Interview with Bishop André Léonard, Bishop of Namur (Belgium)
More than 250 people took part on December 11 in the Colloquium 2000 Years of Christianity, organized by the Dongelberg Meeting Center in Belgium. The Colloquium brought together three speakers: Michel Rouche, professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne; Bishop André-Mutien Léonard, Bishop of Namur, and Herman Van Rompuy, federal deputy and former Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium.
During that intense day of work and of perspectives for the new Millennium, we interviewed Bishop Léonard, theologian and philosopher, specialist in Hegel and modern thought, who preached the most recent spiritual exercises to His Holiness John Paul II. Author of numerous books, in the years before the Jubilee he published volumes dedicated to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and, recently, Trinidad de amor. Eucaristía para nuestro camino. In Spanish he has published Pensamiento contemporáneo y fe en Jesucristo (Ed. Encuentro) and La moral sexual explicada a los jóvenes (Ed. Palabra).
By Xavier L. Ruys
-Bishop Léonard, your new book has just been published: Come, Lord Jesus!, which gathers the twenty meditations you preached in the Vatican last Lent for Pope John Paul II and the Roman Curia. Do you keep any special memory of the moments spent with the Holy Father?
-In 1900 there appeared a small work by a great Russian thinker, Vladimir Soloviev, an Orthodox philosopher and theologian, very open to ecumenism, with evident sympathies toward Catholicism. It is entitled A Short Tale of the Antichrist, and in it he imagines the situation of Europe at the end of the twentieth century; that is, now. It is one of the most prophetic writings I know, and I allowed myself to read it before the Holy Father during the spiritual exercises preached in the Vatican. At the end, in a brief meeting with the participants, John Paul II commented on the reading of Soloviev: “È stato un momento forte!”: it was a very intense moment of the spiritual exercises.
Secularism
-We live in a secularized society. Looking toward the new Millennium, does secularism not represent the greatest challenge to the Christian faith?
-Precisely the text of Soloviev to which I have just referred evokes the fact that it is in the face of the exaltation of secularism that the confession of Christ takes place, of the unique person of Christ, the only one capable of bringing about the unity of Christians.
The Second Vatican Council, when it speaks of the phenomenon of secularization, distinguishes different senses of this word. There is an entirely positive secularity, truly integrated into the spirit of Catholicism, which underlines the proper consistency of the different orders of reality and of the different disciplines of human knowledge. There is also an excessive secularism, which likewise affirms the autonomy of each domain of reality or of each discipline of human knowledge, but closes it to any outside inspiration, especially if it comes from Revelation.
There is still a third form of secularism, intensely lived today, which transfers Christian reality into rational or philosophical categories, but absorbs it, suppressing its transcendence; that is, replacing Christ with Christianity or, as is sometimes said, with Christian values.
Obviously, those values exist. The bad thing is that today they very often serve as an alibi for forgetting Christ. Thus, when a Christian institution is asked to explain its identity and describe the values it promotes, the answer obtained is the enumeration of a series of them, undoubtedly important, but equally shared by free-thinkers, by secularism and by anyone whatsoever, since they form part of the heritage of human reason.
That is to say, today we run the risk of dissolving Christ into a Christianity of values; values that the Christian faith really promotes, but that do not exhaust the heart of Christianity, which is the person of Christ, the dearest thing we have, from whom all things proceed and in whom the fullness of divinity dwells bodily.
The new “Martyrs”
-Hope, of course, prevents us from being defeatist. But how can that situation be turned around?
-The current situation of extreme secularization is a kind of good fortune, a “chance”. We are invited to see what is positive.
We are living a moment of saints and witnesses. From the Greek root for witness comes the word martyr. Antiquity had many martyrs, but John Paul II, on the occasion of the Jubilee, invites us to bring the martyrology up to date, because the twentieth century is the century of the martyrs.
There are many. Those who in our country wish today to sanctify themselves through their professional responsibilities are witnesses. Those who dare to contract a Christian marriage; that is, not only to have a ceremony in a church, but – in the words of Saint Paul – to enter into a marriage in the Lord, are witnesses. Those who dare – and there are such people – to give their lives completely to the Lord, or to answer the call to the priesthood, in the desert that surrounds us are called to be saints, witnesses and martyrs.
The present situation offers us the opportunity to promote living experiences of Christ. It is obvious that, in the spiritual desert in which we live, there are also, and more than in previous times, places of very intense spiritual experience. This is one of the reasons that impels John Paul II to hold the World Youth Days.
-Hope is therefore, as always, in young people.
-Especially in Western countries, this is a time when young people – so it is said, and it is true according to certain appearances – massively desert the churches. But it is also the time when more young people gather to make a discovery of Christ, and they discover Him. It is a paradox, but an understandable paradox. What matters most for the future of Christianity is that there be witnesses of Christ. In Kierkegaard’s words: We need saints more than professors; that is, we need saints who bear witness to Christ more than people who make a career in Christianity by speaking about Him.
Ecumenism
-You alluded earlier, briefly, to the union of Christians. The recent Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on Justification is a mature and hopeful fruit of dialogue with other Christian confessions. How do you glimpse the future of ecumenism?
-Let us evoke Soloviev again: only in the face of radical opposition to the faith will it be possible to bring about the unity of Christians. Certainly, ecumenical colloquia, meetings, the publication of common texts and declarations by Catholics and Lutherans, and so on, must be carried out. All this is necessary and important. But that is not what will bring about the definitive unity of Christians that John Paul II hopes for in the Third Millennium. It is the challenge of secularism, atheism, the return to paganism and perhaps the eschatological nearness of the coming of Jesus Christ in glory that will provoke the unity of Christians.
Religiosity and Eternal Truths
-Subjectivism reigns today, affecting not a few Catholics. Are the means being used to overcome the pretension of a “religion à la carte”?
-We live in an age of profoundly ambiguous religiosity: faith lived only in appearance, the multiplicity of beliefs, recourse to esotericism, occultism, the New Age with its almost religious vision of the future of humanity, the proliferation of sects… All this reality, massively present in our culture, represents a great danger. But at the same time it is an opportunity, a crossroads where the Christian can bear witness, a place for hope, if we promote in the Church living communities, parochial or not, where attention is paid in a global sense – holistic, as is said in the New Age milieu – to human existence.
It is very important that we confess the Christian faith in the global and holistic sense that faith gives to human existence. Communities, whether parochial or not, have a great role to play if they keep their attention on the ultimate end of man and of humanity.
One of the crossroads at which today’s sects and esoteric movements are most present is in questions concerning the end of human life on this earth, death and man’s eternal destiny. These are essential themes about which there is too much silence – perhaps after much having been said in the past – leaving them in the hands of ambiguous forms of religiosity. What we shall become beyond death, the personal ultimate end and also the ultimate end of human history, the end of time, the Parousia, Eternal Life, the Kingdom of God… On the level of religious culture, there is today a great opportunity to reoccupy this ground and not leave it at the mercy of others.
Science and Faith
-Since the dawn of the modern world, science has insisted on its radical separation from faith and even on looking down on it. Do you consider this a widespread and irreversible phenomenon?
-The relationship between science and faith today is, it seems to me, much more positive than it was some decades ago. I was impressed to find a good number of scientists very sensitive to the so-called Principle of incompleteness, according to which no science is capable of completing itself entirely by itself. It is the extension to the various scientific disciplines of the intuition of Gödel’s Theorem, according to which no logical system is entirely capable of grounding itself, but will always contain an axiom that cannot be grounded by the system itself; self-foundation from within a logical system is not possible.
Many scientists are sensitive to this principle. For example, a physicist of quantum mechanics, Bernard d’Espagnat, explained how, from the discovery of the mechanics of elementary particles, one arrives at a principle of incompleteness: the reality of scientific knowledge is only an apparent reality, which lets one glimpse beyond it a veiled, hidden reality. At the same time, a certain number of neurologists strive to show that the human being can never be reduced to a neuronal man, an expression alluding to a book that attempted to change the principle of incompleteness.
A great number of physicists are open to the so-called Anthropic Principle, which goes beyond all mechanism and reintroduces an idea of finality: the parameters of the Universe seem to have been calculated so that life could appear, and also man himself. If the main constants of the physical Universe were varied a little, life would not be possible. The Universe seems calculated, then, to be the cradle of life and of man. This appears to be a refutation of the pure mechanism of the last century.
-Bridges are being built, then, between science and faith.
-Compared with past periods, the present context is much more favorable. A new apologetics shines forth, and it is not an apologetics of recovery, much less a concordat-style apologetics seeking to establish premature footbridges between science and faith. It is rather an enlightened apologetics which, patiently and respectfully, shows how within the autonomy of each register of human thought there are metaphysical questions that insinuate themselves within scientific practice itself.
I find impressive the number of physicists, cosmologists and biologists who today raise questions of a metaphysical order. There is a turn toward questions of a metaphysical and religious order. And this is an opportunity, another “chance”, for the Christian faith.
Reconnecting Knowledge
-Today knowledge is accumulated, but people do not overcome a certain skepticism, perhaps because they do not rise above the level of mental clutter. To what extent is that impression true?
-A new apologetics is needed, a new perception of the reasons for believing, in fruitful relationship with philosophy, especially with the concern to reconnect knowledge, ever more numerous but ever less easy to integrate into today’s culture.
I am reading a book by Edgar Morin, El desafío del siglo XXI: religar los conocimientos. The thesis he develops is that the essential task of the twenty-first century will be to reconnect knowledge. Is this not a task, a vocation of Religion? To reconnect. Is it not a great good fortune, an opportunity, for an ambitious and intelligent theology, to contribute to reconnecting the knowledge of the present time?
Means of Communication
-“The future is on the Internet” is the fashionable phrase in the business world. Throughout history, the Church has made use of new instruments for her pastoral activity. What can be expected from the new communications and from media culture?
-Certainly, we have entered the culture of the means of communication, for better or for worse. If we absent ourselves from that world, it will simply be built without us or against us. It is opportune to be present in the public media, and also for the Church to have her own means of communication, something that we are still developing timidly.
It gives me joy to know that a Catholic television channel is going to be launched in France. In Belgium we have only some Christian radio, because the request was made too late. In France there are Christian radio stations here and there, almost in every diocese. In Belgium we have had to go through an obstacle course to obtain one radio station in Brussels and another, still incipient, in Bastogne. The other requests are still waiting to obtain a broadcasting frequency. Now, the Internet, DVD, CD-ROM… are fields of presence from which we cannot desert and to which we must not arrive too late.
Culture and Faith
-A certain public opinion frequently separates culture and Church, presenting them as two irreconcilable worlds. How can faith be made to permeate the whole of human activity?
-Culture is one of John Paul II’s great concerns. The opportunity represented for the Christian faith by being present in culture is great. We must be present in the places where today’s culture is produced. From this point of view, I insist that the Church must promote many more works of art.
At present we lack architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature or poetry inspired by the Christian faith. We need new Greens, Mauriacs, Bernanos. They are missed. Therefore, prizes should be created, for example, to promote a production of culture inspired by the Christian faith, by Christ, and not merely by a vague and faded Christian value.
Political commitment
-Speaking of culture brings to mind the “culture of death”, which today runs rampant in many laws. Do you not think that politics is a particularly opportune field for giving an adequate response to so many questions?
-Politics, the quality of political life, is an extremely important field of action, on which the happiness of humanity depends to a great extent and in which Christians must be present. Political commitment is of capital importance. It seems to me that there are several levels of commitment, beginning with the promotion of real values and of the Church’s social doctrine. The Church’s social doctrine is a mine, often more visited by non-Christians than by Catholics themselves.
One level of commitment is testimonial firmness, “confessing”, to use an expression employed by Protestants and Catholics during Nazism. There are domains – specifically, ethical domains – that are crucial, where consensus or compromise is not a confessing attitude. One must know how to say yes and how to say no, conscious that any other alternative is mere cleverness.
Another level for the political man with Christian roots seeks to draw attention to certain aspects that go unnoticed by the political class as a whole. I am thinking of an example that has impressed me greatly in recent years and that Michel Schooyans describes very well in his book El crash demográfico. I am dismayed by the silence of politicians concerning the real demographic situation of Europe and humanity. People continue to say and write everywhere that a population explosion threatens us. But serious demographers show that, on the contrary, Europe is in truth threatened by a demographic implosion, a collapse, and that in a somewhat broader time frame humanity as a whole is threatened, including Third World countries, where the demographic pyramid is already about to bend.
Who talks about this? From time to time, some Minister of Pensions mentions this difficulty, and that is all. Christian politicians should draw attention to problems like this and other similar ones that are not usually spoken about.
Hope and Action
-Numerous challenges facing the Third Millennium have been mentioned. They must undoubtedly be faced. But, to finish, how should this be done?
-We have enormous challenges to face in today’s culture, which call for a great investment on our part. Each of us is called to fulfill his own mission here, in order to face those challenges. At the same time, if we confess the Only-Begotten, we possess that inner detachment and freedom to know that God has already accomplished the salvation of the world and that He will be the one to manifest the definitive consequences of this salvation. Therefore, combining at once hope and the dynamism of action – abandonment to Providence and commitment in the face of the difficulties of the present – we will find ourselves well prepared to enter the new Millennium. _
PALABRA, 426 (January, 2000), p. 30 ff.
Source: Encuentra.com
