Cardinal Müller on Theology and Culture

Well, I am delighted today to be here with the Cardinal Gerhard Müller. Cardinal Müller, of course, was a professor of theology in Munich. He was Bishop of Regensburg in Germany, and then most famously he was the prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under both Pope Benedict and Pope Francis, in which capacity he was the chief doctrinal officer of the Catholic Church. So Your Eminence, thank you for being here, for coming all the way to Rochester, Minnesota. Just a delight. Yeah. Thank you very much for the invitation. You’re welcome. And since here you are as one of the really great theological voices in the world today, I’d like to begin with my old hat as a theologian on. You were a student of Karl Lehmann, himself became a Cardinal and Lehmann in turn was a student of Karl Rahner. Now when I was a student, so go back into the 1980s, let’s say, if you were serious about theology, the person you read was Karl Rahner. I’m curious, your own relationship to the thought of Rahner. My own journey has taken me in some ways more away from Rahner. Curious to know your perspective on his thought. Surely Karl Rahner was one of the famous theologians in the past last century aside with Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Joseph Ratzinger, the other famous theologians was at the time before and after the second Vatican Council, great excitement about the possibilities of theology to enter into dialogue with the modern philosophy from Kant and Hegel and also Marx, all these challenges there were. But to come into dialogue with the modern world, and Karl Rahner came from a Thomistic or Jesuit and Suárez and all these Spanish schools of the Jesuits and the classical Catholic theology. He also had great contact with the Church Fathers, and he was a deep philosopher and therefore he was very good prepared for leading this dialogue with the modern world. We know the modern world in the philosophy is that in the actual Scholastic was real, metaphysics of the real, and beginning of Descartes, Cartesius, and the other was more the philosophy of the subjectivity and to make synthesis between these approaches. That was originality of Karl Rahner and his school. Yeah, and it’s interesting to me because Rahner, like Schleiermacher in a way, begins with experience, begins with, he always says, “Man in the presence of absolute mystery,” and then he tends to read doctrine from the standpoint of that experience. A lot of critics of Rahner, and I would join them here, that does experience become too much the measure of doctrine rather than doctrine becoming the measure of experience? And, you know, does the Transcendental Thomist project of Rahner work? I mean, can you read Thomas in light of Kant the way he does? That’d be one of the great debates when I was a young theologian. No, this is a great question. And the later Rahner became more a transcendalist and the facts of history was only the application of transcendental method, and this was the problem. Also, Karl Lehmann criticized it, his own disciple and other famous theologians and philosophers criticized it. Surely we need a certain synthesis, but at the end, the basis of all form of Catholic theology must be the primate of the reality, metaphysics of the reality, and it is absolutely clear also for me, we are finite human beings and our thinking has basis on the beings, the being is superior as our finite human thinking and clearly the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is not first the theory, reflection about the possibility, but begins with the reality, the historical facts, and then later we can reflect about the possibility, first the reality and then to think about the possibilities. I think that’s the difference. I think what I began to see with the help of Balthasar, that Rahner with all his virtues, Rahner was, as you say, a great figure in the intellectual history of the church, but there was a thinness to his Christology, right? His Christology was very abstract. Someone like Balthasar wants to give you a densely textured Christology, a deeply biblical Christology, and he would critique Rahner. You can read a lot of Rahner and not find too much of the Bible there. You find a lot of, you know, Kantianism and abstract philosophical accounts of anthropology, but do you find a densely textured biblical presentation of Jesus? That’s what Balthasar kind of opened up for me when I was doing my doctoral studies. What was your relationship to Balthasar? Did you know him personally? Yes, I know both Karl Rahner and Balthasar. What was Balthasar like personally? He was a very great formation, all the culture, European culture and all the languages, he was present and spoke all Italian and French like Romano Guardini, more in this line. And this is deep cultured-based theology and not so in this abstract form of Rahner, but cannot reduce Rahner only to the transcendent method. He wrote also a lot about spiritualities, deep spirituality, but I think his approach was more philosophical. He want to underline the possibility of Christian thinking against its reductionism of Christianity. Kant was a Christian, but he reduced the Christian mystery only to moral, and Jesus was not a moral teacher. Jesus brought us the nearness, the friendship of God, the kingdom of God and the communities, communion with God the Father and he’s the Son and the Holy Spirit, our baptism in the name of the Father, Son, of the Holy Spirit, that is a friendship with God, a childhood, we have. That is the essence of Christianity and the moral are the consequences of fellowship to Jesus Christ. And I think Balthasar can represent all the richness of the European cultures, the pre-Christian culture and the Christian culture and medieval, but also all the poets and all this literature and the art and— Extraordinary range of culture. —and if not only reduced, there’s a famous book of Karl Rahner was the concept of Christianity, but Christianity is not a concept, it’s not a theory, it’s not a philosophical system, but the Christian faith is a personal relation to another person who is the Son of God who became man. Something I found in one of your interviews, I think, where you said, go back all the way to Irenaeus and Origen and you’ll find, among a cultured elite, a resistance to the incarnation. That’s always the point, isn’t it? Is this strange claim of Christianity, if the word becomes flesh. In Irenaeus, the word ‘flesh’ comes up all the time, the body, the facticity. What is it about that Gnostic heresy that is so persistent? It existed way back then, it exists now, it seems to me. What is it? Why is the Gnostic heresy so persistent? Pope Francis asked me to write a book about the modern Gnosticism as the greatest challenge of Christianity. Like in the times of on the occasion when he appointed Irenaeus of Lyon, Doctor Ecclesiae, the Doctor of the Church, and my studies, I can say the old gnosis, Gnosticism is a pattern also of the modern Gnosticism. And Hegel is not only attack of us, but also his own school, Ferdinand Christian Baur, he said Hegelianism is a new form of Gnosticism, of a higher level of reflection. But the old Gnostics was not stupid people with some sentiments, they were philosophers, but the leaders and Valentin, they were philosophers in Alexandria of a high level and the basis of all Gnosticism is a negation of the reality of God coming into flesh. All the Platonism, Origen against Celsus. The new Platonism is the same, it’s not Gnosticism, but the attack or the absolute refusal of the possibility of the reality of the incarnation. And Irenaeus said not only is he become, took over a body, human nature in abstract form, but the flesh is as real we are, abstract and said we have human nature, but it’s only a philosophical concept, but we are not only in nature, we have body, blood, and our bones, and our sentiments, our soul. That is a real human being. And Jesus Christ suffered really on the cross. The word became flesh. And Hegel spoke only about spekulative Karfreitag what is it to say in English? Speculative. It’s a holy Friday. No? Oh, yeah. Speculative Good Friday, yeah. Right. Only speculation against the real suffering of Jesus on the cross. And that is a crucial point where it is going away and therefore Christianity is not the ideology, it’s not coming out from our ideas. It’s not a new idea of the world, but it’s a new reality. Isn’t it extraordinary how Irenaeus saw that very early on? And he knew that was the decisive battle, that Christianity had to win that battle. Gnosis was so similar to Christianity, and it was also seductive that, ‘Oh, it’s just a little…it’s the same.’ But was undermining, undermining of Christianity was the negation of the historical fact, God became man as the word became flesh. Do you see, Your Eminence, a sign of this new Gnostic approach in the gender ideology today? You know, the language is very much, ‘Well, the real me feels I’m a man or I’m a woman’ or whatever it is, and ‘Now I’ve got to bring my body into line with the real me, which is somehow not my body. It’s buried inside.’ and we say that so facilely today, but it seems to me that’s just the old Gnostic problem. Yeah, the Gnostic moral was the same. It denied the body. The body is neutral, has nothing to do with you. And then genderism has also a little bit to do with this modern subjectivism, Descartes, res extensa, res cogitans is only the thing— The res cogitans is the real and then the res extensa’s out there. This is only the body, but we have to say God became flesh, took over our flesh, our reality and our body is belonging to me and therefore we have also a salvation, the resurrection of our body. The body is belonging to you. It is not only an instrument, ‘I can have power over my own body,’ but has to identify me with my body, with my concrete existence in the world. I have received my body, my physical existence by my parents and my parents, as flesh from flesh, blood from blood. Do you find, you know, in a lot of the Christology I read as a young man, think of Schillebeeckx, the facticity of the resurrection is often questioned. So Jesus dies on the cross, his disciples come together, they remember, you know, how wonderful he was, they feel forgiven by him and therefore they tell stories about the empty tomb and appearances. In many of the more liberal Christologies, you have a kind of bracketing of the bodiliness of resurrection. That too is a neo-Gnosticism, isn’t it? Yeah, I think so. There was a famous formulation of Rudolf Bultmann: Jesus resurrected only in the faith of the disciples, but faith is not the faith of confessing, but his faith is only the conscience is meant. But resurrection is a real fact, like the incarnation; as a consequence, incarnation is real, the suffering of Jesus on the cross is real. The resurrection is a historical reality and also our resurrection of our bodies is a real fact and that is our hope. I think that’s what Irenaeus saw, that all these things are connected. It’s a whole range of Cathol --- Descartes, we get res cogitans, res extensa. You’ve got a strong distinction between the inner and the outer. That’s not the case in Catholicism. Original Lutheranism, of Luther himself, he reduced the seven sacraments to two and the Eucharist was also reduced, not more the sacrifice, but all the supper of memory of subjective memory, what happened in the history but not a real presence. And that was a desacramentalizing of Christian faith and more, he said, those good Christians who are living only by the faith, they don’t need all this signs. But we are saying this sacramental signs has a cause, efficiency, the real presence of the grace of God according to our bodies, we are bodily. We’re not angels, right? Aquinas, when they ask, why is there both form and matter in the sacraments? We're not angels. Our body is not a border, a limit to our encounter with God, but is the place in which, on which we encounter and have the community with God as was also, turning to Rahner, a famous article of him, the eternal meaning, significance of the humanity of Jesus Christ. The humanity, the human nature, the body and blood of Jesus Christ is the instrument, is the form of the mediation between God. God is so infinitely distant to us, but in the body of Christ, in the history just of Israel, historical revelation in the culmination in Jesus Christ, this is the form we have communion with God and also in our eternal life we see God from face to face, but because we are sons and daughters in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the basis of his human nature will remain forever the incarnation and the hypostatic union is not only once and forever historical fact but is present now and for all eternity. Yeah. Well, the Church is the extension of the incarnation, the Church Fathers often used that language. You know my favorite essay by Rahner, actually, he was talking to Protestant colleagues in Germany, and he said, the Eucharist for us is a word-event because Trent says “Vis verborum”—by the power of the words, Christ becomes truly present, when the priest or the bishop pronounced. And there’s a very clever way to take the reverence that Protestants have for the word, but to say, ‘Well, but if it's the word of Jesus who’s the Son of God, then that word is efficacious. It affects what it says. And so, when you’re adoring the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, it’s a word-event that indeed you’re getting in touch with. I thought it was a very clever way to try to bridge that gap between the two approaches. Yeah. It’s also based in the Gospel of Saint John. Right. And it’s the sixth chapter. We’ve both spoken about the Christology and the Eucharist as a consequence, is that my words, my human words and the human grammar and the vocabulary, this is the expression, the diversity, plurality of the human words as a presence of the one Word, which is the Second Person in the Holy Trinity. And therefore these are incarnate words. It’s not only a word in only intellectually reduced way but is a bodily—our language is belonging to our body. We must listen… That’s right. …the words and the communication, without the box, the voice, the word without the voice is nothing for us. We’re talking about angelism in a way, this temptation— and it’s in the Puritan tradition, it’s in the Platonic tradition, the Gnostic tradition— to turn away from the body towards something that’s purely spiritual. And I do think Catholicism has always been strongly against angelism. And it’s because of the incarnation, isn’t it? It’s because of the goodness of creation, the bodily facticity of the incarnation. Hey, can I ask you something now that I’ve got this great German intellectual with me? I think the two most influential nineteenth-century philosophers on the scene today would be Karl Marx, but I think even more than Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche. I think Nietzsche through Heidegger and Foucault and many others, Jung, has come massively into the consciousness of people today. Why is Nietzsche so influential? I appreciate Nietzsche in many ways. He’s great writer, a vivid writer, all that. But Nietzsche, I think you talk to most American teenagers, they’ve got a form of Nietzscheanism in their minds. That truth is it is not really objective and as a matter of the play of wills and the will to power, and that was mediated through Foucault, explain to me why Nietzsche’s been so influential. I think Nietzsche is a master of suspicion. Yeah. Right. Right. And all against tradition and all against Christianity in all the forms and all the confessions, and he is a symbol of our time of this latent nihilism and all this. He’s expressing the deeper feeling of the many people. And what is needed is to overcome this temptation. It is a great temptator, no? To become cynically and all these negative possibilities. When Nietzsche became so popular in the beginning or before the First World War, during the, after the First World War, a lot of young men or people made suicide, as a suicidal philosophy. Yeah, yeah, I think so. A self-negation, a self-hate, and without God, the death of God. It’s a special meaning he had, but he wanted to overcome the nihilism with his theory of the eternal return return of the same things, but it’s also another form of nihilism. He couldn't escape. He wanted to escape the nihilism but didn’t succeed. And therefore, we as Christian believers, we have to speak about the positivity of the being. It is a joy to exist, is a great luck, a good luck to exist. Nothing is better than you are existing and your eternal meaning, you have eternal significance. You are coming not out from the nothing but of the goodwill of God. You are elected of the beginning. There really are values, there really are epistemic values, moral values, aesthetic values. It seems to me, Nietzsche says, “Well, God is dead and we’ve killed him,” and therefore there’s no objective norm for values.” Well, then make up your own values with your great assertion of your will, the will to power. But that leaves people in such a desperate situation, I think. Where it’s the discovery of value, when good educators or churchmen can say, ‘Look, here’s something truly beautiful. Here’s something really morally good. Here’s something of great epistemic value. Now surrender to it. Give yourself to it." But the Nietzscheanism, which I would say is very widespread today. I think we must object to these delusions of the humanity in the newer time when they were in the Copernicanic change, that we are not in the center of the cosmos, and then we are not the masters of our own feeling, in Freud, and all these delusions. And in Charles Darwin, we are not more than animals, a product of the evolution. But I think we can with our philosophy—good philosophy and a good theology— we can overcome these delusions and we can say also intellectual, very correct, you are more than an animal. You are not only a product of a blind cosmos on your birth, there’s all the internal causalities, but there is God who is all-power, influence he is leading to, and we are the center as the object of the creation. And then we can make deeper the feeling of your own dignity. You must first, before you become a Christian, you must have a feeling of your own dignity. The nature of the human being is wounded by the original sin but not destroyed and therefore we have to listen to our personal vocation we have. We are billions of people on the earth, but everybody has an absolute significance. And you must accept it as the first aim of your individual learning and growing up, what is the aim of all education is that you accept yourself absolutely because you are accepted by God and then you will understand what is God doing for you? What is his love to you? Because you are a creature of God and the same God is now saving you by the blood of his own Son who became man, who took over your flesh and your situation, your sorrows. Yeah. Took on death itself. Do you agree with this that in a way the Church is the most important voice battling this sort of popular Nietzscheanism, this popular nihilism, this popular Gnosticism? Which is why we get attacked so often in the general culture because they know, at some level, the Church is the great counter voice to all this. And the one thing we should not do is retreat into privacy, but we should be a very public voice, especially in the West, it seems to me. We are so attacked because if we are presenting the truth and the people are believing the truth of Jesus Christ, we are destroying their model of making money, to make much money with the delusions and with the saying, ‘You are nothing, that you have to accept our medicine, our drugs,’ as modern ideologies are only drugs for overcoming this feeling that you are nothing. But if you are listening, you don’t need drugs. You don’t need sex in a wrong sense. You don’t need all these surrogates. You have a dignity in yourself. You are a partner of the Word of God. You listen, you are a son and daughter of God. You don’t need all these surrogates, no ideology, no drugs. And that’s a huge problem because when God disappears, then people naturally try to fill that space with something else. What’s Augustine’s language? They mistake the creator for the creature, and that’s the source of all the suffering. So the Church has got to keep its voice clear and strong and public, it seems to me. So we’ve talked about a lot of people, Rahner, and Balthasar, and Nietzsche, and so on. Can I ask you about someone that you knew very well and that’s Joseph Ratzinger, the great Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger gave a talk in 1988 in New York, that was very influential though at the time it wasn’t taken that seriously. It was to Bible scholars and it was naming the limitations of the historical-critical method. Now, when I was going through school—university and seminary—the only way we read the Bible was through the historical-critical method, which meant using various rational techniques to uncover the intention of the human author of the text. That’s how we were trained to read the Bible. Ratzinger, as I read him, said, ‘Good, that’s a very good thing, but it’s limited. It has to be complemented by many other approaches to the Bible.’ As I watched this unfold, I think that text was seminal. I think that was an extremely important text in setting a new direction for Catholic biblical theology. Some of your thoughts on that, I’d be curious to hear. Yeah. The historical-critical method was coming out from the Catholic theology in France when they made the great critical editions of the Church Fathers and all of the Bible and so. But later during the immanentism of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, all these people, they used or abused the historical-critical method for the denying of the supernatural origin of the self-revelation of God. And then we had this contradiction between the ‘Christ of faith’ and the ‘Jesus of the history,’ but the reality, the Jesus of the history is Christ sent by the Father and we believe as only mediator --- And he was speaking to people like Raymond E. Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer who were the great practitioners of it, and he said, ‘Good, but there’s more.’ And I think there’s been a revolution, a good one in biblical interpretation since then. Now speaking of Ratzinger and influential addresses- It’s good against the Platonism in Christianity to have this historical basis. Yes, that’s right. That’s right. So it’s indispensable, you know, but not sufficient to understand the Scripture. But speaking of great Ratzinger interventions, I think you told me last night you were present at the famous Regensburg- I was a bishop there at this time. You were the bishop of Regensburg then. Okay. And it was controversial because of the reference to the Islamic leader and all that. But the central theme of that speech, it seems to me was extremely important— namely, the way Christianity embraces the Logos. In the “Introduction to Christianity,” he says, in the early days, Christianity opted for logos rather than mythos, and that made a huge difference. But also, when you say ‘logos,’ you say, ‘Well, now we can dialogue with’ —dialogue, literally—’with anyone who represents reason,’ as the Church’s openness to the world. But then furthermore, I think even more importantly was his critique of voluntarism, and voluntarism, I think, runs as a bacillus—it’s like a disease that runs through the intellectual tradition that prioritizes will over mind. And when that happens, lots of bad things follow, and I would say Nietzsche himself, Schopenhauer and those people are examples of a revived voluntarism. I’m curious, when you were there in the room listening to him, what were your impressions of that talk? I think there were 2,000 professors of all matters from all over Germany and everybody was deep-impressioned. And said, ‘This is a good way to become in an intellectual way, a Christian of today.’ And the polemic came five days— Some days later. And had nothing to do with the speech of him because he said on the contrary, that faith and the Logos have nothing to do with power of violence because the act of faith must be free. Free God is revealing himself to you and that is the dignity of human being. You are not forced, like in the ideology you must be, you are living the Soviet Union, if you are not believing the ideology, you go to Siberia. But we can only accept the freedom of the act of faith. But not in this aspect of the voluntarism. The voluntarism is also a great disease in the occidental development of the thinking. Also, the wrong voluntarism in God, if God has only his will is only arbitrary, but his will, his expression is a realization of his goodness, his grace, and had nothing to do with arbitrarity. And our voluntarism is also, like you said, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer is nothing more than voluntarism, or this gender ideology, my will— —I have a power over my body, instead my body is my friend. Yeah. This is not just some abstract analysis of ideas. It exists today. And it came through those people. All these ideologies are voluntarists. Yes. And I think Ratzinger or Benedict saw that very clearly, didn’t he? And so do you find this ironic? Because I do, that the great defenders of reason today are the Popes, John Paul II and Benedict, when Western intellectualism has become rather nihilistic and relativistic and ‘There’s no truth,’ it’s the Church, ironically, that’s saying yes to logos and yes to reason. When, you know, at the Enlightenment, ‘Oh, the Church. That’s the voice of superstition.’ On the contrary, it seems to me that the intellectual life of the West has kind of lost its way, but the Church keeps speaking for reason. Always. Yes, surely in the beginning, Heraclitus was Logos of the world, but just in the matter as a philosopher, that this Logos is very good and they have found the way to the truth, philosophia, friendship to sophia, to the wisdom, and so. But this Logos is a person and therefore we are the religion of the Logos, of the reason, and the age of reason began with Christianity and not when they say it as the age of reason in the Enlightenment. And Thomas Aquinas, more in an Aristotelian way, not more in the Platonistic way, he said, “The condition of the faith in God is the reason.” If we were not reasonable beings, we could never realize an act of faith and the nature to grace and the reason to faith. And that is the basic, the encyclical “Fides et Ratio” is underlining it. And therefore it’s no surprise that the popes or the bishops or the Church or the Catholic theologian must be the advocates of the reason in this world. But because all these ideologies we had, Nazi ideology, Soviet ideology, all are attacks and denyings of the human reason, the normal reason, the sense, the common sense, and the philosophical reason as a basis of all our being humans. And we’re the defenders of it, the Church is articulating that most clearly, it seems to me. But it’s not reduced reason. They had only the instrumentalization of the reason for technical efforts. But the reason on the basis of the metaphysics, of the moral question, of the deeper question of the deepest identity of a human being, that is a real absolute essential difference to the animals. We have reason, we are reason, we have a free will. You know, I think we’ve been talking about it really, but something I came across in an interview, I think with you, where you said the difficulties in the Church today are not coming from Vatican II, they’re coming from a crisis in the European intellectual life long before the council. Did you mean everything we’ve been talking about—relativism and materialism and Nietzsche and voluntarism? Is that what you mean when you say this crisis in European intellectual life? This great crisis began surely with late medieval voluntarism, the loss of a metaphysics and not a new synthesis between the new natural science. There was not a philosophy of nature in this new sense. It was splitting the science, natural sciences and the humanities and the philosophy and was a reduction of philosophy only to instrumental use and not going to the deepest question of our human existence, ‘Why I’m here?’ ‘What I am?’ ‘What is the sense of my life?’ ‘What is individuality?’ ‘What is personality?’ ‘What is the dignity of human beings?’ And we are convinced that there can be no absolute distance or distinction or a contradiction between what we are knowing of the natural world in the natural science and what is belonging to our deepest questions. And there’s no contradiction to use a computer and to work with a computer and to elaborate a homily. Yeah, I’m intrigued when you say that the crisis goes back in a way to the late Middle Ages because I’ve argued that and I get criticized for it, that even someone like William of Ockham, who so prioritizes will and kind of an arbitrary sense of freedom, and then I would argue that that then influences the nominalism, which in turn influences the early Protestants. So Luther comes out of a very nominalist metaphysics and that in ways you can trace the crisis back that far, can’t you? Yeah. Some investigations are saying studies that Ockham was not so absolute voluntarist, he wanted to defend the liberty of God, but this is ambivalent consequences. But this is historical question of the investigation, what was the exact meaning of William of Ockham? But the effects... The effects. …effects was in this line, but every author you can study a little bit deeper, is a little bit different from the normal image he has, but this is normal way of academic studies, but we have to look to the effects. Nietzsche as such is a little bit more complicated, than our Nietzsche, which we have, but... Still, the effects of it are clear. Yeah. Let’s talk about Vatican II a little bit. I think the main question in the 18th century is Enlightenment was after the disastrous religious wars we had between Protestants and Catholics in England and France, this was the origin of the Enlightenment. They were forced to look for a level without these wars about the truth. And there came out a naturalism but in a contradiction to the supernatural origin of the revelation, but essentially must not be though we can overcome this. They wanted a universal religion, didn’t they? And they were uneasy with particularism. I always think of Lessing, Lessing’s famous gulf, the gulf between the facts of history and then the truth of reason, that all of them, in a way they’re all weeping over Lessing’s gulf. And so Kant, you know, we get from the religion within the limits of reason alone and we sort of bracket the particulars of revelation. Or Schleiermacher: Let’s begin with the feeling of absolute dependency that everybody has. That too is a bracketing of the incarnation, isn’t it? Let’s find a universal religion that would unite the world. Even I think of someone that we all read when I was a young guy, Hans Kung. He’s looking for sort of a world ethic that everybody could subscribe to, and that’s the paradox at the heart of it, isn’t it? That the particularity of the incarnation is not opposed to reason. It’s the Logos that becomes flesh and everything hinges on that, doesn’t it? That to me is the way of overcoming Lessing’s gulf, as you say, well, the Word, the Logos, the highest abstraction in a way, but became this Jesus of Nazareth. Anyway, that’s a big set of questions we have to deal with. I think this is a natural wish of everybody to live in harmony with everybody. Nobody loves—or only some people love—the confrontation about the truth and they say, ‘Yeah, you have this expression, it’s my expression, but the basis we means the same things.’ But it’s true on the level of the nature, we are speaking of a natural moral, and the conception, you cannot kill another person and you cannot lie. So it’s Aristotle or the Stoics developed a natural moral and ethics and therefore we can live together with people of different religions in the same state, accepting these basics. But this cannot go too far or so far to deny the special revelation of God. God has a freedom to reveal himself to Moses, to the prophets in the Old Testament, in Jesus Christ, his Son, and therefore we can live in harmony, but we cannot say, ‘We let it aside because we have different meanings, different faith, or not faith, about the Word of God speaking to us in Jesus Christ.’ And therefore instead of this feeling of harmony, we cannot deny the special Word of God coming to us in Jesus Christ and therefore we make not war with the nonbelievers, but we are ready to defend our faith. It is not only our special meaning, we think our Christian faith in the answer to the Word of God and there we are obliged to obey, to listen to the Word of God and not to…This harmony which is including all, and this is only a manmade harmony. But is the deepest basis and all these people who are of the relativism, they’re not so tolerant. If your theory, your hermeneutics is not mine, they will attack you. Like in the case of Charlie Kirk, present --- bol for the traditionalism and so-called Vatican III as a certain framing of a certain ideology. The Vatican III, we don’t know what is the name of the former council. It could be an ecumenical council in Philadelphia, it could be, depends of the pope’s way of convoking all the bishops where this is only the place of the ecumenical authority, as the ecumenical council independent of the name of the place. And the Vatican Council, if you’re reading and studying exactly the texts, the doctrine of the Vatican Council is nothing more than the doctrine of the Church since the beginning, its basis is the Bible, holy Scripture and the great apostolic tradition and theological tradition. All the councils are cited, Nicaea, Chalcedonia, Trent, the Fourth Lateran Council, has absolute continuity. But it’s spoken out in the terms with the help of some modern theology. We had the liturgical movement not for making a reform of a wrong liturgy but to renew the liturgical sense. But the liturgical sense not only in the active visible participation but to make it easier to make the eternal participation in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the communion with him. And what is said about the Church in Lumen Gentium, you can read in all the texts of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine— The Fathers. —the Fathers, is nothing else on the famous school of Tübingen, Möhler and all this, this is nothing more than explication, and Romano Guardini wrote about the Church. The Church is awaking in the heart of the Christian, of the Catholics, and understanding the Church not only as a religious organization but as a people of God, the body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit. All biblical themes. And it is Möhler and it is Scheeben, isn’t it too, that influenced very much someone like Guardini or Karl Adam. Karl Adam, yeah. I find that fascinating, that strain that comes up into Vatican II. Let me ask you, we’re running out of time unfortunately, I wish I could talk to you all day. The Church’s social teaching. So you have a very interesting, or had a very interesting friendship with Gustavo Gutierrez, which probably surprises some people. You spent a lot of time in Latin America. First of all, tell me about Gustavo. I met him a couple of times, but you knew him quite well. Tell me about that relationship a bit and how you became friends with him. Some people are surprised because they think Cardinal Müller is too conservative and this liberation theology is anything of modernism. But there’s the problems of these people with they have this splitted categories in their ideas and they’re looking to other people not in theological way, but in this political-ideological way. I am coming from Mainz, my city where I’m born, there was the bishop, Emmanuel Von Ketteler, was a great…just before Leo XIII who formulated the social doctrine of the Church. And therefore we have, we can say, in our blood, where we’re coming from, we have the social dimension of Catholicism against the Kulturkampf, against Bismarck and those, the self-affirmation of Catholicism. But modern Catholicism, also open to the evolutions and developments in the modern society, modern form of proclamation, the gospel of catechesis, and so. But on the basis and the fountain in the real revelations, the reality of revelation, not a theory who can be reformed or changed, but we have not to change. Jesus is the same just yesterday, today, and forever, and the same truth. But in the application to the time of today, and I met Gustavo Gutierrez with his famous liberation theology with everybody thought has anything to do with Marxism is a compromise with Marxism but in the contrary is the negation, the overcoming of the Marxism. Marxism has nothing to do with good work for the poor people, is only a struggle of classes. And we as Christians, we have not to overcome, to destroy the other classes. We have to overcome the struggle of the classes. We have not to kill our enemies, we have to overcome the enmity. In Jesus Christ, we all can come together and to construct, to develop society on the basis of the moral elements, on the basics of the moral, basics of human dignity of everybody, social justice, the justice in political, juridical life, what we have in our modern democracies. In Germany after the Second World War was developed through democracy on the basis of the human rights and also with a Catholic social doctrine, Adenauer, all this, it was nothing more than the application of the social doctrine. Adenauer went every day, I think, or every Sunday to Mass. It was all good Christians, Protestant and Catholic, but on the basis of Christians. In Italy too after the war, they had a strong Christian Democrat. Yeah. And these democracies we have, have this Christian basis, but it’s open to everybody who has natural ethics. But Gustavo Gutierrez understands himself not only as a representative of the social doctrine, but he understands himself more as a theologian. Not only for this matter of the social doctrine within the Catholic theology, the faculty, but as a dogmatic or fundamental theologian, is that how is possible to speak of the love of God to everybody if the mother have nothing to give to eat for their children? But if the country is rich, can it be that a great part of the people has not enough to eat and have not, cannot send children to the school for a formation and cannot participate in the political, cultural life that is wrong is against our understanding of human being on the basis of the natural law but also more in the light of the revelation of the love of God to everybody in Jesus Christ. And therefore he did overcome the Marxism. The Marxism is a definition of human being without God, without justice. And everywhere we had, in every country we had in the last century Marxism, all these states failed and ended up in the gulag and in the killing fields. Corpses piled up. Yeah. And the Red Revolution in Red China, millions and millions of dead. But when they applied the application of the social doctrine in the afterwar Germany, no one was killed. Everybody had a good stay. The revolution of our economy, the formation of school system, was all in a good state. And this was also the idea of Gustavo Gutierrez in South America as Catholic countries where there is rich countries, we have enough prima materia, rough materia, and this is enough, we have a good system of formation or could make it better and everybody should participate in the richness of the country. And I think we cannot say, like the Marxists said, ‘You are interested only as eternal salvation for the soul after the death and when we are here, that is our reign.’ But we say, ‘Body and soul are belonging together. The individual, the social life, it cannot separate.’ Let me ask you about Europe. So I lived in Paris for three years. I’ve lived and I’ve taught in Rome. I’ve visited a lot of places in Europe, and I, like many Americans, we look to Europe as our cultural homeland, the great cathedrals and our great intellectual figures we look to in Europe. What’s your take now on the Church in Europe? Because it seems to be struggling in so many ways, doesn’t it? In France and in Germany, Italy, the very low birth rate going on, the shrinking numbers of people going to Mass. Give me a sense, Your Eminence, of the future of Europe, which as I say is like our cultural homeland here and a lot of us worry about that, that the Church is in very dire straits in Europe. Give me a sense of how you read that. Yeah. Also for us in Europe, our cultural basis is a Greek, Roman, Latin culture, and we are only a stage of evolution of it. And if we are denying this Greek-Latin culture, we are going in absolutely a chaotic anthropology, but also the Christianity, the Christendom, the Christian faith is the soul of our culture. The form is Greek-Latin, but the soul is belief: the dignity of everybody, the importance of everybody, love of God to everybody. This is the soul of our anthropology, of our self-understanding. But I think the Church, the official Church, and there are a lot of bishops who are afraid about the attacks are coming out from the mass media, from non-Christians, of Marxists and of the so-called leftists, the soft socialists. But they have this socialistic understanding: ‘You are only my friend if you are of the same meaning,’ and not your life is nothing, that no importance. But the bishops and the priests must understand themselves more than apostles. Yeah. That’s the successors of the apostles. It’s not a title of our rights we have but is a title to underline our personal mission. We are the good shepherds. We have to give our life for the people independently what the wolf is saying or doing. We are responsible for the eternal life and also for a good human life of the people in this world. Good Catholic education—schools and kindergartens—and good communication system. Also in the modern social medias have to be present with laypeople or competent priests, and we have to see the alternative. All these ideologies we have, political ideologies or more in the social life, social ideologies like gender ideology, feminism. Feminism is nothing good for women. Catholic Christian anthropology is the best for women, for men, for children, and for everybody. And we must be more aware of the importance of our mission, of the superiority of the Christian faith over all these wrong ideologies. And we should be bold in announcing it and not retreat into privacy. I think that is a large part of the problem. We’ve lost our nerve. The criteria for a good life as a bishop, for a good bishop is not to be lauded in the left press, on the conservative press, because also there are political conservatives, sometimes they’re only instrumentalizing the Church. In Germany, not all our so-called conservatives are close to Christians, and in reserve to Christianity. But we should accept everybody of all political parties. But we have to say, ‘You are more than a member of a political party. You cannot identify yourself as a human being only by the membership of a political party or belonging to the ideology. Your identity is to be son and daughter of God. That is your identity, friend of God. That is the deepest identity of everybody. And this is superior to the parties. I say always, what is the alternative? Can a philosopher save me or a great general or Napoleon or Stalin? Nobody can help me. Not Einstein, the great, can help me in the hour of my death. It’s only inside of me. It’s only Jesus Christ, the only Savior of the world. And this is a question, who can help you in the hour of your death? No other man can do it. Only God who became man. I think on that Gospel note, we should bring our conversation to a close. I could talk to you all day long about all these things, but it’s a nice note to end our conversation on. Your Eminence, thank you, a delight to be with you. Thank you for taking the time to be with us today. God bless you. My blessing for all our people who were listening to us. Thank you.