(LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), gave multiple talks during a pastoral trip in the United States, one of them at the Philadelphia International Institute for Culture (IIC), in which he forcefully reminded his audience that the leaders of the Catholic Church must remain loyal to teachings set forth by Jesus Christ Himself and not to try to adapt them to the spirit of the times. “A Church that no longer believes in Jesus the Christ is no longer the Church of Jesus Christ,” he insisted. Having the cardinal’s permission, LifeSiteNews is pleased to publish the full text of his speech as well as three other texts of his, one speech and two homilies (see below).
Welcomed by Dr. John Haas, moral theology professor at Charles Borromeo Seminary and president of the IIC, Cardinal Müller spoke on September 27 on the topic “Magisterium in the Life of the Church.”
The German cardinal criticized “relativism in doctrine” and told his audience that bishops of the Catholic Church “who betray their divine mission in order to avoid being accused of proselytism or of being rigorists for defending Christian morality have forgotten the meaning and reason of their existence.”
These comments follow upon the Synod on Synodality, recently completed in Rome, with further commissions continuing to discuss matters such as female ordination and the Church’s moral teachings.
Cardinal Müller makes it clear that we are dealing with a resurgence of the modernists comparable to that of the era of Pope Pius X:
Bishops and theologians who have forgotten that in Christ alone we are given the fullness of grace and truth, or who – like the modernists at the beginning of the 20th century – think they can develop the teachings of Christ according to their own liking, should remember the words of St. Paul: “If I wanted to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ: the Gospel I preached did not come from men … I received it through the Revelation of Christ.” (Gal 1:l0f)
LifeSiteNews recently published a report on how modernist figures such as Cardinal Blaise Cupich and Father James Martin, S.J., are using the Synod on Synodality discussions to further their liberal agenda in the Catholic Church, including the imposition of female deacons and a decadent approach to the LGBT movement.
Against these attempts to alter the Church’s teaching, the former head of the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith insists that “the Holy Spirit does not update the supposedly dead Tradition for the present through self-appointed prophetesses, as the Montanists thought in the 3rd century.” Cardinal Müller mentions other heretical ideas, for example those of Joachim de Fiore, who spoke of the coming “Kingdom of the Spirit.” A contemporary version of these ideologies is, according to the cardinal, the Great Reset of the World Economic Forum.
“Today,” the cardinal went on to say, “this historical materialism is called the New World Order of the Davos ‘World Economic Forum,’ with Klaus as its god and Yuval Harari as his prophet of this world without the living God and inspired by the so-called transhumanism, which is nothing other than a pure nihilism.”
Nevertheless, the Church must remain loyal to her founder and His teachings. As Cardinal Müller shows, wherever parishes or dioceses become progressive and modernist, one sees “the seminaries empty, dying monastic lives, a very small Sunday mass participation,” and the loss of many faithful.
Besides giving a speech at the IIC, Cardinal Gerhard Müller also celebrated a Solemn Pontifical High Mass on September 26 at the Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia.
The cardinal kindly provided LifeSiteNews with the text of his homily (full text below) which introduced the theme of his speech the following day.
During the “crisis of traditionally Christian societies” and the question of whether the Church still fits “into our time,” the prelate reminded the congregation that the Church crisis is “man-made and has arisen because we have cozily adapted ourselves to the spirit of a life without God.”
“This is why in our hearts, so many things are un-redeemed and long for substitute gratification,” he continued.
The antidote for the crisis of our time is the Faith. “But he who believes, needs no ideology,” Müller added. “The one who hopes will not reach for drugs.”
LifeSite invites our readers to read the full speech below, as well as the homily that he gave in Philadelphia.
In addition to his visit to Philadelphia, Cardinal Müller also went to South Bend, Indiana, where he gave a scholarly talk on theology at Holy Cross College and honored St. Thomas Aquinas in a homily at the University of Notre Dame’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Invited to celebrate the 800th anniversary of this doctor of the Church, the German cardinal honored Aquinas’ Summa theologiae as an “enormous masterpiece” and described him as a man of humility who did not present himself as an “autonomous philosopher who, at the end of his thinking, postulates or affirms God as a necessary idea of reason.” Instead, Aquinas “sees himself as a ‘teacher of Catholic truth’ (Summa theologiae I. prol.), which presents God’s self-revelation as the truth and life of every human being, and which has definitively become historical reality in Jesus Christ.”
Cardinal Müller proposed Thomas Aquinas as a solution to overcome ideas of a supposed dialectic between “God and the world” or of “an irreconcilable opposition between nature and grace, or between rational knowledge and faith,” and finally between “revelation and reason.”
“The apparent opposition between Christianity and modernity, in philosophy and in the empirical sciences has one of its origins in the rejection of Thomas’ synthesis between faith and reason,” the prelate stated.
Due to the importance of Cardinal Müller’s comments on the contribution of St. Thomas to the reconciliation of faith and reason, we shall quote him here at length:
Essentially, the colossal work of St. Thomas is a refutation and overcoming of ancient and modern Gnosticism and Idealism, which with its metaphysical dualism tears being apart into an irresolvable dialectical contradiction and deprives people of any hope of communion with God in truth and love and delivers us all to an existentialist or cosmological nihilism. The hermeneutical key to the Catholic understanding of Christianity is the analogy of nature and grace, reason and faith, will and love. Faith is based on the authority of God revealing himself in the living testimony of the apostles and the Church. “Nonetheless, sacred doctrine uses human reason as well – not, to be sure, in order to prove the Faith, since this would destroy the meritoriousness of faith, but rather to make clear certain other things that are dealt with in this doctrine. For since grace perfects nature and does not destroy it, natural reason must serve the Faith, just as the natural inclination of the will likewise serves charity. This is why in 2 Corinthians 10:5 the Apostle says, “bringing into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ.” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I q. 8 a. 8. ad 2).
Cardinal Müller’s praise of the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as his insistence upon the general loyalty of the shepherds of the Catholic Church to Our Lord’s teachings and the Church’s perennial Magisterium are an encouragement to Catholics in our time. He ended his homily in Philadelphia with these beautiful words that can be of help to us Catholics who need to be reminded of the essentials of our Faith, especially our love for the Blessed Mother:
The Church knows that we are lost without the gospel of Christ. In her womb, Mary conceived God Himself, who was born from her: Jesus Christ, the one Savior of the whole world. He alone can save the world; and frankly, I also would not want to be saved by anyone but Him, true God and true man.
Let us ask the Mother of God to intercede for us, that we become more worthy to receive the author of life, our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with God His Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever.
In the following, LifeSite presents to our readers first Cardinal Müller’s two texts from his visit to Philadelphia, and then a homily from his visit to South Bend. We will publish the talk he gave at Holy Cross College at a later date.
READ: Cardinal Müller: Synod supporters are committing ‘sins against the Holy Spirit’
Please see here Cardinal Müller’s full speech at the International Institute for Culture:
The Church of Christ in Fidelity to the Apostolic Succession
1. Without Christ – no Church
A Church that no longer believes in Jesus the Christ is no longer the Church of Jesus Christ. Bishops who betray their divine mission in order to avoid being accused of proselytism or of being rigorists for defending Christian morality have forgotten the meaning and reason of their existence. That relativism in doctrine does not make Christianity fit for the present, a fact which has been impressively brought to our attention by Pope Benedict XVI.
And already in the 17th century the great mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal had warned the Jesuits againstlaxism in his Lettres Provinciales. These “smart guys” wanted to reconcile Christianity with the frivolous goings-on of theBourbon court. But despite their willingness to update Christianity, they ended up being the victims of their own strategy of adaptation.
Bishops and theologians who have forgotten that in Christ alone we are given the fullness of grace and truth, or who -like the modernists at the beginning of the 20th century – think they can develop the teachings of Christ according to their own liking, should remember the words of St. Paul: “If I wanted to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ: the Gospel I preached did not come from men … I received it through the Revelation of Christ” (Gal 1:10f).
The “shepherds of the Church of God appointed by the Holy Spirit” (Acts 20:28) are nothing other than the legitimate successors of the Apostles (cf. 1Clement Letter 42-44). To His Apostles the risen Lord said: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven. To whom you refuse forgiveness, it is refused” (Jn 20:21f).
Only because Christ revealed himself as “the Way, the Truth and the Life” (Jn 14:6), can the Holy Spirit ensure “the Church of the living God be the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1Tim 3:15). The “truth of the Gospel” (Gal 2:14), which Paul even once had to defend against the ambiguity of a confused Peter, is therefore not, in the sense of Hegel’s dialectical processual theory of development, the expression of the changing spirit of the age. The spirit of truth and life is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit reminds us of the truth of Christ and introduces us to the fullknowledge of the Word made flesh. For in Jesus Christ “we have seen the glory of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14).
Thus, the Holy Spirit does not update the supposedly dead Tradition for the present through self-appointed prophetesses, as the Montanists thought in the 3rd century. The sensus fidelium is also not the voice of the people demanding to be heard by their shepherds or the breath of the Holy Spirit, which the Pope then interprets in his own sense. The holy People of God participate in the prophetic ministry of Christ, in that the entirety of the faithful who have received the anointing of the Holy Spirit cannot err in faith. Vatican II explains, “they manifest this special property by means of the whole peoples’ supernatural discernment in matters of faith when ‘from the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful’ (Augustine, De Praed. Sanct 14, 27) they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals … By that sense of faith … the people of God … adheres unwaveringly to the faith given once and for all to the saints (cf. Jude 3)” (Lumen Gentium 12).
Even the bishops, with the Pope at their head, do not receive new revelation, but “preach to the people committed to them the faith they must believe and put into practice, and by the light of the Holy Spirit illustrate that faith. They bring forth from the treasury of Revelation new things and old” (Lumen Gentium 25).
Nor does the Holy Spirit establish his own Third Kingdom after the Kingdom of the Father in the Old Testament and of the Son in the New Testament, as Joachim of Fiore thought in the 12th century. This doctrine of the dialectically unfolding God in three stages, who appears in the Holy Spirit as an absolute spirit after he has passed through the whole history of the world and after having absorbed it, has determined the philosophy of history of Hegel. As is known, Karl Marxreinterpreted this absolute idealism into an absolute materialism, so that in the end, man does not find his goal in God, but in the earthly paradise, in which man elevates himself as his own creator and redeemer.
Today, this historical materialism is called the New World Order of the Davos “World Economic Forum,” with Klaus Schwab as its god and Yuval Harari as his prophet of this World without the living God and inspired by the so-called transhumanism, which is nothing other than a pure nihilism.
The truth, on the other hand, to which the Church proclaims and testifies, is the person and work of Christ. In Him, the unsurpassable newness of God and the fullness of His truth has irreversibly come into the world (cf. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies IV 34,1). Therefore, the believers in Christ are told: “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever! Do not be led astray by various strange doctrines” (Heb 13:7-9). And that is why the Church as the body of Christ is continually sanctified by the Holy Spirit and can never go out of date. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council explain: “The Spirit dwells in the Church and in the hearts of the faithful, as in a temple. In them He prays on their behalf and bears witness to the fact that they are adopted sons. The Church, which the Spirit guides in way of all truth and which He unified in communion and in works of ministry, He both equips and directs with hierarchical and charismatic gifts and adorns with His fruits. By the power of the Gospel, He makes the Church keep the freshness of youth. UninterruptedlyHe renews it and leads it to perfect union with its Spouse. The Spirit and the Bride both say to Jesus, the Lord, ‘Come!’ (Lumen Gentium 4).
2. The bishops in apostolic succession as ministers of the truth of Christ
In Holy Scripture and the Apostolic Tradition, therefore, changing human views about God and the world – which bishops and theologians would always have to update – are not presented. Rather, through these media, namely, Sacred Scripture and Apostolic Tradition, i.e., the Baptismal Creed and the Divine Liturgy, Christ is proclaimed as He who speaks to us in the word of preaching (1 Thess. 2:23) and who communicates His salvation to every believer in the seven sacraments of the Holy Church.
This is why Vatican II teaches: “Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God committed to the Church … But the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission, and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed.” (Dei Verbum 10).
In the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, therefore, Vatican Council II does not begin with a sociological-immanent definition of the Church. To the Church’s loss of weight in society, the Pope and the bishops cannot respond with a modernistic adaptation by transforming their mission for the salvation of the world in Christ and by proving their right toexist with a religious-social contribution for inner-worldly goals and ideologies (in the sense of the Great Reset of the atheistic-philanthropic “elite,” the eco religion, the hyper-activism in the Corona[virus] crisis, the anti-rational Woke movement diametrically contradicting natural and revealed anthropology).
The Church, in fact, is not a purely human organization that would have to prove its usefulness or systemic relevance before the world. Her essence and mission are founded in her sacramentality, which derives from the God-human unity of Christ. Ecclesia catholica est Christus praesens visibilis: the Catholic Church is the visible presence of Christ.
At the beginning of the 2nd century, the holy martyr-bishop Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the Church of Smyrna: “Where the bishop appears, there shall be the Church, as that where Christ Jesus is, the Catholic Church is. Without the bishop, one may neither baptize nor hold the love feast [the Eucharist], but what he deems good is also pleasing to God.”(Smyrnaeans 8:2).
This is why Vatican II declares that the Church “by no weak analogy … is compared to the mystery of the incarnate Word. As the assumed nature, inseparably united to Him, serves the Divine Word as a living organ of salvation, so in a similar way, does the visible social structure of the Church serve the Spirit of Christ, who vivifies it, in the building up of the Body.”
“This is the one Church of Christ, which in the Creed is professed as the one, holy, catholic and apostolic, which our Savior, after His Resurrection, commissioned Peter to shepherd, and him and the other apostles to extend and direct with authority, which he erected for all ages as ‘the pillar and mainstay of the truth.’ This Church, constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him.” (Lumen Gentium 8).
The apostolic succession of the bishops, that is, its “hierarchical constitution” (cf. Lumen Gentium 18-29), is a constitutive element of the being and mission of the visible Church and guarantees her necessary historical identity with the Church of the Apostles.
The authentic sense was unfolded in principle by Irenaeus of Lyons – whom Pope Francis declared a teacher of the Church, Doctor unitatis – in the debate with the Gnostics precisely in the sense of a referential connection between Sacred Scripture, Apostolic Tradition, and the teaching authority of the bishops in the legitimate succession of the apostles. “Therefore, it is necessary to listen to the rulers of the Church who, together with the succession in the episcopate, have received the reliable charism of truth (charisma veritatis certum), as it pleased God. The others who do not want to know about this succession, which goes back to the origin, are … heretics who spread strange doctrines … Whoever rises up against the truth and incites others against the Church remains in hell.” (Against Heresies IV 26,2).
3. The definitive criterion of the apostolic succession in the Roman primacy
The individual local churches form the one Catholic Church of God in the communio of the episcopal churches. The local Church of Rome is one among many local churches, but with the peculiarity that its apostolic foundation through the martyrium verbi et sanguinis [martyrdom of the Word and of the Blood] of the Apostles Peter and Paul gives it, in the communion of all episcopal churches, a primacy in the total witness and unity of life of the catholica communio.
Because of this potentior principalitas [superior leadership], every other local church must agree with the Roman one (Irenaeus, Against Heresies III 3,3). Since the College of Bishops serves the unity of the Church, it must carry within itself the principle of its unity. This can only be the bishop of a local church and not the president of a federation of regional and continental church federations. Nor can this be a purely factual principle (parliamentary majority decision, delegation of rights to an elected governing body, such as in Germany with a synodal council composed by virtue of human law, to whose decisions the bishops would have to submit).
Since the inner essence of the episcopate is a personal witness, the principle of the unity of the episcopate itself is thus embodied in one person, namely the bishop of Rome.
As an ordained bishop (and by no means only as a non-bishop designated to this office), he is the successor of Peter, who himself, as the first apostle and first witness of the Resurrection, embodied in his person the unity of the apostolic college. Crucial to a theology of primacy is the characterization of Peter’s ministry as an episcopal mission, as well as the recognition that this office is not a human right but a divine right, insofar as it can only be exercised in the authority of Christ by virtue of a charism given personally to the bearer in the Holy Spirit. “But that the episcopate itself may be one and undivided, … (the eternal Shepherd Jesus Christ) placed St. Peter at the head of the rest of the apostles and instituted in him an everlasting and visible principle and foundation of the unity of faith and communion.” (LG 18; DH 3051).
4. The victory of truth in love
This is precisely the Church’s testimony to Jesus, that He not only proclaims truth, but is the Truth in Person. “We do not want to live by word and tongue, but by deed and truth. And by this we know that we are of the truth and by it we act in love” (Jn 3:18f). “Let us, guided by love, hold to the truth and grow in all things until we reach Him: Christ, the head of His body, the Church” (Eph 4:15f).
The advice to the Church to modernize her true teaching of the Gospel with the help of a relativistic philosophy or an ideologically corrupted anthropology brings only illusory results. We can see this in all local churches where progressive theology prevails: the seminaries empty, dying monastic lives, a very small Sunday mass participation. For example, in Germany the Catholic church [has] lost in the last 50 years 13 million Catholics, from 33 million members in the year 1968 to 20 million members in 2023. And [those responsible for] the ”German synodal way” recommend themselves as the model for the Universal Church and the leaders on the way into the future.
But Jesus said: “Enter the narrow way, since the road that leads to destruction is wide and spacious, and many take it; but it is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Mt 7, 13-14). One must not fall for the following suggestion: if you want to reach the people of today and be loved by all, then, like Pilate, leave aside the truth, then you will spare yourself persecution, suffering, cross, and death! In worldly terms, the power of politics, media, and banks are safe, while the truth challenges contradiction and promises suffering with Christ, the crucified Savior of the world. Jesus could have easily saved Himself with the message of the unconditionally loving heavenly Father who does not demand repentance and conversion.
But why did He challenge the devil, the “father of lies and the murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44f)?
Is there helpful, diplomatically, a pact with the rulers of this world, the political-media elite? Do we not ourselves have to secure the future of the Church by a compromise with the powerful and wise of this world, instead of always proclaiming “Christ crucified: to Jews a stumbling block, to Gentiles foolishness; but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:23f).
Below is the homily of Cardinal Müller delivered at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia on September 26, 2024:
Jesus Christ is the Truth in Person
Dear Brothers and Sisters in “Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1),
As Catholics we connect our good will towards all human beings with the marvelous experience that, in the light of God, all things – past, present, and future – have a purpose. When the sacrifice of Christ for the salvation of the world becomes present in the Mass, we give “thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 5:20).
We thank God for having created the world, and for giving us all we need. We thank Him, that for our sake Christ became man, and for sending us His Holy Spirit. We thank Him for the Church, who has become our Mother in faith: she is the Body of Christ, in which we have been incorporated through baptism and confession of the Catholic faith. We thank Him for our families, in which we were allowed to grow up, and for our friends, who are our faithful companions through life. And if God has called us to marriage, we thank him for our husband or wife, and for the children we love, because they are God’s gift to their parents.
As Christians, we have a musical awareness of life: In our hearts resounds the song of thanksgiving of the redeemed. Its melody is love, and its harmony is joy in God. We do not believe in the superficial optimism of fate, which we hope will remain kind to us. No one will be spared the suffering of this world, and everyone must bear his or her cross. Instead, in work and leisure, in happiness and pain, in life and death, a Christian puts all his hope in Christ alone for “we know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to His purpose” (Rom 8:28).
Like water bursting from a source, becoming a living stream that can make the desert blossom, so our joy in God is the seed in the field of our life that brings fruit, a hundredfold. Adoration of God in the spirit of Christ is this: “to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1). Following Christ’s example, who gave His life on the altar of the cross, our life is a sacrifice to God. But the same Christ, through his resurrection, has also opened the door to eternal life for us. This is our faith.
Today, however, many Christians are anxious and concerned: Looking at the crisis of traditionally Christian societies in the West, and at the confusion in the Church, does Christianity still fit into our time? Is the rock on which Jesus built His Church shaking?
The crisis in the Church is man-made and has arisen because we have cozily adapted ourselves to the spirit of a life without God. This is why in our hearts so many things are un-redeemed and long for substitute gratification!
But the one who believes needs no ideology. The one who hopes will not reach for drugs.
The one who loves is not after the lust of this world, which passes along with the world. The one who loves God and neighbor finds happiness in the sacrifice of self-giving. We will be happy and free when, in the spirit of love, we embrace the form of life to which God has called each one of us personally: in the sacrament of marriage, in celibate priesthood, or in religious life according to the three evangelical counsels of poverty, obedience, and chastity for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.
I would like to evoke a famous Christmas homily by St Leo the Great. During the migration of peoples and dissolution of order as the Roman empire disintegrates, Leo speaks to the personal faith of each Catholic. With his words, I would like to address every Catholic today who has become unsettled in the present crisis of the Church, of our nations, and of mankind: “Christian, acknowledge your dignity and, becoming a partner in the Divine nature, refuse to return to the old baseness by degenerate conduct. Remember the Head and the Body of which you are a member. Recollect that you were rescued from the power of darkness and brought out into God’s light and kingdom. By the mystery of Baptism you were made the temple of the Holy Spirit: do not put such a great guest to flight from you by base acts“ (Sermon 21:3).
We cannot escape the deadly poison of the serpent if we strike friendship with it, but only if we prudently keep our distance and have the antidote ready at hand. The poison paralyzing the Church is the opinion that we should adapt to the Zeitgeist, the superficial spirit of the age, that we should relativize God’s commandments and reinterpret the doctrine of faith according to narrow-minded rationalism or immanentism.
“The Church of the living God” is “the pillar and foundation of truth” (1Tim 3:15), but today some people would like to reconstruct her as a convenient civil religion. [Both the] post-Christian society and anti-Christian opinion makers in the mainstream media approve of such self-secularization. But that in no way means they accept the faith in Jesus Christ, never mind that some Church authorities are confused about this. The agents of the New World Order lurking around the Vatican, trying to instrumentalize the Pope for their agendas on climate change and population control, are not getting closer to the Church; […] only those who together with St. Peter are looking to Jesus and confess “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:18) are.
The antidote against secularization of the Church is the “truth of the gospel” (Gal 2:14) and living “by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me” (Gal 2:20).
Today, the tempter’s magic phrase is “necessary modernization”; consequently, anyone opposing this ideology will be fought like an enemy and will be accused of being a traditionalist. Let me give you one example of this perverted logic. Protecting human life from conception to natural death is discredited as a “conservative,” “right-wing” political position – while at the same time killing innocent unborn children is declared to be a “human right” and therefore deemed “progressive.” In politics and media, it is all about power over human minds and over the money in people’s pockets. For this purpose, people are being conditioned [with the use of] campaign slogans like “conservative” or “modern.” But faith in God is concerned with the contrast between true and false, and ethics is about the distinction between good and evil.
For some, the Catholic Church is lagging behind by 200 years compared to where the world is today. Is there any truth to this questionable accusation, formulated even by some Church leaders? So-called or self-appointed “Adult Catholics,” for their part, play the useful idiots or model students of the Enlightenment, promising they will quickly catch up to the lessons of atheistic criticism of religion.
Does “necessary modernization” mean the Church should reject the historical revelation of God in Jesus Christ? Can the Church be faithful to her founder, if she mutates into a religion of humanity or a civil religion? The allegedly peaceful agnostics of today generously allow the simple people to keep their religion, but they are eager to use the potential of meaning the Church possesses for their own purposes. They do not hold revealed faith to be true but would like to use it as building material for the new religion of old [Free]masons’ dreams of an universal brotherhood without the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In order to be admitted to this international meta-religion, the only price the Church would have to pay is giving up her truth claim. No big deal, it seems, as the relativism dominant in our world anyway rejects the idea that we can […] know the truth and presents itself as the guarantor of peace between all religions and world views. And in fact a Catholicism without dogmas, without sacraments, and without an infallible magisterium, is the Fata Morgana [i.e. mirage—Ed.] for which even a number of Church leaders are longing.
But because in the “fullness of time, God sent his Son, born of a woman” (Gal 4:4), whom the shepherds of Bethlehem found as “the infant lying in the manger” (Lk 2:16), every time is immediate to God.
Jesus cannot be surpassed by the changing of times, because God’s eternity encompasses all eras of history and the biography of each person. In the concrete human being Jesus of Nazareth, God’s universal truth is concretely present here and now – in historical time and space. Jesus Christ is not the representation of some supratemporal truth: He is “the way, the truth and the life” in person (John 14:56). God “wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth. For there is one God. There is also one mediator between God and the human race, Christ Jesus, himself human” (1Tim 2:4f).
The Church walks with the times in their societal changes. And theology, in dialogue with modern, scientific, and technological worldviews, formulates how faith and reason are compatible. Faith is a knowledge of God’s truth, and a light in which we understand ourselves and the world in its innermost origin and purpose. This knowledge, however, we owe to the Word of God who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). By inner-worldly reasoning, the truth of revealed faith can neither be proven nor disproven.
The Church knows that we are lost without the gospel of Christ. In her womb, Mary conceived God Himself, who was born from her: Jesus Christ, the one Savior of the whole world. He alone can save the world, and frankly I also would not want to be saved by anyone but Him, true God and true man.
Let us ask the Mother of God to intercede for us, that we become more worthy to receive the Author of life, our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with God his Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.
The following homily was given on September 24, 2024, in the context of the conference “Aquinas at 800 – ad multos annos” at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana.
Thomas Aquinas, master of Catholic truth
The essential mission of the Church is to proclaim to all people the “Gospel of God … and of his Son … Jesus Christ, our Lord” (Rom 1:1-4).
In order for it to carry out its divine mission, “the Spirit guides [the Church] in way of all truth and which He unified in communion and in works of ministry, He both equips and directs with hierarchical and charismatic gifts and adorns with His fruits” (Lumen Gentium 4).
It is an expression of their hierarchical-sacramental constitution when the apostles and their episcopal successors carry out the command of Jesus, who said to them with divine authority: “Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations… and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you” (Mt 28:19).
At the same time, the ability to teach is also one of the free charisms through which the Holy Spirit unites and builds up the one Body of Christ in the diversity of its members: “Whoever is called to teach, let him teach” (Rom 12:7), says the Apostle Paul to the Christians in Rome, so that each one, with the gift assigned to him, contributes to building up the Church in charity.
Christian theology is an essential function of the Church of the incarnate Logos – whether it is represented by professors in the priesthood or laypersons. And theology must never forget this double reference, namely that it is anchored in the mission of Christ and the apostolic Church, and that it can only be saved from cold rationalism and humourless positivism if it does not forget its charismatic element. “For nobody is able to say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit … the particular manifestation of the Spirit granted to each one, is to be used for the general good … (for example) the charism of utterance expressing wisdom or expressing knowledge.” (1 Cor 12:3, 7, 8).
Theology is the third form of teaching in the Church, after the official presentation of the revealed faith by the Magisterium and its catechetical and homiletic mediation in the liturgical and social life of the faithful. Theology uses scientific methods and logical argumentation. For anyone who asks about the “Logos/reason of our hope” (1 Peter 3:15) deserves a rational answer.
This answer must not, however, subject the truths of revelation to the limited power of natural reason. But the reason of faith (ratio fidei) participates, through the light of the Holy Spirit, in the Logos of God, Who in Jesus Christ has entered into the horizon of man’s understanding, expanded it, and elevated it. “The Word was the real light, that gives light to everyone, which enlightens every man … but to those who did accept him, he gave power to become children of God.” (John 1:9,12).
St. Thomas Aquinas, whose 800th birthday we are celebrating, combines in a unique way all three dimensions of Christian teaching, which are ultimately all united in the faith infused by the Holy Spirit and in the reason enlightened by the same Spirit. This professor of theology, recognized by the Church as the Doctor communis, was humbly aware that we can only recognize God as the truth and salvation of man in faith and accept Him freely if our reason is first of all enlightened by the Holy Spirit. The truth of God is received by us first, and then reason enlightened by faith is able “to illumine the mysteries of salvation as completely as possible, [so that] the students should learn to penetrate them more deeply with the help of speculation, under the guidance of St. Thomas, and to perceive their interconnections” (Second Vatican Council, Optatam totius 16).
Thomas did not see himself as an autonomous philosopher who, at the end of his thinking, postulates or affirms God as a necessary idea of reason. Rather, he sees himself as a “teacher of Catholic truth” (Summa theologiae I. prol.), which presents God’s self-revelation as the truth and life of every human being, and which has [definitively] become historical reality in Jesus Christ.
But he also rejects the dialectic of contradiction between God and the world based on a theology of the cross or a philosophy of the subject, which, due to sin or the absolute autonomy of finite reason, would consider the essence of Christianity to be an irreconcilable opposition between nature and grace, or between rational knowledge and faith, or even, in post-Christian terms, would see this as the basis for the irreconcilability of revelation and reason. The apparent opposition between Christianity and modernity, in philosophy and in the empirical sciences, has one of its origins in the rejection of Thomas’ synthesis between faith and reason.
In his 1800-page history of philosophy, the post-metaphysical German philosopher Jürgen Habermas of the Frankfurt School, in striking agreement with the encyclical “Fides et ratio” of Pope John Paul II, describes the relationship between faith and reason as the only theme that defines Western culture, and thus world civilization today. The relationship between reason and faith is therefore more important for the fate of humanity than climate neutrality and total wokeness.
The question is what meaning existence has at all, or whether nothingness is not rather the aimless beginning and the hopeless end of everything. But at the same time, our reason is not just the rational consideration of the physical and psychological given and of the metaphysical principles of being and knowledge, but also the openness of listening to the Word. For, through the Word that was in the beginning and is God, everything came into being. And the same Word through which all creation exists has spoken to us in a human way, in his Son Jesus Christ who dwelt among us (John 1:1,14).
Essentially, the colossal work of St. Thomas is a refutation and overcoming of ancient and modern Gnosticism and Idealism, which with its metaphysical dualism tears being apart into an irresolvable dialectical contradiction, and deprives people of any hope of communion with God in truth and love, and delivers us all to an existentialist or cosmological nihilism. The hermeneutical key to the Catholic understanding of Christianity is the analogy of nature and grace, reason and faith, will and love.
Faith is based on the authority of God revealing himself in the living testimony of the apostles and the Church. “Nonetheless, sacred doctrine uses human reason as well – not, to be sure, in order to prove the Faith, since this would destroy the meritoriousness of faith, but rather to make clear certain other things that are dealt with in this doctrine. For since grace perfects nature and does not destroy it, natural reason must serve the Faith, just as the natural inclination of the will likewise serves charity. This is why in 2 Corinthians 10:5 the Apostle says, “bringing into captivity every understanding unto the obedience of Christ” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I q. 8 a. 8. ad 2).
All biblical theologies, from the Old Testament Genesis to Paul to John, begin with the absolute goodness of creation, in which God reveals himself as origin and destination. In participating in the being and life of God, everything that exists is in itself unum, verum, et bonum. And in the cross of Jesus, God does not reveal a pain of otherness that would occur in the eternal emergence of the Son from the Father and that would manifest itself in the emergence of creation as a natural contradiction between God and the world – as a Gnostic-tainted theology of the cross from Luther to Hegel would insinuate.
Rather, in the cross of Jesus we have the forgiveness of sins and the beginning of the redeemed world in the nuptial unity of Christ and the Church in anticipation of the New Creation. In Christianity there is no room for world-weariness, fatalism, and nihilism, because we are all in God’s hands. Like all people and even the greatest thinkers, with the exception of the man Jesus of Nazareth, the God-Logos made flesh, Thomas Aquinas is a child of his time. But in his presentation of Catholic truth and his reflection on its principles, which are based on the intellect of God who reveals Himself, he is an excellent example for every teacher of the faith, both in the ecclesiastical teaching office, in catechetical teaching, and in scientific research, in paying attention to new anthropological questions and progressive findings of the empirical sciences, so that “there may be a deeper realization of the harmony of faith and science” in the one truth (Second Vatican Council, Gravissimum educationis 10).
What Thomas intended with his enormous masterpiece, the Summa theologiae, namely, to present the Christian religion in such a way that even beginners in sacred science are motivated, is also what the Second Vatican Council suggests to teachers at Catholic universities and schools. With Thomas as their teacher and role model, “the students of these institutions are molded into men truly outstanding in their training, ready to undertake weighty responsibilities in society and witness to the faith in the world” (Second Vatican Council, Gravissimum educationis 10). Amen.
