A Coda
There was a meeting of German theologians and bishops just prior to the opening of the Second Vatican Council. One of the attendees was the young Joseph Ratzinger, then a promising theologian, later, of course, Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger reported that the lively discussion centered on the question of which themes should be treated at the upcoming ecumenical council. In accord with the tenor of the times, many said that ecclesiological issues should be in the forefront: the nature of the church, the role of the laity, the church’s engagement with the modern world, and so forth. At the close of an hours-long and sometimes heated conversation, Ratzinger reported, an elderly retired bishop rose unsteadily to his feet and said, “I have listened, brothers, with great interest to this debate, and I agree that issues concerning the church are important ones, but I’m convinced that the council should speak, first and foremost, of God.” Then he sat down. In that simple exhortation, Ratzinger said, the participants felt they had heard the voice of the Holy Spirit. Finally, what the church is about, what councils, theologies, pastoral programs, and liturgies are about, is God. Catholicism speaks of God or it is a “resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.”
My fondest hope is that this modest book has, in a small way, spoken of God, or perhaps better, that it has shown how God uses Catholicism to utter his Word. For I am certain that God speaks through the sinuous arguments of Aquinas, through the upward-thrusting lines of the Cologne Cathedral, through the artfully crafted story of tortured Job, through the tear-stained pages of Augustine’s Confessions, through the letters that Paul wrote from prison, through the profession of faith given by Simon Bar-jona at Caesarea-Philippi, through a speech offered to puzzled philosophers on the Areopagus in Athens, and through the missionary journeys of Matteo Ricci and Francis Xavier. I am sure that God whispers in the apse mosaic in San Clemente, in that Noah’s ark that is Notre Dame Cathedral, in the statues of the apostles in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, in the infallible umpiring of the popes, in the Rhapsodic Theatre of young Karol Wojtyla, and in the rhythmic “we want God” chant of the Warsaw throng.
And I am convinced that God communicates himself in the angel’s “Ave” to a Galilean girl, in the torch-lit parade in Ephesus in honor of Theotokos, in the heavenly lady who appeared to an Indian man on his way to Mass, in what appears to the world to be the utter uselessness of the sacred Liturgy, in transfigured signs of bread and wine, in the troubled hearts of two women who left the presence of Pope Leo XIII in tears, in the Birkenau gas chamber in which a brave and brilliant nun died, and in a call heard on the way to Darjeeling: “help the poorest of the poor.” I am persuaded that God expresses himself in the electric intensity of the Sainte-Chapelle, in the dingy coffee shop on 111th Street that became, for a young spiritual seeker fresh from Mass, the Elysian fields, in the mystical poetry of a Spanish friar madly in love, in the pierced heart of Teresa of Avila, in the epiphany at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the severity of Lough Derg, in the chants and dances that honor the young martyrs of Uganda, and in the singing of the fiery Seraphim, burnt by their proximity to the holy.
And I have based my life on the knowledge that God speaks with greatest clarity in the Bethlehem baby, too weak to raise his head but more powerful than Caesar Augustus, in the rabbi who, trumping the Torah itself, told all of us how to find beatitude, in the warrior who picked a fight in the Temple precincts, in the young man, tortured to death on a squalid hill outside Jerusalem, with the words, “Father, forgive them,” on his lips, in the risen one who said “Shalom” to those who had abandoned and betrayed him, in Maschiach leshoua, Christ Jesus, the Lord of the nations.
To hear the echo of God’s voice in all these things is to be a Catholic.