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Viewpoint Ratzingers Iesus omits love, the
poor
By LEONARDO BOFF
In Dominus Iesus, the recent
document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that proclaimed
the Catholic churchs role in salvation, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is not
teaching the essence of Christianity. Without the essential, none of the
arguments of the document can be sustained. Two items are most serious: He
leaves aside the centrality of the law of love and he has no place for the
decisive importance of the poor. In this document, both of these aspects are
completely absent.
For Jesus, as we find in the entire New Testament, love is all
(Matthew 22: 38-39), for God is love (1 John 4: 8, 16), and only love can save
(Matthew 25: 34-47), a love that must be unconditional (Matthew 5: 44). None of
this is found in the cardinals document. He only speaks of revealed
truths and that theological faith means that one must adhere to these
truths. Yet the cardinal knows well that faith alone cannot save.
As all of the councils have taught, the only faith that can save
is faith that has been informed by love. Well-known is Blaise
Pascals phrase, Truth that is outside of charity is not God, it is
only an image and idol that no one should love or adore. This is a
screaming absence in such a document as this one, something that can only be
excused if the author were someone with no spiritual experience, one who does
not know the God who is a communion of divine persons, who does not
love God and neighbor, one who lazily adheres to written and abstract truths.
The text reveals no sense of love of anyone; it only expresses a love for its
own system. Without compassion, with no intent at comprehension, it damages and
destroys the beliefs of others.
Worse yet is the fact that there is no mention of the poor. For
Jesus and the New Testament, the poor are not just one theme among many. The
poor are the starting point where one begins to understand the gospel as the
good news of liberation. The poor stand as the final criteria of salvation or
damnation.
It is useless to belong to the Roman Catholic church, to have all
the means of salvation, to submit yourself heart and mind to the hierarchical
system, to take unto yourself all revealed truths, unless you have love, for
without love, you are nothing (1 Corinthians 15:2). If we have no love for the
hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the refugee and the prisoner, no one -- not me
or Ratzinger -- can hear the words of the Beatitudes, Come to me, blessed
of my Father, take possession of the Kingdom prepared for you since the
creation of the world (Matthew 25: 34), because when you do this to
one of these least ones, you did this to me (Matthew 25: 45). The
question of the poor is so essential to the tradition of Jesus that when Paul
went to verify his doctrine before the apostles in Jerusalem, these demanded of
him the care of the poor (Galatians 2:10).
The theological tradition of the church has always correctly
argued that where Christ is, there too is the church. Christ is in the poor;
thus the church must also be in the poor. Not only in the poor who happen to be
good workers, but also purely and completely in those people who are simply
poor. By being poor, they have less life and for this reason are the first
recipients of this good news and the first who benefit from the liberating
intervention of the God of life.
There is no resonance of this announcement of liberty and
compassion to be found in this hopeless Vatican document. The question of the
poor is fertile ground for opening a rich and open ecumenism, for discussions
with all churches, religions, spiritual traditions and people of good will. The
centrality of the message of Jesus is to be found in unconditional love and in
the poor, and not in the ideological discussion put together in the
cardinals document.
There is a form of the negation of the living God that only
ecclesiastics can pull off -- by speaking of God, of Gods revelation and
of Gods grace, but without showing any sort of compassion for the poor
and the wretched. These are not speaking of the God of Jesus who did in fact
hear the cry of the oppressed, and who came down to save them, but of an
ecclesiastic fetish designed by human beings in their thirst for power. The
image of God that emerges from this document is that of a funereal God who died
long ago, but who left as a testament some choice phrases from the New
Testament, which the Vatican hierarchy wishes to use to build an edifice that
would offer salvation only for those who would enter it.
We are moving toward a single world society. This world society
has the face of the Third World, because 4 billion people -- of a total of 6
billion, according to the data of the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund -- live beneath the level of poverty. Who is to wipe the tears of these
millions of victims? Who will hear the cry that rises up from this wounded
earth, from the hungry and marginalized tribes of the earth?
This document has no ears for such tribulation. And the one who
deafens himself before the cry of the oppressed can have nothing to say of God,
nothing to say in the name of God. The Christianity presented by Ratzinger is
not exportable: It is the expression of the darkest part of the West, which is
increasingly becoming irrelevant to the rest of the world.
This document closes out the second millennia with a kind of
Christianity that should not be prolonged out of respect for the mystery of God
who reveals Gods self in history, out of love for Jesus Christ, whose
meaning and message were meant for all and were never meant to diminish or
exclude anyone, out of respect for the other Christian churches who keep alive
the memory of Jesus, and out of respect for the other religions and
spiritualities by means of which God has visited salvation and grace upon all
human beings.
In the new millennia, there will come forth a new Catholic
ecumenism like that being developed in the hierarchy by those who have been
converted to the gospel idea of service and promotion of the faith, and in
Catholic and Christian communities with an ecumenical spirit founded in the
mystery of a living encounter with the spirit and with the resurrected one, at
the service of men and women, beginning with the most poor and most miserable,
in communion with and in dialogue with others who live out the spiritual
dimension of human existence. It is the mission of each and every one of us to
revive and promote the sacred call of the Divine and the Mystical that burns
within each and every human heart as well as in the entire universe.
Without this sacred call, we will not save life, we will not be
able to guarantee a hopeful future, neither for the human family nor for our
common home, the Earth. Toward this end, all ecumenism is desirable, and all
synergy indispensable. And Rome, one day post-Ratzinger locutum -- after
Ratzinger has had his say -- will also have to put its shoulder to this
messianic task.
Leonardo Boff, professor of ethics and the philosophy of
religion at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, is a laicized Franciscan
priest and the author of more than 40 books on liberation theology. This
article, translated from Spanish by Fr. Michael Seifert of Brownsville, Texas,
is an excerpt from a full statement that can be found online at
http://www.uca.edu.ni/koinonia/relat/233e.htm
National Catholic Reporter, November 24,
2000
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