Subject: VISnews 110923
Organization: VIS - Ufficio Stampa della Santa Sede
From: Vatican Information Service - Eng - txt
VATICAN INFORMATION SERVICE
TWENTY FIRST YEAR - N. 160
ENGLISH
FRIDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER 2011
SUMMARY OF THE POPE'S TRIP TO GERMANY: 22 - 23 SEPTEMBER
- Interview with the Pope on Flight Bound for Germany
- The Shared Foundations of Law
- Pope Underlines Church's Closeness to the Jewish People
- Whoever Believes in Christ Has a Future
- Fruitful Collaboration between Christians and Muslims
- Faith Thought Out and Lived Afresh Will Save Christianity
- Shared Ecumenical Task: Bearing Witness to the Living God
___________________________________________________________
INTERVIEW WITH THE POPE ON FLIGHT BOUND FOR GERMANY
VATICAN CITY, 22 SEP 2011 (VIS) - This morning, as is traditional on his
apostolic trips abroad, Benedict XVI granted a brief interview to
journalists accompanying him on the flight to Germany.
The first question put to the Pope was: "How much do you still feel
yourself to be German, and in what aspects do your origins still influence
you?"
The Pope replied: "I was born in Germany and that root cannot and must not
be severed. I received my cultural formation in Germany, my native language
is German and language is the way in which the spirit lives and works. ...
The fact of my being German is a vital part of the cultural framework of my
life. My attachment to the country's history, with all its greatness and its
failings, cannot and must not be denied. As a Christian, however, another
question arises: through Baptism we are born anew, we are born into a new
people with includes all peoples. ... And when, in this people, we take on a
great responsibility, as I have done in taking on the supreme
responsibility, ... the root becomes a tree which extends in various
directions, and the fact of being at home in this great community ... of the
Catholic Church becomes ever more vibrant and profound, it moulds all of
existence without cancelling what went before".
The second question was: "Over recent years increasing numbers of people
have been leaving the Church in Germany, also as a result of acts of child
abuse committed by members of the clergy. What are your feelings about this?
What would you say to those who wish to leave the Church?"
"Let us first distinguish", said the Holy Father, "the specific
motivations of those who are horrified by the crimes that have recently come
to light. I can understand how, in the light of such information and
especially if close relatives are involved, one would say: 'This is no
longer my Church. For me the Church was a humanising and moral force. If
representatives of the Church do such wrong I can no longer live with this
Church". This is a specific situation. Generally speaking though, against
the background of a widespread secularisation of our society, there are many
reasons and the act of leaving is often only the last step people make in a
long process of distancing themselves from the Church. In this context, I
feel it is important to ask: 'Why am I in the Church?' ... In my view it is
vital to remember that being in the Church is not like being in some
association. It means being in the net of the Lord where He catches fish,
both good and bad, to draw them from the waters of death to the land of
life. It may be that, in this net, I find myself alongside the bad fish and
that I see only them, but it remains true that I am not there for them, I am
there because it is the net of the Lord. This is quite different from human
associations and touches the very foundation of our being. Speaking to these
people, I believe that we must delve to the bottom of the question of what
the Church is. ... Why am I in the Church even if there are scandals and
terrible human failings? In this way we will renew our awareness of the
specific nature of being Church, ... which is the People of God, and thus we
would learn ... to combat the scandals from within, from within the great
net of the Lord".
Fundamental unity with Evangelical Churches
Asked about groups which have opposed this and others of his apostolic
trips, Benedict XVI replied: "In the first place I would say it is normal
that, in a free society and in a period of secularisation, a papal visit
should meet with opposition and that such opposition should be expressed. It
is part of our freedom, and we must be aware that secularisation and
specific hostility to Catholicism is strong in our societies. When this
opposition is expressed civilly then we have nothing to say against it.
"However it is also true that many people have high expectations and a lot
of love for the Pope. ... There is great consensus around the Catholic
faith, and a growing conviction that we need a moral force, that we need the
presence of God in our time. And so I know that alongside the opposition,
which naturally exists, a lot of people are awaiting this feast of the faith
with joy. ... For this reason I am glad to go back to my native Germany, I
am happy to bring the message of Christ to my own land".
Finally Benedict XVI was asked about his expectations for his meeting with
members of the Evangelical Church. "When I accepted the invitation to make
this trip", he replied, "it was clear that ecumenism with our Evangelical
friends had to be a central theme. As I have said before, we live in
secularised times in which all Christians have the mission of making God's
message present to the fellows. ... Thus the fact that Catholics and
Evangelicals meet is fundamental for our time. And although we are not
perfectly united at the institutional level, although problems (even large
problems) persist, we are united in the fundamentals: faith in Christ and
the Triune God, and the fact that man was made in the image of God. At this
moment of history it is vital that we intensify this union.
"For this reason", the Pope added, "I am very grateful to our Protestant
brothers and sisters who have made it possible to hold this highly
significant meeting in the convent where Luther began his theological
journey, to pray ... and talk together about our responsibility as
Christians today. I am delighted to be able to express our fundamental unity
as brothers and sisters who work together for the good of humankind,
announcing the joyful message of Christ, of God Who has a human face and Who
speaks to us".
PV-GERMANY/ VIS 20110923
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THE SHARED FOUNDATIONS OF LAW
VATICAN CITY, 22 SEP 2011 (VIS) - At 4.15 p.m. today the Holy Father
travelled from the apostolic nunciature in Berlin to the Reichstag where he
was welcomed by the president of the German Federal Parliament. He held a
brief meeting with the five chief office holders of the German State: the
president, the chancellor and the presidents of the Bundestag, the Bundesrat
and of the Federal Constitutional Court. He also greeted the leaders of the
various parliamentary groups. He was then accompanied to the hall of the
Reichstag where he listened to a speech by Norbert Lammert, president of the
Bundestag.
In his own address to the Parliament, Benedict XVI affirmed that politics
"must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the
fundamental preconditions for peace. Naturally a politician will seek
success, as this is what opens up for him the possibility of effective
political action. Yet success is subordinated to the criterion of justice,
to the will to do what is right". Without this, "success can be seductive
and thus can open up the path towards the falsification of what is right,
towards the destruction of justice".
"We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty
spectre", said the Holy Father. "We have seen how power became divorced from
right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an
instrument for destroying right - a highly organised band of robbers,
capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the
abyss".
For this reason, "to serve right and to fight against the dominion of
wrong is and remains the fundamental task of the politician", especially
today. But, "how do we recognise what is right?" asked Pope Benedict. He
explained that "for the fundamental issues of law, in which the dignity of
man and of humanity is at stake, the majority principle is not enough. ...
This conviction was what motivated resistance movements to act against the
Nazi regime and other totalitarian regimes, thereby doing a great service to
justice and to humanity as a whole. For these people, it was indisputably
evident that the law in force was actually unlawful".
Restoring the cultural heritage of Europe
"In terms of the underlying anthropological issues, what is right and may
be given the force of law is in no way simply self-evident today", said the
Holy Father, recalling how, throughout history, "systems of law have almost
always been based on religion". However, "unlike other great religions,
Christianity has never proposed a revealed body of law to the State and to
society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead,
it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law. ... For the
development of law and for the development of humanity, it was highly
significant that Christian theologians aligned themselves against the
religious law associated with polytheism and on the side of philosophy, and
that they acknowledged reason and nature in their inter-relation as the
universally valid source of law".
"This seemed to offer a clear explanation of the foundations of
legislation up to the time of the Enlightenment, up to the time of the
Declaration on Human Rights after World War II", however "there has been a
dramatic shift in the situation in the last half-century". Due to the
predominance of a positivist conception of nature and reason, "the idea of
natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth
bringing into discussion in a non-Catholic environment".
"A positivist conception of nature as purely functional ... is incapable
of producing any bridge to ethics and law. ... The same also applies to
reason, according to the positivist understanding which is widely held to be
the only genuinely scientific one. Anything that is not verifiable or
falsifiable, according to this understanding, does not belong to the realm
of reason. ... Hence ethics and religion must be assigned to the subjective
field. ... This is a dramatic situation which affects everyone, and on which
a public debate is necessary.
"The positivist approach to nature and reason", Pope Benedict added, "is a
most important dimension of human knowledge and capacity that we may in no
way dispense with". But, "where positivist reason considers itself the only
sufficient culture, ... it diminishes man, indeed it threatens his humanity.
I say this with Europe specifically in mind, where there are concerted
efforts to recognise only positivism as a common culture and a common basis
for law-making, so that all the other insights and values of our culture are
reduced to the level of subculture, with the result that Europe vis-a-vis
other world cultures is left in a state of 'culturelessness' and at the same
time extremist and radical movements emerge to fill the vacuum".
This is why it is so important for reason and nature to rediscover their
true greatness, and reassert themselves in their "true depth, with all its
demands, with all its directives", said the Pope. We must "listen to the
language of nature and we must answer accordingly", bearing in mind that
"man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at
will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself.
He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly
ordered if he listens to his nature, respects it and accepts himself for who
he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is
true human freedom fulfilled".
"At this point Europe's cultural heritage ought to come to our assistance.
The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of
human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the
recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and
the awareness of people's responsibility for their actions.
"Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. ... The culture
of Europe arose from the encounter between ... Israel's monotheism, the
philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. ... In the awareness of
man's responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable
dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it
is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our
history".
Having completed his address, Benedict XVI withdrew for a few moments
before meeting with members of the Jewish community.
PV-GERMANY/ VIS 20110923
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POPE UNDERLINES CHURCH'S CLOSENESS TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE
VATICAN CITY, 22 SEP 2011 (VIS) - At 5.15 p.m. today Benedict XVI met with
fifteen representatives of the German Jewish community, led by their
president, Dieter Graumann. In his remarks to them, the Pope recalled his
visit to the synagogue of Cologne on 19 August 2005, when Rabbi Teitelbaum
had spoken of memory "as one of the supporting pillars that are needed if a
future of peace is to be built".
"Today", said the Holy Father, "I find myself in a central place of
remembrance, the appalling remembrance that it was from here that the Shoah,
the annihilation of our Jewish fellow citizens in Europe, was planned and
organised. Before the Nazi terror, there were about half a million Jews
living in Germany, and they formed a stable component of German society.
After World War II, Germany was considered the 'Land of the Shoah', where it
had become virtually impossible to live. Initially there were hardly any
efforts to re-establish the old Jewish communities, even though Jewish
individuals and families were constantly arriving from the East. Many of
them wanted to emigrate and build a new life, especially in the United
States or Israel".
The Pope went on: "In this place, remembrance must also be made of the
'Kristallnacht' that took place from 9 to 10 November 1938. Only a few could
see the full extent of this act of contempt for humanity, like the Berlin
Cathedral Provost, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who cried out from the pulpit of
St. Hedwig's Cathedral: 'Outside, the Temple is burning - that too is the
house of God'. The Nazi reign of terror was based on a racist myth, part of
which was the rejection of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of
Jesus Christ and of all who believe in Him. The supposedly 'almighty' Adolf
Hitler was a pagan idol, who wanted to take the place of the biblical God,
the Creator and Father of all men. Refusal to heed this one God always makes
people heedless of human dignity as well. What man is capable of when he
rejects God, and what the face of a people can look like when it denies this
God, the terrible images from the concentration camps at the end of the war
showed".
The Holy Father went on to express his joy at the fact that, despite past
history, Jewish life is now blossoming in Germany and the community has made
great efforts to integrate Eastern European immigrants.
"The Church feels a great closeness to the Jewish people", he said. "With
the Vatican Council II Declaration 'Nostra Aetate', an 'irrevocable
commitment to pursue the path of dialogue, fraternity and friendship' was
made. This is true of the Catholic Church as a whole. ... Naturally it is
also true of the Catholic Church in Germany, which is conscious of its
particular responsibility in this regard". In this context the Pope
mentioned a number of initiatives to strengthen Jewish-Christian relations,
such as the "Week of Fraternity", the "Jews and Christians Forum" and the
"historic meeting for Jewish-Christian dialogue that took place in March
2006 with the participation of Cardinal Walter Kasper".
"We Christians must also become increasingly aware of our own inner
affinity with Judaism. For Christians, there can be no rupture in salvation
history. Salvation comes from the Jews. When Jesus' conflict with the
Judaism of His time is superficially interpreted as a breach with the Old
Covenant, it tends to be reduced to the idea of a liberation that views the
Torah merely as a slavish enactment of rituals and outward observances. In
fact, the Sermon on the Mount does not abolish the Mosaic Law, but reveals
its hidden possibilities and allows more radical demands to emerge. It
points us towards the deepest source of human action, the heart, where
choices are made between what is pure and what is impure, where faith, hope
and love blossom forth.
"The message of hope contained in the books of the Hebrew Bible and the
Christian Old Testament has been appropriated and continued in different
ways by Jews and Christians. 'After centuries of antagonism, we now see it
as our task to bring these two ways of rereading the biblical texts - the
Christian way and the Jewish way - into dialogue with one another, if we are
to understand God's will and His word aright'. This dialogue should serve to
strengthen our common hope in God in the midst of an increasingly
secularised society. Without this hope, society loses its humanity", the
Pope concluded.
Following his meeting with the Jewish community, the Pope travelled by car
to Berlin's Olympic stadium for the celebration of Mass.
PV-GERMANY/ VIS 20110923
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WHOEVER BELIEVES IN CHRIST HAS A FUTURE
VATICAN CITY, 22 SEP 2011 (VIS) - At 6 p.m. today the Holy Father arrived by
car at Berlin's Olympic stadium to celebrate Mass with large numbers of
faithful who had gathered there from Germany and surrounding countries. In
the same stadium fifteen years ago, John Paul II had presided at the
beatification of Karl Leisner and Bernhard Lichtenberg.
In his homily, Benedict XVI commented on the parable of the vine shoots
taken from today's Gospel reading. When Jesus says "I am the vine, you are
the branches", what He means is that "I am you and you are I, an
unprecedented identification of the Lord with us, His Church. ... He
continues to live in His Church in this world. He is present among us, and
we are with him", said the Pope.
In this parable, Jesus says "my Father is the vine grower" who cuts off
the withered branches and prunes the fruit-bearing ones, so that they bring
forth more fruit. This means that God "wants to bestow new life upon us,
full of vitality. Christ came to call sinners. It is they who need the
doctor. ... Hence, as Vatican Council II expresses it, the Church is the
'universal Sacrament of salvation', existing for sinners in order to open up
to them the path of conversion, healing and life. That is the Church's true
and great mission, entrusted to her by Christ".
Reasons for disenchantment with the Church
The Holy Father continued: "Many people see only the outward form of the
Church. This makes the Church appear as merely one of the many organisations
within a democratic society, whose criteria and laws are then applied to the
task of evaluating and dealing with such a complex entity as the 'Church'.
If to this is added the sad experience that the Church contains both good
and bad fish, wheat and darnel, and if only these negative aspects are taken
into account, then the great and deep mystery of the Church is no longer
seen.
"It follows that belonging to the vine, to the Church, is no longer a
source of joy. Dissatisfaction and discontent begin to spread, when people's
superficial and mistaken notions of 'Church', their 'dream Church', fail to
materialise".
Later the Pope went on to explain how Jesus invites us to abide in Him.
"As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine,
neither can you, unless you abide in me ... If a man does not abide in me,
he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered,
thrown into the fire and burned".
"The decision that is required of us here makes us keenly aware of the
existential significance of our life choices. At the same time, the image of
the vine is a sign of hope and confidence. Christ Himself came into this
world through His incarnation, to be our root. Whatever hardship or drought
befall us, ... God can transform into love even the burdensome and
oppressive aspects of our lives. It is important that we 'abide' in Christ,
in the vine".
This is of particular importance in our own "era of restlessness and lack
of commitment, when so many people lose their way and their grounding, when
loving fidelity in marriage and friendship has become so fragile and
short-lived. ... The risen Lord gives us a place of refuge, a place of
light, hope and confidence, a place of rest and security. ... Future, life
and joy are to be found in Christ.
"To abide in Christ means to abide in the Church as well" the Pope added.
"The whole communion of the faithful has been firmly incorporated into the
vine, into Christ. ... Within this communion He supports us, and at the same
time all the members support one another. ... We do not believe alone, but
we believe with the whole Church.
"The Church, as the herald of God's word and dispenser of the Sacraments,
joins us to Christ, the true vine. ... The Church is God's most beautiful
gift. ... With and in the Church we may proclaim to all people that Christ
is the source of life, that He exists, that He is the one for Whom we long
so much. He gives himself. Whoever believes in Christ has a future. For God
... wants what is fruitful and alive, He wants life in its fullness".
In closing the Holy Father expressed the hope that the faithful may
increasingly discover "the joy of being joined to Christ in the Church, that
you may find comfort and redemption in your time of need and that you may
increasingly become the precious wine of Christ's joy and love for this
world".
Following the Eucharistic celebration, Benedict XVI travelled back to the
apostolic nunciature by car, arriving at about 9 p.m.
PV-GERMANY/ VIS 20110923
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FRUITFUL COLLABORATION BETWEEN CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS
VATICAN CITY, 23 SEP 2011 (VIS) - At the apostolic nunciature in Berlin at 9
a.m. today, the Holy Father met with representatives of the Muslim community
in Germany. Muslims in Germany number around 4.5 million; 70 percent of them
are of Turkish of origin while others come from Arab countries, the Balkans
and Iran.
In his remarks to the group the Pope recalled how "from the 1970s onwards,
the presence of numerous Muslim families has increasingly become a
distinguishing mark of this country". In this context he highlighted the
importance of constant effort, not only "for peaceful coexistence, but also
for the contribution that each can make towards building up the common good
in this society.
"Many Muslims attribute great importance to the religious dimension of
life", he added. "At times this is thought provocative in a society that
tends to marginalise religion or at most to assign it a place among the
individual's personal choices. The Catholic Church firmly advocates that due
recognition be given to the public dimension of religious adherence. In an
overwhelmingly pluralist society, this demand is not unimportant. Care must
be taken to guarantee that others are always treated with respect. Mutual
respect grows only on the basis of agreement on certain inalienable values
that are proper to human nature, in particular the inviolable dignity of
every single person".
The Holy Father went on: "In Germany - as in many other countries, not
only Western ones - this common frame of reference is articulated by the
Constitution, whose juridical content is binding on every citizen, whether
he belong to a faith community or not. Naturally, discussion over the best
formulation of principles like freedom of public worship is vast and
open-ended, yet it is significant that the Basic Law expresses them in a way
that is still valid today at a distance of over sixty years".
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