Archive, Conversation with
Conversation with Matteo Matzuzzi
You can find the Italian text of the interview here, in PDF, or online here.
It is Christmas. There is much talk of hope. Often the word is used superficially, as if it were a simply wish to stay well or ‘that everything will work out alright’. I think instead of the trenches of Ukraine, of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, of the reality of this world in pieces: to claim that all will work out well is almost an insult. Christian hope comes to our aid. What is its true significance, even in relation to war?
Christianity is no utopianism. Biblical religion is supremely, in some ways shockingly realistic. The great teachers of faith have always insisted that supernatural life must build on a true appraisal of nature. We must train ourselves to see things as they are, ourselves as we are. To have Christian hope is not to expect everything to work out alright. Not everything does. To hope is to have confidence that everything, even injustice, can be purposeful. The light ‘shines in the darkness’. It does not obliterate the dark — yet; that will be for the new heaven and the new earth in which ‘there shall be no more night’. Here and now, hope glimmers. That is not to say it is inconsequential. There is a blessed contagion in hope, enabling it to spread from heart to heart. Totalitarian powers always work to obliterate hope and induce despair. To school ourselves in hope is to exercise ourselves in freedom. In a poem, Péguy describes hope as the sanctuary lamp’s flame. This flame, he says ‘has traversed the depths of all the night’. It lets us see what is now, yet envisage what may come about. To hope is to stake one’s existence on the possibility of becoming. That is an art to practise assiduously in a fatalist, determinist atmosphere.
Christmas has a mysterious aspect that fascinates even non-believers. I think of Claudel, who was converted while hearing Vespers at Notre Dame at Christmas in 1886. Or of Jean-Paul Sartre, the atheist par excellence, who wrote in one of his stories: ‘The pale Virgin contemplates her child. One ought to depict on her face an anxious stupor that has appeared bu once on a human countenance.’ What is this mystery of Christmas that speaks to everyone?
Is something of the stupor of which Sartre speaks not in fact evident in many depictions of the Virgin as she appears in Byzantine iconography? The attraction of Christmas is embedded in its evangelical emblems: the newborn child; the proclamation of peace; the assertion that men are still capable of ‘good will’; the peaceful silence of a night during which creation — humans, animals, and stars — is expectantly, harmoniously arranged around a self-evident focus. Claudel wrote in L’Annonce faite à Marie, a work I reread each Christmas, ‘Bien des choses se consument sur le feu d’un coeur qui brûle’. Christmas lets us intuit the longing of our heart. It gives us a sense of what passes, of what remains. The challenge is to let that intuition become concrete in resolutions, not confined in passing soggy sentiment.
You are a bishop in one of the peripheries of which Pop Francis often speaks. Even a European periphery. In the south we see signs of how the faith of the Old Continent is being lost, pressed by an ever stronger secularism. How do you see things, from the periphery?
A periphery is defined with regard to a centre. In a Christian optic, the centre is not a spot on the map. The centre is wherever Christ’s mystery is present in fullness. The periphery is called to become centre. We see this dynamic at work in the Church’s missionary history. The flame of faith shines brightly, again and again, in unexpected places. What was the astonishment of self-confident Europeans coming to India in the sixteenth century, thinking they had arrived at the margins of civilisation, only to find that the centre had obtained there since apostolic times, while their ancestors were worshipping sticks and stones? The terminology of peripheries is often deployed by institutions or people certain of being, by virtue of inherited privilege, central. Faith challenges this assumption. Thus the terminology becomes helpfully self-subverting. It challenges us to ask, ‘Where, in fact, is the centre?’ In Biblical terms, this is a matter of following the Lamb wherever he goes, letting go of the comfortable assumption that he will necessarily stay put where I am.
Those who got o church are increasingly elderly; we struggle to engage the need for sense as it appears to the younger generations, which do nurture it, even if we often say they think only of entertainment and their smartphone. As in every age, in every generation, they have an exalted desire. What can the Church to do engage this desire?
My experience is different. I encounter many young people hungry for meaning, sincere in their search, lucid in their analyses. I am often amused by diagnostics, be they secular or ecclesiastical, in which very elderly commentators proffer theses about ‘the young’ as if the latter were a species artificially kept alive in a laboratory fridge, confined to the assumptions and cultural habitat of decades past. How can the Church engage with today’s youth? By taking them seriously. By not talking down to them. By daring to present high, beautiful ideals. By respecting their desire to embrace the fulness of their patrimony. By not giving them stones, or sweetmeats, for bread.
In your book The Shattering of Loneliness you wrote in the Introduction: ‘I saw that, to live, one must learn to look death in the eye. Before I could have known what the word meant, I had tired of superficiality.’ We were talking about young people, and about war. I ask you: is the present climate of drowsiness not partially caused by the fact that for generations Europe does not know at home the realities of war and death. If I may express myself brutally: Have we become too used to peace at home, so that we no longer know how to look death in the face?
There is indeed a risk is that we take peace for granted, thinking it somehow normative. It is not. History reminds us of this insistently. The older I get, the more it impresses me that the first death recorded in Scripture is a death by fratricide. It sets a paradigm we see repeated with dreadful consistency up to our own day. The Prologue to the Rule of St Benedict cites a Psalm that gives a helpful perspective. St Benedict exhorts us to ‘seek peace and pursue it’. We are reminded that peace is dynamic, a living reality to be fostered A European half-century without major wars was something of a miracle. Now, the horizon darkens. The iniquitous war in Ukraine rages on; the collapse of one government after the other, as fragile coalitions explode, generates anxiety; the rhetoric of aggression spreads like a noxious fume. My sense is that our continent, its young people not least, are waking up to this. Covid was a wake-up call. It brought death’s spectre close. It shattered illusions that affluence or scientific expertise would keep us safe, that death is only something that happens to others. Have we sufficiently reflected on these lessons? I think not. I see it as a lost opportunity, politically and catechetically.
Global media have enabled us to follow the spectacle of the re-dedication of Notre Dame, restored after the fire. A huge crowd was there. The rich and mighty were queuing to get in. Ordinary people contributed to the financing of the work, quite as in the Middle Ages. I ask: are we still, despite everything, attached to these symbols that speak to us of our identity?
That there is attachment seems evident. The outpouring of grief that followed the fire at Notre Dame was moving. All honour to all who have contributed to its rebuilding. To what, though, are we attached? To a great Christian sanctuary? Or to a cultural talisman? In Advent the Church lets us read the prophet Isaiah. It is sobering stuff. Isaiah gives us wonderful images of consolation, prophecies of incarnation. He also tells us that redemption will arise out of ruin. He makes it clear that it is the Lord who orchestrates the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its people, wanting to teach them, precisely, not to put their trust in monuments of strength but to live, instead, by grace, sustained day by day in their existential fragility. It is the Church’s task to ensure that our architectural and artistic patrimony remains a potent sign of God’s goodness, enabling the encounter of our being of dust with God’s uncreated splendour. Have we sufficient confidence in our tradition to help our contemporaries see what superficially identity-shaping places and objects signify and implicitly promise? There is scope here for self-examination. For often, it seems to me, we capitulate to secular modernity and strive to make our heritage ‘relevant’ on its terms; while our times in fact look to us for something different.
Further to my previous question: do we Europeans of the Third Millennium have an identity issue? Do we still know where we come from, where we are going?
Not for a long time has consensus been so fraught on fundamental issues: on what it is to be a man or a woman, what it is to be a human being, what a society is supposed to be. Public discourse has long buzzed ominously like a wasp’s nest. Anyone engaging in it has run the risk of being stung. My sense is that the trend is now turning, with more people asking questions, seeking sound reasoning and reliable parameters. The Catholic intellectual tradition has an immense contribution to make here. While not wishing to downplay the preeminence of charitable work or the causes of justice and peace, I believe the intellectual apostolate is paramount for the decades ahead. The Word became flesh to imbue our very nature, created in the image of the Word, with logos. To embrace that aspect of our being and articulate it is to begin to remember our dignity.
In so-called ‘public opinion’ we often hear it said that what the Church offers is anachronistic, especially in the fields of moral life and even bioethics. After all, people say, why should we say no to euthanasia if a person suffers? The easier road is the one that is more pleasing. The problem is that many representatives of the Church likewise ask, in the media, whether we haven’t to ‘change’ or ‘reform’ because the message does not find its way to the People of God. What is you opinion? How useful, or how risky, it is to listen to the Zeitgeist?
The Zeitgeist is a fickle thing! Of course, we must listen out for it: it breathes a message we must take into account. But to seek to follow it is self-defying. By the time we have arrived where it was a moment ago, it has shifted. The Church is by its nature slow-moving. There is a risk that we engage with what we assume are contemporary trends when there is nothing left but dying embers. So we go haplessly, and absurdly, from one extinguished bonfire to the next. It is surely more promising, interesting and joyful to hold fast to what endures. That is what will speak to human hearts and minds in our age as in any age. The Second Vatican Council was marked by the incentive to drink deeply from the sources. The best vitality of Catholic life in the twentieth century sprang from the exhilaration of uncovering forgotten wells, to find the water therein limpid, fresh. What has happened to the exhilaration? Why do we now feel we must abandon the wells in order to set up collapsible stands by vending machines?
It is often claimed that our world, the Western world, is now post-Christian. I would like to ask if you agree with this definition or if the real risk is that of generalisation? Then, how can those who today declare themselves Cristian maker their presence felt in the midst of this reality?
As it happens, I am not in agreement. Theologically, the term ‘post-Christian’ makes no sense. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, and all the letters in between. He carries constitutionally the freshness of morning dew: not for nothing do we throughout Advent storm heaven singing, ‘Rorate!’ Christianity is of the dawn. If at times, during given periods, we feel enshrouded by twilight, it is because another day is in the making. If we do want to deal in the currency of ‘pre’ and ‘post’, I think it more apposite to suggest that we stand on the threshold of an age I would call ‘post-secular’. Secularisation has run its course. It is exhausted, void of positive finality. The human being, meanwhile, remains alive with deep aspirations. Consider the fact that Marilynne Robinson and Jon Fosse are read worldwide; that people flock to the cinema to watch the films of Terence Malick; that thousands are seeking instruction in the faith. These are signs of the times. They should fill us with courage. They should make us determined not to put our light under a bushel. The Church possesses the words and signs by which to convey eternity as real. The English writer Helen Waddell once wrote: ‘to get any conception of infinity is like taking the stone off the mouth of a well’. Is that not a key Christian task for the present moment? Sursum corda!
Photograph: Margot Krebs Neale.