How Jesus entered Pope Benedict XVI's Life

How Jesus entered Pope Benedict XVI’s Life
cinops be gone Sunday, April 20, 2008
How Jesus entered my life: I met him first not in literature or philosophy, but in the faith of the Church. That means that from the beginning he was not, for me, an important figure from the past (like Plato or Thomas Aquinas, for example), but someone who lives and works today, someone we can meet today.

It means, above all, that I have learned to know him within the history of the Faith that originates in him, to see him as faith sees him in its most enduring formulation by the Council of Chalcedon. In my opinion, Chalcedon is a great and most courageous reduction of an extremely complex and multilayered fund of Tradition to a single, central and fundamental statement:

Son of God, possessed of one nature with God and one nature with us. In contrast with the many other possibilities that have been broached in the course of history, Chalcedon interpreted Jesus theologically; I regard that as the only interpretation that can do justice to the whole spectrum of Tradition and can bear the full implications of the phenomena.

Every other interpretation is, in some way, too restricted; every other concept includes one part of the truth and excludes another. Here, and here alone, is the whole truth revealed. Ultimately, everything else derives from this interpretation.

First of all Jesus and the Church are, for me, as impossible to separate as they are impossible to identify one with the other. Jesus is always infinitely transcendent to the Church. It was not through Vatican Council II that we first learned that, as Lord of the Church, he is also her standard. I have always regarded this truth as both consolation and challenge.

As consolation because we have always known that the scrupulosity of the rubricists and the legalists does not have its source in Jesus, in that infinite magnanimity that comes to us from the words of the Gospels like a fresh breeze and collapses all excessive literalness like a house of cards. We have always known that nearness to him is as totally independent of the ecclesiastical rank one may hold as of one’s knowledge of juridical and historical details.

That has enabled me to look upon external details with a corresponding ease of mind. To that extent, the person of Jesus has always been for me a source of optimism and liberation. On the other hand, I have never been able to ignore the fact that, in many respects, he asks more of me than the Church would ever dare to ask, that the radicalism of his words can be equated only with the kind of radicalism displayed by Anthony, the Desert Father, and Francis of Assisi in their wholly literal acceptance of the Gospel.

If we do not do that, we have already taken refuge in casuistry, and cannot escape the corroding restlessness, the knowledge, that, like the rich young man, we have turned away when we should have taken seriously the words of Gospel.

All of the above is entry April 20th from Co-Workers of the Truth, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1992, p. 20-22
George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate in to Spanish or Vietnamese.