It starts off with a friendly “Dear Joe,” but this is not a letter from a long-lost colleague wanting to get back in touch.
Leonard Swidler, Professor of Catholic Thought and Interreligious Dialogue at Temple University in Philadelphia, put pen to paper to write an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI, who was a colleague at the University of Tübingen, Germany in the late 60s and early 70s.
Swidler was a Visiting Professor, while Ratzinger was Professor Ordinarius. But, Swidler says, a relationship of “collegiality” arose between them.
And this is why – after the “call to disobedience” from the Austrian parish priests and Benedict XVI’s response in his Holy Thursday homily – he is frankly expressing his concern for “signals that are in opposition to the words and spirit of Vatican Council II” coming “of late” from the chair of Peter.
The U.S. professor reminds the pope that, as a “leading young theologian” at the Council, he had “helped to move our beloved Catholic Church out of the Middle Ages into Modernity.”
In Tübingen, Swidler recalls, Professor Ratzinger, Hans Küng, and other colleagues from the Faculty of Catholic Theology “publicly advocated…the election of bishops by their constituents, and…limited term of office of bishops” in the faculty journal, Theologische Quartalschrift .
“Now,” writes the American theologian, “you are publicly rebuking loyal Catholic priests for doing precisely what you earlier had so nobly advocated. They, and many, many others across the universal Catholic Church, are following your youthful example, trying desperately to move our beloved Mother Church further into Modernity.”
“Desperately,” he repeats, because “in your own homeland, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, the churches are empty, and also are so many Catholic hearts when they hear the chilling words coming from Rome and the ‘radically obedient’ (read: ‘yes-men’) bishops.”
Swidler reminds his former colleague, “Joe,” that at Vatican Council II, he was one of the theologians who had promoted Pope John XXIII’s appeal to update “by the reforming spirit of returning to the energizing original sources (resourcement!) of Christianity (ad fontes!—to the fountains!).”
“Those democratic, freedom-loving sources of the Early Church,” he notes, “were exactly the renewing ‘sources,’ the ‘fountains,’ of renewal that were spelled out in detail by you and your Tübingen colleagues.”
The pope’s former colleague asks him to return to the “reforming spirit” of his youth: “Joe,” he concludes, “I urge you to return to your reforming fountains: Return ad fontes!”