ill-considered reform of the Mass so reprehensible. It is a moral outrage that those who gutted the Roman Rite because of their presumption and delusion were permitted to rob a future generation of their full Catholic inheritance. Yet it is now at least possible for individuals and for small groups to gradually win back a modicum of un-self-conscious familiarity with even the most arcane prayers of the Church. Today, children can grow into the rite and thus attain a new, more advanced level of spiritual participation.

The movement for the old rite, far from indicating aesthetic self-satisfaction, has, in truth, an apostolic character. It has been observed that the Roman Rite has an especially strong effect on converts, indeed, that it has even brought about a considerable number of conversions. Its deep rootedness in history and its alignment with the end of the world create a sacred time antithetical to the present, a present that, with its acquisitive preoccupations, leaves many people unsatisfied. Above all, the old rite runs counter to the faith in progress that has long gone hand in hand with an economic mentality that is now curdling into anxiety regarding the future and even a certain pessimism. This contradiction with the spirit of our present age should not be lamented. It betokens, rather, a general awakening from a two-hundred-year-old delusion. Christians always knew that the world fell because of original sin and that, as far as the course of history is concerned, it offers no reason at all for optimism. The Catholic religion is, in the words of T. S. Eliot, a “philosophy of disillusionment” that does not suppress hope, but rather teaches us not to direct our hope toward something that the world cannot give. The liturgy of Rome and, naturally, Greek Orthodoxy’s Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom open a window that draws our gaze from time into eternity.

Reform is a return to form. The movement that seeks to restore the form of the Latin Rite is still an avant-garde, attracting young people who find modern society suffocating. But it can only be a truly Christian avant-garde if it does not forget those it leads into battle; it must not forget the multitude who will someday have to find their way back into the abundant richness of the Catholic religion, once the generations who, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, sought the salvation of the Church in its secularization have sunk into their graves.

Rome, Third Sunday of Advent,
“Gaudete,” 2016

Martin Mosebach, a German writer, is the recipient of the Kleist Prize and Georg Büchner Prize. This essay was translated from the German by William Carroll and Graham Harrison.

 

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The times in which a new form is born are extremely rare in the history of mankind. Great forms are . . . .

 

[Bernard]

                    Pope Benedict's Red Thread

         

One shouldn’t speak of a “cult of personality” when describing the papal devotional items that are offered to the hordes of pilgrims and tourists round about Saint Peter’s in Rome: postcards and calendars, coffee cups and silk cloths, plates and plastic gadgets of every kind, always with the picture of the current happily reigning Holy Father—and next to them also those of Popes John Paul II, John XXIII, and even Paul VI. There is only one pope you will not find in any of the souvenir shops—and I mean none, as if there were a conspiracy here. To dig up a postcard with the picture of Benedict XVI requires the tenacity of a private detective. Imperial Rome knew the institution of damnatio memoriae: the extinction of the memory of condemned enemies of the state. Thus, Emperor Caracalla had the name of his brother Geta—after he had killed him—chiseled out of the inscription on the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus. It seems as if the dealers in devotional goods and probably also their customers (for the trade in rosaries also obeys the market laws of supply and demand) had jointly imposed such an ancient Roman damnatio memoriae on the predecessor of the current pope.

It is as if, on this trivial level, should be accomplished that which Benedict himself could not resolve to do after his resignation (disturbing to so many people, profoundly inexplicable and still unexplained)—namely, to become invisible, to enter into an unbroken silence. Those especially who accompanied the pontificate of Benedict XVI with love and hope could not get over the fact that it was this very pope who, with this dramatic step, called into question his great work of reform for the Church. Future generations may be able without anger and enthusiasm to speak about this presumably last chapter in the life of Benedict XVI. The distance in time will place these events in a greater, not yet foreseeable order. For the participating contemporary, however, this distance is not available because he remains defenseless in the face of the immediate consequences of this decision. To speak about Benedict XVI today means first of all trying to overcome these feelings of pain and disappointment.

All the more so, because during his reign this pope undertook to heal the great wounds that had been inflicted on the visible body of the Church in the time after the Council. The party that had assembled against tradition at the Council viewed the compromise formulas that had settled the conflict in many conciliar documents only as stages in the grand war for the future shape of the Church. The “spirit of the Council” began to be played off against the literal text of the conciliar decisions. Disastrously, the implementation of the conciliar decrees was caught up in the cultural revolution of 1968, which had broken out all over the world. That was certainly the work of a spirit—if only of a very impure one. The political subversion of every kind of authority, the aesthetic vulgarity, the philosophical demolition of tradition not only laid waste universities and schools and poisoned the public atmosphere, but at the same time took possession of broad circles within the Church. Distrust of tradition, elimination of tradition began to spread in, of all places, an entity whose essence consists totally of tradition—so much so that one has to say the Church is nothing without tradition. So the postconciliar battle that had broken out in so many places against tradition was nothing else but the attempted suicide of the Church—a literally absurd, nihilistic process. We all can recall how bishops and theology professors, pastors and the functionaries of Catholic organizations proclaimed with a confident, victorious tone that with the Second Vatican Council a new Pentecost had come upon the Church—which none of those famous Councils of history which had so decisively shaped the development of the Faith had ever claimed. A “new Pentecost” means nothing less than a new illumination, possibly one that would surpass that received two thousand years ago; why not advance immediately to the “Third Testament” from the Education of the Human Race of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing? In the view of these people, Vatican II meant a break with the Tradition as it existed up till then, and this breach was salutary. Whoever listened to this could have believed that the Catholic religion had found itself really only after Vatican II. All previous generations—to which we who sit here owe our faith—are supposed to have remained in an outer courtyard of immaturity.

To be fair, we should remember that the popes attempted to counter this—with a weak voice and above all without the will to intervene in these aberrations with an organizing hand as the ruler of the Church. Only a very few individual heresiarchs were disciplined—those who with their arrogant insolence practically forced their own reprimand. But the great mass of the “new-Pentecostals,” unrestrained and protected by widespread networks, could continue to exercise a tremendous influence on the day-to-day life of the Church. So, for outside observers, the claim that with Vatican II the Church had broken with her past became ever more probable. Anyone accustomed to trusting his eyes and ears could no longer convince himself that this was still the Church that had remained faithful for thousands of years, through all the changes of the ages.

One is reminded of Carl Schmitt's scornful rhyme: Alles fließt, lehrt Heraklit. / Der Felsen Petri, derfliesst mit (“Heraclitus taught that all things flow; the rock of Peter—it’s flowing too”). An iconoclastic attack like the worst years of the Reformation swept through the churches; in the seminaries the “demythologizing of Christianity” à la Bultmann was propagated; the end of priestly celibacy was celebrated as something imminent; religious instruction was largely abandoned, even in Germany, which had been highly favored in this regard; priests gave up clerical attire; the sacred language—which the liturgical constitution of the Council had just solemnly confirmed—was abandoned. All this happened, so it was said, to prepare for the future, otherwise the faithful couldn’t be kept in the Church. The hierarchy argued like the proprietors of a department store, who didn’t want to sit on their wares and so tossed them out to the people at throwaway prices. Regrettably the comparison isn’t exact, for the people had no interest in the discounted products. After the “new Pentecost” there began an exodus out of the Church, the monasteries, and the seminaries. The Church, unrestrainedly pushing ahead with her revolution, continued to lose any ability to attract or retain. She resembled that baffled tailor who, looking at a badly cut pair of trousers while shaking his head, muttered: “I’ve cut you off three times and you’re still too short!” It is claimed that this exodus from the Church would also have happened without the revolution. Let’s accept for the moment this claim. If that had really been the case, however, the great revolution would not have been necessary at all. On the contrary, the flock remaining in the Church would have been able to persevere in faith under the “sign that will be contradicted” (Lk 2:34). There’s not one argument in favor of the post-conciliar revolution; I certainly haven’t encountered one yet.

Pope Benedict could not and would never allow himself to think in that way, even if in lonely hours it may have been difficult for him to defend himself against an assault of such thoughts. In no way did he want to abandon the image of the Church as a harmoniously growing organism under the protection of the Holy Spirit. With his historical consciousness it was also clear to him that history can never be turned back, that it is impossible as well as reckless to try to make what has happened “unhappen.” Even the God who forgives sins does not make them “undone,” but in the best case lets them become a felix culpa. From this perspective, Benedict could not accept what the progressives and traditionalists expressed equally and with the best reasons: that in the post-conciliar era a decisive break with Tradition had indeed occurred; that the Church before and after the Council was not the same institution. That would have meant that the Church was no longer under the guidance of the Holy Spirit; consequently, she had ceased to be the Church. One cannot imagine the theologian Joseph Ratzinger as laboring under a naive, formalistic faith. The twists and turns of ecclesiastical history were very familiar to him. That in the past, too, there had been in the Church bad popes, misguided theologians, and questionable circumstances was never hidden from him. But, while contemplating ecclesiastical history, he felt borne up by the indisputable impression that the Church, in constant development, had again and again overcome her crises not simply by cutting off mistaken developments but by making them, if possible, even fruitful in the succeeding generations.

It thus appeared to him imperative to combat the idea that this rupture had really occurred—even if all the appearances seemed to argue for it. His efforts aimed at attempting to remove from men’s minds the assertion of such a rupture. This attempt has an air of legal positivism about it, a disregarding of the facts. Please do not understand it as irony when I quote in this context the famous lines of the great absurdist poet Christian Morgenstern: “what may not be, cannot be!” The Church can never exist in contradiction to itself, to tradition, to revelation, to the doctrines of the Fathers and to the totality of the Councils. This she cannot do; even when it appears as if indeed she has done so, it is a false appearance. A more profound hermeneutic will finally always prove that the contradiction was not a real one. An inexhaustible confidence in the action of the Holy Spirit resides in this attitude. A cynical outside observer could speak of a “holy slyness.” In any case, this standpoint can be justified from both perspectives: that of trust in God and that of Machiavellianism. For a glance at ecclesiastical history shows that the continuation of the Church was always connected with a firm faith (or at least a fearlessly asserted fiction) that the Holy Spirit guided the Church in every phase. What Pope Benedict called the “hermeneutic of rupture”—whether asserted by the traditionalist or progressive side—was for him an attack on the essence of the Church, which consists of continuity without a rupture. Therefore he proposed a “hermeneutic of continuity.” This was not so much a theological program nor a foundation for concrete decisions but an attempt to win others over to an attitude of mind—the only one from which a recovery of the Church could arise. When, finally, all understood that the Church does not and cannot rely on ruptures and revolutions, then the hierarchy and theologians would, of their own accord, find their way back to a harmonious development of Tradition.

From these thoughts speaks an almost Far Eastern wisdom, a principled distrust of all manipulations and the conviction that decrees issued from a desk cannot end a spiritual crisis. “Les choses se font en ne les faisant pas.” No Chinese said that but the French foreign minister Talleyrand, who after all was a Catholic bishop. “Things get done by doing nothing”—this is a quotidian experience that everyone has encountered. But it is also a profound insight into the course of history, in which great developments remain uninfluenced by the plans of men—however excitedly the political protagonists in the foreground of the present day may gesticulate. That was what Benedict, as Cardinal and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had already criticized in Paul VI’s reform of the Mass. Here organic growth, the development shaped by the imperceptible hand of time, had been interrupted by a bureaucratic act, a “dictatus papae.” It appeared to him to be not just hopeless but even forbidden to try to heal through another dictate this wound that Pope Paul’s attack on Tradition had inflicted. A gradual transformation of thought, proceeding from the contemplation of the model that Benedict gave the world, would create a frame of mind in which the return of Tradition would ensue almost by itself. He trusted in the power of images arising out of his public appearances, where, for example, he employed the Roman Canon or distributed communion on the tongue to the kneeling faithful. To allow truth to act only through what Dignitatis Humanae called “the gentle power” of truth itself corresponded both to his temperament and to his conviction.

A characteristic expression of his approach was his care for overcoming the many aberrations in the liturgy that obscured the Eucharistic mystery. He hoped to be able to eliminate the abuses through a “reform of the reform.” “Reform”—now that’s something the justification for which is completely understandable. Everyone demands, after all, continuous economic, political, and social reforms. Indeed, wasn’t “reform of the reform” well-nigh an intensification of this positive word, an expression of the maxim ecclesia semper reformanda? And wasn’t an evaluation and reassessment of the ad experimentum phase which the liturgy had gone through since its revision by Paul VI also necessary? The progressives, however, were not deceived regarding the innocuousness of this “reform” initiative. They recognized even the first ever-so-cautious steps of the Cardinal and even more so those of the Pope as a danger for the three great objectives of the revolution in the Mass (even though the popes had already contested all three). What Benedict wanted to achieve would stand in the way of the desacralization, the Protestantizing, and the anthropomorphic democratization of the rite. What struggles were involved just in eliminating the many errors in the translations of the missal into modern languages! The philologically incontestable falsification of the words of institution, the well-known conflict over the pro multis of the consecration, which even with the best (and worst) of wills cannot mean pro omnibus, has not yet been resolved in Germany. The English-speaking and Romance worlds had submitted, more or less gnashing their teeth, while for the Germans, the theory of universal salvation, one of the dearest offspring of the post-conciliar era, was endangered! That at least a third of the Gospel of Matthew consists of proclamations of eternal damnation so terror-inducing that one can hardly sleep after reading them was a matter of indifference to the propagandists of the “new mercy”—regardless of the fact that they had justified their struggle against Tradition by the desire to break through historical overgrowth and encrustation to the sources of the “authentic” Jesus.

The same thing happened to another central cause of Benedict’s—one that really didn’t touch Pope Paul’s reform of the Mass. As is well known, that reform did not require a change in the direction of the celebration. The liturgical scholar Klaus Gamber, admired by Pope Benedict, had given the scholarly proof that in no period of the Church’s history had the liturgical sacrifice been made facing the people instead of facing East, together with the people, to the returning Lord. Already as Cardinal, Pope Benedict had pointed out again and again how greatly the Mass had been distorted and its meaning obscured by the celebration’s false orientation. He said that Mass celebrated facing the people conveyed the impression that the congregation is not oriented towards God, but celebrates itself. This correct insight, I admit, never made it either into a binding document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or into papal legislation. Here too, truth was supposed to prevail through the “gentle power” of truth—so appeared the rule of the “Panzerkardinal” or “God’s Rottweiler” (or whatever other compliments public opinion dreamed up for Pope Benedict). The consequences of the effects of this “gentle power” are today apparent to everyone. The unique hope of the present Curia,  Cardinal Sarah, who teaches and acts in Benedict’s spirit, has been given no power to continue the mission he inherited from Benedict, even though he is head of the Congregation for Divine Worship. “Reform of the reform,” which was always a motto instead of a policy, is now even forbidden as a phrase.

Is it then still worthwhile to ask how the “reform of the reform” might have looked had it been achieved? Pope Benedict did not think of calling into question the use of the vernacular. He considered this to be irreversible, even if he might have greeted the spread of occasional Latin Masses. Correcting the incorrect orientation of celebrating the Mass was very important for him, likewise the reception of communion on the tongue (likewise not abolished by the missal of Paul VI). He favored the use of the Roman Canon—also not prohibited today. If he had, moreover, thought of putting into the new missal the extremely important offertory prayers of the traditional rite, one could say that the reform of the reform was simply a return to the post-conciliar missal of 1965 which Pope Paul himself had promulgated before his drastic reform of the Mass. In regard to the 1966 edition of the Schott missal, the Cardinal Secretary of State at that time, Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, specifically wrote: “The singular characteristic and crux of this new edition is its perfected union with the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.”

What drove Pope Paul to disregard the missal he himself had promulgated and shortly thereafter to publish a new missal—one which no longer corresponded to the task set by the Council—is among the great puzzles of recent Church history. One thing is certain: If things had remained as they were in the 1965 version, which although inflicting many senseless sacrifices, left the rite as a whole untouched, the rebellion of the great Archbishop Lefebvre would never have occurred. But one other thing is also true: Even today nothing prevents a priest from including in his celebration of the Mass the most important components of the “reform of the reform”: ad orientem celebration, communion on the tongue, the Roman Canon, the occasional use of Latin. According to the books of the Church this is possible even today, although in an individual congregation it requires considerable courage and authority to find the way back to this form without support from Rome. In truth, the reform of the reform would not have been a tremendous achievement; it would not have won back many spiritual treasures of the old Rite. But it certainly would have led to a change in the atmosphere—it would have allowed the spirit of adoration and of sacred space to arise again. When an individual priest undertakes this in a parish alone and on his own account, he risks an exhausting struggle with his superior and trouble with his liturgy committee. Thus, that which is possible and permitted quickly becomes practically impossible. How helpful would be a single papal document that recommended ad orientem celebration!

While entertaining (perhaps pointless) thoughts regarding “what would have happened, if…,” it may be appropriate to recall what would have been more important still than work on ritual details. Anyone who has dealt more thoroughly with the great crisis of the liturgy in the twentieth century knows that it didn’t simply fall down from heaven or rise up out of hell. Rather, there were developments reaching into the far past that finally led to the catastrophe: a mindset which, looked at in isolation, doesn’t seem dangerous at first, cannot be understood as simply anti-liturgical and anti-sacral, and can be found even today among some friends of the traditional rite. One could call it Roman-juristic thought or misunderstood scholastic analytic thought. In any case, it was a manner of thinking and perceiving that was completely foreign to the first Christian millennium that formed the rite.

According to this view, some parts in the rite are essential and others less important. For the mindset influenced by this theology of the Mass, the concept of “validity” is critical. It is a concept derived from the realm of civil law, which inquires into the prerequisites that have to be present for a legal action to be valid, and those things that do not contribute to this validity. This perspective necessarily leads to a reduction, a formal minimalism that only wants to know whether the minimal prerequisites for the validity of a certain Mass exist. Under the influence of this understanding, reductive forms of the rite were created early on, for example, the “low Mass.” We can certainly love it, but we cannot forget that it represents a conceptual impossibility for the Church of the first millennium, which continues to live in the various Orthodox churches. Choral music is prescribed for the Orthodox celebrant even when he celebrates alone. For the liturgy moves man into the sphere of the angels, the angels who sing. And the men who sing the songs of the angels, the Sanctus and the Gloria, take the place of the angels, as the Eastern liturgies expressly state. The low Mass developed when, in monasteries, several priests celebrated at the same time at different altars. Easily understandable practical considerations sought to avoid musical chaos. But you only have to have been in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to experience that in the spiritual world of the first millennium practical considerations had no legitimacy in matters of the opus Dei, the liturgy. Greek Orthodox, Egyptian Copts, and Armenians sing at different altars each in their own chant, until a holy noise fills the space. Admittedly, that may confuse, perhaps even repel people of the North in their search for Protestant inwardness and contemplation—especially when from a nearby mosque the call of the muezzin gets mixed into the whole. What interests us here is that even in the face of such jarring consequences, the Eastern liturgies could not even imagine a minimalization, a “reduction to the essentials,” the omission of elements that do not concern the consecration, etc.

The essential distinction between the thought of the ancient Church and the more recent Western Latin conceptions consists in the understanding of the consecration of the offerings. Ancient Christian belief understood the entire liturgy in all its parts as “consecrating.” The presence of Christ in the liturgy is not centered only on the words of consecration in the strict sense, but runs through the entire liturgy in different forms till it experiences its summit in the form of the sacrificial death made present in the consecration. Certainly, whoever understands the Mass in this way does not think of reduction and even less of arbitrary interventions, for, from the outset, the presence of Christ excludes any arbitrary arranging and staging by man. It was the new Western way of perceiving the “real” sacred act as narrowed down to the consecration that handed over the Mass to the planners’ clutches. But liturgy has this in common with art: Within its sphere there is no distinction between the important and the unimportant. All parts of a painting by a master are of equal significance, none can be dispensed with. Just imagine, in regard to Raphael’s painting of St. Cecilia, wanting only to recognize the value of the face and hands, because they are “important,” while cutting off the musical instruments at her feet because they are “unimportant.”

What is decisive, however, is that the Latin world reached this opinion against the facts of its own liturgy, which spoke a totally other, increasingly incomprehensible language. Not only the Orthodox but also the Roman liturgy consists of a gradual increase of the Lord’s presence, culminating in the consecration. But this is precisely not in the form of a division separating the parts before the consecration from those afterwards—just as the life of Christ is not separated from its climax, the sacrificial death, but logically leads up to it. Christ recalled and made present is the theme of the Latin liturgy from its first moments; the language of its symbols permits no other interpretation. The liturgy had taken over from the court ceremonial of the pagan emperors the symbolic language for the presence of the supreme sovereign: candles, which preceded the emperor, and the thurible. Whenever candles and incense appear in the liturgy, they indicate a new culmination of the divine presence. The priest himself, as he enters upon his liturgical function, is an alter Christus, a part of the great work of theurgy, Gottesschöpfung or “God-creation,” as the liturgy has been called. He represents the Christ of Palm Sunday, who festively enters into Jerusalem, but also Christ come again on the last day, surrounded by the symbols of majesty. At the reading of the Gospel the candles of the Gospel procession and the incensing of the Gospel book as well as of the celebrating priest once more indicate the presence of the teaching Christ. The readings are not simply a “proclamation” but above all the creation of a presence. Then the offertory gifts, hidden by the chalice veil, are brought to the altar and are reverently received and incensed. The prayers that are recited at this moment can be understood to mean that these gifts, even though unconsecrated, just by reason of their having been set aside already have the role of representing Christ preparing for his sacrificial death. Thus, the liturgical understanding of the first millennium interpreted the removal of the chalice veil on the altar as a representation of the moment in which Christ was stripped of his garments.

The traditional offertory was a particular thorn in the side of the reformers of the Mass. Why these prayers, why these signs of reverence, if the gifts have not yet even been consecrated? A theology of the Mass of the second millennium had stolen in, from whose perspective this offertory had suddenly become incomprehensible, a detail that had been dragged along which only produced embarrassment. Now just appreciate the spirit of reverence of, say, the epoch of the Council of Trent. It had revised the liturgy, but of course did not think at all of changing a liturgical rite because it had been found to be theologically inconsistent. But when this offertory reached the desks of the unfortunate twentieth century, it could finally be eliminated. One senses the satisfaction of the reformer in eliminating the nonsense of millennia with one stroke of the pen.

It would have been so easy, on the other hand, to recognize the offertory as a ritual of representation if one had glanced over at the Orthodox ritual. But Roman arrogance preserved us from such digressions. It haughtily ignored the fact that one cannot make any competent statement concerning the Roman rite unless one also keeps an eye on the Orthodox rite. In it, the offertory is celebrated in a far more festive and detailed way, precisely because it is considered part of the consecration. Why did no one at the time of the reform wonder why the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit at the consecration of the gifts, is part of the offertory in the Latin rite? That the liturgy thus contains a clear sign that the consecration has already begun at that point? But the more profound understanding of the liturgical process had already been so largely lost that one felt able to throw away that which one could no longer understand as if it were a meaningless frill. It must have been an exalted feeling, as a member of a future generation, to be able so blithely to cut down to size the greatest pope in history, St. Gregory the Great! Allow me here to cite an atheistic writer, the brilliant Stalinist Peter Hacks, who said regarding the question of revising classic plays: “the best way to revise classic plays is to understand them.” A principle already heeded in literature—how much more so should it be when it involves the liturgy, the greatest treasure we possess? Among the greatest achievements of Pope Benedict was directing the Church’s attention once more to Orthodoxy. He knew that all the striving towards ecumenism, however necessary, must begin not with attention-grabbing meetings with Eastern hierarchs but with the restoration of the Latin liturgy, which represents the real connection between the Latin and Greek churches. Now, in the meantime, we have realized that all such initiatives were in vain—especially because it wasn’t death that interrupted them, but a capitulation long before one was sure that irreversible facts had been created.

The disappointment over the shocking end of the Benedictine pontificate is all too understandable, but threatens to obscure a sober view of the facts. Just imagine what the liturgical reality would be if Pope Francis had immediately succeeded Pope John Paul II. Even if the dearest cause of Pope Benedict, the reform of the reform, has failed, he remains a pope of the liturgy, possibly, hopefully, the great savior of the liturgy. His motu proprio truly earned the designation “of his own volition.” For there were none—or very, very few—in the curia and in the world episcopacy who would have stood at the side of the Pope in this matter. Both the progressive side and regrettably also the “conservative” side (one has grown accustomed to putting this word in quotation marks) implored Pope Benedict not to grant the traditional rite any more freedom beyond the possibilities created unwillingly by Pope John Paul II. Pope Benedict, who with his whole being distrusted isolated papal decisions, in this case overcame himself and spoke an authoritative word. And then, with the rules of implementation for Summorum Pontificum, he created guarantees, anchored in canon law, that secured for the traditional rite a firm place in the life of the Church. That is still just a first step, but it was a conviction of this pope, whose spiritual seriousness cannot be denied, that the true growth of liturgical consciousness cannot be commanded. Rather, it must take place in many souls; faith in tradition must be proved in many places throughout the world.

Now it is incumbent on every individual to take up the possibilities made available by Pope Benedict. Against overwhelming opposition he opened a floodgate. Now the water has to flow, and no one who holds the liturgy to be an essential component of the Faith can dispense himself from this task. The liturgy IS the Church—every Mass celebrated in the traditional spirit is immeasurably more important than every word of every pope. It is the red thread that must be drawn through the glory and misery of Church history, the path through the labyrinth; where it continues, phases of arbitrary papal rule will become footnotes of history. Don’t the progressives secretly suspect that their efforts will remain in vain so long as the Church’s memory of her source of life survives? Just consider how many places in the world the traditional rite has come to be celebrated since the motu proprio; how many priests who do not belong to traditional orders have come to learn the old rite; how many bishops have confirmed and ordained in it. Germany—the land from which so many impulses harmful to the Church have issued—regrettably cannot be listed here in first place. But Catholics must think universally. Who would have believed it possible twenty years ago that there would be held in St. Peter’s, at the Cathedra Petri, a pontifical Mass in the old rite? I admit that that is little, far too little—a small phenomenon in the entirety of the world Church. Nevertheless, while soberly contemplating the gigantic catastrophe that has occurred in the Church, we do not have the right to undervalue exceptions to the sorrowful rule.

The totality of the progressive claims has been broken—that is the work of Pope Benedict XVI. And whoever laments that Pope Benedict did not do more for the good cause, that he used his papal authority too sparingly, in all realism let him ask himself who among the cardinals with realistic chances to become pope would have done more for the old rite than he did. And the result of these reflections can only be gratitude for the unfortunate pope, who in the most difficult of times did what was in his power. And his memory is secure, if not in evidence among the items of devotional kitsch at the pilgrims’ stores around St Peter’s. For whenever we have the good fortune to participate in a traditional Mass, we will have to think of Benedict XVI.

Martin Mosebach, a German writer, is the recipient of the Kleist Prize and Georg Büchner Prize. This essay, translated from the German by Stuart Chessman, also appears as a foreword in Peter Kwasniewski’s Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness.

 

Pope Benedict's Red Thread | Martin Mosebach

WWW.FIRSTTHINGS.COM

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Whenever we have the good fortune to participate in a traditional Mass, we will have Pope Benedict XVI to thank. 

 

[Bernard]

"Is the Church forever committed to the tradition of the evangelists, the apostles, martyrs, and Church Fathers, or can it break that commitment and discover other ever-new sources of revelation? 

 

 "Do I believe that the Church of the Apostles, the Martyrs and Fathers is the Church of Jesus Christ, or do I believe that this ancient Church has perished and that the Holy Spirit is now manifesting itself in the spirit of the age?"

 

When the "fumes of the present confusion" are cleared away, Benedict's call for decision [on this matter] will become visible as "the real and imperishable achievement of his pontificate."

 

[Bernard]

„Невера на Истоку је наслеђе Пруске“

Објављено 20.04.2012 | Време читања: 9 минута

Аутор Луцас Виегелманн

 

Егзодус из цркава почео је много пре атеизма режима ДДР-а који је спонзорисала држава, каже Мартин Мозебах

Извор: дпа

Лутер је ојачао антиримско осећање, пише Мартин Мозебах, објашњавајући распрострањен атеизам у Источној Немачкој. Он такође сматра да исламу није место у Немачкој.

 

 

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Нова студија Универзитета у Чикагу показала је да мање људи у Источној Немачкој верује у бога него у било ком другом региону света. Око 46 одсто испитаних изјавило је да никада нису веровали у Бога. „То ме не изненађује“, каже писац Мартин Мозебах . Добитник Бухнерове награде представља конзервативни католицизам, залаже се за повратак тридентској литургији и скептичан је према одлукама Другог ватиканског концила. Он каже да је „логично“ чињеница да источна Немачка, дом реформације, постаје све безбожнија.

 

Велт Онлине : Господине Мозебах, да ли сте били у цркви на Велики петак?

Мартин Мозебах : Наравно. У Франкфурту је, први пут од католичке литургијске реформе 1968. године, ове године служена литургија Великог петка по старом латинском обреду. Учествовао сам у томе.

 

Велт Онлине : Онда сте се молили и за атеисте. Црква на Велики петак тражи: „Помолимо се и за све оне који Бога не препознају, да уз његову помоћ следе своју савест и тако дођу до Бога и Оца свих људи“. Зашто Бог ово све ређе чује?

ТАКОЂЕ ЧИТАТИ

 

АРМАГЕДОН ЦХАМПИОНСХИП СЕРИЕС

Шах светске класе уживо и ексклузивно на ВЕЛТ-у - ко ће купити прву карту за велико финале?

Мозебах : Чуо је то на много различитих начина. Црква је у сталном порасту током миленијума. На свету има много више хришћана него што их је било пре сто година, а чак и више него пре 500 година.

Велт Онлине : Али раст варира од региона до региона. Према новој студији Универзитета у Чикагу, 46 одсто људи у Источној Немачкој су убеђени атеисти. Зашто се Бог ту више не укључује?

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Мозебах : Велико Грасијаново правило је: верујте божанским средствима као да људска не постоје, а верујте људским као да божанска не постоје. Црква – а то значи свака особа која је крштена – има задатак да промовише веру. Не само говорећи о својој вери, већ живећи животом који је неверницима толико убедљив да их наводи на размишљање. Мисија има божанску и људску страну. Много се ради на људској страни, али много није.

Велт Онлине : Према студији, Источна Немачка је најатеистичкија регија на свету. Да ли је то заиста лоше?

Мозебах : Увек је лоше за хришћане када људи изгубе везу са Христом. Зато што су уверени да та повезаност способност да се буде човек доведе до савршенства. Они који су религиозно немузички – како се то данас тако добро каже – оштећени су у свом пуном развоју као људска бића. Невера је недостатак. Живот потпуне одвојености од Бога је смањено постојање. Духовна, а такође и рационална пуноћа људског бића није дата када је веза са Творцем мртва.

 

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Велт Онлине : Да ли је ДДР крива за повлачење вере у Источној Немачкој?

Мозебах : Развој је почео много пре ДДР-а. Социјализам је био веома заинтересован за строго атеистичко образовање, али тако је било и у другим земљама, у Русији, Пољској или Румунији. Тамо је црква повратила снагу када је социјализам срушен. Москва данас има стотине цркава. Током бољшевичког периода постојале су само три цркве у којима се још служила литургија.

Велт Онлине : Зашто је другачије у Источној Немачкој?

Мозебах : Зато што има наслеђе Пруске. У Пруској је од 18. века постојао процес уништавања цркве. Фридрих ИИ, чија је верска толеранција била толико слављена ове године, био је толико толерантан само зато што је презирао религију и био му је потпуно гађен. Затим су дошли пруски филозофи попут Фридриха Јулија Штала са формулама попут „јавна служба је богослужење“, концентрисали су се на етику и желели су да побегну од натприродног. Дух доба изражен је у Гетеовој „Књизи рашчлањивања“: „Свакодневно очување тешких дужности, иначе нема потребе за откровењем“. То је био протестантизам који је у великој мери напустио везу са сакралношћу и живим односом са Христом.

Велт Онлине : Да ли је више од хира историје да је атеизам толико јак у делу Немачке где је реформација почела?

Мозебах : То никако није хир историје. То има своју логику. Немачка је увек била подељена земља. Чак и када је ушао у историју, састојао се од дела којим су доминирали Римљани и дела варвара. У ствари, неке од наших верских граница данас иду дуж древних римских војних граница. На Истоку је још пре реформације постојало антиримско осећање које је Лутер тада појачао. Државна религиозност, са краљем као епископом и владаром као врховним верским вођом, такође је настала кроз реформацију. Онда је савез са просветитељством мало по мало уништио религију.

Велт Онлине : Да ли је реформација била предуслов за атеизам?

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Мозебах : Никако не мора. Постоји и евангелистички протестантизам, на пример у САД. У Немачкој постоје побожни протестантски покрети као што су пијетисти или Моравска црква. Али чињеница је да је протестантизам, какав се развио на Истоку, са својом тежњом ка секуларизацији готово неизбежно довео до слабљења вере. Иначе, комунизам тамо не би могао да уништи веру на тако трајан начин.

Велт Онлине : Као читалац новина, Источна Немачка је повезана са већом незапосленошћу, нижим платама и опадањем становништва. Да ли и економски фактори имају везе са вером?

Мозебах: У сваком случају, чињеница је да су се друштвени услови у Немачкој променили када је реч о религиозности: У 19. веку, за просвећену, верски дистанцирану Пруску, католички крајеви су били назадни. Ту су живели лењи, неефикасни, они који се нису прилагодили савремености. Побожност је била за сиромашне људе. Запањујуће, то се преокренуло. Тренутно је религија стабилнија тамо где постоји економски успех, где постоји успостављена средња класа. Они успешни, они који могу да се изборе са савременим светом, данас су вероватније верници. Све више атеиста живи у Источној Немачкој – и не може се а да се не стекне утисак да нове савезне државе нису баш легла иновација, производње и виталности.

Велт Онлине : С обзиром на растући атеизам , треба ли питати религије да ли су довољно привлачне за људе?

Мозебах : Прво морам да кажем: имам потпуно другачија искуства. Срео сам много људи који су крштени. Али ионако морамо другачије да говоримо о религији. Или религија поседује истину о човековој природи, пореклу и сврси – или је не поседује. А када има ту истину, не мора се о њој причати као о робној кући која губи купце, остављајући менаџера продавнице да се пита зашто. Истина не подлеже већини гласова. То је добро за оне који то препознају, лоше за оне који не препознају. Истина не зависи од пристанка.

Велт Онлине : Зашто толико људи у Немачкој види ислам као конкуренцију, иако све мање исповеда хришћанство?

Мозебах : Брига о исламу у Немачкој је мање брига хришћана него људи који су се већ удаљили од цркве. Они виде религију саму по себи опасном и виде повратак религије у ислам.

Велт Онлине : Са хришћанске тачке гледишта, да ли више волите муслимана него атеисту?

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Мозебах : Шта више волиш. Он ми је дефинитивно ближи. Наравно.

Велт Онлине : Не плашите се да ће ислам протерати хришћанство у Европи?

Мозебах : Историјски успех није предвиђен за хришћанство. У разним апокалипсама му се прориче да ће црква скоро потпуно нестати у последњим данима пред крај света. Црква је такође потпуно нестала из језгра региона из којих је настала. Из крајева где је добила свој печат. Августин је дошао из северне Африке, Василије Велики из Централне Анадолије, где данас готово да и нема хришћана. Али данас постоје хришћани у земљама које нису биле ни познате у древним временима. Ово је миграциони покрет. Црква лута по свету. Сада, на пример, хришћанство развија велики сјај у Кини. Са политичке тачке гледишта, то би требало да буде интересантнија вест од тога да ли је црква у Котбусу пуна.

Велт Онлине : Да ли ислам припада Немачкој, као што је Кристијан Вулф рекао и како Фолкер Каудер сада пориче?

Мозебах: Када политичар говори о исламу, може рећи: Немци који исповедају ислам имају иста грађанска права као и остали Немци. То се подразумева. Али реченица „Ислам припада Немачкој“ је неодговорна и демагошка изјава. Шта је ислам до сада допринео нашој политичкој и друштвеној култури? Наш основни закон је заснован на хришћанству, на просветитељству и на константама које сежу далеко у немачку историју, као што је партикуларизам. Не постоји ниједан исламски елемент – одакле би то требало да дође? Ако би Немци муслимани имали културну моћ да уткају исламске карактеристике у немачку културу, онда би се за сто година можда могло рећи:

Велт Онлине : Да ли хришћанство још увек припада Источној Немачкој?

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Мозебах : Наравно. Ова земља је створење хришћанства. Његови градови, његов језик, његова уметност, све. То неће нестати за неколико деценија верског проређивања.

Велт Онлине : У чикашкој студији, испитаници су такође упитани да ли се слажу са следећом самопроценом: „Знам да Бог постоји и не сумњам у то“. Потписало га је 7,8 одсто Источних Немаца. Да ли бисте и ви пристали на то?

Мозебах : У веровању цркава стоји: Цредо. Верујем. Не: Знам – по чему вера претходи знању по хришћанском схватању: Цредо ут интеллигам, верујем да разумем. Ученици Петар, Јован и Андреј видели су васкрслог Господа. Нажалост, нисам га видео. У том смислу не могу да кажем „знам“. Изабрао сам да верујем сведоцима васкрсења.

Велт Онлине : Када сумњате?

Мозебах : Не бих то назвао сумњом, већ бледењем, тонућем од религије до тачке непостојања. То ми је познато. И то се дешава изнова и изнова.

 

 

Atheismus-Studie : "Der Unglaube im Osten ist ein Erbe Preußens" - WELT

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Luther hat den antirömischen Affekt verstärkt, erklärt der Schriftsteller Martin Mosebach den ausgeprägten Atheismus im Osten Deutschland. Auch findet er, dass der Islam nicht zu...