Amoris
Laetitia? "It should be read as a whole, in any case, adultery
is always a mortal sin and the bishops who stir confusion on this
should study for themselves the doctrine of the Church. We must help
the sinner to overcome the sin and to repent."
The
unity of Christians? "It is important, but it cannot become
relativism, one can not sell out the sacraments instituted by Jesus."
Cardinal
Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith, weighs in with utmost clarity upon the hottest topics
of ecclesial debate and beyond. We met him in the rooms from which he
directs what once was the Holy Office, the place with custody of
sound doctrine. We were greeted with great cordiality. His role of
defender of Catholic orthodoxy, combined with an imposing physique
and Teutonic [German] origins elicited a certain reverence, but it
was quickly overcome by the Cardinal's cheerfulness and
accessibility. We sit around the table; the theme is doctrine, the
role it has in the Christian life, knowing we were broaching an
unpopular topic.
Your
Eminence, let us go straight to the heart of the question. What is
doctrine?
Aristotle
says at the beginning of his Metaphysics,
that all men seek the truth. The nature of the intellect is love for
the truth. That is why God gave has given us an intellect and will,
the one ordered towards the truth and the other towards love as the
center of existence of all being, of God himself in his nature. For
us God is the origin and the end of our existence, and for this
reason it is necessary to know what God has revealed: it is the most
important thing for a human creature—to know from where I came and
to where I am going, what it is the meaning of suffering, of death.
It is a sign of a hope that goes beyond the limits we experience in
our weak and finite lives.
The Catechism tells us what to believe in
the Creed, what to do in the Commandments, how to unite ourselves to
God in faith, hope and charity, through the prayer (the Our Father),
how to receive sanctifying grace in the seven sacraments. God has
revealed Himself in His Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, and this means
that we can participate in the knowledge that God has in himself: to
know God is the first fundamental dimension of the faith, because
faith is not just a religious feeling, an irrational faith, but faith
is first and foremost a knowledge of God. This does not mean an empty
intellectualism, because there is always a unity between knowing God
and loving God. It is therefore in knowing a person intimately, with
a willingness to accept who the Other Person is, who God is in His
Trinitarian reality, a communion of love of the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit.
Throughout all of life we need catechesis, a permanent
introduction - both intellectual and with the heart - to the divine
mysteries which are the mysteries of life. Doctrine, therefore, is
the basis for the entire life of the Church, otherwise, the Church
remains only a non-profit organization, a charitable organization
like many others. The identity of the Church instead is to be the
Body of Christ, called to lead all men to an encounter with God in
this life and even unto eternal life. For this reason doctrine is
absolutely necessary for salvation and for the everlasting happiness
of man in God.
In
recent decades, "doctrine" has not had what we might call
“good press." It is often presented as a series of laws,
unbearable weights on men's shoulders, moralizing about what one can
or cannot do. What you are saying turns the question around.
This
bad name doctrine receives is the inheritance of the rationalism of
the eighteenth century. The claim that reason can understand
everything in the world, but is powerless towards the transcendent,
has reduced the faith to simply a good feeling for the simple-minded.
Or instead, faith is seen as a subjective judgment that comes only
after reason has recognized its limits. The philosophy of Immanuel
Kant, for instance, denied the rational dimension of faith, reducing it to only a reference point for morality.
And Revelation,
therefore, becomes essentially superfluous. To answer these
philosophical errors, the First Vatican Council in its constitution
"Dei
Filius"
has already clearly set out the mutual relationship between reason
and faith, starting from reason’s capacity for going beyond the
senses. Hence, in Catholic theology we must reaffirm that faith is a
participation in the Logos
of
God, and for this reason it is always necessary to emphasize the
rationality of the act of faith. This is an important need for our
time, which claims to know everything about the subject and seems
almost proud of being ignorant regarding those questions which are
capable of giving meaning to existence. Faith makes us believe in God
in the light of the Incarnate Word and by the power of the Holy
Spirit through the testimony of the Church (the Bible, Tradition and
the Magisterium).
Unfortunately,
we know that men of the Church do not always reflect this truth.
There
are also very serious scandals.
How
can one distinguish between the "treasure of the Gospel"
and the "clay vessels" that carry it?
There
were, there are and there always will be scandals. As Jesus said, "It
is impossible that scandals do not happen", but he also added:
"Woe to him by whom they come!" (Luke 17:1). We must first
of all distinguish between the scandals that arise from the moral
life and those of the intellectual one, when one behaves as a heretic
or a schismatic, against the truth and unity. In general, in our
maturity in faith, we believe in God even when the minister of the
Word shows himself unworthy of his mission. In the third century
there were great discussions in the case of Augustine (354-430)
against the Donatists, who believed that the sacraments did not have
a dignity in themselves, but that their validity depended on the
dignity of those who administered them. It was a great challenge for
the faith: how is it possible that one who is not "holy" in
his moral or intellectual life can confer grace?
Augustine, with the
whole Church, held that the grace of God does not depend upon us who
are its instruments. The other extreme would be, as in certain
currents of Protestant reform, of totally denying the human mediation
of the Church. St. Thomas said that just as God sends us his grace
through simple signs - such as, for example, the water for Baptism -
so also He himself confers his grace through the instrument of man
and not an angel. This has to do with our nature which is bodily,
social, historical. Therefore, we must accept the humility of Christ
who has come in our flesh and wanted to confer his grace through the
"flesh" of the apostles and their successors, bishops and
priests.
We
are called to accept this concreteness of grace. We cannot expect to
choose a Pope, a bishop, a parish priest from a kind of catalog, as
if there were a personal desire to satisfy. We must live the
concreteness of reality as it is given to us and accept the
contingency of human existence.
Yet
today in the Church emphasis is often put on the fact of its being
credible...
Credibility
is certainly necessary, but in what does the credibility of the
Church consist? The Church does not lose credibility when some
priests fall into sin, we all can fall into sin, but when these ones
abuse their authority in sinning. Thus, they deliberately undermine
the mission of the Church, but it is not a self-referential
credibility: the ministers of God are just instruments, and they are
called to be faithful to the mission for which God himself has called
them.
It
is often said, rightly, that
the
faithful should listen to the Word.
But
commonly the Word tends to be
identified
with Sacred Scripture.
Is
this not a reductive vision of the Word of God?
Certainly.
We are not a religion of the book, but of the Word predicated upon
Jesus Christ and the Word of God in His own Person. Jesus did not
write Sacred Scripture, He is the living Word of God. The Holy
Scripture is the first and fundamental testimony of the Word of Jesus
Christ, but in the context of the testimony of faith of the apostles
and the early Church. The Church is the receiver of the Word, and
that Word is now present in the knowledge of the faith of the Church,
but understood not as a simple archive, but as a search within the
living heart of the Church, which finds, in the passing of
generations, that same Word. A Word understood only as Sacred
Scripture is reductive and not Catholic.
Unfortunately, Protestantism
wanted to debase the value of the living tradition of the Church.
Revelation is certainly present in the Bible in a unique and
fundamental way, but [it is present] also in the life of the Church,
in the writings of the Fathers, in the great councils, in the
sacramental life. The sacraments are not simply a memory, there
Christ is present, truly and concretely.
If
these things are so, in view of unity among Christians, doctrine
seems to become an obstacle.
Just
think of the seven sacraments ...
For
us the seven sacraments are not a problem. Certainly, we have no need
to justify ourselves for having these seven sacraments, since their
recognition came from the life of the Church. For the Catholic Church
these seven signs not only signify the grace, but effect the grace.
The ones who should justify themselves are the Protestants who have
denied all this. One cannot claim to accept tradition only up to a
certain date, as if the Holy Spirit after the Council of Chalcedon
had disappeared from the life of the Church. We must say that today
there are also ecumenical movements that have somehow passed over
this "isolation" of the Bible, but we must always remember
that without the living context of the Church guided by the Holy
Spirit, Scripture ends up being just an archival document. Faith is
not built upon archives. In order to know the revealed faith, one
must turn to the Church, not an archive.
So
the differences between the Catholic Church and other Christian
confessions are not, so to speak, empty apologetic rigidities?
The
Protestant reformation must not be understood simply as a reform of
some moral abuses, but we need to recognize that it went on to affect
the core of the Catholic concept of Revelation. How is it possible
that the Church has taught for 1500 years that these sacraments are
necessary for the faith, and they find, instead, that the Church had
led millions of believers into error? Did the founder of the Church
leave it in the dark for centuries upon centuries? The Church would
have guided people to hell, this cannot be granted. One can always
reform the moral life, our institutions, universities, pastoral
structures, it is necessary also to be rid of a certain "worldliness"
of the Church: we can accept all this from elements of the Protestant
Reformation, but we must say that for us there are dogmatic errors
among the reformers that we can never accept. With Protestants the
problem lies not only in the number of the sacraments, but also in
their meaning. Ecumenism can not advance with relativism or
indifference toward the doctrinal issues: to seek unity, we cannot
agree to "give away" two or three sacraments, or accept
that the Pope is a kind of president of the different Christian
confessions.
Another
topical controversy today is the relationship between doctrine and
personal conscience.
Everyone
must follow their conscience, but conscience is a term that expresses
a rapport, a relationship - not with me to myself, but towards the
Other. Conscience stands in the presence of another and for us,
clearly, this other can only be God, who is our Creator and Savior,
and who has given us the commandments not to make us angry, or to
control us, but to illuminate the path. The commandments are a
guidance to the Good, to reach our end: they are the way, but also
the goal. This applies to morality, but also to doctrine, because we
have knowledge of truth when we as men understand that we must
ob-audire
(to
listen while standing in the presence of) the Word of God which
illuminates. They are transcendent truths which go beyond our
capacity, but with the help of grace we have this capacity to
understand that which God has said to us and which illuminates the
path. I know that I have been called unto an eternal relationship of
my person with the Person of God. This encounter, obviously, is also
in the moral life. Men are called to choose between good and evil.
Even animals kill other animals, but we are confronted with the
question of whether this is good or bad. I know by the nature of my
conscience that I ought to do good and avoid evil, this is the
fundamental judgment of the law inscribed by nature in our beings,
and for us Christians this is expressly stated in the Ten
Commandments and the evangelical Beatitudes. The Holy Spirit tells us
this, who is poured into our hearts, and who illuminates the mind and
comforts the will.
But
cannot there be a contradiction between doctrine and personal
conscience?
No,
that is impossible. For example, it cannot be said that there are
circumstances in which an act of adultery does not constitute a
mortal sin. For Catholic doctrine, coexistence between mortal sin and
sanctifying grace is impossible. In order to overcome this absurd
contradiction, Christ has instituted for the faithful the Sacrament
of Penance and Reconciliation with God and with the Church.
There
is a question which is being much discussed with regard to the
internal debate about the post-synodal exhortation Amoris
laetitia.
Amoris
Laetitia
must
clearly be interpreted in the light of the whole doctrine of the
Church. The sacrament of Penance can accompany us to the sacramental
communion with Jesus Christ, but some human acts, guided by the
Spirit, are essential parts of the sacrament of Penance, which must
be respected: contrition of heart, the resolution not to sin again,
the accusation of sins and satisfaction. When one of these elements
is lacking, or the penitent does not accept them, the sacrament is
not effected. This is the dogmatic teaching of the Church, regardless
of whether people can accept it or not. We are called to help people,
little by little, to reach the fullness of their relationship with
God, but we cannot make concessions. I do not like it, it is not
right that so many bishops are interpreting Amoris
laetitia
according
to their own way of understanding the teaching of the Pope. This does
not follow the line of Catholic doctrine. The magisterium of the pope
is interpreted only by himself or by the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith. The Pope interprets the bishops, it is not for
the bishops to interpret the pope, this would constitute an inversion
of the structure of the Catholic Church. To all these who are
speaking excessively, I urge them to first study the doctrine on the
papacy and on the episcopate in the two Vatican Councils, without
forgetting the doctrine of the seven sacraments (the Fourth Lateran
Council, the Council of Florence, the Council of Trent and Vatican
II). The Bishop, as Teacher of the Word, must himself be well-formed
first lest he fall into the risk of the blind leading the blind.
Thus, says the letter to Titus: The Bishop “must have a firm grasp
of the word that is trustworthy in accordance with the teaching, so
that he may be able both to preach with sound doctrine and to refute
those who contradict it." (Titus 1:9).
But
in this regard the possibility of the development of doctrine is
often spoken of.
How
should this development be understood?
The
Church is a living body, the development is a movement to understand
better the depths of the mysteries. But it is not possible to
overturn statements of the magisterium when it comes to statements
that concern the revealed divine and Catholic faith. Revelation is
complete in Jesus Christ and is present in the deposit
of faith
of
the apostles. We have many reflections on the issue of the
development of doctrine, like for example, that of Blessed John Henry
Newman, or the one offered by the same Joseph Ratzinger.
Here we can
find expressed the significance of the development of doctrine in the
Catholic sense, to defend themselves from the evolutionary modernism
on the one hand and from fixism on the other. One ought to grant a
homogeneous development in continuity and not in rupture. What is
dogmatically defined cannot be denied in any way; if the Church has
said that there are seven sacraments, no one, not even a council
could be able to reduce or change the number or the meaning of these
sacraments. He who wants to unite himself to the Catholic Church must
accept the seven sacraments as means of salvation. The foundation for
the homogeneity of the development of dogma is the preservation of
the basic principles: Arianism is not a development of the dogma of
the Incarnation, but a corruption of the faith.
Thus, the Church has
clearly expressed the recognition of marriage as an indissoluble
union between a man and a woman. Polygamy, for example, is not a
development of monogamy, but a corruption of it. For this reason, we
can say that Amoris
laetitia
wants
to help people who live in a situation that is not in accord with the
moral and sacramental principles of the Catholic Church and who want
to overcome this irregular situation. But one certainly cannot
legitimize those who are in this situation. The Church can never
legitimize a situation that is not in accord with the divine will.
The
exhortation of Saint John Paul II, Familiaris
consortio,
provides that divorced and remarried couples that cannot separate, in
order to be able to approach the sacraments must commit themselves to
live in continence. Is this obligation still valid?
Certainly,
it is not negotiable, because it is not only a positive law of John
Paul II, but he expressed what is an essential element of Christian
moral theology and the theology of the sacraments. The confusion on
this point also concerns the failure to accept the encyclical
Veritatis
Splendor,
with
its clear doctrine of the intrinsece
malum [intrinsic
evil]. Let us say in general that no human authority can accept what
is against the manifest will of God, his commandments and the
constitution of the sacrament of marriage. Let us remember that
marriage is a sacramental bond that is imprinted almost like the
nature of baptism, as long as spouses are alive this marriage bond is
indelible. On this the words of Jesus are very clear and their
interpretation is not an academic interpretation, but the Word of
God. No one can change it. We must not surrender to the worldly
spirit that would like to reduce marriage to a private reality. Today
we see how States want to introduce a definition of marriage that has
nothing to do with the definition of natural marriage, and we must
also remember that for Christians the requirement to get married in
the form of the Church matters, saying ‘yes’ for forever and only
to an exclusive ‘you.’ For us, marriage is the expression of
participation in the unity between Christ the bridegroom and the
Church his bride. This is not, as some said during the Synod, a
simple vague analogy. No! This is the substance of the sacrament, and
no power in Heaven or on Earth, neither an angel, nor the Pope, nor a
council, nor a law of the bishops, has the power to change it.
How
can one resolve the chaos that is being generated on account of the
different interpretations that are being given of this passage of
Amoris
laetitia?
I
urge everyone to reflect, studying the doctrine of the Church first,
starting from the Word of God in Sacred Scripture, which is very
clear on marriage. I would also advise not to enter into any
casuistry that can easily create misunderstandings, above all that
one according to which if love dies, then the marriage bond is dead.
These are sophistries: the Word of God is very clear and the Church
does not accept the secularization of marriage. The task of priests
and bishops is not that of creating confusion, but of bringing
clarity. One cannot refer only to little passages present in Amoris
laetitia,
but one must read everything as a whole, with the purpose of making
the Gospel of marriage and the family more attractive for people. It
is not Amoris
laetitia
that
has provoked a confused interpretation, but some confused
interpreters of it. Everyone must understand and accept the doctrine
of Christ and his Church, and at the same time be ready to help
others to understand it and put it into practice even in difficult
situations. Marriage and the family are the fundamental cell of the
Church and of society, in order to restore hope to a humanity
affected by a strong nihilism, it is necessary that this cell be
healthy.