By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The question isn’t whether a Christian loves God, but whether he prefers God above all else, an instructor told an audience looking into a book assembled from three sermons that Joseph Ratzinger gave in 1964, decades before he became Pope Benedict XVI.
Simone Rizkallah spoke for a program that lasted nearly three hours at the Phoenix-based Institute of Catholic Theology (ICT) on October 19, saying that while God “delights in us…do we delight in Him?”
The book is What It Means to Be a Christian, originally published in 1965 in Munich, then reissued in 2005, the year Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope, by Libreria Editrice Vaticana (the Vatican Publishing House) and also Ignatius Press, based in San Francisco.
Ratzinger’s three sermons, preached at the Cathedral at Munster to the Catholic Student Chaplaincy in December 1964, were, “Are We Saved? Or, Job Talks with God,” “Faith as Service,” and “Above All: Love.”
“I think this was his happiest time” when he was just a priest in Germany, Rizkallah told the audience as she discussed the book, along with her reflections.
To this future Pope, she said, the season of Advent was “not just a sentimental remembering of the past,” but a reminder “for us Christians today…in a certain way, we are still in a period of waiting” instead of fulfillment.
She added later in her talk that Ratzinger’s message is, “How do we know we’re still waiting? Things are not as they should be.”
Earlier in the talk, ticking off the dates of the twentieth century’s two world wars and the rise and defeat of Nazism, Rizkallah noted that Ratzinger, a German native, had seen a regime “that elevated mass murder to a horrifying degree of perfection.”
Time and again, Ratzinger said, men set off for something better which, time and again, collapsed, she said.
Rizkallah’s background information at the Institute for Catholic Theology says she is the daughter of immigrants from the Armenian diaspora in Cairo, Egypt, and has pursued studies in Norcia, Italy, Trumau, Austria, and Krakow, Poland.
Amid all the distractions of modernity including wealth, power, pleasure, and honor, there’s a fear that faith won’t be able to cope with reality, she said. “Faith seems like a weaker position” to deal with this sort of world.
But when Christ breaks through, she said, all the ways in which people were thinking are shattered.
Amid all his tribulations, Job in the Bible didn’t stop talking to God but “cried out to Him in his pain and suffering,” showing that he was a better friend to God than Job’s own friends who were quick to attribute his pain to his supposed faults, Rizkallah said.
“This whole book is going to the depths of it all,” she said about Ratzinger’s publication.
Christians’ faith “says that Jesus eventually justifies everything” — if not in this life, then the next — “so we can have hope….It’s not wishful thinking” that He will do so, she said.
“. . . He wants us to seek Him out,” Rizkallah said “. . . Be hot, be cold, but indifferent?. . . ‘How much do you really want me?’ ”
She told a story of a man seeking guidance from a monk, who stuck the man’s head under water until he came up gasping. “When you want God like you want that breath, then we’ll pray,” the monk said, she related.
Ratzinger said a question that really troubles Catholics isn’t how does God save others, Rizkallah said, but why do Catholics bear the burden of their dogma and responsibilities if others can be saved otherwise?
“To whom much is given, much is required,” she said, adding that the future Pope asked, “Do we want salvation only on the condition of other people’s damnation?”
God Is A Family
On another topic, Rizkallah said that God isn’t simply in a vertical relationship with people, but wants them to come to Him through other people.
“He wants to use us to make saints of others,” she expressed Ratzinger’s thought.
“God Himself is not alone. God is a family. . . . We can’t actually be ourselves alone,” she said, adding later that although she herself had been baptized, she wasn’t active in her faith until she was influenced by others.
“My own conversion would never have happened if it hadn’t been for people, specific people,” she said.
“Don’t get confused, the Christian isn’t the one who never makes mistakes,” Rizkallah cited Ratzinger. “I’m not a Christian because I’m perfect, but because I know how far I am” from perfection, she added.
The ICT is based at Phoenix’s St. Thomas the Apostle Parish.
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