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https://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/Category:Georg_G%C3%A4nswein |
Rod Dreher writes:-
"Hello from Rome, where there was something of an earthquake this morning.
The
De Gasperi Foundation held an invitation-only conference in Rome’s House of Deputies this morning, to discuss
The Benedict Option. I
gave a talk, and then gave the floor to Archbishop Georg Gänswein. He
is the prefect of the papal household, but more importantly, is the
longtime personal secretary to Benedict XVI. I was extremely curious to
know what he would have to say about my book, as I have not hidden the
fact that Benedict XVI is “the second Benedict of
The Benedict Option.”
What Monsignor Gänswein said was nothing short of astounding. An Italian journalist just texted me to say
I assure you that a lot of people in Rome and all over
the Catholic world are stunned by those remarks. Exactly because it
clearly means approval [of The Benedict Option] by BXVI …
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
I will post an official translation of the entire text when it
becomes available in English. Here are highlights from the Italian
original, translated with Google and with the help of Italian-speaking
friends:
1. It is “an act of Divine Providence” that we are having this
conference today, on September 11, because the sex abuse scandal is the
Catholic Church’s own 9/11.
2. No churches have been destroyed (so far) by terrorists, but
symbolically, US churches (“all the churches of Pennsylvania, along with
the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in
Washington”) have “collapsed” because of the “mortal wounds” delivered
to souls by “priests of the Catholic Church.” [The basilica cite might
be a reference to Cardinal Wuerl]
3. “I remember as if it were yesterday when on April 16, 2008,
accompanying Pope Benedict XVI right in that National Shrine of the
Catholic Church in the United States of America, he touchingly tried to
shake the bishops convened from all the United States: he spoke bent
over the ‘profound shame’ caused by ‘the sexual abuse of minors by
priests’ and ‘the immense sorrow your communities have suffered when men
of the Church have betrayed their priestly duties and duties with such
grossly unethical behavior.’ But evidently in vain, as we see today. The
lament of the Holy Father was not able to contain the evil, nor the
formal assurances and the commitments in words of a large part of the
hierarchy.”
4. Mons. Gänswein said that reading
The Benedict Option, he thought a lot about the following words that
Benedict XVI said on the flight back to Rome from Fatima on May 11, 2010:
“The Lord told us that the Church would always be
suffering, in different ways, until the end of the world. […] As for the
news that we can discover today (in this third secret of the Fatima
message), there is also the fact that not only are the Pope and the
Church attacked from outside, but the sufferings of the Church come from
interior of the Church, from the sin that exists in the Church. This
too has always been known, but today we see it in a truly terrifying
way: that the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from
outside enemies, but arises from sin in the Church. “
5. Talking about the collapse of churchgoing in his home country,
Germany, Mons. Gänswein contrasted that to the picture BXVI gave in
these 2005 remarks to a meeting in Bari.
The pope talked about the arrest in the year 304 of a group of
Christians as they prayed in church. The Emperor Diocletian had
forbidden them from gathering on Sundays to celebrate the Eucharist, and
to build churches. In the North African town of Abitene, 49 Christians
were arrested during Sunday worship. They told their captors that they
could not live without the Eucharist — and they were all martyred for
their faith. Today, though, very few Catholics in Germany can bother to
get out of bed on Sunday to go to mass.
6. Speaking in a frankly apocalyptic vein, BXVI’s secretary — think
of that! — said these days make him think of the Bible’s warnings that
in the Last Days, believers will see “the abomination of desolation in
the holy place.” He said that he wonders, along with Cardinal Eijk of
the Netherlands, if the Church is facing its final trial before the
Second Coming.
7. Mons. Gänswein praised my coverage of the Catholic abuse scandal,
saying that I am “a man who completely corresponds to the desires and
tastes of Pope Francis, because no one else in Rome knows better than he
that the crisis of the Church, in its core, is a crisis of the clergy.
And so the time has come for the strong and determined laymen,
especially in the new independent Catholic media, as embodied by Rod
Dreher.”
8. He said that since his retirement, BXVI has considered himself to
be an “old monk” spending all his time praying for the Church and the
world. Mons. Gänswein offers as BXVI’s response the
Pope Emeritus’s 2008 lecture to the Collège des Bernardins in Paris.
The entire point of the Benedicine mission, the pope said, was “quarere
Deum” — to search for God. Everything else followed from that.
Along those lines, the archbishop highlights
The Benedict Option‘s
claim that this general crisis of disbelief roiling the Christian world
— not just the Catholic one — may actually save our souls by forcing us
to draw nearer to God. Mons. Gänswein said, of the book:
…it does not contain a ready answer. In it you will not
find an infallible recipe or a master key to reopen all those doors that
until now were accessible to us but that are now slamming shut again.
Between the first and the last cover you will find, however, an
authentic example of what Pope Benedict said ten years ago about the
Benedictine spirit of the beginnings. It is a real “Quaerere Deum”. It
is that search for the true God of Isaac and of Jacob who, in Jesus
Christ, has shown his human face.
9. Many people are saying today that the Church is finished, that she cannot recover, said Gänswein. However:
And this is the hour when Rod Dreher from Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, presents his book near the tombs of the Apostles; and, in the
midst of the eclipse of God who is terrifying all over the world, he
comes among us and says: “The Church is not dead, but only sleeps and
rests”.
And not only this: the Church “is young” also seems to tell us, and
with that joy and freedom with which Benedict XVI said it in the Mass
for the beginning of the Petrine ministry on April 24, 2005. Recalling
once again the suffering and the death of Saint John Paul II of which he
had been a collaborator for so many years, addressing each one of us in
St Peter’s Square, said:
“It was precisely in the sad days of the Pope’s illness and death that
this manifested itself in a marvelous way in our eyes: that the Church
is alive. And the Church is young. It carries within itself the future
of the world and therefore also shows each of us the path to the future.
The Church is alive and we see it: we experience the joy that the Risen
One has promised to his own. The Church is alive – she is alive,
because Christ is alive, because he has truly risen. In pain, present on
the face of the Holy Father on Easter days, we contemplated the mystery
of the passion of Christ and together touched his wounds. But in all
these days we have also been able, in a profound sense, to touch the
Risen One. We have been given the opportunity to experience the joy that
he promised, after a short period of darkness, as the fruit of his
resurrection “.
10. His concluding lines:
Therefore I have to confess sincerely that I perceive this
time of great crisis, one that is evident to everyone, mostly as a time
of grace. In the end, we will be “set free” not by a specific effort,
but by the “truth”, as the Lord assured us. Within this hope, I look at
the recent accounts made by Rod Dreher for the “purification of the
memory” requested by John Paul II; and hence, with gratitude, I read his
“Benedict Option”, as a marvelous source of inspiration. In these last
few weeks, nothing else has provided me as much consolation."
For the whole story see:-
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-xvi-ganswein-benedict-option/ .
