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Interviewer: Benedict XVI. has rarely been as worldly as during the announcement of his resignation.
Never was he has progressive as during his confession that mentally and physically
he feels no longer up to the task to be God’s deputy on earth.
I will now speak about the outgoing Pontifex and the future of the Catholic Church with Eugen Drewermann.
You will know him from his talk show Freedom of Speech [Redefreiheit] every month here at Nordwestradio.
Eugen Drewermann is a theologian, psychoanalyst, writer, and suspended Catholic priest.
In October 1991, Archbishop Johannes Joachim Degenhardt revoked his Catholic license to teach,
in January 1992 his right to preach, and in March 1992 he suspended him from the priesthood.
The reason were controversial views of Drewermann in moral theology and the interpretation of the Bible.
Good even, Mr. Drewermann. Drewermann: Good evening, Mr. Obuch.
Interviewer: Benedict XVI is resigning. A surpise. A “modern” departure, many have said.
Has the Pope, at least in his resignation, become open to modern times?
Drewermann: That would be accurate if he had given a theological reason for his personal stepping down from the office.
We would then see what the churches of the Reformation have already been saying for about 500 years:
Religion, the relationship with God, has to be developed from the perspective of the human person
and not from the perspective of institutions or offices.
If it is possible that one resigns because one has become incapable of doing the work given with an office,
then the unshakable Catholic doctrine can no longer be true
which claims that God through the grace of the office compensates for all human frailty.
Reality is different. This doctrine transforms truth into something static, into an administrative dogmatic act, and completely misses people.
I believe anyone can like somebody who knows her own limits, who admits his fallibility,
who is together searching for truth which has to emerge through dialogue.
The problem of the Catholic Church stems from an office which claims to represent God on earth,
to know with infallibility the plans and truths of God, and impose them on people in virtually any important question of life.
It creates an ideology and obsessive conformity, the opposite of a sense of freedom, personhood, and maturity.
Interviewer: We remember the pictures of Pope John Paul II, marked by Parkinson’s, struggling for words he could not find.
He endured in his office until death delivered him. Now Benedict comes and says
“The office is important, not I” and he receives some praise for it.
But does he not behave a little bit lax here, like a senior boss handing over his company?
Drewermann: I don’t think that’s it, actually. If the office could successfully be humanized
by referring back to the original intention, then we would have real progress.
Instead we were not really allowed to speak about John Paul II.’s Parkinson’s disease.
It was a secret although in the end everyone could simply see it. Identifying him with Jesus and the martyrdom on the Cross
was an inflated spirituality, which revealed at the same time its inhuman and tragic aspects.
What we need are not officials who sacrifice themselves for the office, but rather humans who help humans on one and the same level.
It is impossible to say that the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, is the successor of Peter, without remembering how Peter is chosen by Jesus.
To me this scene in the fifth Chapter of the Gospel of Luke is shocking: Peter begs Jesus after the large catch of fish
to go away from him because he is nothing but a sinner.
It is just that confession which is decisive for Jesus to call this man who knows his weakness, who acknowledges his fallibility,
into a close relationship because he can be trusted to have compassion and understanding for all other people who are just like him.
An infallible office, the idea of being the representative of God on earth, is the exact opposite of this.
And here lie, too, the difficulties among the denominations within Christianity.
Benedict XVI., already while he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith,
simply denied the churches of the Reformation the status as churches.
And he does so because of this one controversial point: that religion is a matter of the person and not essentially a matter of an institution.
Protestants have the message of Jesus on their side here, and the Pope, defined this way, doesn’t have it on his side.
Interviewer: You have lost the Catholic license to teach and to preach as well as your priesthood, as I said at the beginning of our conversation.
Josef Ratzinger, let me put it carefully, was not necessarily inactive in these decisions.
How did you yourself experience him personally?
Drewermann: The condemnations you just mentioned came directly from him, although I never had a chance or permission to speak with him about it.
This exemplifies the whole way of thinking: the current form of theology in the educational system of the Roman-Catholic Church is incapable,
despite its high degree of intelligence and enormous amount of information and education, of thinking from the perspective of human experience
in questions of marriage, sexuality, homosexuality – the perennial topics of the Catholic Church;
incapable of understanding the tragedies potentially given with human existence.
They are moraltheologically simply ‘solved’ by administrative acts.
Worse yet, the same Church and theological elite is unable to read the Bible symbolically,
to evoke the spirituality which its poetic statements could have.
Pope Benedict XVI, shortly before Christmas, published a book about the infancy stories of Jesus,
where he reads the Bible in completely fundamentalist fashion: Jesus was born as the son of a ***,
and unless one believes this one does not believe; and everything else has to be historically true in the same way.
I expected exegetes to stand up unanimously and say “We know better than that.
And we do need to have the right to interpret these symbol-filled images as akin to great poetry springing from the human soul,
so that the contents can connect with us.
It is true: Jesus comes into the world in a way that is not the result of human history simply because he does everything different
in terms of power, greatness, violence, with aggression. He comes to us literally from God into our world.
To express this we need such symbols. But if we take them literally, then we do not really take the Bible serious making it impossible for
generations of parents to share their faith with their children; for religion teachers in schools to do their job in schools;
and for Christians to dialogue with Jews from which Jesus himself comes or with Muslims who correctly base themselves on the Bible.
In all these points we encounter a language that is dogmatically and ideologically so fixated that there is no escape from it.
The church thus gets in its own way. In the end that which is called ‘faith’ is reduced to nothing but
an ‘obedience,’ fed by fear and guilt feelings, dependent on a central teaching office.
This does not promote maturity and development of human beings, nor thoughtfulness, an ability to dialogue.
Most of all it does not serve to unify humanity, which is precisely what God should also be there for,
a connection which embraces all human beings as created by God.
Interviewer: Is the end of the eight years of Benedict a chance for the Catholic Church to free itself
from the rather orthodox position prescribed by the Vatican that you just described?
Drewermann: Benedict XVI.s whole demeanor and background stood, already as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith,
of course, within a tradition of stabilization and petrification in reaction to the 2. Vatican Council in 1962-63.
Whether a new Pope will be able to act differently is open. He will first of all be again a ‘Pope,’
with all of the expectations, definitions of his office, doctrinal traditions by which he is bound.
And he is supposed to be the connector for one billion people in a homogeneous creed.
That is the enormous problem: there is no sufficient cultural plurality; There is no freedom and autonomy of speech.
Martin Luther’s successful attempt 500 years ago to bring God to speech by listening to the people has died out completely in this church.
It has a fixed language that is far removed from the experience and is nearly diametrically opposed to the human psychology.
This language can no longer be used to interpret the big human questions creatively.
I believe this is the real problem of today’s papacy: it is no longer allowed to be creative because the past crushes it and blocks its future.
Interviewer: That sounds very pessimistic. Many expect, also within the Catholic Church, that the election of a new Pope
could signal an opening and liberalization, and a willingness for reform. You do not believe that, or?
Drewermann: I can only wish the Church, as is being discussed, that it will name a Pope from Brazil or Africa.
But then we must be aware that at the periphery of the center the thinking is even more conservative then at the heart of the center.
Whether this will lead to a theological awakening is still to be determined.
The Church does believe, which is correct, that it is no longer regenerating in atheist Europe, in the Europe that has turned secular,
but still in countries that emerged from colonialization, especially by Portugal and Spain. But this will prove to be an error.
Because all of these countries will develop the same spiritual problems we have seen in Europe since the era of the Enlightenment.
Reason and faith cannot come together simply through ideological mediation attempts.
The open question how the Bible can be read critically has been raised now for 200 years.The Catholic Church has ignored it and never integrated.
We could continue with all the questions raised by the natural sciences and by issues of social development.
The Church needs a democratic culture, the equality of man and woman – ancient aims that have been openly addressed
in other denominations outside of Catholicism, but not to this day under the regime of the Pope.