The Power of Personal Encounter

Pietro Luca Azzaro - “Of faith, it is easier to speak than to write: for it is not a system contrived inwardly, but comes from the fact that others communicate it to me and demands to be communicated.”

Joseph Ratzinger was once asked whether, as a man of such superior culture and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he felt uncomfortable expressing himself in the “poor” form of the interview.

His response reveals the profound reason behind the privileged relationship he consciously sought with the press. This relationship was particularly evident with the journalist who knew him best and interviewed him most: Peter Seewald.

It all began on a cold winter morning in 1996. The two had arranged to meet in front of the Palace of the Holy Office, next to St. Peter's. From there, they drove together to Villa Cavalletti, a Jesuit retreat house on the outskirts of Rome.

They planned to spend a few days there to produce their first book interview. In themselves, the co-authors could not have been more different: here an impetuous political nationalist, formerly a communist militant in Catholic Bavaria, who had long since abandoned the Church and who in any case lacked any theological training; there an elderly and mild-mannered cardinal, a delicate and authoritative theologian who, however, in the collective imagination was above all the “Rottweiler of God,” the ruthless censor of anyone who dared to challenge the “official line” or question acquired positions of power.

And yet, in those days, the more the conversation thickened, the more something matured that, by the given premises, one could hardly have imagined would happen. Seewald was indeed asking “uncomfortable,” “radical” questions in the literal sense of the term, the kind that a certain routine of faith or reverential fear would have led one not to ask, and all the more to a “prince of the Church.”

And yet, Ratzinger himself would later recall, precisely those were also the most “authentic” questions because “one could see that they concerned him personally,” indeed: “that they concerned us right down to the deepest and most personal aspects of our being and of our lives.”

Thus was born Salt of the Earth, the first of three interview books made with the German journalist (and ten years after Report on Faith, the famous conversation with Vittorio Messori in 1985 also collected in volume 13 of the Opera omnia, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City 2024). In 2000 followed God and the World, conceived in the Abbey of Montecassino; then, in 2010, Light of the World, the fruit of a long conversation with Pope Benedict XVI during a stay at Castel Gandolfo.

Although different in content - reflecting the changing times and at the same time the different stages of Seewald's own journey of conversion - the three long conversations are united by the same interweaving of personal dimension, topicality and relevance to life.

And at the same time they all reflect a profound attitude of Joseph Ratzinger that he once referred to his beloved teacher Augustine, but which, just by reading the interviews, the reader will not struggle to glimpse in himself: “Nietzsche once said that he could not suffer St. Augustine, so much did he seem to him plebeian and common.

There is undoubtedly something right in this remark, but therein lies the true Christian greatness of St. Augustine. He could have lived as an aristocrat of the spirit. However, out of love for Christ and for men, in whom he saw Christ approaching him, he chose a different path. He abandoned the ivory tower of high spirituality to become fully a man among men—a servant of the servants of God.

For the sake of Christ, who did not disdain to forsake divine glory and be a man like us, he sacrificed all his higher learning and was able to bring the Word of God to his own with ever greater simplicity and directness.”

The significance and importance Ratzinger attaches to the form of dialogue for this purpose is rendered well by an episode recounted by him in an interview he granted in the early 2000s (and contained in the third tome of the volume that collects a selection of conversations carried out from 1969 to 2004 and until now, largely unpublished).

Once Christoph Schönborn - a former student of his at the time when Prof. Ratzinger was teaching in Regensburg and meanwhile also becoming a cardinal and archbishop of Vienna - in an airport had come across a book in which, in the form of a dialogue, a father was teaching his son what Hinduism was: “It was so engagingly written,” Ratzinger notes, “that people in that airport actually bought something like that and read it.

Of course: not that once Ratzinger became “Custodian of the Faith,” he rejected a priori any methodical reflection on God marked by reason: theology was and remained his world.

It should not, however, derail from the simplicity of tradition, on pain of losing itself first and foremost and betraying its true task: to help unveil the great potentialities of the human condition, to orient man to the fullness of life.

Thus, when at the beginning of his tenure as head of the former Holy Office, the Cardinal was asked to outline the task of a Congregation over which still weighed an aura of suspicion and mystery, he replied, “It is the care of the faith of the ‘little ones’ of whom the Gospel speaks, which must always be put before the fear of some conflict with those who appear powerful.” This struggle against power to defend the faith of the simple is the great background note of all his interviews and his entire life as a priest, theologian, bishop, cardinal, and finally pope.

In the early 1990s, he made a striking observation that contrasted sharply with the general euphoria following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. He predicted that a time would come when the “pride of reason” would grow so immense and pervasive that no argument, no matter how reasonable, would have the power to counter it.

But just then, he said, it would again become evident that ultimately “banal nihilism”-he used a term from his friend Robert Spaemann-” can only be overcome by witnesses, by people who are truly touched by the truth, who do not want to assert themselves, but who know how to listen, who are sensitive, welcoming and who are also ready to testify to the truth.

People, therefore, in whom one sees that they do not aspire to become someone, to make a career, to exercise power … people who have something to transmit, and they do it; and in whom one sees that there is something greater of which they themselves make themselves servants …; because for us, truth, cannot be abstract.”

By the end of his journey, the pope emeritus could hardly speak. For those who occasionally visited him at the “Monastery” and expressed, even through a glance, their fear of an unequal struggle and the challenge of finding joy amidst such realities, Joseph Ratzinger had a profound response. He replied with the overwhelming force and the irresistible appeal of his witness.

Those who met him know how his gaze, so serene and limpid, immediately touched the heart, as much as the message he conveyed with that gaze: “It is not we who embrace the Lord, but it is he who embraces us; we do not carry the Lord, but it is he who carries us; the boat is not ours, but his: with our gaze fixed on him, we will walk on the waters.”

I wish the reader of this volume that he too can, page after page, be regenerated in the encounter with this very great theologian, pastor, and witness to the truth in dialogue with his time.

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