benedict XVI

SOLOMON’S “LISTENING HEART” opened a road for me

by Marta Cartabia
Judge of the Italian Constitutional Court

On September 22, 2011, Benedict XVI gave a speech to the Bundestag that was historic for the judicial culture and, more in general, for contemporary culture, a milestone in decades of heated debates on the role of religion in the public sphere: not revelation, but reason and nature in their correlation are the wealth that each Christian brings to his or her life in history.
If I may make a personal note, I would add that the initial image of that speech is, and will remain, unforgettable for me. Young King Solomon, on the eve of taking power, was allowed to make a request, and he asked God for a listening heart, that is, an open reason. “He asks for a listening heart so that he may govern God’s people, and discern between good and evil” (cf. 1Kg 3:9), and thus establish true law, and serve justice and peace. A few days before, on September 2, 2011, the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, nominated me to the Italian Constitutional Court, something I had not in the least expected. My professional life, which until then had been devoted entirely to academia, changed radically, but more than my profession, this changed my life. In this change, the young King’s desire to act according to reason opened wide, to discern and orient himself toward goodness and justice, could not have been more pertinent for me. This invitation to continually throw wide open the windows of reason, which always tend to close upon a “concrete bunker” to use Benedict XVI’s expression in the Bundestag speech, marks the road offered to me personally to try to serve justice in the agora every day.
Like our reason, so all our humanity continually tends to contract. What enables them to continually return to openness? In each of the speeches of his pontificate, Benedict XVI has shown a profound understanding of the drama of contemporary man. He has shown uncommon love of man and truth. What is the origin of all this? Looking at the fruit of his rich and very human personality, one cannot help but wonder about the source. In every word and gesture he testifies to what happens to reason and the heart in a person who lives a real faith, that is, lives an intense relationship with Christ present.
He has been a witness to Christ, all the way to the supreme gesture of his resignation, fruit of a decision made “after having repeatedly examined my conscience before God,” a decision that can flow only from “the perceptible and demanding presence of the voice of truth in the subject himself,” according to the words of Blessed John Henry Newman. A few months have passed since Benedict XVI, speaking to his former students, said, “No one can have the truth. It is the truth that possesses us, it is a living thing! So we cannot say: I have the truth, but the truth came to us and impels us. We must learn to be moved and led by it. And then it will shine again: if the truth itself leads us and penetrates us.” And again, it has shone.