CHURCH
INTERVIEW

“What I expect from the faith”
“The intelligence of a person is cultured when the heart is cultured.” H. E. Monsignor GERHARD LUDWIG MÜLLER speaks of the education he received from his mother and of relations
with non-believers, guiding us in the Church’s challenge in this Year of Faith. At the end of the Synod for the New Evangelization, we discuss the only road that does not reduce desire.

by Davide Perillo

“A newness of life able to change our inner depths...” These words suffice to summarize what is at stake, what Benedict XVI is calling us to discover–or rediscover–in these months. Gerhard Ludwig Müller, 64 years old, a German from Finthen (Mainz), has been head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for six months now, in the position occupied for many years by his countryman Joseph Ratzinger. In some way, he is the guardian of this endless patrimony. A few days ago during the Synod on the New Evangelization, he defined faith as a newness of life, “full and perennial,” something we can draw upon, staying before He “who brought every newness into the world, bringing Himself”–Christ. Not a doctrine to relearn, not a series of consequences to deduce, but first of all a fact, a Person. Monsignor Müller spoke of this again in our dialogue just after the Synod. It is too early to hazard a judgment on the outcome, to understand how and where the contents that emerged in the Hall–beginning with the Pope’s contributions–will bear fruit. But it was an excellent opportunity to take a look at the work that lies before us in the coming months, perhaps starting from its origin, from the point where it gains ground.

Your Excellency, in your opinion, what was the urgent need that pressed the Pope to proclaim the Year of Faith?
The fundamental need was that indicated in the opening of the Apostolic Letter Porta Fidei: to invite all the baptized to rediscover the journey of faith and thus to show everyone the beauty of the encounter with Christ. In fact, in our times, attention among Christians often seems to shift to the consequences of faith, simply taking for granted its existence. Instead, it is necessary to consciously turn to that heart, that origin of our faith, the Person of Jesus. He was once asked about this by His listeners: “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” and His answer was, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the One He sent” (Jn 6:28-29).

One of the most evident characteristics of the modern era is the dramatic divide between believing and knowing. Faith is felt as “useless” or often bound to the sphere of sentiment and the hypothetical, not of reason and truth. Why? How can the Year of Faith respond to this challenge?
Faith is a source of knowledge: it attains truth that reason alone is unable to reach. The more the encounter with Christ happens, the more one’s intelligence and will are spurred to embrace with zeal and gratitude the precise contents of divine Revelation, which is a free and profoundly correspondent gift, far beyond all foreseeable expectations, the deepest expectations of the heart of every person. Instead, if one reduces faith to irrational sentiment, something private that has nothing to do with the reality to know and love, as if it were directed at containing the nuisances of a psychology hard pressed by the complexities of contemporary living, then one prejudices a priori the chance of identifying its true nature and extraordinary content of truth. This, too, is a great challenge that the Year of Faith intends to address.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky wondered, “Can a cultured man, a European of our day, believe, really believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ?” How would you respond?
The intelligence of a person is cultured when the heart is cultured. Simple erudition is not enough–it could fill one with inopportune pride. My mother did not attend university; she was a homemaker, and as a deep believer in the divinity of Jesus Christ she educated me to “read within” reality, to verify in a profound way how much she herself had received in the gift of faith that she transmitted to me. Other encounters, intellectually important ones as well, followed one after the other in my life. I have always been convinced that the Catholic faith corresponds to the highest intellectual demands and that we mustn’t suffer any kind of complex. But it is essential to ask for and seek a simple, humble heart, as Jesus said, without which the human spirit does not open itself to reality in its entirety, including that revealed by God, and insists on reducing it to a finite measure.

How does faith respond to the needs of the human person today? How do we understand if and to what measure it is “relevant to our needs,” according to a concise formula Fr. Giussani used?
Women and men today, as always, desire to be happy. Thinking we can reduce happiness to what each of us holds it to be, in a way that is isolated, individualistic, subjective, extraneous, and inimical to others, procuring for oneself a quantity of “things” (or even people) that should guarantee it, does not go very far in terms of the objective sought. Experience and data confirm this. From the very beginning, when the Lord gathered His first friends around Himself, the Christian faith introduced into the world the possibility of a renewed life together, with Him as living criterion, in which forgiveness could also find its indispensible space. Notwithstanding the fragility and weaknesses of us Christians, the Church continues to be the place of the contemporaneousness of Christ to man in every time. In this objective place of His presence, the true needs of women and men today, as it was for those of yesterday and as it will be for those of tomorrow, are acknowledged and valorized.
What impact do you think this initiative can have on non-believers? What is the positive “challenge” that the Church poses to the world in this way?
If believers in Christ offer each other testimonies to the truth of their faith, which is faith in the truth of Christ encountered as fullness of one’s existence, then also non-believers may perhaps be amazed. And just as it happened in the beginning of Christianity, perhaps they will return to asking questions with freedom, truth, and good desire to know. Appealing to the unity of human nature attentively considered and the fundamental needs of fulfillment that characterize it, in the face of the insuperable failures that historically qualify it, all people, even non-believers, will be able to sincerely open themselves to thought and–who knows?–the expectation of an unknown God, as Saint Paul observed in the Areopagus in Athens. As Franz Kafka wrote, “Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.”

The Year of Faith began with the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. How can this occasion help us reread its importance and contents?
The Second Vatican Council was the principal event in the history of the contemporary Church. As the Note with Pastoral Indications of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, of January 6, 2012, expressed very well, “Beginning with the light of Christ, which purifies, illuminates, and sanctifies in the celebration of the sacred Liturgy (cfr. Constitution, Sacrosanctum Concilium) and with His divine word (cfr. Dogmatic Constitution, Dei Verbum), the Council wanted to elaborate on the intimate nature of the Church (cfr. Dogmatic Constitution, Lumen Gentium) and its relationship with the contemporary world (cfr. Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium et Spes). Around these four Constitutions, the true pillars of the Council, are arranged the Declarations and Decrees which address some of the major challenges of the day.” Pope Benedict XVI offered a useful interpretation to this when he rejected as erroneous the so-called “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” and promised what he himself called a “‘hermeneutic of reform,’ of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us,” which is “a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God” (Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Roman Curia, December 22, 2005). Thus it is necessary to overcome all ideological clashes, whatever their source, to reject specious polemics dictated by circumstantial reasons and to immerse ourselves in harmony in the doctrine of the Church, which through the help of the Holy Spirit conserves intact over time the patrimony of faith received from the apostolic tradition.

What do you expect from this year, Excellency?
I expect that the beauty of faith in Christ will shine in the faces and lives of many people, and that it can contribute to producing the fruit of testimony and conversion. It is a providential opportunity offered by the whole Church to the freedom of each person: welcoming it is an index of wisdom, because Jesus encounters us today and never stops knocking on the door. The Year of Faith is a help so that each moment of life will be a personal acknowledgment of Christ.

What do you ask of us–the CL Movement–in particular?
That the Eucharistic celebration be the soul of your days, that listening to the Word of God nourish them, that through the varied forms of culture, charity, and mission, you deepen the gift received, and that with all your brethren in the faith you contribute to the building of the Body of Christ, so the world may see and, seeing the good works of faith, believe.