Categoria: Idiomas

Questions and Answers: What Pope can we hope for who is not another Benedict XVII?

Leonardo Boff10 Comentários

1. Question: How did you receive the news of the renunciation of Benedict XVI?

Answer: At first, I felt a deep sadness for him because from what I knew, especially of his shyness, I could imagine the effort he had to have made to greet the people, to embrace them, kiss the children. I was convinced that one day he would take advantage of a sensible reason, such as the physical limitations of his health and his declining mental vigor, to resign. Even though he appeared to be an authoritarian pope, he was not attached to the position of pope. I felt relieved because the Church is without a spiritual leader who elicits hope and purpose. We need a different type of pope; more a pastor than a professor, not a man of the Church-institution, but a representative of Jesus of Nazareth who said: “and he that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out”, (Gospel of John, 6,37), be he a homosexual, a prostitute, or a transsexual.

2. Q: What is the personality of Benedict XVI like, since you had a certain friendship with him?

A: I met Benedict XVI in my doctoral years in Germany, between 1965-1970. I attended many of his conferences, but was never a student of his. He read my doctoral thesis: “The Place of the Church in the Secularized World” and liked it very much, to the point of looking for an editor to publish it, a 500 page work. After that, we worked on the international magazine, Concilium, whose directors met every year, somewhere in Europe, during the week of Pentecost. I edited the Portuguese edition. This was between 1975-1980. While the others took a nap, he and I would take a walk and talk about topics of theology, faith in Latin America, especially about Saint Bonaventure and Saint Augustine, of whom he is a specialist and to whom even now I often turn. Then, in 1984, we found ourselves in a moment of conflict: he as my judge in the process the former Holy Office undertook against my book, Church: Charisma and Power, (Iglesia: carisma y poder, Vozes 1981; Sal Terrae 1982). Then I had to sit in the chair where, among others, Galileo and Giordano Bruno had sat. He subjected me to a time of “obliging silence”, I had to leave teaching and was prohibited from publishing anything. After that we never saw each other again. As a person he is refined, timid and extremely intelligent.

3. Q: As a Cardinal he was your Inquisitor, after having been your friend: how did you see that situation?

A: When he was named President of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the former Inquisition) I was extremely happy. I thought: we will finally have a theologian as the head of an institution with the worst imaginable reputation. Fifteen days later, he thanked me, and said: “I believe you have several issues pending here in the Congregation, that we will have to solve.” And almost every time I published a book, requests for clarification would come from Rome, that I did not answer promptly. But nothing ever comes from Rome that has not previously been sent to Rome. Here in Brazil there were conservative bishops who persecuted theologians of liberation and sent complaints of their theological ignorance to Rome, under the pretext that my theology could harm the faithful. Then I realized that he had already been contaminated by the Roman virus that causes all those working in the Vatican to quickly find a thousand reasons to be moderate or even conservative. And then, more than surprised, I was truly disappointed.

4. Q: How did you receive the punishment of “obliging silence”?

A: After the examination and the reading of my written defense, that is now an appendix to the new edition of Church: Charisma and Power, (Record 2008), there were 13 Cardinals who opined and decided. Ratzinger is only one of them. Then they submited their decision to the pope. I believe his was a dissenting vote from the majority, because he knew other books of mine on theology, translated into German, and had told me that he liked them. Once, in front of the pope in an audience in Rome, he even referred to them favorably. I received the “obliging silence” as any Christian linked to the Church would: l accepted it with calm. I remember saying: “it is better to walk with the Church than alone with my theology”. It was relatively easy for me to accept the imposition, because the Presidency of the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil, (CNBB, in Portuguese) had always supported me, and two of its Cardinals, don Aloysio Lorscheider and don Paulo Evaristo Arns, accompanied me to Rome and participated, in a second part, in the dialogue between Cardinal Ratzinger and me. There we were three against one. Sometimes we put Cardinal Ratzinger on the spot because the Brazilian Cardinals assured him that the criticisms against the theology of liberation Ratzinger had made in a recently published document were just an echo of its detractors and not an objective analysis. They asked for a new, positive, document. He accepted the idea and actually did it two years later. They also asked, to me and to my brother Clodovis who was in Roma, that we write a scheme and give it in the Sacred Congregation. In one day and one night, we wrote it and turned it in.

5. Q: You left the Church in 1992. Do you have any bitterness over the whole Vatican affair?

A: I never left the Church. I left a function within the Church, the priesthood. I continued as a theologian and professor of theology in several chairs, here in Brazil and abroad. Whoever understands the logic of a closed and authoritarian system, not very open to the world, that does not cultivate dialogue and exchange (living systems are alive to the degree that they open up and inter-exchange), knows that someone like me, who does not plainly get in line with that system, will be watched over controlled and eventually punished. It is similar to the security systems that we have known in Latin America under the military regimes of Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Within this logic, the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, (former Holy Office, former Inquisition), Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger condemned, silenced, removed from their teaching chairs or transferred out more than one hundred theologians. There were two of us from Brazil: theologian Ivone Gebara and myself. Because I understand and lament the above mentioned logic, I know they are condemned to do what they do with complete good will. But, as Blaise Pascal said: “Evil is never so perfectly done as when it is done with good will”. Of course this good will is not good, because it creates victims. I have no rancour or resentment because I had compassion and mercy for all those who moved within this logic, that, as I see it, is many light years away from the witness of Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover, it is something of the last century, already past. And I will not go back to it.

6. Q: How do you evaluate the pontificate of Benedict XVI? Has he known how to handle the internal and external crises of the Church?

A: Benedict XVI was an eminent theologian, but a frustrated pope. He did not have the charisma to direct and animate the community, as John Paul II had. Unfortunately, he will be stigmatized in a reductionist manner, as the papacy when pedophiles increased, homosexuals were not recognized, and women were humiliated, as in the United States, where the right of citizenship was denied to a theologian for reasons of gender. And he will also go down in history as the pope who strongly criticized the theology of liberation, interpreted it in the light of its detractors, and not through the pastoral and liberating witness of bishops, priests, men and women religious and lay people who made a serious option for the poor against poverty and in favor of life and liberty. For this just and noble reason they were misinterpreted by their brethren in the faith and many of them were detained, tortured and murdered by organs of national security of the military state. Among them we find bishops such as Bishop Enrique Angelelli from Argentina and Archbishop Oscar Romero from El Salvador. Archbishop Dom Helder Camara was the martyr they did not kill. But the Church is much larger than her popes, and she will continue, between shadow and light, offering a service to humanity, in order to keep alive the memory of Jesus and to offer a possible source of meaning to life beyond this life. Now we know from the Vatileaks that the Roman curia are deeply involved in a ferocious fight for power, especially between the wing of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the present Secretary of State, and the former Secretary, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, already emeritus. Both have their allies. Bertone, taking advantage of the limitations of the pope, has practically built a parallel government. The scandals revealed by the leaked secret documents from the desk of the Pope and the Vatican Bank, used by Italian millionaires, some from the mafia, to launder money and send it abroad, very much affected the Pope. And more and more he became isolated. His resignation is due to the limits of age and illness, but made even graver by these internal crises that weakened him and that he did not know how to, or could not, stop in time.

7. Q: Pope John XXIII said that the Church cannot be a museum, but must be a house with open doors and windows. Do you believe Benedict XVI attempted to transform the Church back into something like a museum?

A: Benedict XVI is nostalgic for the medieval synthesis. He reintroduced the mass in Latin, chose vestments of renaissance popes and of other times in the past, kept palatial habits and ceremonials, to those who sought communion he would first offer the papal ring to be kissed, and only after that would he offer the sacrament, something that was no longer done. His vision was restorative and he is nostalgic for a synthesis between culture and faith that visibly exists in his native Bavaria, something he explicitly noted. In the University where he studied, where I also studied, in Munich, when he saw a poster announcing me as a guest lecturer to deliver a conference on the new frontiers of the theology of liberation, he asked the dean to postpone it sine die. His theological idols are Saint Augustine and Saint Bonaventure, who always had a great distrust of everything coming from the world, contaminated by sin and in need of rescue by the Church. It is one of the facts that explain his opposition to modernity, which he sees through the lens of secularism and relativism, and as being beyond the realm of the Christian influence that helped to form Europe.

8. Q: In your opinion, will the Church change her doctrine on the use of condoms and sexual morals in general?

A: The Church must maintain her convictions, those she believes cannot be abandoned, such as opposition to abortion and the manipulation of life. But she must renounce the status of exclusivity, as if she were the only carrier of truth. She must understand herself within the democratic space, where her voice is heard alongside other voices. And she must respect those voices and even be ready to learn from them. And when her point of view is defeated, she should offer her experience and tradition to improve what can be improved and to make easier the weight of existence. In fact, she has to be more human, more humble and to have more faith, in the sense of not having fear. The opposite of faith is not atheism, but fear. Fear paralyzes and isolates the people from each other. The Church must walk together with humanity, because humanity is the true People of God. She reflects this more consciously, but she does not exclusively own this reality.

9. Q: What should the future Pope do to avoid the emigration of many of the faithful to other Churches, especially to the Pentecostals?

A: Benedict slowed down the renewal of the Church that was encouraged by Vatican Council II. He did not accept divisions in the Church, so he preferred a lineal point of view, strengthening tradition. It so happens that the tradition of the XVIII and XIX centuries opposed all the modern achievements of democracy, such as religious liberty and other rights. Benedict has tried to reduce the Church to a fortress to defend herself from modernity, and he saw Vatican II as a Trojan Horse through which it could enter. He did not deny Vatican II, but he interpreted it in the light of Vatican Council I, that is centered on the figure of the Pope with monarchical power, absolute and infallible. This produced a great centralization in Rome, under the direction of the Pope, who, poor pope!, has to guide a Catholic population the size of China. This has brought a great conflict to the Church and even to whole episcopacies, such as the German and the French. It has contaminated with suspicion the atmosphere of the internal Church, resulting in the creation of groups, the emigration of many Catholics of the community and accusations of relativism and of parallel teaching. In other words, in the Church there no longer lived a frank and open fraternity, a spiritual home common to all.

The profile of the new Pope, in my opinion, should not be that of a man of power nor of a man of the institution. Where there is power love does not exist and mercy disappears. The new Pope should be a pastor, closer to the faithful and to all human beings, independently of their moral, political and ethnic situations. He should have as a motto the words of Jesus mentioned above: “and he who cometh to me I will in no wise cast out”, because Jesus of Nazareth welcomed everyone, from a prostitute such as Magdalen to a theologian such as Nicodemus. He should not be a man of the West that is seen now as an accident of history, but a man of the vast globalized world who feels a passion for the poor and for the suffering cry of the Earth, devastated by consumerist greed.

He should not be a man of certitudes but someone who encourages all to find better paths. He would logically be guided by the Gospels but without a proselytizing spirit, with the consciousness that the Spirit always arrives before the missionary and that the Word illuminates all men and women who come to this world, as Gospel writer Saint John says.

He should be a profoundly spiritual man open to all religious paths, that together they keep alive the sacred flame that is in every person: the mysterious presence of God. And, finally, he should be a man of profound goodness, in the style of Pope John XXIII, with tenderness for the humble and a prophetic firmness to denounce those who promote exploitation and who make of violence and war instruments to dominate others and the world. May a man of this type prevail in the negotiations of the Cardinals in the conclave and over the tensions of the tendencies. How the Holy Spirit works there is a mystery. He has no other voice, or other head, than those of the Cardinals. May the Spirit not fail them.

Leonardo Boff

Translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

Obama Paves Way for Black Pontiff: L.Boff

Leonardo Boff5 Comentários

Entrevista dada à rede Bloomberg para Joshua Goodman 19/02/13

Rebel Theologian Says Obama Paves Way for Black Pontiff

By Joshua Goodman – Feb 19, 2013 11:09 AM GMT-0300

Catholic cardinals impressed by Barack Obama’s rise to power may be encouraged to elect the first black pope, according to a Brazilian theologian once silenced by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became pope.

Leonardo Boff said the chances of an African such as Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana becoming the next pontiff are slim after Pope Benedict XVI named most of the 117 cardinals who will choose his successor in a conclave next month. Still, Obama’s election as U.S. president may open up the Vatican’s old guard to change, easing opposition to contraception and women priests, he said.

Leonardo Boff said the chances of an African such as Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana becoming the next pontiff are slim after Pope Benedict XVI named most of the 117 cardinals who will choose his successor in a conclave next month. Photographer: Gregorio Borgia/AP Photo

“Without a doubt Obama’s presence is going to be felt among the cardinals,” Boff, a former Franciscan friar who studied with Ratzinger at the University of Munich in the 1960s, said in a phone interview. “We already have a black president, so why not a black religious president?”

Boff was an early exponent of Liberation Theology, a movement started by Latin American priests during the Cold War that sided with the region’s poor. As head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, Ratzinger accused the campaign of Marxist tendencies, and in 1985 he silenced Boff for publishing a book critical of church leadership. Boff left the church in 1992, later accusing the future pope of “religious terrorism.”

Benedict’s ‘Failure’

While the 74-year-old Boff said he respects Benedict’s intellect, he called him an “authoritarian” and a “failure” as pope, citing his handling of a sex-abuse scandal that led to charges of pedophilia against thousands of priests and shook the core of the church’s mission as a bearer of morality.

“Benedict never questioned one of the underlying causes of pedophilia, which is the sexuality of priests and sex education in the seminaries,” Boff said in a Feb. 15 interview from Araras, a farming village and tourist enclave in the jungle- covered hills outside of Rio de Janeiro. “He considers celibacy a law set in stone.”

An African or Latin American pope with real-life pastoral experience would be more sensitive to the need for renewal, and could use his monarchic power to single-handedly reverse doctrine on celibacy and other divisive issues, he said.

“It all depends on the pope coming from the third world,” said Boff, author of more than 60 books on religion and adviser to political protest groups including Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement. “Continuity won’t suffice now. We had someone who was intelligent, but as pope he was a failure.”

Vatican Reaction

A senior Vatican official said calling the pope a failure due to sex scandals in the church is like blaming Obama for weakness in the global economy. While an African pontiff may be elected, to think he’d reverse teaching on contraception or women priests is to think a non-Catholic could become pope, said the official, who asked not to be identified because he the Vatican’s deliberations are confidential.

The conclave to pick the next pope may take place before March 15 if all voting cardinals arrive in Rome on time, Holy See spokesman Federico Lombardi told a press briefing on Feb. 16. Vatican officials would like to have a new pope in place before Easter, Catholicism’s most important holiday, which is on March 31 this year, daily Repubblica reported on Feb. 17.

From Latin America, Honduran Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga is one cardinal capable of modernizing the millennia-old institution and inspiring a dwindling flock, said Boff. He said a more likely choice, with greater traction among the Vatican leadership, is Ghana’s Turkson, who’s currently second behind Milan Archbishop Angelo Scola in the running to succeed Benedict, according to Dublin-based bookmaker Paddy Power Plc.

‘Semi-Revolutionary’

While Boff said he doesn’t know Turkson personally, he said his comments in favor of a more Africanized church are “semi- revolutionary” for the Holy See. Turkson has said that choosing a pope from the developing world, where more than half of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics live, would go a long way toward strengthening the church’s influence in emerging nations.

While three popes in the church’s earliest days hailed from North Africa, territories at the time under Roman Empire rule, there’s been no African Pope in the modern era.

Choosing a Latin American or African pope could also help Vatican finances at a time when parishes in Germany and the U.S. are still reeling from the cost of lawsuits and dwindling church attendance sparked by the sex-abuse scandal, Boff said.

“The Vatican faces an enormous financial crisis because its two biggest sources of funding are falling apart,” he said. “The church, out of financial necessity, is going to opt to become a more simple church.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Joshua Goodman in Rio de Janeiro at jgoodman19@bloomberg.net

What type of Pope? The Tensions within Today’s Church

Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

I don’t propose to present an evaluation of the pontificate of Benedict XVI, something that has been competently done by others. For readers, it may be more interesting to recognize the tension that is always present in the Church and marks the profile of each Pope.

We presuppose that a balanced view should sit on two fundamental pillars: the Kingdom and the world. The Kingdom is the central message of Jesus, his utopia of an absolute revolution that reconciles creation with itself and with God. The world is where the Church accomplishes its service to the Kingdom, where it is built. If the Church is too closely linked to the Kingdom, it runs the risk of spiritualization and idealism. If it is too close to the world, it faces the temptations of secularization and politicization. It is important to know how to articulate Kingdom-World-Church. The Church belongs both to the Kingdom and the world. It has a historical dimension with its contradictions, and a transcendent dimension.

How should this tension be lived within the world and history? We present two different and sometimes conflicting models: testimony and dialogue.

The model of testimony affirms with conviction: we have the deposit of faith that contains within itself all of the truths necessary for salvation; we have the sacraments that communicate grace; we have a well-defined morality; we have the certainty that the Catholic Chuch is the only true Church of Christ; we have a Pope who enjoys infallibility in matters of faith and morals; we have a hierarchy that governs the faithful; and we have the promise of the continued assistance of the Holy Spirit. It must bear witness to a world that does not know where it is going and which, by itself, will never attain salvation. It is necessary to pass through the mediation of the Church, without which there is no salvation.

The Christians of this model, from Popes to the ordinary faithful, feel imbued with a unique mission of salvation. We find fundamentalists here and there are very few things up for dialogue. Why do we need dialogue? We already have everything. Dialogue is just to facilitate conversion and it is a gesture of courtesy.

The model of dialogue begins with other assumptions: The Kingdom is larger than the Church and and it also has a secular component, where there is always truth, love, and justice; the risen Christ has cosmic dimensions and pushes evolution to a good end; the Spirit is always present in history and in people of good will; It arrives before the missionary because it was with our peoples in the form of solidarity, love, and compassion. God never has abandoned his own and God offers everyone an opportunity for salvation, because he brought them forth from his heart in order that they would one day live happily in the Kingdom of free men and women. The Church’s mission is to be a sign of this history of God within human history and also an instrument for implementation along with other spiritual paths. If both religious and secular reality is soaked through with God, all of us should be in dialogue: exchange, learn from each other, and make the human journey towards our happy promise, more easily and more safely.

The first model is the testimony of the Church of tradition, which promoted the missions in Africa, Asia and Latin America, being complicit, in the name of evangelization, in the decimation and domination of many original peoples, Africans, and Asians.  It was the model of Pope John Paul II who traveled the world, carrying the cross as testimony that salvation was found there. It was the model, even more radicalized, of Benedict XVI who denied the title of “Church” to evangelical churches, offending them harshly; he attacked modernity directly as going down a bad road, relativistic and secular.  Of course he did not deny all values, but saw their source in the Christian faith. He reduced the Church to a secluded island or a fortress, surrounded by enemies on all sides against which it is defending itself.

The model of dialogue was present in Vatican II, Paul VI, and Medellin and Puebla in Latin America. They saw Christianity not as a deposit, a closed system with the risk of becoming fossilized, but as a source of living, sparkling waters that can be channeled by many cultural conduits, a place of mutual learning because all are bearers of the Creator Spirit and the essence of the dream of Jesus.

The first model, testimony, frightened many Christians who felt devalued and infantilized in their professional knowledge; they felt that the Church was no longer their spiritual home and were disconsolate. They walked away more from the institution than Christianity as the value and generous utopia of Jesus.

The second model, dialogue, made many people feel at home, helping to build a Learning Church, open to dialogue with everyone. The effect was the feeling of freedom and creativity. So it is worth the trouble to be a Christian.

This model of dialogue is urgent if the Institutional Church wants to emerge from the crises which have hurt its ancient honor: morality (pedophiles) and spirituality (theft of secret documents and serious problems of transparency in Vatican Bank).

We must discern intelligently which method best serves the Christian message within an ecological and social crisis of very serious consequences. The central problem is not the Church but the future of Mother Earth, of life and of our civilization. How does the Church help in this passage? Only by dialogue and joining forces with everyone.

In pain-filled and hopeful memory of the youth died in Santa Maria

Leonardo Boff3 Comentários

As the ancients said: «vivere navigare est», that is, «to live is to navigate», to take a voyage, a short voyage for some, a long one for others. All navigation involves risks, fears and hope. But the ship is always attracted to a port that waits on the other side.

The ship starts out to sea. Family and friends say farewell and follow them on the beach. Some let furtive tears fall, because one never knows what may happen. And the ship slowly goes away. At the start it is very visible, but as it continues, it appears, to the eyes, to become ever smaller. Finally, it is only a point. A little more, and it disappears on the horizon. Everyone says: It is gone!

It was not swallowed by the sea. It is there, even though it is no longer visible, like the star that shines even when obscured by the clouds. And the ship continues its voyage.

The ship was not meant to remain anchored and secure on the beach, but to navigate, to confront the waves and reach its destiny.

Those who remain on the beach do not pray: Lord, free them from the dangerous waves, but, give them, Lord, the courage to face the waves and to overcome them.

What is important is to know that there is a safe port at the other end. The ship is being awaited. It is getting nearer. At the beginning it is just a point on the horizon that appears larger as it approaches. And when it arrives, it is admired in its full dimension.

Those at the port say: Here it is! It has arrived! And they go to meet the passenger; they embrace and kiss him. And they rejoice because it was a happy voyage. They do not ask about the fears or the dangers that almost drowned him. What is important is that he arrived in spite of all the afflictions. He has arrived to a happy port.

That is what happens with all who die. Sometimes it is maddening to know the conditions under which they departed this sea of life. But what counts is the certainty that they have arrived, yes, that they really arrived at a happy port. And when they arrive, they fall, blessed they are, they fall into the arms of God-Father-and-Mother of infinite goodness, into the infinite embrace of peace. God awaited them with saudades, because they are His beloved sons and daughters, navigating beyond their home.

All is finished. They have no need to navigate anymore, to confront the waves and overcome them. They rejoice at being home, in the Kingdom of life without end. And they will live this way for the centuries and centuries to come.

Leonardo Boff