12/02/2014
José Luis Restán is a journalist and director of the Socio-Religious Department of Cadena COPE
He looks calm, or, more precisely, happy. He has that light of his in the eyes, that gentle smile he always gave everyone, even when he was fully aware of the hardness of a circumstance or an account. Those who have had the fortune to see him and to talk with him say so. His physical strength is clearly declining, but he is still lucid and present, very aware of having made the gesture which God asked him to do for the sake of the Church. “I am old now, a monk devoted to prayer, and nothing else”, he answered with cutting sweetness to the Caldean Patriarch Louis Sako, who joked about a possible visit from the Pope emeritus to Iraq. “I pray for Iraq every day”, he repeated. And for the whole Church, because that is the service which he has been called to, and it is no small thing.
The old monk is still bound to the cross in the enclosure of Saint Peter, like he said at his farewell, aware that it is now his mission. Last summer, he said to his students in the “Ratzinger Schülerkreis” that “whichever position History might allocate us, the determining factor is responsibility before God, and responsibility before love, justice and truth…”. That is the way he saw it, and that is how he announced it with an unprecedented gesture. The Declaratio text, soberly pronounced in Latin on 11 February 2013 has not yet been treated in depth. Theologians and canonists can find there substantial material to work with. But now, almost nobody doubts it: such an unexpected and prophetic gesture triggered a new momentum on the path of the Church, the urgency of which Benedict XVI understood and felt like no other, just as much as he understood and felt that it could not be him who took it forward. There lies the enormous greatness of his historical decision.
It is interesting to note here the comment revealed by his friend, the psychiatrist and theologian Manfred Lütz, who visited him during his retire from the Mater Ecclesiae monastery: “From a theological point of view, (Francis and I) agree completely”. But not only about theology. The denunciation made in Fribourg of a Church which becomes self-satisfied, settles down in this world, becomes self-sufficient and adapts herself to the standards of the world, giving greater weight to organization tan to her vocation to openness toward God an to opening up the world toward the other, could easily be signed by Francis. Another common point is the necessity of opening up new ways ahead, of learning a new way to be present in order to communicate the life of Jesus Christ in a changing world. Evangelical poverty and freedom, priority of the grace and driving a new mission: Pope Francis’s reforming spirit and missionary disposition drinks from the deep waters of Benedict XVI’s luminous, but also suffering, pontificate.
Last year’s gesture, thoroughly matured, can only be understood in the light of an entire life devoted to serve as a labourer in the vineyard. And the Church to which he devoted himself until the end will always recognise it.