The Cardinal’s Nocturnal Conversations in Jerusalem with the Austrian Jesuit Georg Sporschill are the first volume of the series from Tuesday 30 on newsstands with Corriere
Why is Christianity no longer attractive to most young people? Two Jesuit elders asked this for a long time, conversing with each other in Jerusalem late into the night and discussing the problem in its many questions. For example, the eldest at one point said: The Church in recent decades has lost many young people, I wonder how we can win them back. The result deposited in this book,titled precisely Night conversations in Jerusalem, which, when it came out in 2008, caused a lot of talk about itself in Italy and in the world, perhaps precisely because at night ideas are born more easily than in the rationality of the day.
The main cause of this uproar was the identity of the main author, the one who answered the questions that the other asked him in the name of many young Austrians and Germans. In addition to being one of the most authoritative scholars of New Testament textual criticism, he was a cardinal,he had been archbishop of Milan for 22 years, for a long time papabilis, and represented a point of reference of contemporary spirituality for the faithful of all religions and also for many non-believers.
Asking the question about the growing crisis of Catholicism, Carlo Maria Martini and Georg Sporschill looked the situation in the face without hesitation and for this reason they chose to give this book the following subtitle: On the risk of faith. Usually this expression is understood in the sense of the risk that faith makes those who embrace it run, as happened for example to Abraham called to leave his land; in these pages, above all, another value of that genitive emerges, that is the risk that faith itself is running due to its progressive declinethat today in the postmodern West seems to merge it into irrelevance. The risk of faith in the Christian God of fading more and more, until it disappears.
Martini was very aware of this, so much so that when asked what he would ask Jesus if he had the chance, he replied that before, as bishop, he would have asked him the reason for the gap between the Church and young peoplebecause of the indifference of the latter, and then of the quantitative and qualitative crisis of the clergy; now that he had left the leadership of the diocese due to age limits, he specified: I prefer to ask and pray that he will welcome me and that he will not leave me alone.
Not without neglecting the reasons for hope, the book lists and discusses the reasons for the crisis, making it a kind of small summa of the anxieties and perspectives of Catholic spirituality. (…) The main critical point is undoubtedly the Church and its apparatus which, according to Martini, tends more and more to behave as often happens to those sick people who reduce the whole world to their own health and end up seeing nothing but themselves. : in the same way the Church tends to give too much importance to herselfand runs the risk of posing as absolute, forgetting that instead he is only an intermediary. Martini does not hide his criticism: I once had dreams about the Church … today I no longer have these dreams, a statement reaffirmed in his last interview granted on 8 August 2012 to Father Georg Sporschill together with Federica Radice Fossati Confalonieri, and published by Corriere on September 1 following his death: The Church has fallen behind by 200 years. How come it does not shake? Are we afraid? Fear instead of courage ?.
To fully understand the method that Martini applied to the reading of reality and people, it is appropriate to recall what he said one day about his episcopal motto in a conference at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome held on May 23, 2002: Il motto mio : To love adversity for truth, that is, to be happy with the contradictions. Martini thus translated the meaning of the phrase that twenty-two years earlier he had chosen at the moment of the sudden appointment as bishop of Milan by John Paul II, from which he had done everything to avoid. The sentence taken from a work by Gregory the Great entitled The pastoral rule
and it is usually translated to love adversity to defend the truth, in the sense that the defense of the truth comes to require the assumption of unpleasant tasks for the subject, as was the case with Gregory, who did not want to become Pope, and as was the case with Martini, who did not want to become a bishop and leave his beloved studies.
Martini, however, gradually came to attribute another meaning to the phrase, as he affirmed that day in Rome: to be happy with the contradictions.But in what sense can one be happy with contradictions? It can be because contradictions demolish granite certainties and stimulate thought, and free and conscious thought is the vital basis of the most authentic spirituality.
The first volume and the series
It comes out on Tuesday 30 November on newsstands with Corriere della Sera and with the weekly Oggi il volume Night conversations in Jerusalem. On the risk of faith, in which Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini confronts the Austrian Jesuit Georg Sporschill on the problems of the Church. The book is on sale at a price of € 7.90 plus the cost of the newspaper or magazine. This is the first issue of a series of twenty volumes entitled Masters of the Spirit, which will continue until April 12, 2022. The theologian Vito Mancuso is the curator of the work as a whole, who signs an explanatory introduction for each of the titles, such as the dedicated one. to Martini’s book of which we publish an excerpt on this page.
Born in Turin in 1927, the future archbishop of Milan entered the Society of Jesus at a very young age and was ordained a priest in 1952. Specialized in theology and studies on the Holy Scriptures, he was first rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, then of the Pontifical Gregorian University. In 1979 John Paul II appointed him archbishop of Milan, a position he held until 2002. Pope Wojtyla also made him cardinal in 1983. As head of the Milanese diocese, Martini distinguished himself for his ability to dialogue with all the realities of the territory and for his pay attention to the most fragile subjects. Thus he became one of the most authoritative and esteemed personalities of the Italian Church. He died in 2012.
The second volume of the Maestri dello Spirito series will be on newsstands on 7 December. It is about Pray, perhaps the most urgent speech of Father David Maria Turoldo. Follow What I believe by Swiss theologian Hans Kng, out on 14 December.
November 28, 2021 (change November 28, 2021 | 21:51)
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