Msgr. Bernard Tissier de Mallerais: Faith Imperiled by Reason - Benedict XVI’s Hermeneutics

[Stone]

Foreword
This is Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic[1]
Msgr. Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, SSPX

– First it is the hermeneutic which a pope proposes for the second Vatican Council so as to obtain for it, forty years after its conclusion, reception into the Church;

– Next it is the hermeneutic, very much like modern reason, which the Council and conciliar theologians propose for the faith of the Church, though these have opposed each other in a mutual exclusion since the Enlightenment, in order to reduce their opposition;

– Last, it is the hermeneutic of the thought of a pope and theologian who attempts to make faith reasonable to a reason trained to refuse it.


The triple problem which, according to Benedict XVI, hermeneutic ought to have resolved at the Council and which it must still resolve today is the following:

1. Modern science, with the atomic bomb and a consumerist view of man, violates the prohibitions of morality. Science without conscience is nothing more than the ruin of the soul, said a philosopher. How to give science a conscience? The Church in the past was discredited in the eyes of science by its condemnation of Galileo; by what conditions can she hope to offer positivistic reason ethical norms and values?

2. Confronted by a laicized, ideologically plural society, how can the Church play her role as seed of unity? Certainly not by expecting to impose the reign of Christ, nor by restoring a false universalism and its intolerance, but by making an allowance for positivistic reason to challenge, in a fair competition, Christian values, duly purified and made palatable for the world which emerged after 1789, that is to say, after the Rights of Man.

3. Faced with ‘world religions’ better understood and more widespread, can the Church still claim exclusivity for her salvific values and a privileged status before the State? Certainly not. However, she wishes only to collaborate with other religions for the sake of world peace, by offering in concert with them, in a ‘polyphonic correlation,’ the values of the great religious traditions.

These three problems make no more than one: Joseph Ratzinger estimates that to a new epoch of history there must correspond a new relation between faith and reason:

“I would then willingly speak,” he has said, “of a necessary form of correlation between reason and faith, which are called to a mutual purification and regeneration.”[2] Asking pardon of my reader for having perhaps anticipated my conclusion, with him I have just entered my subject by the back door.



Footnotes
[1] Hermeneutics is the art of interpreting facts or documents.
[2] J. Ratzinger, “Right, Democracy and Religion” (debate with Jürgen Habermas, Catholic Academy of Bavaria, Munich, January 19, 2004), Esprit,
July 2004, p. 28