If there is one theologian and one Pope who throughout his life reflected and taught on the reasonableness of faith, it was Joseph Ratzinger. It is no coincidence that he also spoke about it in the final lines of his spiritual testament, made public on the day of his death: “I have seen, and see, how, out of the tangle of hypotheses, the reasonableness of faith has emerged and is emerging anew.
This repeated emphasis, however, has never meant - in Ratzinger's view - reducing faith into a philosophical “system,” into an architecture of ideas, into a list of moral norms, ending up forgetting that the Christian faith is the encounter with a Person, as we read in the prologue of the encyclical Deus caritas est. In an interview written with the German monthly magazine , published in July 2021, the Pope Emeritus observed: “The believer is a person who questions himself....
Already as a cardinal, in 2001, Ratzinger had spoken very clear words to avoid falling into this reductionism, which are worth reiterating today: “The nature of faith is not such that from a certain moment onwards one can say: ‘I possess it, others do not’... Faith remains a journey. Throughout the course of our lives it remains a journey, and therefore faith is always threatened and in danger. And it is also healthy that it thus escapes the risk of becoming an ideology that can be manipulated.
Faith, as Benedict XVI himself recalled and as Francis likes to repeat, is only transmitted by attraction and not by proselytism or imposition. The believer is not the one who “possesses” something that he can “administer.” The Christian does not dispense pre-packaged answers to explain everything to everyone. The Christian can only reverberate some spark of the gift he has undeservedly received, and when this happens it is by pure grace.
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