A Reason Open to God

Foreword

Foreword John Garvey This is a collection of Pope Benedict XVI’s addresses and writings about education and the university. During his papacy Benedict has devoted special attention to the “educational emergency ” of recent years.1 It is a subject about which he has a lot to say. Before his election he was a widely admired academic theologian. For twenty-five years he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the oldest congregation in the Roman Curia. The pieces in this book are the reflections of a finely tuned theological mind and a meditative disposition on that modern problem. They also address another, and for us more important, question : How should a Catholic education differ from a secular one? What unique contributions might the schools born from the heart of the Church make to the solution of the modern educational emergency? Benedict’s writing offers a response, which I want to highlight by way of introduction. At the center of a Catholic education, as at the center of Catholicism itself, is a friendship between God and man, mediated through the tradition of the Church. Benedict insists that Catholic education ceases to do its job when it ignores, sidelines, or alters this friendship. Benedict’s insistence on the centrality of friendship with God in Catholic education is not trite or sentimental rhetoric. It is a ix 1. Pope Benedict XVI, Letter to the Faithful of the Diocese and City of Rome on the Urgent Task of Educating Young People, January 21, 2008. x Foreword deeply held theological commitment that is evident throughout his career as a theologian and ecclesial authority. We see it in his work as a young man involved in the debates at Vatican II. We see it in the more mature writings found in this book. Benedict’s reflections on education stress a distinctively Catholic formation of the intellect. But given the importance he attaches to friendship with God, it is natural that he should see more in Catholic education than just an intellectual component. He also emphasizes cultivating virtue and love of neighbor, since the relationship with God is never only vertical, but also always horizontal.2 Friendship with God adds a moral dimension to Catholic education. However , nothing we do, no matter how intellectually rigorous or scientific , happens outside our relationship with God. To forget this is to forget who we are and for what and for Whom we are made. This is the main point of the pope’s writings on this subject, and it is the reason we should pay attention to what he has said. If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation ... open wide the doors to Christ—and you will find true life. Pope Benedict XVI, Homily for the Mass for the Inauguration of the Pontificate, April 24, 2005 Late in the first session of Vatican II, Joseph Ratzinger was summoned to act as an advisor for the archbishop of Cologne, Joseph Cardinal Frings. By that time Ratzinger had written a doctoral dissertation on Augustine’s ecclesiology and a postdoctoral dissertation on Bonaventure. Just in his mid-thirties, he had already spent a year teaching at Freising College and a few years at the University of Bonn. The Council, which sought to respond 2. Cf. Benedict XVI, Address to Representatives from the World of Culture at the “Collège des Bernardins” in Paris, Apostolic Journey to France, Paris, September 12, 2008. Foreword xi to questions posed to the Church by the modern world, put an indelible mark on the young theologian. In some ways Vatican II merely rephrased an old question about the Church’s relation to other traditions. Since its earliest days the Church has engaged in a dialogue with other intellectual and moral currents. Many of the brightest lights in Church history made their mark by integrating insights from other traditions into Catholic thought. The early Church fathers married Greek philosophy with Christian theology. Medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas synthesized the pagan wisdom of the Greeks and Romans with Christian thought. Those who succeeded in these endeavors used the wisdom of other traditions while preserving...