Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith is a festschrift a bunch of Cardinal Ratzinger's students put together on the occasion of his 75th birthday. In the comments section I will post the remainder of the beginning of an address Cardinal R. gave entitled "The Church on the Threshold of the 3rd Millennium." Is it marvelous. . . .
I recently read in a newspaper of a German intellectual who said about himself that where the question of God was concerned, he was an agnostic: It was just not possible, he said, either to demonstrate the existence of God or absolutely to exclude it, so the matter would remain undecided. He said he was utterly convinced, on the other hand, of the existence of hell; a glance at the television was enough for him to see that it existed. While the first half of this confession corresponds entirely with modern consciousness, the second appears strange, indeed, incomprehensible –at least when you first hear it. For how can you believe in hell if there is no God? When you look closer at it, this statement turns out to be entirely logical: hell is, precisely, the situation in which God is absent. That is the definition of it: Where God is not there, where no glimmer of his presence can any longer penetrate, that place is hell.
Perhaps it is not actually our daily look at the television that shows us that, but certainly a look at the history of the twentieth century, which has left us terms like Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago and names like Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Anyone who reads the witnesses’ accounts of those anti-worlds will encounter visions that for atrocities and destruction in no way yield to Dante’s descent into hell, are indeed even more frightful, because there appear dimensions of evil that Dante could have no way of perceiving in advance. These hells were constructed in order to be able to bring about the future world of the man who was his own master, who was no longer supposed to need any God. Man was offered in sacrifice to the Moloch of that utopia of a God-free world, a world set free from God, for man was now wholly in control of his destiny and knew no limits to his ability to determine things, because there was no longer any God set over him, because no light of the image of God shone forth any more from man.
Perhaps it is not actually our daily look at the television that shows us that, but certainly a look at the history of the twentieth century, which has left us terms like Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago and names like Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Anyone who reads the witnesses’ accounts of those anti-worlds will encounter visions that for atrocities and destruction in no way yield to Dante’s descent into hell, are indeed even more frightful, because there appear dimensions of evil that Dante could have no way of perceiving in advance. These hells were constructed in order to be able to bring about the future world of the man who was his own master, who was no longer supposed to need any God. Man was offered in sacrifice to the Moloch of that utopia of a God-free world, a world set free from God, for man was now wholly in control of his destiny and knew no limits to his ability to determine things, because there was no longer any God set over him, because no light of the image of God shone forth any more from man.
Continue reading in comments --it's worth it!
