The late pope emeritus Benedict XVI, whose funeral was last week, is getting lots of tributes. One of them stopped me in my tracks: the pontiff’s approving words for Martin Luther and the Reformation principle that salvation is by faith alone.
The Catholic writer George Weigel, writing in First Things, recalls a conversation with him when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, holding the important Vatican office of Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Weigel asked him why the Vatican had just named St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a 19th century French nun, a “doctor of the church.” Normally, that title was given to notable theologians, such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
St. Thérèse was simply a devout young woman who died at the age of 24, known mainly for her spiritual autobiography, in which she articulated a “little way” of reaching Heaven: Instead of the heroic good deeds and achieving perfection that were urged by most Catholic writers, she stressed the importance of humility and trust in Jesus. “I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection,” she write. “Thine Arms, then, O Jesus, are the lift which must raise me up even unto Heaven. To get there I need not grow. On the contrary, I must remain little, I must become still less.”
In answer to his question of why St. Thérèse was named an official and authoritative doctor of the church, the future Pope Benedict–speaking, according to Weigel in complete paragraphs, after noting that there have been many different kinds of doctors of the church–said:
This is also interesting for the ecumenical dialogue. Luther’s doctrine of justification was provoked by his difficulty in understanding himself justified and redeemed through the complex structures of the medieval Church. Grace did not arrive in his soul and we have to understand the explosion of ‘sola fide’ in this context: that he discovered finally that he had only to give fiducia, confidence, to the Lord, to give myself into the hands of the Lord—and I am redeemed. I think in a very Catholic way this returned in Thérèse of Lisieux: You don’t have to make great things. I am poor, spiritually and materially; and to give myself into the hands of Jesus is sufficient. This is a real interpretation of what it means to be redeemed; we don’t have to do great things, we have to be confident, and in the freedom of that confidence we can follow Jesus and realize a Christian life. This is not only an important contribution to the ecumenical dialogue but to our common question—how can I be redeemed, how am I justified? [Thérèse’s] “little way” is a very deep rediscovering of the center of Christian life.
“Give myself into the hands of the Lord–and I am redeemed”! “You don’t have to make great things” because “to give myself into the hands of Jesus is sufficient”! This is the answer “to our common question–how can I be redeemed, how am I justified”! This is “a very deep rediscovering of the center of Christian life”!
Is the Pope Catholic? Or is the Pope Lutheran?
Surely not, I hasten to say, but this shows that the Gospel can be found in the Catholic church.
And is the future Pope implying that Luther ranks as a doctor of the church?
Photo: St. Thérèse of Lisieux by Celine Martin (Sor Genoveva de la Santa Faz) – Archivos del Carmelo de Lisieux, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35129680
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In