Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has criticised the German Church for what he claims is its lack of faith.
In a 15-page written interview for the August issue of the theological monthly Herder Korrespondenz, to mark the 70th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood, Benedict recalls his year as a curate in a Munich parish in 1951-2 but also deplores, as he has done before, what he perceives as a lack of faith on the part of German church employees.
“In church institutions in Germany, that is in hospitals, schools and Caritas, many Catholics participate in decisive positions who do not share the inner mission of the Church and thus in many cases obscure the witness of the institution,” Benedict says.
This lack of faith was particularly noticeable in official church announcements and comments, he says, as the texts were mainly written by people “for whom the faith is only a routine”.
“The exodus from the world of faith will continue as long as in institutional Church texts only the office, but not the heart and the spirit, speak,” Benedict underlines. That was why it was so important to expect a “real personal testimony of faith from the spokesmen of the Church”.
Benedict also touches upon a subject he had highlighted in his Freiburg address on his last visit to Germany as Pope in 2011 – namely, his insistence then that, “in order to accomplish its true task, the Church must constantly renew its efforts to detach itself from the ‘worldliness’ of the world”. He now felt that perhaps the German wording “entweltlichte Kirche” (“a Church that is detached from the world”) was inadequate.
“I don’t know whether it was wise of me in Freiburg to choose the word ‘Entweltlichung’, which goes back to Heidegger (German philosopher 1889-1976). It does not emphasise the positive aspect [of detachment from worldly values] sufficiently and only stresses the negative side of the movement I am concerned with. The issue is more about shaking off the constraints of a particular time and entering into the freedom of the faith.”