Y COMUNIDADES AFRODESCENDIENTES
F. Derecho a la libertad personal y protesta social
1.1 Questioning the Anthropocentrism of the Dutch Catechism
As has already been noted, Ratzinger shares in the general critique of Neo-scholasticism and its effects upon catechesis. At the same time, he is equally as critical of the Rahnerian trajectory within evangelization and catechesis. In 1966, almost immediately following the Council, the Dutch bishops’ conference published its “new” Catechism. This Catechism, despite its “praiseworthy originality,” was found by Pope Paul VI’s 1968 commission of six cardinals, to be imprecise and in need of being corrected with regard to various fundamental points.1 Also in
1968, Ratzinger noted that the Dutch Catechism had attempted to take into account the findings of historical-critical scholarship, along with the “the fundamental change in the presuppositions of our thinking by the mathematical-scientific-technological world” that has eclipsed that “old, static, geocentric world view, which took ontological thinking for granted.”2 In short, the Dutch
Catechism aimed at answering the questions of a “post-metaphysical” age dominated by positivism,3 and it did so in two fundamental ways: (1) by calling itself “new” in its “living
voice; and (2) in assuming the perspective of a “post-metaphysical” age. The Dutch Catechism aims at a “new living voice” that cuts between Luther’s claim that Scripture is self-interpreting without need of the Magisterium, and the Catholic position that Scripture needs the living voice of the Magisterium.4 Ratzinger notes that the problem with the Dutch Catechism lies in the fact
that path between sola scriptura and Magisterium remains unclear. In its attempt at being “post- metaphysical,” the Dutch Catechism proceeds according to phenomenology and “descriptive- narrative thinking” that attempts to discover the “question of meaning [Sinnfrage] and things that give meaning [Sinngebung] in the course of human life, in the events of history, and to situate the faith on the level of meaningful answer [Sinngebung] that can be detected in the course of
1 Ratzinger, Introduction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 12.
2 Joseph Ratzinger, “Theology and Preaching in the Dutch Catechism,” in Dogma and Preaching, trans. Michael J.
Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 62. Originally published under the title “Der Holländische Katechismus: Versuch einer theologischen Würdigung,” Hochland 62 (1970): 301-13.
3 Ratzinger, “Theology and Preaching in the Dutch Catechism,” 62. 4 Ratzinger, “Theology and Preaching in the Dutch Catechism,” 62-63.
events themselves.”5 Ratzinger also points out that the work also operates in a decidedly
anthropocentric fashion. He cites the chief editor, Fr. Guus van Hemert, as saying “Human existence is never left behind. The whole catechism moves within human existence,” and J. Dreißen, as saying “Catechizing does not mean presenting to the child truths that it did not yet know….The supply depends on the demand….Life is believed, and the faith is lived.”6 Already,
then, in the late 1960s, Ratzinger questions the anthropocentric vision so closely related to the Rahnerian position. This anthropocentric vision poses a number of problems for theology and for evangelization: “Does Christian preaching really present nothing to us that we do not already know ourselves?…can we fit catechesis into the scheme of supply and demand?…Should it only affirm and reinforce what already is…?”7 While its attempt to truly address the man of today is
noteworthy,8 its anthropocentrism and phenomenological thinking lie at the bottom of the other
concerns.9
1.2 Criticism: Identifying the Causes of the Catechetical Crisis
Ratzinger’s more reserved critique of the Dutch Catechism in 1968, became a more pointed critique of the catechetical movement by 1983. In his lecture, “Handing on the Faith and the Sources of the Faith,” Ratzinger calls the situation within catechesis a “crisis,” that, to be sure, has been heavily impacted by the technological, and “self-made world of man.”10 Ratzinger
notes that feasibility (the reduction of certainty to what can be calculated) has radically changed the landscape for man, with salvation no longer a question pertaining to God, but to man who is the engineer of his own future, and whose morality is determined by social acceptability.11 The
impact of the world on the traditional supports for catechesis — the family and the parish — is all too clear, and the faith “can no longer connect with the experience of faith lived out in the living Church,” and is instead “to be condemned to remain mute in an age whose language and
5 Ratzinger, “Theology and Preaching in the Dutch Catechism,” 63. 6 Ratzinger, “Theology and Preaching in the Dutch Catechism,” 63. 7 Ratzinger, “Theology and Preaching in the Dutch Catechism,” 63-64. 8 See Ratzinger, “Theology and Preaching in the Dutch Catechism,” 64-65. 9 Ratzinger, “Theology and Preaching in the Dutch Catechism,” 66-74.
10 Joseph Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the Sources of the Faith,” in Handing on the Faith in an Age of Disbelief, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 13-14.
thought feed almost exclusively by now upon experiences of the self-made world of man.”12 In
the face of this situation, Ratzinger admits that catechetics has worked diligently to find new ways of handing on the faith in the present milieu. However, Ratzinger holds that these efforts, “instead of helping to overcome the crisis, have tended in large measure to aggravate the problems…declaring in general that the literary genre ‘catechism’ was outmoded” and
renouncing “a structured, fundamental schema for transmitting the faith, drawing upon tradition in its entirety, resulted in a fragmentation of the faith presentation, which not only abetted arbitrariness, but also simultaneously called into question the seriousness of the individual elements of the content.”13 What lay behind these decisions was the hasty aggiornamento of the
catechetical texts following the Council, that had already become dated. Ratzinger says, “It is inevitable that whoever binds himself too rashly to today already looks old-fashioned
tomorrow…catechesis had to be constantly written anew.”14 Therefore, the collapse of the
effectiveness of catechesis is not entirely a result of external cultural forces,15 but internal ones as
well. In 1983, Ratzinger names two of these internal forces: (1) the hypertrophy of method; and (2) the crisis of faith.
Ratzinger first identified a hypertrophy of method as opposed to content, wherein method became the measure of content and no longer served as its vehicle.16 Supply must now be
determined by demand, “so the instructor had to stop at what was immediately accessible, instead of seeking ways of going beyond it and advancing to things that are not understood at first but that alone can make a positive change in man and the world. In this way the actual potential of the faith to be an agent of change was crippled.”17 Ratzinger notes that catechetics
detached itself from dogmatic and systematic theology and became its own self-sufficient
12 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the the Sources of the Faith,” 14-15. 13 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the the Sources of the Faith,” 15.
14 Ratzinger, Introduction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 12. In many ways, Rahner notes this point about
the transitory-ness of contemporary catechetics, and accepts it. In calling for “short formulas” of faith, Rahner calls for an explanation of the faith that is: (1) intelligible to and able to be easily and immediately assimilated by the man of today; (2) capable of addressing the large number of intellectual trends today; (3) remain brief as the person of today is busy; (4) anticipate a short life span. See Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 122. See also Karl Rahner, “A Short Formula of Christian Faith,” in A Rahner Reader, ed. Gerald A. McCool (New York: The Seabury Press, 1981), 205-11.
15 See Ratzinger, Introduction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 13.
16 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the Sources of the Faith,” 16.
standard.18 In many ways, this position is apparent in Moran and Groome. The reconstitution of
revelation as “ongoing” and subjective, without reference to the Church or to tradition, frees catechesis to act as its own standard. Next, Ratzinger notes the corresponding tendency “to rank praxis over truth, which within the context of neo-marxist and positivistic philosophies now made its way into theology as well.”19 Determining supply by demand also betrays the priority of
anthropology over theology, which is, in effect, a “radical anthropocentrism.”20 As modernism’s
anthropological vision collapses, Ratzinger notes that a new center of gravity is established in “the predominance of sociology or even the primacy of experience, which became the measure for one’s understanding of the faith heritage.”21 On this point, Ratzinger issues forth a sharp
critique of catechetical theories like that of Groome: “Catechesis remained entirely a matter of accommodations designed to facilitate communication, never moving beyond them to deal with the subject itself.”22 When content is relegated, and nothing common and objective stands at the
heart of the faith, then “faith in each case must be what the community in question thinks, what its members discover in dialogue to be their common conviction. ‘Community’ replaces Church, and its religious experience is consulted instead of the Church’s tradition.”23 Here, Ratzinger
attacks positions like that of Groome who proposes Story and Vision as a way of emphasizing the local community over the universal Church,24 along the same lines as the ecclesiology that
understands “people of God” in an entirely horizontal manner and sees the Church “as a network of groups, which as such precede the whole and achieve harmony with one another by building a
18 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the Sources of the Faith,” 16.
19 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the Sources of the Faith,” 16. See also Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 14-18.
20 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the Sources of the Faith,” 16. 21 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the Sources of the Faith,” 16.
22 Ratzinger, Introduction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 14. Ratzinger also highlights this condition in
the years leading up to the promulgation of the Catechism in an October 9, 2002 address entitled “Current Doctrinal Relevance of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” Here he says, “After the epochal turning point of the Second Vatican Council, the catechetical tools used until then seemed insufficient, no longer on a par with the consciousness of faith as it was expressed by the Council. A multiplicity of experiments began - analogous to what happened with the liturgy. Even with all of the valid elements, that could be found in different publications, a vision of the whole
was lacking. After the great turning point it seemed to be problematical to know what was still valid and what was
not” (emphasis mine).
23 Joseph Ratzinger, “Standards for Preaching the Gospel Today,” in Dogma and Preaching, trans. Michael J. Miller
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 31.
consensus.”25 At the bottom of the issue of method and content lies a question of the very faith of
the Church.
At this point, the cause of the crisis that is likely the cause, becomes clear: the crisis of faith, or perhaps more precisely, the “crisis of faith in the faith shared with the Church of all
ages.”26 He says:
The fact that catechists no longer dared to present the faith as an organic whole, on its own terms, but only piecemeal, in excerpts that reflected individual anthropological experiences, was ultimately due to the fact that they no longer had confidence in that whole. It was due to a crisis of faith, or, more precisely, to a crisis of the faith shared with the Church of all ages. As a consequence, dogma was largely left out of catechesis, and teachers tried to construct the faith right out of the Bible…When scientific certainty is regarded as the only permissible or the only possible form of certainty, then the certainty of dogma necessarily appears to be either an outmoded, archaic stage of thought or else the emanation of the will to power of self-perpetuating institutions.27
The Church’s members are not immune to the culture. Ratzinger aptly linked the crisis to the rise of the technological world, where, in “a self-made world of man, one does not immediately encounter the Creator; rather, initially, it is only himself that man always encounters. The fundamental structure of this world is feasibility, and the manner of its certainty is the certainty of what can be calculated.”28 In this world, faith falls out of favor as being “unscientific,” and, in
a world without God, everything runs the risk of becoming self-made, even within the Church, as decisions are made not with reference to God, but with regard to feasibility or “consumer”
25 Joseph Ratzinger, “Communio: A Program,” Joseph Ratzinger in Communio: The Unity of the Church, trans.
Peter Casarella (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 124. For more on this point, see Joseph Ratzinger, “The Origin and Essence of the Church” in Called to Communion, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 13-45; Joseph Ratzinger, “The Universal Church and the Particular Church: The Task of the Bishop,” in Called to
Communion, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 75-103; and Joseph Ratzinger,
“Difficulties in Teaching the Faith Today,” in Handing on the Faith in an Age of Disbelief, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 73-74.
26 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the Sources of the Faith,” 17 (Emphasis mine).
27 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the the Sources of the Faith,” 17.
trends.29 With God out of the picture, one stands, not even on the “hard facts” of science, but
precariously on hypotheses about methods and Scripture.30 Catechetics attempted to establish
itself on Scripture without regard for dogma.31 Instead, catechists opted for a return to the literary
sources and an attempt to “unearth” the historical Jesus according to historical-critical methods. However, as Ratzinger points out, when the Bible no longer lives and is interpreted within the living organism of the Church, any form of exegesis becomes necrophilia.32 When the Bible no
longer needs to be read as an organic whole, personal experience becomes the standard for what is relevant. The result is “a sort of theological empiricism, in which the experience of the group, of the parish, or of the ‘experts’ (= the manager of the experiences) becomes the supreme
source”33 for determining what in Scripture is valid and what is outmoded. Everything becomes a
matter of taste, with the Bible being used “to provide applause for what we ourselves want.”34
The Bible thus disintegrates as a sacred book, and eventually, the sources behind the text become more important than the Bible itself.
In addition to the two causes for the catechetical crisis Ratzinger identifies in 1983, one finds three additional points worth noting in his 1992 article entitled “Christ and the Church: Current Problems in Theology and Consequences for Catechesis.” Writing in light of the fact that catechetics cannot completely, by its very nature, extricate itself from theology, Ratzinger notes three theological crises that deeply impact catechesis. The first crisis lies in a contemporary Christology that denies Jesus as Christ. The Jesus of the Gospels is not the real Jesus. Instead, exegesis must set out to find the real Jesus of history. Additionally, a second split between Jesus and Christ lies in modernity’s understanding of redemption. Today, redemption refers either to
29 See Joseph Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth, trans. Mary Frances McCarthy and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1992), 340-41.
30 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the Sources of the Faith,” 21.
31 For example, see Groome, Sharing Faith, 215.
32 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the the Sources of the Faith,” 19. The term “necrophilia,” here, is not used
in reference to the psychological disordered of being sexually aroused by a corpse, but of an attraction to or fixation upon an ideological position that effectively renders an object lifeless through technological manipulation or an excessive application of scientific methods. See a similar point on pg. 271 of this thesis.
33 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the the Sources of the Faith,” 22.
34 Ratzinger, “Handing on the Faith and the the Sources of the Faith,” 20. See also Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report,
“psychological-individual,” or to “political-collective” salvation. In these cases, “Jesus has not redeemed us, but he can be a role model for the way redemption or liberation comes about.”35
Second, Ratzinger highlights the rise of a deism flowing from the Enlightenment which says, “God has nothing to do with us,” and the whole problem of sin vanishes.36 Now there is no
need for redemption, no need for the Son to take flesh, and no need for the Cross. All of this has a significant impact on the liturgy,37 as:
The primary subject of the liturgy is neither God nor Christ, but the ‘we’ of the ones celebrating. And liturgy cannot of course have adoration as its primary content since, according to the deistic understanding of God, there is no reason for it. There is just as little reason for it to be concerned with atonement, sacrifice, or the forgiveness of sin. Instead, the point for those celebrating is to secure community with each other and thereby escape the isolation into which modern existence forces them. The point is to communicate experiences of liberation, joy, and reconciliation; denounce what is
harmful; and provide impulses for action. For this reason the community has to create its own liturgy and not just receive it from traditions that have become unintelligible; it portrays itself and celebrates itself.38
Removing God from the picture simultaneously removes the problem of sin and reconfigures the nature of liturgy. No longer a participation of the Body of Christ in the work of her Head for the sake of her redemption, liturgy devolves into communal expression and banal self-affirmation. The emphasis of the liturgy becomes more and more the creativity of the community. Finally, the deism of the present day affects morality, which cannot be conceived of in terms of theology any longer, but only in terms of ethics. When God is limited to the transcendental sphere and is capable of providing no “categorical” instructions, God becomes a frame of reference devoid of content and “the meaning of moral conduct must then be determined solely within the world.”39
35 Ratzinger, “Christ and the Church,” 38. 36 Ratzinger, “Christ and the Church,” 39.
37 For more on the relationship between catechesis and liturgy, see CCC, §1074. 38 Ratzinger, “Christ and the Church,” 39.
Careful to not overextend theories of “natural law” without regard for historicity, Ratzinger does point out the rise of an extreme dualism between nature and history, being and time, essence and existence, which he believes “can only be overcome by a renewal of belief in creation,”40 and a
serious dialogue regarding the manner in which essence and historicity coincide.41
Finally, Ratzinger identifies a humanistic attitude as foundational to the catechetical crisis — one which has called the entire missionary enterprise of the Church into question. In a 1958 lecture, “The New Pagans and the Church,” he identifies this attitude, saying:
For the modern Christian, it has become unthinkable that Christianity, and in particular