Arkiv, Samtaler
Conversation with Ana Zarzalejos Vicens
Below is an English version of a conversation you can read in Spanish here.
Are we living, right now, in a post-secular era?
I think so. I’ve said this in a couple of interviews over the last year. I think we see it quite clearly in Northern Europe.
Obviously, we live in a time where cultural trends shift extremely quickly. And Catholics do like to be reassured. So we’re all very keen to say, ‘Oh, it was just a blip, this thing that happened when everyone seemed to be turning their back.’ Well, we might hope it is. But I think everything depends on how we greet the present providential moment, what sort of testimony we give, what sort of teaching we proclaim.
To what do you attribute a growing interest in Catholicism?
I think people feel attracted to it because it’s true. That’s the fundamental reason. And I think they increasingly feel let down by many other options. And, you know, with so much collapsing, in terms of old certainties and old institutions, with the great fragility of our political life, our cultural life, our ecological life, our financial lives, people are looking for parameters that stand some promise of resisting the flood.
Could one then argue that, well, this new curiosity regarding religion or the Catholic Church is like a life-raft for people who fear drowning, without occasioning real conversions?
No, no. I encounter such conversions almost on a daily basis. So I must simply say that such a claim would not correspond to empirical evidence.
In the Catholic Church we also see a search for what is often called a traditionalist movement, closely linked to the liturgy and to young people, causing generational tension in the Church. How do you see this?
This phenomenon occurs in some places, not everywhere. I think of Poland. I think of our own country. I wouldn’t say it is causing a lot of friction there. I think it’s connected with a search for parameters, for form, for a certain beauty. And the Church has all this.
As long as we celebrate the mysteries well, as long as we stick to the simple principle that when we celebrate the liturgy, we ‘do the red and say the black’, observing the rubrics and letting the Church’s words resound, not just our own little words — as long as we stick to this, it is compelling.
At times this is viewed as a retrograde phenomenon, opposed to the Second Vatican Council…
I think it’s time to be a little more relaxed with regard to these parameters, which more often than not don’t correspond to facts.
For instance, a lot was written about this year’s Chartres pilgrimage, a big walking pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres that takes place each Pentecost. It has a traditional, even traditionalist aspect. There were more people participating this year than ever before. Some who were there have remarked that the young taking part were impossible to categorise. They weren’t all rabid, type-cast traditionalists with ties and long skirts. Some of them might go to a charismatic service on a Saturday, then to a Latin Mass on Sunday, then go to feed the poor with Caritas on Monday. As long as we keep insisting on shoving people into narrow boxed categories, we’re just not going to understand what’s going on.
Do you think the narrative of progressive versus conservative is infiltrating the church?
I think it’s infiltrated it for a long time. And I think we must gently, kindly, perhaps even humorously subvert it.
I think of a German Benedictine scholar, a monk of Gerleve called Elmar Salmann. He taught at Sant’Anselmo for many years. I was present at his leave-taking lecture in Rome. He said, with characteristic lucidity: People have been trying for decades to classify me as either conservative or liberal. Then he said, in Italian, ‘I prefer to consider myself classico e liberante’. That’s a great example of how we can take this conversation to a deeper, more fruitful level.
Do you think we see an emergence of Christianity as a political identity?
There are certainly those who want to claim it as such. We need to take great, great care here, when it comes to the instrumentalisation of Christian symbols and of Christian vocabulary, and this whole rhetoric of a civilisational struggle.
The point we have to just keep hammering home is this: it is illicit to instrumentalise faith for any secular purpose. Faith is supposed to illumine and enrich and deepen the secular arena, but it can’t be held hostage to it.
So what would would you say is the responsibility of a Christian today?
I’m inclined to cite the counsel of Saint Antony: ‘Let Christ be the air you breathe!’ Try and live coherent, credible Christian lives; give an account of the hope that is in you; practise hospitality; bear witness to what it is to be a human being, alert both to the painfulness and the glory of the human condition; cultivate humble fascination for the mystery of God.
In a recent lecture you spoke about the linguistic discovery human beings can make when they realise ‘there is more to be said and other ways of saying it’. How can the Catholic Church, after letting many people down on account of abuse scandals, convince them that it is the custodian of eternal truths?
First of all by being truthful, by pursuing the work of reparation in justice and with tears. Perhaps that experience can teach us to be humbler, and thereby more hospitable.
Another great and joyful challenge for the Church now is to, to remain within the linguistic metaphor, to reacquire and be re-enthused by its own specific language
In the last 20 or 30 years, we in the Catholic Church have had the sense that the world has been running away from us. We’ve been trying to catch up with it and to learn to speak the way it speaks, to use the signs the world uses, to get ourselves onto TikTok and Instagram.
As long as we carry on like that, we risk condemning ourselves to irrelevance, because we’re always going to be at least 10 steps behind everyone else. The Church, a big body, moves slowly. By the time we catch up, the world has moved on.
But if we speak our own language, if we speak the language of Scripture, the language of the liturgy, the language of our ritual, the language of the sacraments, we can say astonishingly fresh, original, and beautiful things. People do listen to them.
You have written, among many things, about chastity and redemptive suffering. These aren’t exactly things that first come to mind when one thinks about what people today want to hear. So, do they listen?
I’ve been astounded by the reception of the chastity book, for instance. It’s three years now since it was published. For a long time not a day passed without letters and emails arriving, or even people coming to see me.
It has been moving to find myself standing before audiences of primarily young people in Oslo, in the United States, in Portugal, in Spain. I’ve found such openness and a real desire to engage with these questions.
What do you think that says about the search for the meaning of the body today?
I think it has a lot to do with it. In Portugal The Shattering of Loneliness and Chastity have been published as companion volumes. That makes sense, because the two books are really about the same thing, that is, about what it is to be a human being. The first one is about dealing with remembrance and about spiritual aspirations; the second one is about dealing with the hunger and the desires and the hopes of the body.
In your last book you speak of the Epic of Gilgamesh. You say that the protagonist could be our contemporary. You say he is ‘a megalomaniac, in love with his proficiency but unsure of his purpose, haunted by death, perplexed by his heart’s craving, courageous in the face of the absurd, yet weighed down by sadness’. Are these afflictions of the present moment, you think? Are contemporary men and women like that?
I think so. And I purposely use the Epic of Gilgamesh because it’s one of the earliest manifestations of literature available to us.
There is a little note of irony as well in my choice. Another theme of mine that I try to voice now and again is this: I’m just not convinced by our underlying doctrine of cultural exceptionalism, which seems to presuppose that we are just so different now; that no one can understand us; that we function on totally different terms and have nothing to learn from what anyone has said or experienced before us.
It’s just wonderful, then, to be able to point to this text, almost 3 ,000 years old, and say, well, ‘Look at that fellow. He’s just like you!’
Is that what you mean when you say that literature can save lives?
Partly. But my claim is mainly to do with simply the fact that literature, when it’s worthy of the name literature (because not every book is literature), is an attempt to articulate what life is really like.
I think it can save lives in the sense that it can help me to understand that I’m not alone, that someone’s been here before, that even if in my immediate circle of acquaintances no one may understand, or I may think that no one understands what is going on inside me, I may come upon a contemporary novel, or an eighteenth-century poem, or a page of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and think, ‘Ah! But that’s me.’
And what about music?
Music takes us as close to eternity as we can come in this life. Music has this marvellous potential to express the ineffable. That which is beyond the reach of words can somehow be conveyed by music.
Still on the subject of culture, you have chosen to do a series on the wisdom of the Desert Fathers. Again I would say: this isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of engaging with contemporary culture. What can they offer us today?
Oh, lots. Realism, wisdom, a firm spirit of faith, quite often a delicious self-irony, and a sense of the proportions of things.
What’s the biggest challenge prevents contemporary man from having an encounter with God.
I think the biggest challenge is that of believing we are loved.
What do you wish man, homo sapiens, would understood better about himself right now?
His potential for eternal life.