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 Open letter to Pope Benedict XVI.
After the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy, an Original Christian wrote him an extensive letter. Since this letter had still received no answer several weeks later, a second letter was written, which has also remained unanswered up till the present time. Both texts are printed in their entirety on the following pages.
To
Pope Benedict XVI (16.)
Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano
V-00120 Città del Vaticano
Rom - Italien
May 2, 2005
Honorable Pope Benedict,
Please do not hold the salutation I have used against me! I find it very difficult to address a human being as “Holy Father” or “Your Holiness.” I am not turning to you as a member of your Church, but simply as a brother in Christ.
Perhaps I may start by mentioning that we have already met one another, under quite critical circumstances. As Archbishop of Munich and Freising you had introduced disciplinary measures against a rebellious local priest who refused to deliver his Peter’s Pence. And this man turned to me of all people, as a lawyer, to help prevent his dismissal via the use of legal channels. The dispute over church law turned into a personal meeting, during which you showed understanding, and which ultimately led to an amicable agreement. The priest was thankful to his cardinal and the lawyer was impressed by the cardinal’s readiness to reconcile. Considering your eventful life, of course, I find it very improbable that you still remember this encounter. Presumably just as little, that you may have heard that on the television program “Dieci minuti” on RAI UNO, a German jurist appeared who presented a religious movement that reaches back to Original Christianity. The Munich lawyer of that time has meanwhile become a (hopefully) modest God-seeker within the circle of an Original Christian community, which tries to understand the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and to put them into practice in daily life without church dogmas and rites.
By referring to this effort, I will allow myself to pose several questions to the newly elected pope of the Roman-Catholic Church. This may seem presumptuous, but Christ does not differentiate between high-ranking and low-ranking persons. And since it concerns fundamental questions to being Christian, these should not be discussed in a closed circle, which is why I also allow myself to write this as an open letter.
The first question was already once posed by yourself: As Bishop of Limburg, Franz Kamphaus recently reported in the “Frankfurt Allgemein Newspaper” during the mid 1960s, you, already a conciliar theologian, pointed out that as pope it is dangerous to let oneself be called “Holy Father.” The words of Jesus contradict this: “… you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called masters, for you have one master, the Christ.” (Mt. 23:8f) For many this may seem merely a formality. But as you said yourself: The words of Jesus are against this – which is why the question arises: How seriously does the new pope take the words of Jesus, the Christ, when he, too, lets himself be called “Holy Father” and lets people kneel before him?
The same question also applies to the church as an institution, when, despite its bloody past, it continues to view itself as the one and only true institution of salvation in Christendom, and which, under threat of spiritual punishment, requisitions its members already as babies and holds on to them as adults. In your much-read “Introduction to Christendom,”* you wrote already in 1968 that in view of the history of the church, you could understand “Dante’s terrible vision of the Babylonian whore sitting in the Church’s chariot.” (p. 339) The consequences to be drawn from this can be found in the Revelation of John, who referring to the whore of Babylon advised: “Come out of her my people, lest you share in her sins …!” (Rev. 18:4) But anyone who wants to follow this advice is threatened by the church with the horrible punishment of eternal damnation.
Whoever seeks advice in your theology for the solution to this conflict between salvation in Christ and the calamity of the church receives paradoxical information: “Because of the Lord’s devotion, never more to be revoked, the Church is the institution sanctified by Him forever, an institution in which the holiness of the Lord becomes present among men. And it is truly the holiness of the Lord that becomes present in her and that chooses again and again the dirty hands of men as the vessel of its presence in paradoxical love. It is holiness that radiates as the holiness of Christ from the midst of the Church’s sin … One could actually say that precisely in her paradoxical structure of holiness and unholiness the Church is in fact the shape taken by grace in this world.” (pp. 341-42)
I am not a learned theologian. Perhaps that is why I cannot avoid the impression that this is an intellectual game, in which things are turned upside down: The Apriori is no longer the “Lord,” but the Church; He becomes the vehicle of an organization, which because of His “devotion, never more to be revoked,” then also remains holy, when it turns away from Him. At the end of your deduction, you write that “this unholy holiness of the Church has in itself something infinitely comforting about it.” (p. 343)
Honorable Pope Benedict, what would Jesus of Nazareth have to say about so much paradox? Would He not refuse to have your Church call itself the “mystical body of Christ”? And particularly since it, according to your paradox of the “unholy holiness” was and is allowed to do as it pleases – also during the centuries of the Crusades and Inquisition, during which it drew its trail of blood through the history of the world? Does not this motto “once holy, always holy” make the Church unpredictable for the future, not to say dangerous?
In your book, you protest that “the criticism of the Church adopts that tone of rancorous bitterness … accompanied only too often by a spiritual hollowness, (in which the specific nature of the Church as a whole is no longer seen,) in which she is regarded only as a political instrument whose organization is felt to be pitiable or brutal, as if the real function of the Church did not lie beyond the organization, in the comfort of the Word and of the sacraments …” (p. 343) This may very well be, but was not the “real function” buried by the “non-purpose” long ago? Considering the imperial cut and power structure of your Church in history and at present, how do you justify to the people its spiritual claim before God and in the name of Jesus Christ?
Allow me to presume for a moment myself as the Nazarene’s lawyer, in order to pose a few more awkward questions regarding this: Do you find it compatible with the teachings of Jesus that the Church continues to keep the enormous wealth, which it has acquired over the course of centuries – in part through deception and violence? Or would it not be time to act to relieve the hunger and misery in the Third World with it? What would Jesus of Nazareth advise?
What would Jesus of Nazareth think of the unfoldment of pomp and splendor that the world experienced with the death of your predecessor and your own enthronement? Admittedly: Jesus knew how to celebrate at the proper time – just think of the wedding at Canaan. But in a world in which 40,000 children starve to death day after day, the glistening pomp of gold and crimson in the name of Jesus takes on questionable proportions. The Church used its festivities as acts of state of the Catholic world mission. But in the loud media spectacle the chance for spirituality turned rather into a mass psychosis, in which the “representatives of God” were paid homage as idols, while Christ became a mere decoration as the crucified one. Just as an aside: Why is He still hanging on the cross, even though He resurrected long ago?!
Perhaps with a more broadminded way of looking at things, one could overlook much that irritates one in the way of the external discrepancies between the carpenter and the rich Church. More painful is the denial of Jesus by the central dogma of the Church. Is it not dreadful that many church Christians become uncertain when asked why Christ became a human being and why He had to die such a terrible death? Someone who rummages about in his memories of Catholic religion class will falteringly answer that this sacrifice was necessary in order to reconcile God with mankind. But anyone who seriously reflects upon this answer has to loose breath over it: This must be a dreadful God who is so offended that he demands human sacrifice as compensation, and at that, his own son.
Such an image of God frightens many people and also makes Jesus of Nazareth suspect.
But whoever opens the catechism of his Church (perhaps in the hope that he was mistaken) will be confirmed in this nightmare: He reads that “the Father handed his Son over to sinners in order to reconcile us with himself,” that Jesus “makes himself an offering for sin,” that his “blood … was poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,” and that he “made satisfaction for our sins to the Father.” For about a thousand years, this doctrine has gnawed on the roots of human trust in God and a plausible belief in the meaning of the life of Jesus. You have also seen this dilemma as a theologian, when you write of the “sinister light,” into which this doctrine of the image of God immerses. (p. 233) Therefore, you attempt with much theological eloquence to make relative the downright satanic components of this to Anselm of Canterbury, basically going back to Paul’s “theory of satisfaction.” You emphasize that it was not confirmed by the gospel. When in the Letter to the Hebrews it says that Jesus accomplished expiation through his blood, this is not “to be understood as a material gift, a quantitatively measurable means of expiation,” but “simply as the concrete expression of a love of which it is said that it extends ‘to the end’” (p. 287)
A person who believes in a loving God and takes Jesus’ message seriously can only assume that His death is not a new pagan sacrifice, but the expression of His unconditional loyalty to His mission: to proclaim the Kingdom of God to mankind and to bring His Kingdom of Peace to the earth. But when one is in agreement about the true mission of Jesus, why has your Church not dissociated itself in its doctrine long ago from the pagan, completely falsified myth of sacrifice? The presently valid version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church was published in the year 1992. Can a Church, which in its Catechism, in thousands of devotions and prayers, lets the Son of God be revered as a necessary human sacrifice, still seriously base itself on Him?
And in addition: How can a Church make the formulation of “Lamb of God, who takes away our sins,” into a religious mantra, and simultaneously threaten with eternal damnation all those who stumble over the casuistry of its doctrine of mortal sin? During my youth, this could still happen, when one read a book on the index, when one kissed a girl too passionately or did not appear at mass on Sunday two or three times. Things may not be so bad today, but according to Church doctrine, the majority of Church Christians are still moving quite close to the abyss of eternal Hell.
With this, I am not supporting a “Dictatorship of Relativism,” but am raising an objection in the name of Jesus and of His Father who infinitely loves all of us, whose almighty kindness is insulted when one implies that He eternally damns the majority of mankind. The Early Christian theologian Origen still knew that at the end of time everything would be good and all people would return to God (“Apokatastasis”); but the Council of Constantinople put an end to this in 553 – not because there were serious spiritual or theological grounds against his teachings; instead, it was mainly because the East-Roman Emperor Justinian wanted to nip in the bud a religious quarrel about the pre-existence of the human soul and the redemption of all souls and people by Christ. This is why he did not shilly-shally long and presented the assembly with the anathemas against Origen and thus against an essential part of the Good News of Christ. The Roman state Church took leave of His message about a loving Father-God who damns no one, but will bring back all souls and people, all of the fallen creation, into the eternal homeland – with the help of the Redeemer-deed of Jesus, which enables all human beings to turn back and change their ways. Since then, the Church had their sharpest weapon in hand: the threat of eternal damnation, which it used very effectively over the next 1500 years. It also became the basis of the Inquisition and of the Crusades, costing the lives of millions of people.
How can a Church still base itself on Jesus of Nazareth, when in the most important questions, it does not orient itself to Him, but to other teachers? And men such as Paul, Canterbury and Justinian were by no means the only ones. Only the fewest of Catholics know that the Apostoles’ Creed was not formulated by Early Christian followers of Jesus, not even by theologians, but by other Roman emperors aside from Justinian. This started already at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325, which Emperor Constantine had called in order to smooth out the first big theological debate, the quarrel between Arius and Athanasius: about whether Jesus, the Christ, was God Himself (“of the same substance as God”) or the Son of God (“of a similar substance as the Father”). It was not a pious follower of Christ, but a (non-baptized) Roman Emperor, who decreed that Christ is “of the same substance as God,” and who thus has helped determine an essential aspect of the Catholic Creed, which is valid until today. Jesus may have said: “The Father and I are one,” but He did not say, I am “the true God of the true God,” as the Church has prayed Sunday after Sunday, thanks to Constantine.
You know better than I that other articles came into being in similar ways: for example, the dogma of the trinity and the dogma of the only true Church. Here, too, a Roman emperor, Theodosius I, presumed in 381 at the Council of Constantinople, to determine the doctrine by dictum. He convened the council, and one of his jurists, who was quickly baptized, consecrated as a priest and promoted to metropolitan, took over the leadership of the assembly, in order to juristically bring the dogma of trinity to paper without any objection. At the same time the Church was declared “holy” and “apostolic” and its means of grace were declared the instruments of salvation for the new state religion. What Theodosius and his jurist made final is until today a component of the creeds of all Christian denominations. However, it is not “Christian,” because it did not come from Christ, but from the Roman-Catholic state Church.
Perhaps you would like to counter by wondering: Why a non-Catholic cares about this? After all he does not have to accept this Creed. However, this objection is not valid as long as the Catholic Church does not renounce its claim to being the sole representative in matters pertaining to Christianity and does not acknowledge that Church and Christianity are not identical. With this, I come to the troublesome question of the relationship of your Church to Christians who are not counted among your members and who want to follow the Christ of God without church doctrine. To a certain extent, this pertains to your own field as the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the succession of the church officials of the Inquisition. Recently, you did not deny this continuality; instead, you underlined it when in March of this year, you explained on Radio Berlin-Brandenburg: “Great Inquisitor is a historic decision, somewhere we stand in its continuality.” This makes us prick up our ears, even more so the next sentence in which you remarked that one “must say” that the Inquisition was a step of progress, that nothing more could be condemned without inquisitio, which means, that investigations took place. I assume that you had in mind the nature of these “investigations,” in which people were often cruelly tortured, when you said in the same interview that “the methods of that time could in part be criticized.” Perhaps your statements in the interview were passed on in shortened form, since they to play down things somewhat.
At any rate permit me to question whether, and to what extent, the declaration of the Second Vatican Council on freedom of religion can be relied upon. This question arises not only because the Church allowed itself time until 1965 to separate itself from the right and the “duty to suppress moral and religious fallacies (falsities)” (Pius XII). The council’s explanation, in connection with other church documents, also gives reason for considerable doubt, when it insists on: “leaving untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and society (!?) toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.”
This always concerns not only a “moral,” but also a legal duty, assumed by the Church proceeded in this connection. This is why it is frightening that until today the letter of Pius IX to the Munich Archbishop can still be found in the collection of your official doctrines. In this letter, the pope said about his Church: “You must remove and eradicate (?!) with meticulous care everything that is against the faith or could somehow damage the salvation of the soul.” As long as this text is not annulled, the Church’s claim to the sole right of salvation remains a threat, which prompted Karl Jaspers to say that this ecclesiastical claim is “constantly ready to ignite the pyres for heretics.” At this point, someone who lives as a Christian outside the Church can no longer limit himself to mere questions or requests. Here one must, in the name of Jesus and of human rights, demand that the Church get rid of the aggressive tinder of such doctrines for once and for all. Since by definition reconciliation among Christians is a deep concern of yours, a papal stroke of the pen in “Neuner-Roos” should not be too difficult for you.
An honest “decree of tolerance” from the pope would have beneficial results in many ways: It would not only be an important contribution toward peace between different directions of faith. It is possible that it would also open doors within the Church for a gust of wind from the Holy Spirit, which as we know blows where it wants to, and does not tolerate, in the long run, an approach that leads to narrow theological-dogmatic concepts. Does not it really occur to anyone in Church circles that the Early Christians not only had the gift of healing, but also the gift of prophecy, which is reported about several times in the Gospels? And that, with very few exceptions, the prophetic stream never appeared within the Church, but only outside its walls – and was there persecuted with fire and sword?
In any case, no one less than Karl Rahner wrote a complete treatise concerning the possibility of “private revelations.” “Private” because they do not come from the mainstream churches, which do not believe anymore in revelations from the divine world, perhaps because here, too, it claims sole rights, in this case not only toward the people, but also toward the Spirit of God? Can one seriously imagine that God has remained silent for 2000 years, even though He revealed Himself through the mouth of prophets at all times?
There are many people who are convinced that also today a prophet is living among us, this time in the form of a woman, through whom a divine work of revelation and a worldwide original Christian community has emerged. The one who unbelievingly waves this aside should not do this without a new look into your book that I have already quoted several times. Under the chapter “Doubt and Belief,” you describe, based on Kierkegaard’s parable of the clown and the burning circus, the situation of the believing one who alarms the fire department and is laughed at, because no one takes him seriously in his clown suit. In your text, the clown symbolizes the theologians. Perhaps one should at least for a moment, exchange him with the figure of a prophet. Then your words of the “frustrating inability to break through accepted patterns of thought and speech….” (p. 40), would be current in a new dimension. The “ignorant villagers,” whom the clown encounters in Kierkegaard’s parable, would then be the ignorant church folk, whom the prophet faces. In the “Dilemma of Faith,” His revelation would be no weaker than the dogma of the theologians, for as you so aptly write: “But however strongly unbelief may feel justified thereby, it cannot forget the eerie feeling induced by the words ‘Yet perhaps it is true.’ That ‘perhaps’ is the unavoidable temptation it cannot elude … both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief …” (pp. 46-47)
People have been in this dilemma of belief over and over again, every time they encountered a prophet. Most of them rejected the prophet, above all the priests of the respective time. They have tradition in mind and the prophets, on the other hand, have revolution in mind, which is why they are, by their very nature, suspect to the priests. Even when the Son of God appeared on earth, nothing changed – and just as little changed when later enlightened men and women, mystics and visionaries threatened to shake up the Church’s dogmatically entrenched structure of belief. Often they experienced as it took place in Dostoyevsky’s story “The Grand Inquisitor,” with the reappeared Christ. There, the medieval prince of the Church said to him: “We have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority. And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep … Why has Thou come now to hinder us? … We are not working with Thee, but with him – that is our mystery. It’s long – eight centuries – since we have been on his side and not on Thine. Just eight centuries ago, we took from him, the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness, what Thou didst reject with scorn, that last gift he offered Thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth …” *
It could be similar when a new prophet goes over the earth, who goes back to the buried teachings of Jesus, disregarding all the dogmas and rites, and is ignored by the pope. Perhaps he is sent off with threats like the reappeared Christ in Dostoyevsky’s story; perhaps he is ridiculed like the clown in Kierkegaard’s parable, who calls for the fire department. The circus burns and rescue would be possible, if one would believe the call of alarm. If one does not regard such calls to rescue from the divine-spiritual world as simply impossible even today, then even a skeptic should check it out, if he weighs the risks of checking it out or not. If he checks it out and finds nothing prophetic in it, he can withdraw again and would have lost nothing – outside of a bit of time and energy. However, if he does not check it out and the prophetic is actually there, he would have lost everything by refusing to check it out.
As an example of the prophetic call of alarm for our time, I allow myself to include for you the book “The Great Cosmic Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth for His Apostles and Disciples Who Could Understand Them.” It is just a small part of a great work of revelation, in which mankind learns much about the development of the earth and life on our planet, about the interrelationships of spirit and matter, of body and soul, of health and illness. And not lastly, much is revealed about the life and teachings of the Nazarene, which has disappeared over the course of centuries. The Spirit of God sets straight what has been falsely taught, and in part kept silent, about Jesus of Nazareth. It also describes how Jesus loved the animals. The revelations provide answers about the meaning and purpose of our life on earth, about the true significance of Jesus’ Deed of Redemption, about the validity of the law of cause and effect, about the nature of the continuing life of the soul after the body passes away, about the coming time of mankind, the emerging Kingdom of Peace and much more.
I do not know whether this letter will “get through” to you. If it is God’s will, it will happen and you can then decide for yourself what you think of my questions and above all: whether you want to seriously examine the possibility of a new divine prophecy.
With this and all future important decisions of your life, I wish you God’s blessing and the guidance of Christ.
In this spirit, I greet you as your brother in Christ,
Christian Sailer
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