The challenge of secularization
By Bernhard Grom
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/4-2023/die-herausforderung-der-saekularisierung/.]

The survey results published by the Religion Monitor 2023 show not only a strong trend towards dechurching, but also a lack of interest in religion in general. One in four church members has thought about leaving in the last twelve months, one in five has a firm intention to leave – Catholics more often than Protestants. In 2013, 47 percent of the German population as a whole said they believed in God very or quite strongly, but by 2022 only 30 percent said the same. The number of those who pray daily fell from 23 to 17 percent; the number of those who do not pray at all rose accordingly from 32 to 43 percent. The authors comment on these figures very cautiously: “The findings do not indicate a clearly secularized society; religion and religiosity continue to be formative.” Well, three quarters still believe in God to a greater or lesser extent, and 57% pray at some point.

However, the Freiburg study on church membership and church tax predicts that the current 44 million Protestant and Catholic church members will be halved by 2060. They will then make up around a quarter of the population. Dechurching and secularization will continue. We in the churches will have to adjust to this, between being shocked and ignoring it.

On the one hand, we should treat our secularized fellow citizens as brothers and sisters and with respect. In our free society, we participate together with them in life support services for all and in efforts to create a just welfare state. Many are socially committed in the sense of an areligious humanism, shape their lives responsibly in “transcendence-free ethics” (Ernst Tugendhat) and enrich them through culture with extraordinary experiences. To a deeply religious person, all this may seem like living in a windowless room, and he may think like Hermann Hesse: “Without prayer and deified, the people walk soberly in the dust.” But even a secularized life has its meaning and dignity. When it comes to equal rights for women, tolerance towards people with different sexual orientations and dealing with self-determined lay people, we certainly have a lot to learn from the seculars.

On the other hand, the prospect of minority status should not burden us with feelings of inferiority. We need not be ashamed of our faith and should not hide it. Christians tend to be loyal to the state and are less likely to come into conflict with the law. Mayors value their voluntary help for the needy in the communities, and their contribution to development aid in the large church aid organizations and numerous One World groups is enormous. In a representative Allensbach survey, 16- to 29-year-old Germans who consider themselves religious were significantly more likely than non-religious people to say that social justice, helping those in need, taking responsibility for others and active participation in political life are important to them.

Faith can make a major contribution to pro-social feelings and actions becoming part of the ideal self-concept. Jürgen Habermas, the prominent representative of a post-metaphysical philosophy, also indirectly acknowledges this when he calls for a joint learning process between non-religious and religious citizens in which secular culture uses the potential of moral intuitions that religious traditions possess in terms of language. For “even in its post-metaphysical form, philosophy will neither replace nor supplant religion.”

Faith offers added value: it recognizes an unconditional affirmation “by the grace of God” for all people equally and can enrich our efforts to cope with critical life events such as illness, frustration and grief by pointing to a kind of trans-social support from God’s spirit. As a faith in creation that develops into a culture of mindfulness and gratitude, it can also counteract a materialistic, consumerist trivialization of life. The fact that this succeeds time and again is demonstrated by the fact, well documented by well-being research, that religiosity, alongside other factors, is a limited but not insignificant resource for life satisfaction and happiness.

What is philanthropic and meaningful about secular culture can be enhanced by the Christian faith in a way that remains closed to the non-religious. With this conviction, we will not bring about a new evangelization of Europe, but we can appear on the market of meaningful offers with appropriate, grateful self-confidence. “We carry this treasure in fragile vessels” (2 Cor 4:7), but nothing more precious can be thought of in comparison with it.

    Bernhard Grom SJ was Professor of Religious Education and Psychology in Munich.
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On the road with those who are on the move: Pope Francis’ vision for refugees

During his now ten-year pontificate, Pope Francis has consistently used his position as a spiritual and moral authority on the world stage to speak out about migrants and refugees. He has shown deep compassion, but has also gone above and beyond. Amaya Valcárcel Silvela is a lawyer in Rome and has worked for the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) for 25 years. Michael Schöpf SJ is the international director of the JRS in Rome. The article also appears in La Civiltà Cattolica. Translation and editing by Philipp Adolphs.
By Michael Schöpf, Amaya Valcárcel Silvela
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/4-2023/unterwegs-mit-jenen-die-unterwegs-sind-papst-franziskus-vision-fuer-gefluechtete/.]

“Each of you, dear friends, has a life story that tells us about the tragedies of war, about conflicts that are all too often linked to international politics. But above all, each of you carries within you a wealth of humanity and a religious sense, treasures to be embraced rather than feared. Many of you are Muslims or members of another religion. You come from different countries, from different situations. We must not be afraid of differences! Fraternity makes us discover that they are riches, gifts for all! Let us live in fraternity!”

With these words, Pope Francis addressed the refugees in the soup kitchen of the Centro Astalli, one of the first projects founded by Pedro Arrupe SJ in the early 1980s, back in 2013. Carol, a refugee from Syria who had just arrived in Italy, said: “Syrians in Europe feel a strong responsibility not to be a burden. We want to be active players in a new society. We want to offer our help and the skills and knowledge we bring with us, as well as our culture, in building a fairer and more welcoming society for those who, like us, are fleeing war and persecution. We adults can endure a little more suffering if it serves to guarantee our children a future in peace. We ask for this opportunity so that they can go to school and grow up in a peaceful environment.”

Throughout his pontificate, Pope Francis has portrayed and preached a God of justice and mercy. He has made the plight of migrants and refugees worldwide a central theme not only in words but also in deeds. A recent example was his visit to South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo in February 2023, where he met with community leaders and displaced people. This focus on social justice is deeply Christ-centered. This in no way fails to recognize the groundwork laid by his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who provided much of the theological foundation for Pope Francis’ later commitment. His message for the 2018 World Day of Peace was “Migrants and refugees: men and women in search of peace”. In his own direct manner, he asked: “Why so many refugees and migrants?” and recalled how Pope John Paul II had pointed out a few years earlier the “increased number of displaced persons as one of the consequences of the ‘endless and appalling succession of wars, conflicts, genocides and ethnic cleansing’”. Pope Francis also recognized that people have a natural desire to seek a better life and that poverty and environmental degradation are also major causes of migration decisions.

In recent years, a misplaced sense of self-preservation has led to a fixation on keeping migrants away from national borders, and this has closed hearts and minds to the reality of the hopes, fears and aspirations of some of the world’s most vulnerable people. Pope Francis suggests that we who live in prosperity and security need to hear their stories and see the full picture of their journey. In the years of his pontificate, he has consistently maintained his commitment and set out a clear and unequivocal vision for an alternative and more humane approach to the challenges of involuntary migration.

Lampedusa, July 2013:
Globalization of indifference

“Immigrants who died at sea, in boats that were carriers of hope and became carriers of death. That’s what the headlines said. When I first heard about this tragedy a few weeks ago and realized that it happens far too often, it stuck in my mind like a painful thorn in my heart” (Pope Francis 2013).

The Holy Father made the first trip of his pontificate in July 2013 by boat to the island of Lampedusa off the southern coast of Sicily. The timing and context of his visit were significant: Libya was sinking into violence and chaos. Poorer Africans who had been attracted by the jobs following Gaddafi’s economic expansion now had to look elsewhere, particularly in the Mediterranean. On Lampedusa, Pope Francis celebrated a mass in memory of thousands of migrants who had died crossing the Mediterranean. He also gave a now famous homily in which he explained that he felt obliged to come “to pray and to give a sign of my closeness, but also to challenge our conscience so that this tragedy is not repeated. Please, don’t let it happen again!”

Lampedusa shows how the Pope’s response to concrete human tragedies began as a heartfelt gesture rooted in biblical principles and Catholic Social Teaching and evolved as he took on board the lived experiences of others and drew from a variety of sources. In Evangelii Gaudium (EG), Pope Francis later shared that “migrants represent a particular challenge for me, since I am the shepherd of a Church without borders, a Church that sees itself as the mother of all. For this reason, I exhort all countries to generous openness” (Pope Francis 2013, no. 210). The Judeo-Christian teaching that the earth is not the final destination of humanity means that the Catholic faith is migratory in nature – we are all migrants, “in transit”.

One of Pope Francis’ unique contributions to solving the migration issue has been to insist on making “personal journeys” with migrants and refugees, or “gestures of closeness”: seeing, listening, welcoming; protecting; supporting and integrating; pursuing long-term solutions. He draws on Jesus’ words: “Treat others as you would have them treat you” (Luke 6:31). In his Apostolic Exhortation (EG), the Holy Father explains this approach:

“Realities are greater than ideas … The principle of a reality, of a Word already made flesh, constantly striving to take on flesh anew, is essential to evangelization…. This principle urges us to put the Word into practice in order to accomplish works of justice and charity that make this Word fruitful. Not to put the word into practice is to build on sand, to remain in the world of mere ideas” (Pope Francis 2013, n. 175).

This pontificate coincides with the rise in the number of displaced people worldwide to the highest level since the end of the Second World War, which many refer to as the “refugee crisis”. The term is actually problematic. It implies that the displaced people seeking refuge are the cause of their own flight. This is simply not the case – Laudato si’ (LS) highlights the scale of climate and poverty-induced migrants and those fleeing war and poverty. Pope Francis has wisely shifted the emphasis by insisting that we should recognize the crisis as a “crisis of solidarity”. His speech on Lampedusa laid the foundation for his teaching on the “globalization of indifference”, by which he means the indifference with which individuals and communities treat those on the margins. What does the Holy Father recommend? It begins with us; to paraphrase his speech on Lampedusa – we who have become “accustomed to the suffering of others”, we who “think only of ourselves”, we who are “insensitive to the cries of other people”. We believe that the essence of this teaching invites us all to reflect on ourselves and to experience a metanoia, a conversion that requires positive, human responses to these desperate movements of people. It is a conversion of the heart.

Lesbos, April 2016:
The culture of encounter

Following the large immigration movements of mainly Syrian and Afghan refugees to Europe in 2015 and 2016, Pope Francis visited the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on April 16, 2016. This time he took an ecumenical approach and appeared together with Ieronymos, Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, and Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. His intention was to spark a global paradigm shift to change the tragic course of events and admonish those who held the fate of nations in their hands. He told the gathered refugees and migrants:

“I have come here with my brothers Patriarch Bartholomew and Archbishop Ieronymos, simply to be with you and to hear your stories. We have come to draw the world’s attention to this grave humanitarian crisis and to plead for its resolution. As people of faith, we want to unite our voices to speak for you. We hope that the world will heed these scenes of tragic and so desperate need and respond in a manner worthy of our common humanity” (Pope Francis, 2016 n. 2).

As with his visit to Lampedusa, the development of Pope Francis’ thinking on migrants, refugees and human trafficking stems from concrete encounters. Here he is clearly confronted with the great danger of indifference and exploitation. However, he also emphasizes the under-recognized kindness and goodness that many people show when they encounter migrants in desperate need. As if this encounter were a hidden treasure, Francis digs deeper and resurfaces with the idea of a “culture of encounter”:

“We all know from experience how easy it is for some to ignore the suffering of others or even to exploit their vulnerability. But we also know that these crises can bring out the very best in us. You have seen this in yourself and in the Greeks, who have responded generously to your needs in the midst of their own difficulties. You have also seen it in the many people, especially young people from Europe and around the world, who have come to help you” (Pope Francis 2016, no. 3).

The Moria camp was set on fire in 2020 by some of the resident refugees themselves, in a desperate attempt to draw the attention of the international community to their terrible living conditions and hopeless reality. This, along with many other examples, is still today a sign of the lack of global capacity to deal with migration. In his address to the Prime Minister, the Greek authorities and the Catholic community in Greece, Pope Francis addressed the critical issue of tackling the root causes as a solution to migration:

“To be truly united with those who are forced to flee their homes, we must address the root causes of this dramatic situation: It is not enough to limit ourselves to responding to emergencies as they arise. Instead, we must promote political efforts that are broader-based and multilateral. Above all, it is necessary to build peace where war has brought destruction and death and to stop the spread of this scourge. To this end, the illegal and legal arms trade and its often hidden machinations must be resolutely opposed; those who commit acts of hatred and violence must be denied any support. Cooperation between nations, international organizations and humanitarian agencies must be tirelessly promoted, and those on the front lines must be supported and not kept at a distance” (Pope Francis 2016, no. 7).

Section for Migration and Refugees

Immediately after his visit to Lesbos, the Holy Father created a new section for migrants and refugees (“Migrants & Refugees Section”), which is linked to the “Dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development”. It was founded to be “particularly competent in matters concerning migrants, the needy, the sick, the excluded and marginalized, the imprisoned and unemployed, as well as victims of armed conflict, natural disasters and all forms of slavery and torture”. The M&R section led by Pope Francis himself was particularly focused on realizing his vision: “On Lampedusa and Lesbos, important transit points in Italy and Greece, Pope Francis wept with the migrants and refugees huddled there. On the plane back from Lesbos, he brought some Syrian refugee families to the Vatican. ‘When we heal the wounds of refugees, displaced people and victims of human trafficking,’ he said, ‘we are practicing the commandment of love that Jesus left us … Their flesh is Christ’s.’ As the Pope himself teaches and does, he also wants the M&R Section to help others to speak out and act around the world” (M&R Section, 2017).

Consequently, the mission of the M&R Section has been to help the Church (i.e. the bishops, the faithful, the clergy, the ecclesial organizations) and all people of good will to “accompany” those who are leaving and fleeing, those who are in transit or waiting, those who arrive and want to integrate, and also those who return. One of the greatest achievements of the M&R Section has been to help nurture and multiply the fruits sown by the Pope during his intervention in Lampedusa. The Section has been particularly closely involved in further developing the theological and intellectual basis for a more determined Catholic approach to issues of human displacement. In 2020, it published a comprehensive collection of Pope Francis’ teachings on pastoral care for migrants, refugees and victims of human trafficking entitled “Lights on the Ways of Hope”. On a practical level, it was this section that spearheaded the efforts that led to the Vatican’s Twenty Action Points for the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees, as well as the pastoral recommendations for action on human trafficking, internally displaced persons and people displaced by the consequences of the climate crisis.

In January 2023, the M&R section merged with the larger dicastery. This can be seen as an internalization of the Pope’s teaching on the crisis of solidarity and a turn to action as a result of greater compassion and understanding.

Goals for states and civil society

Like his predecessors, Pope Francis has drawn on core elements of the Christian faith and Catholic Social Teaching to develop a clear and radical vision for an alternative and more humane approach to the challenges of involuntary migration. In February 2017, the Holy Father addressed the meeting of the International Forum on Migration and Peace in Rome. He stated that the responses to today’s migration challenges should be pooled by the political community, civil society and the Church and articulated in the form of four interconnected actions: Reception, Protection, Promotion and Integration.

The M&R Section subsequently published the above-mentioned Twenty Action Points as a contribution to the elaboration, negotiation and adoption of the “Global Compacts on Migrants and on Refugees” by the end of 2018 (cf. StdZ 143, 2018, 595-601: Interview with Michael Czerny SJ, Refugee Commissioner of the
Pope). These consultations consisted of listening to bishops’ conferences and Catholic organizations that worked with refugees on the ground and were therefore able to contribute a thorough reflection on the good practices of the Church that they had developed over the years.

The Twenty Action Points are based on the aforementioned four actions (welcome, protect, promote and integrate), which underpin Pope Francis’ vision for an improved and more humane approach to the displacement of people and provide clarity on the Church’s position. The Holy Father summarizes his recommendations for the 2018 Global Compacts as follows:

“Welcome calls for expanding legal entry opportunities and no longer pushing migrants and displaced people into countries where they face persecution and violence. This also requires us to reconcile our concerns about national security with our concern for basic human rights. Scripture reminds us: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” (cf. Heb 13:2).

“Protect” has to do with our duty to recognize and defend the inviolable dignity of those who flee from real dangers in search of asylum and safety, and to prevent their exploitation. I am thinking in particular of women and children who find themselves in situations where they are exposed to risks and mistreatment that may even amount to enslavement. God does not discriminate: “The Lord watches over the stranger and preserves the orphan and the widow.”

“Sponsoring” means supporting the holistic human development of migrants and refugees. Among many ways to do this, I would like to emphasize the importance of ensuring access to all levels of education for children and young people. This will not only enable them to cultivate and realize their potential, but will also help to better equip them to encounter others and foster a spirit of dialogue rather than rejection or confrontation. The Bible teaches that God “loves the strangers who live among you and gives them food and clothing. And you shall love the strangers, for you yourselves were strangers in Egypt.”

“Integrating” ultimately means enabling refugees and migrants to participate fully in the life of the society that welcomes them, as part of a process of mutual enrichment and fruitful cooperation in the service of the integral human development of the local community. St. Paul expresses it with these words: “You are no longer aliens and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the people of God.”

Bringing the forgotten to light

The Holy Father’s approach has clearly evolved. He is now focusing even more on the evils of human trafficking. In the context of migration issues, Francis wants to address this phenomenon. Migrants are very vulnerable to human trafficking as they flee under precarious conditions. They often risk their lives when entering a destination country and are afraid of deportation. In 2014, the Holy Father described human trafficking as “an open wound on the body of contemporary society, a scourge on the body of Christ”. On July 29, 2018, Pope Francis emphasized in front of a full St. Peter’s Square that “migration routes are often also used by traffickers and exploiters to recruit new victims”.

Pope Francis also recognizes something deeper. In Evangelii Gaudium, he speaks of a “throwaway culture” in which human beings are seen as “consumer goods” that can be used and discarded: “This notorious criminal network is now well established in our cities, and many people have blood on their hands because of their comfortable and silent complicity” (Pope Francis 2013, no. 211). At the beginning of 2015, Pope Francis dedicated his annual World Day of Peace message to human trafficking. He emphasized that “we are confronted with a global phenomenon that exceeds the competence of any single community or country” and he called for “a comparable mobilization on the scale of the phenomenon itself”. In 2016, the Holy Father urged the eradication of human trafficking and people smuggling, as these new forms of slavery are also crimes against humanity that must be regulated by local and international laws.

Two of the three encyclicals written by Pope Francis to date, Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti, deal with human trafficking. It may come as a surprise to some to know that in Laudato si’, the Pope’s focus on respect for nature also refers to indifference to human trafficking. It is a holistic view of God’s creation: Pope Francis points out that care for nature cannot exist separately from care for the human person: “It is clearly contradictory to fight trafficking in endangered species while being completely indifferent to human trafficking, not caring for the poor or destroying a human being deemed undesirable.”

In 2018, the M&R Section hosted two consultations with church leaders, academics and experienced practitioners – many religious communities, especially women’s communities, have been key stakeholders for years. Six months of listening and drafting led to the Pastoral Handbook on Human Trafficking, which was approved by the Holy Father in 2019. The document addresses what human trafficking actually is, examining its underlying causes and the importance of recognizing the reality and dynamics of this evil. It proposes recommended responses to human trafficking, including care for survivors.

Another group of forgotten people are the internally displaced, who do not cross borders but flee within their country for the same reasons: Conflict, persecution, human rights violations, extreme poverty, a mixture of several of these, or other complex causes. At the end of 2021, there were 59.1 million internally displaced people worldwide (IDMC, 2022), for example in Syria, Venezuela, Ethiopia or Myanmar. As with human trafficking, the M&R Section held consultations with church leaders and partner organizations that led to the Pastoral Orientations for Internally Displaced Persons, which were published in 2020. The “Orientations” are intended to guide the Church’s ministry to IDPs in planning and practice, engagement, advocacy and dialog.

In 2021, Pope Francis drew international attention to the plight of those displaced by the climate crisis, and in 2022, the M&R Section gathered the knowledge and experience of local churches worldwide and published the Pastoral Orientations for the Climate Crisis and Displacement. This dynamic shows how the Church is walking with the people who are on the move and how it seeks to bring to light the plight of the most forgotten, to seek justice, awareness and change.

At the center of the interconnected world

Throughout his pontificate, Pope Francis has used his position as a spiritual and moral authority on the world stage to speak out about migrants. He has shown deep compassion, but has also gone beyond this to develop a radical vision that offers an alternative approach to the mainstream and places marginalized people at the center of the response: “A just policy is at the service of the person, of all those involved; a policy that provides for solutions that can guarantee security, respect for the rights and dignity of all; a policy that seeks the good of one’s own country while taking into account that of others in an increasingly interconnected world.”

Pope Francis was able to convey his concerns to the local churches, but also to go beyond the Catholic audience and inspire women and men of other faiths or non-believers who have discovered many common values in the Christian message. One of these values is clearly the need for “encounter” as a way to change a world out of joint, where refugees are invisible, towards a reconciled world in which personal relationships and community take center stage. It is this physical, intimate relationship with those on the margins that will not only convert each of us, but will ultimately lead political and social decision-makers to “a better kind of politics”, as Laudato si’ No. 49 explains:

“I would like to point out that people do not usually have a clear idea of the problems that afflict the excluded in particular. They are the largest part of the planet, billions of people. Today, they feature in international political and economic debates, but it often seems that their problems are treated as an appendage, as it were, like an issue that is almost dutifully added, or as a side issue, if it is not seen as mere collateral damage. In fact, at the moment of concrete realization, they often remain in last place. This is partly due to the fact that many academics, opinion makers, media and power centers are located far away from them, in secluded urban areas, without coming into direct contact with their problems. They live and think from the comfort of a level of development and quality of life that is unattainable for the majority of the world’s population. This lack of physical contact and encounters, sometimes facilitated by the disintegration of our cities, contributes to the corrosion of conscience and to ignoring part of reality in tendentious analyses. This sometimes goes hand in hand with “green” speeches. Today, however, we cannot avoid recognizing that a truly ecological approach is always transformed into a social approach that must include justice in environmental discussions in order to hear the lament of the poor as well as the lament of the earth.”

In his journey with displaced people, Pope Francis seems to be telling us how much they offer us an opportunity to discover hidden parts of humanity and deepen our understanding of the complexity of this world. Perhaps this is and will remain his legacy: through migrants and refugees, we are invited to encounter God and find a just model for our societies that offers a future for all, “even when it is difficult for our eyes to recognize him” (Pope Francis 2020, no. 6, citing the homily on 15 February 2019). This process helps not only them, but above all us, and leads us to a common foundation for life that sustains us.

“Every day, here and in other centers, so many people, especially young people, queue up to get a hot meal. These people remind us of the suffering and dramas of humanity. But this queue also tells us that we should do something now, everyone, it is possible. It is enough to knock on the door and try to say: ‘Here I am. How can I help you?’” (Pope Francis 2013, during his visit to Centro Astalli).

    Michael Schöpf SJ is international director of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in Rome.

    Amaya Valcárcel Silvela is a lawyer in Rome and has been working for the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) for 25 years.

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Reviews: Theology & Church
[These reviews posted in 2023 are translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/4-2023/rezensionen-theologie-und-kirche/.]

Striet, Magnus / Hoping, Helmut: God, friend of freedom. An argument.
Freiburg: Herder 2023. 141 pp. Hardcover. 18,-.

Controversy probably prevails: It’s not just about God, but also about the world. Freedom is discussed more in the background. The two Freiburg faculty theologians, one a fundamental theologian (Striet) and the other a dogmatist (Hoping), are not only known for their prolific publication activity, but also for their decided positions: Striet is reform-oriented, Hoping more traditionalist. In their discussion, they deal with the usual controversial topics that have been brought to a head by the Synodal Way.

The topics on offer, spread over eight chapters, range from the theology of ministry to the ordination of women, from the possibility of doctrinal development to the future of Christianity in general. No big news is to be expected. It really does seem that not only has everything been said by now, but that almost everyone has already said it. However, it becomes apparent again and again that the respective judgments are strongly influenced by the openness to the current arguments. In quite a few cases, conventional doctrine is based on assumptions that can no longer be upheld. This applies, for example, to the historical factuality of the chain of the laying on of hands in the Apostolic Succession or the dogmatic value of the theory of transubstantiation. Hoping often has to take a back seat here. Personal involvement also plays a part in the positioning, for example in the case of the appropriateness of celibacy. In most cases, the distance between the two remains within shouting distance.

The value of this small book lies in the first chapters on God and Jesus Christ. The decisive factor in deciding which side one takes in today’s discussions is the question of what epistemological significance faith has for them. For the opponents, it is undisputed that this is a setting, a willful decision. This can undoubtedly be so decisive that one can give one’s life for it. Nevertheless, Striet’s objection is valid that this decision is decisional insofar as it is ultimately based on a hypothesis – no different from all other areas of knowledge and life. God is not strictly provable; one can also rationally and responsibly deny his existence. But faith is only possible if the promise is rationally justified. I must be able to take human responsibility for believing that Christ, but not Eurydice, has risen from the underworld. Hoping largely denies this, but confuses the act of faith and the understanding appropriation of faith. One can ask whether many disagreements are not simply sparked by the fact that two academics who are related but not of the same discipline are arguing here: Dogmatics is allowed to make presuppositions, but these must be backed up by fundamental theology. And it is precisely this that is both difficult and essential nowadays, as for many people the establishment of the act of faith is neither self-evident nor easy. They no longer have access to dogmatic forms of thought. This is exemplified by the problem of women’s ordination. It is neither plausible nor objectively justified to link its prohibition to the human nature of Jesus. Could it not be based on the deprivation and deficiency caused by the assumption of the same, which has nothing to do with the question of ministry?

The controversialists’ discussion is pleasingly factual, distinguished and collegial. The value of the discussion, moderated by Stefan Orth, editor-in-chief of “Herder-Korrespondenz”, lies in the fact that it offers the reader a good opportunity to form his or her own opinion on problems on whose solution the future viability of the church depends, at least in our country. In doing so, we should look forwards even more than backwards: The Church is heading towards the coming Lord!

                Wolfgang Beinert

Schulz, Hannah A.: It shall not be so with you! Abuse of spiritual authority (Ignatian impulses).
Würzburg: echter 2022. 90 pp. Gb. 9,90.

The author, a systemic supervisor, retreat leader and lecturer in adult education, begins by making a fundamental distinction between “power” and “authority”. Authority develops in relationships “from below”, power is bestowed “from above” when it is linked to offices and titles. Abuse of spiritual power is easier to recognize, as its proper use can be measured against objective criteria more easily than is the case with the abuse of spiritual authority (cf. 25). Schulz aptly compares the abuse of spiritual authority to theft: authority is “bestowed through recognition, esteem and respect. You could even say it is given as a gift. Its abuse consists of taking something that is not due to you. It is a form of theft” (31).

The definitions are followed by an explanation of the dimensions of spiritual abuse. The entanglement character becomes particularly clear in the example of the distinction between icon and idol: “An icon is not offended if it is ignored” (58). Leaving is possible, but at a high price. It means admitting to yourself that you will not get back what you have lost” (68). Nevertheless, spiritual abuse does not have to have the last word. There is life afterwards. In the section on shooting (70-88), the author gives advice for the various people involved: the power holders, the authority figures, the weaker ones in the power imbalance, the outside observers. Here, what Jesus says to his disciples on the subject of abuse of power is spelled out: “It shall not be so with you …”.

With this “Ignatian impulse”, Hanna A. Schulz has made an excellent contribution to dealing with the difficult topic of spiritual abuse. The conceptual clarity helps to grasp the phenomenon and, at the same time, to distinguish it from boundless extensions (cf. 18). The author reflects on her own experiences of being close to clerical idols (57 f.). Obviously, she also has a wealth of experience from accompanying those affected, which is particularly fruitful for practice in the references in the last chapter. The author is also very familiar with the Ignatian tradition. There, too, she has unearthed new treasures for the relevant question.
treasures.

In a way, this “Ignatian Impulse” belongs right next to the Spiritual Exercises book in order to protect Ignatian spirituality and those who engage in it in the face of new challenges posed by spiritual abuse.

                Klaus Mertes SJ

Höhn, Hans-Joachim: In God’s ear. On the art of poetic divine speech.
Freiburg: Herder 2022. 176 pp. Hardcover. 22,-.

The book’s thesis that theological language must be poetic and theology must be short and concise is very much to be supported. It is explained in the long first chapter, in rather theological language – the suspicion of a certain performative contradiction quietly arises. Among other things, there is a six-page polemic against those who speak of a merely “loving” and merciful God (21 ff.) – but no one is quoted who speaks in this way. Moreover, Hans-Joachim Höhn does not expose bad theological language here, but bad theology, and he does not offer a better one – how does he interpret the central biblical sentence that God is love (1 John 4:16)? Höhn also criticizes “compliant substitute words”: The “retreat master” becomes a “spiritual companion”, of whom in the end only the “coach” remains (40); now, however, these are three different tasks, all of which have their good purpose; it is quite commendable, also in the sense of preventing abuse of power, that today one hardly masters retreats anymore, but accompanies people on spiritual paths.

In chapter II, Höhn praises theopoetics and criticizes theology – again, however, quite prolix, but spiced up with quite interesting poems by various authors. Chapter III begins with the statement “…only rarely is a good idea good for a whole book” (85): “Short and sweet: mnemonics about God and the world”. This is followed by a firework of aphorisms, corny jokes and short “definitions”, often more linguistic jokes, occasionally stimulating insights; all really short and sweet, but quite a lot; sometimes quite theological, sometimes also generally human; sometimes witty, also ironic, sometimes a little strained and – sorry – definitely with the courage to be banal. A fourth chapter follows on resigning at work and in life, on renunciations and on quitting – witty and helpful, but the connection to the previous chapters and the title of the book is not entirely clear.

The book does not really fulfill all the expectations that its title raises. However, there is no doubt that some readers will draw good ideas from it.

                Stefan Kiechle SJ

Marx, Dalia: Through the Jewish Year. Translated from the Hebrew and edited by Rabbi Ulrike Offenberg. Illustrations by Elad Lifschitz.
Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich 2021. 384 pp. Hardcover. 34,-.

To say it in advance: an impressive publication! The book by Rabbi Dalia Marx, the original edition of which was published in Israel in 2018 under the title “In der Zeit. Journeys through the Jewish-Israeli Year”, provides a deep insight into the richness of Jewish traditions. The professor of liturgy and midrash at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem presents the twelve months of the Jewish calendar, describes little-known traditions, rituals, prayers and domestic customs and asks what significance these traditions can have in modern 21st century life.

“The aim of this book,” says Dalia Marx in her introduction, “is to open many windows and doors to the Jewish calendar, to air out rooms, … to illuminate hidden corners”. The reflection on each of the twelve months follows the same structure: introduction – song of the month – discussion – prayer of the month. Text windows in the margins of individual pages of the book provide additional insights with their reflections and additions. The author brings together many Jewish voices from different times and regions.

The book was translated and edited for the Central European context by the Hameln rabbi Dr. Ulrike Offenberg, who also teaches at universities and is involved in Jewish-Christian discussions. In her foreword, she emphasizes that the book is also aimed at a non-Jewish readership in order to promote their knowledge and understanding of Jewish rituals, customs and traditions. An impressive book that invites readers on a journey through the Jewish calendar with its diverse traditions in a well-founded and sensitive way.

                Wolfgang Brinkel

Volkov, Shulamit: Germany from a Jewish Perspective. A different history from the 18th century to the present.
Munich: C.H. Beck 2022. 336 pp. Hardcover. 28,-.

The author, Professor Emeritus of Comparative European History at Tel Aviv University and member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences, ends her overview of two centuries of Jewish history in Germany on a cautiously optimistic note: “The achievements of the past are not completely lost, and looking to the future opens up room for optimism” (306). In doing so, she by no means conceals the difficulties and ambivalences of Jewish life beginning anew after 1945 in Germany before and after 1989, i.e. before and after the restoration of German unity. A feeling of absolute belonging to the beloved fatherland, as had developed in parts of the Jewish population in the German Empire, could no longer exist after the Holocaust. At the same time, however, this is also part of the paradoxical consequence of the Shoah: “Paradoxically, however, it was precisely through this radical discrimination and the efforts to exterminate them together with their European co-religionists that the Jews became of central importance to the Germans and Germany, more than ever before. Whereas in the past they could be regarded as marginal, and they themselves often wished to disappear as a minority within the majority, after the war the memory of their fate … meant that it was no longer possible to exclude the Jews from the German perspective” (243 f.).

Volkov lets modern German history and modern Jewish history begin with the Enlightenment. She names Moses Mendelssohn as the central figure for the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala). With him, German and Jewish history combine to form a “common drama” (28). From a Jewish perspective, the ambivalences of the following decades become clearer: the Enlightenment also had an intolerant face towards Jews. Political liberalism at the beginning of the 19th century up to its climax during the revolution of 1848 is ambivalent; modern and traditional, egalitarian and exclusionary at the same time. The unification of the small German states under Prussia leads to a rupture in the old Jewish world: integration on the one hand, anti-Semitism and exclusion on the other. In 1933, the dream of a common identity is shattered. The unimaginable crimes committed by the Germans break the bond of unity, if it had actually existed until then.

Volkov adds portraits of individual Jewish personalities who exemplify the tensions of Jewish life in their time to her overview in the current text: Heinrich Heine, Walter Rathenau, Bertha Pappenheim, Hannah Arendt, Fritz Bauer, and many others. In this way, she impressively achieves the intention of her book: “Above all, we have attempted here to provide an overview of German history over time, to connect the history of German Jews with it and to perceive the former through the perspective of the latter.
perspective of the latter” (243). This is more than a mere addition, but rather a change of perspective on the whole of German history since the Enlightenment.

                Klaus Mertes SJ

Müller, Kathrin: The cross. An object history of the best-known symbol from late antiquity to modern times.
Freiburg: Herder 2022. 304 pp. Hardcover. 35,-.

In antiquity, anyone who was killed on the cross was a criminal and was despised accordingly. That a crucified man could rise from the dead and prove himself to be the Son of God was considered completely implausible and unreasonable. So how did the cross of Christ, of all things, become the most important symbol, even the logo of Christian history? In fact, it took several centuries for Emperor Constantine to declare the cross a symbol of victory. The iconography of the cross in the centuries that followed shows the changes in the visual culture and theology surrounding the symbol of the cross.

The Berlin art historian Kathrin Müller tells this complex story using selected depictions of the cross. The symbol changed from a sign of shame to a symbol of triumphant victory. Soon it also became a symbol of the divinely created cosmos – the four arms of the cross denote the cardinal points and encompass the whole world. The story of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Golgotha and the discovery of the cross by Empress Helena is told in detail. Later, it deals with the cult of cross relics in the Middle Ages and how the cross was instrumentalized for anti-Semitic purposes.
instrumentalized. Crusades to the Holy Land and pilgrimage routes – as followers of the crucified – are described in detail, and the indulgence system surrounding the cult of the cross is critically examined. Towards the end of the book, there is a leap from the late Middle Ages to the 17th and 18th centuries (Adam Elsheimer and Giandomenico Tiepolo) and then straight to the present day, to some of today’s disputes about depictions of the cross (official crosses in Bavaria, Berlin Palace…). At times, the author loses herself somewhat in historical and art historical details, but the theological aspects are also there, in concise form.

What I miss is the change in the image of the crucified: in the first millennium he was more the radiant, already elevated and risen Christ, from the High Middle Ages he then became the Man of Sorrows Jesus of Nazareth; this is how he was venerated in Spanish imagery and mysticism, among others, and still is today – but perhaps the author wanted to concentrate on the cross and not on the crucified. And why did the cross almost completely disappear from churches during the Reformation? The selection of topics from the modern era onwards seems reduced and arbitrary – there would have been a great deal of inspiration to be found in modern and contemporary depictions of the cross.

Despite these limitations, this beautifully illustrated volume is highly recommended. Especially for the early period, it provides a deep insight into the symbolic history of Christianity, which is hardly known today, and introduces readers not only to the paradoxes and occasional misuse of the cross, but also to its beauty and radiance. And it raises awareness of the need to deal wisely with this symbol today, which is constantly under threat of being appropriated for something alien and ideological.

                Stefan Kiechle SJ

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Light and darkness of the church
By Stefan Kiechle
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/3-2023/licht-und-dunkel-der-kirche/.]

Yes, there is a lot of darkness in the church: an endless backlog of reforms that threatens to make the church look ridiculous in the eyes of the modern world. Gruelling polarizations, often irrational, escalating in terms of language. XXL parishes, for many the end of classic pastoral care. An over-institutionalization and bureaucratization that hinders the view of the spiritual. The processing of abuse, which is only making slow progress. Leaders who appear helpless and overwhelmed. The seemingly reality-blind and authoritarian-blocking Rome. Young people who – understandably in many cases – simply stay away.

Yes, there is a lot of light in the church: lively congregations in which people live their faith with joy and find a home. Church schools, sought after by parents because of their quality, their values, their openness to religion. The social commitment of the church, which does so much for the poor and the sick, often in secret, without commercialism. Church associations that achieve great social and spiritual things for their members. Lay people, priests and religious who live their vocation with dedication. Efficient integration work for young people and migrants. Worldwide networking and help where the need is greatest.

Why does the media mainly focus on the darkness? The churches are only “working on their own abolition” (NZZ, 21.12.22). Cardinal Woelki, fixated on the little things, is rubbed with a bitter undertone. Of course, you can find all the spitefulness you want on the Internet. Of course, scandals are more attractive and sell better than edifying stories. Celibate old men in strange robes are always good for bashing. Some authors probably also write out of personal hurt. But does this sufficiently justify the fixation on darkness?

I know people who have had nothing but good experiences with the church throughout their lives, have benefited a lot from it and have enjoyed being involved; now they read in the newspaper how terrible the church is – some leave, but continue to be involved, even going to church services. I know people who have never had any contact with the church and have no experience whatsoever; they also read all the bad things, get outraged and stir things up. I know young people who discover their faith, are enthusiastic, go to church in a relaxed manner and shrug off the negative news. I know people who are Catholic – “but without exaggeration” – who work in a church authority and say that as an employer, the church is better than most others. I know people who were victims of abuse in their family and think that if it had happened to them in the church, they would be better off, because at least the church is doing something. I know people who have great responsibility in dioceses, who are enormously committed – loud and competent, hard-working and deeply pious – and are stunned at how suddenly “the place is blowing up in their faces”. Something is wrong here: in the contradictory mix of darkness and light, in perception, judgment and action.

Media criticism by church representatives is seen as pointing away from one’s own sins to the sins of others. It is not at all politically correct. Conversely, criticism of the church by media representatives is politically highly correct and should be humbly swallowed by church representatives. Bad news is often self-fulfilling prophecy: anyone who reads that people are leaving in droves because the church is so bad will therefore think the church is bad and leave – making everything even worse. However, the fact that a good 20 million people in Germany are members of the Catholic Church despite its miserable reputation, some of them more consciously and with greater conviction than before, is something you don’t read about.

Yes, the need for reform is huge and the ability to reform is low. Aren’t the rigid bureaucratic apparatuses with their many staff also a problem? In other countries, where church frustration is lower, these do not exist. If the churches run out of money and staff in the near future, this could – despite all the pain – also help. In this way, the church could become more voluntary and fraternal, more social and more spiritual. Incidentally, the state, with its increasingly complex administrative regulations, also has its part to play in this misery, which is certainly affecting society as a whole.

Christians do not go to church because of the church, but because of their faith. The church is less a very fallible institution than a community of believers. How can we succeed in making this unifying and spiritual aspect of the church shine through more clearly in the image it presents to its members and the public? How can the light within it interact with the darkness, which should not be concealed, in such a way that the church appears to be what it is: a human community – fallible and always in a state of flux – that trusts in the saving power of Christ and is committed, with fruit, to the physical and spiritual well-being of all people and to justice and peace?

    Stefan Kiechle SJ, Dr. theol., born 1960, was a university pastor and novice master, city chaplain and provincial (head of Germany) of the Jesuits. He is currently editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine “Stimmen der Zeit” and commissioner for Ignatian spirituality.
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Russia and Ukraine: Divergence of two societies

The Russian population seems to have endured the state of war so far, but mobilization has changed the situation. To understand this, we must take into account the omnipresence of violence and the valorization of “masculinity” in Russian society. This characterizes the difference with Ukrainian society: the gap between the two countries is widening. Anna Colin Lebedev teaches political science at the University of Paris Nanterre. François Euvé SJ, editor-in-chief of Études, the French cultural magazine of the Jesuits, asked the questions. The article, taken from there, was translated by Stefan Kiechle SJ.
By François Euvé, Anna Colin Lebedev
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/3-2023/russland-und-die-ukraine-divergenz-zweier-gesellschaften/.]

François Euvé: At the end of September 2022, Vladimir Putin ordered a partial mobilization to increase the number of Russian soldiers. This affects a larger proportion of the population than the previous recruitment, which mainly affected peripheral population groups. Has this changed the support of the Russian population for the so-called special military operation in Ukraine?

Anna Colin Lebedev: When the mobilization was ordered, for me it was the worst decision the Kremlin could have made if it wanted to maintain its legitimacy in the eyes of the population. My analysis was that one of the foundations of the Russians’ support for their state power lay in their ability to stay away from the state. This also enabled Russians to become wealthy and to envision a life that seemed right and acceptable to them: a predictable tomorrow for them and their children.

This support, in my view, was not at all an adherence to altruistic sacrifice for the fatherland. The basis of the social contract was that Russians continued to openly – and without asking too many questions – support whatever policies the state demanded of them as long as it let them live their lives. In my analysis, I argue that the state is actually putting its own power on the line, more so than with any other political strategy to date. Even the highly controversial pension reform or the problematic management of the Covid pandemic have not affected support for state power that much. We are facing a decision here that not only affects almost the entire population at all levels, but is a matter of life and death. We can see that the indicators, as so often in Russia, are not to be found on the side of opinion polls or stated beliefs, but on the side of behavior; not in what people say, but in what they do. The tip of the iceberg is the massive flight of Russians abroad, even if there are some among them who flee and at the same time support the so-called special military operation. The latter are not necessarily against the state power, but they say: “This is perhaps a just war – but without me”. What we cannot estimate is the numerical significance of those who escape mobilization. If their motivation is to go into hiding, they will understandably not show it publicly. Quantification became even more difficult when the military authorities continued with the mobilization without necessarily following a strict list. In the beginning, there was a list of people to be mobilized, but then they proceeded mostly with raids. We don’t know how many people received a summons.

I think that we are currently in an intermediate phase in which the fate of the mobilized people has not yet reached the Russians’ awareness on a massive scale. The relatives of the mobilized are complaining about soldiers who were sent to the front without equipment or preparation. But instead of blaming the state power, they attribute this situation to a local failure: How is it that Putin’s orders are not being implemented on the ground? Furthermore, the Russian government is implementing the usual measures: It is trying to drown the protest in money by granting huge salaries to the mobilized and a number of benefits in kind to their families. In the first months of the mobilization, the families of the mobilized spent their time running around the offices of the various administrations to assert their rights. But unlike the contracted soldiers, the mobilized will raise their voices and protest. Those who come back alive will tell what happened to them. So it is a ticking time bomb that the Russian state has placed under its feet.

Haven’t the mobilized people started talking?

There are already many testimonials circulating. On the other hand, the Russian authorities have been using the same strategy since the beginning of the invasion: They do not recover the bodies on the battlefields, and a large number of those killed are declared missing. This is quite easy, as many of those mobilized leave without knowing which military unit they are assigned to. Some even leave without any personal identification. If they fall, they are anonymous bodies.

Do the soldiers’ mothers mobilize, as was the case during the war in Afghanistan and Chechnya?

Two things have changed since those years. Firstly, the context: in the 1990s, criticism could still be voiced in public. Ordinary people could speak out and sometimes assert some rights against the military. Today, the law punishes any criticism of the Russian army. To be prosecuted, it is enough for a mother or wife to suggest that the military is hiding the true facts from her – the accusation is then that she has discredited the Russian army. The military sometimes also threatens the families with declaring the soldier a deserter or missing person, which denies the relatives the possibility of financial compensation.

The second difference to today is that at the time of the Chechen war, conscripts were drafted, i.e. very young men. Mothers dared to defend their children back then. This corresponded to the role that was ascribed to women in public both in the Soviet Union and in Russia: They were the people charged with caring for and protecting the little ones. The conscript fell into this category. He was all the more considered a minor because his identity papers were withdrawn during his military service. If a mother picked up the phone to reach an official because she was worried about her child, she was in a socially accepted role, even with the military authorities. Today, enlisted men and conscripted soldiers are adults. Their situation affects their mothers much less than their wives.

Here too, the question of socially accepted roles for men and women comes to the fore. When we hear the words of the men who go to the front, they go in the name of a certain vision of masculinity. This masculinity is not necessarily martial. The role model carries the idea of a certain honor: I am a man, I will not evade, I will do my duty as a man. Those who are receptive to propaganda go with the idea that they are defending their homeland. The women think accordingly: even if they disapprove of their husband’s departure, they must not prevent him from doing what his male duty dictates. To oppose the mobilization of the husband today, in a society where the idea of a just war is deeply rooted, is in a way to deprive him of his masculinity. On the other hand, when coffins or wounded or maimed men return in greater numbers, women will speak again. They will do so in the name of protecting the weak, which continues to be their social role. At the moment, they do not have the space to do so.

There is talk of a militarization of Russian society. There is also talk of a strong dominance of men over women, as the debate on domestic violence has shown.

Oppression by men is an observation shared by several colleagues, but my reading is a little different: gender relations in Soviet times, as today, were based on a combination of two things: women’s broad access to education and professional life and the belief that there is a biological difference between men and women that defines their social roles. Women today work and pursue careers as they did in Soviet times. Men and women have a duty to invest in and develop in the public sphere: Women are not relegated to the domestic sphere. However, this is linked to an ideology of fundamental biological differences that determine the roles that men and women should play in society. There is a list of professions that have been closed to women since the Soviet era. For example, women have only recently been able to become metro drivers, which was previously considered too dangerous for them. Unlike in Ukraine, there are still no women in combat roles in the Russian army. For their part, in Soviet times, as today, men are called upon to do their job and at the same time take their place as potential defenders of the fatherland.

I don’t think that Russian society has been militarized, but I do think that the masculine facade of men has been reinforced. One reason for this is that Russia has been at war almost continuously in recent decades. The state tried to restore a certain image of the military that had been damaged in the 1990s. Even though the façade became more virile, I am not talking about a deep militarization of society. A large proportion of those mobilized did not do military service or have bad memories of it.

As for domestic violence, I think it is more related to the general tolerance of violence in Russian society, which is extremely high. Domestic violence is just as socially accepted as other forms of violence, for example in schools, in the health service, in child or disability care and, of course, in the army.

Are there differences between urban and rural areas or between generations when it comes to these issues?

Above all, I see a difference between the social milieus. A young man from a modest background is much more imbued with these models. As Russia is very disparate both territorially and professionally, this Russian tends to live on the outskirts of the city and in rural areas. The situation is different in the population of large cities and especially in wealthy circles who have traveled a lot. This generation was the first to leave the country.

Can we talk about a massive, even permanent exodus?

Presumably those who are leaving now are not planning to leave for good, any more than those who left after 1917 did; but the latter did remain in exile. Today’s exiles prefer not to consider this scenario. It would be unbearable for them to believe that Russia would be plunged into misfortune for long, dark years; they prefer to hope that things will soon return to normal. Moreover, those who leave today belong to different social milieus than the emigrants after 1917. The political elites have hardly left so far, neither those who rally around the Kremlin nor the regional political elites. The intellectual elites in particular have left the country, as have a certain number of entrepreneurs, not so much out of opposition to the war, but because the war is ruining business. These losses do not destabilize political power, but they do destabilize certain areas of science or education. People who emigrate stay abroad for different lengths of time, depending on the means at their disposal. Those who fled due to mobilization without sufficient language skills and vocational training have difficulty integrating abroad and are likely to return soon. Those who already had connections abroad and say to themselves that their children’s future lies outside Russia may have other plans.

To come back to the gender issue: Is the place of men and women in Ukrainian society comparable to that in Russia?

It is indeed interesting to compare Russia and Ukraine in this dimension. Both countries are based on the same model. The socially acceptable gender roles are pretty much the same. The relationship to the public and military spheres is also roughly the same. This was particularly sensitive when war broke out in 2014. Ukrainian women joined the volunteer battalions because the sense of threat was strong. But the roles were sharply divided: the women officially held non-combatant positions as nurses or accountants, although in reality they went into combat. They were also very numerous in the rear, in all the associations that supported the military, also to raise money to buy equipment, to supply the armed forces, etc.

The separation still exists, but since the whole society was involved in the war, the women immediately tried to move on. The partnership with Western armies and the Ukrainian army’s desire to switch to NATO standards accelerated an already latent dynamic of women’s inclusion. As a result, a radical change took place between 2014 and 2022. Today, all legal barriers to women’s participation in combat have been lifted. Women can enlist in combat positions. There are already female officers, even in the top ranks. I think that the effects of this change will be lasting and will rub off on other areas of society, where a traditional vision still prevails, similar to that of Soviet times. The war is changing Ukrainian society, which would not have changed so quickly without it.

One element that justifies the war, at least in the eyes of Moscow Patriarch Kirill, is the fight against the depravity of the West, which organizes gay pride and accepts the union of people of the same sex. How is the issue of homosexuality perceived by Russian society?

To assess the current situation, we need to take a brief look at history. In Soviet times, homosexuality was a crime punishable by prison. Since the end of the USSR, homosexuality has been decriminalized, but with great indifference. Therefore, the debate about sexual preferences never took place. In fact, society was permissive for many years, but a number of questions were never asked. For Russians, this is an issue on which they remain completely ignorant. This ignorance makes it easy to demonize the issue: the Orthodox Church has now usurped it, as has the state. The breeding ground for the current demonization of homosexuals is therefore ignorance. In the 1990s and 2000s, many issues were raised in public debates in Russia: Compared to the Soviet era, society has become much more humanized. But this issue has remained completely in the shadows.

How could one characterize the difference between Russian society and Ukrainian society? How has this divergence deepened?

I will stick to what can be judged by current human experience. We are not starting from the same situation: The historical experience is objectively different for a Ukrainian citizen from Lviv and for a Russian citizen from Volgograd. The experience of war is not the same, nor is the experience of Stalinist repression. The place of each society in the Soviet Union – are we in the center or on the margins? – is not the same. Soviet Russia never asked itself the question of its identity in relation to other republics. The new Russia has never questioned the oppression it may have inflicted on its neighbors.

Ukraine immediately had a different experience due to this hybridity that was built up during the Soviet era. When societies separate and become two independent states, they already have neither the same starting point nor the same history to rediscover. Moreover, the thirty years of independence were times of a completely different state-building. The past was interpreted in a different way. The economic, political and social experiences are also not the same for Ukraine and Russia. But it is important to me that difference does not necessarily mean difference. The states that emerged from the USSR each followed a specific path. These fifteen paths did not lead to fifteen contradictory societies. The conflict between Ukraine and Russia is primarily linked to a political rather than a social dynamic. To be clear, this war had no reason outside of Vladimir Putin’s political logic. There was no fundamental conflict between Russian and Ukrainian societies that could explain why they should be forced to come into conflict at some point. Rather, a gentle mutual indifference prevailed. Everyone went their own way. What happened in the neighboring country happened to people you knew well – neighbors, friends… – but it was a different state. This distinction was not visible in the 1990s, but in the last thirty years it has become commonplace on both sides.

If the first reason for the conflict is the policy of the Russian state, it was able to gain a foothold because the Russian state mobilized a certain Russian imagination. The image that Russia developed of the Second World War facilitated the penetration of the idea that Ukraine was ruled by a neo-Nazi power. The fact that Russian society no longer resorted to the oppression it had exercised on its fringes favored the idea that Ukraine belonged to Russia. Ignorance, amnesia, false certainties and clichés conveyed by school textbooks were mobilized by Putin’s state to drag his country into war and ensure that those drafted into the military had a certain – demonized – vision of what a Ukrainian was.

In the winter of 2013-2014, at the time of the Maidan events, the Russian state managed to completely overturn Russian public opinion in a matter of weeks. Ukraine was seen as vaguely inferior, capable of making great political nonsense, but it was a foreign state. What happened to the Ukrainians was only remotely worrying to an ordinary Russian. The Russian state cleverly used references to the Second World War and Nazism to create outrage and fear. For the central square of Kiev, the Russian media highlighted the presence of nationalist activists brandishing portraits of Stepan Bandera, one of the founders of the national movement. Because of his ties to Nazi power, he is a devilish figure for the average Russian. Connections were easily made. As the Second World War is a pivotal moment in Russian history, the events of the Maidan took on a whole new meaning in their eyes. The strategy of creating fear was just as effective for the Russians as it was for the population of eastern Ukraine. The newer propaganda is also rooted in deep and old ideas.

Can we already see a change in the Ukrainians’ view of Russia before February 24, 2022?

Of course. But it’s a vision that has been built up since 2014, i.e. since the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 – the turning point for me. Before that, Ukrainians had no sympathy for the Russian state, but also no sense of threat from it and no hostility towards ordinary Russians. From March 2014, the Ukrainians found themselves in a previously unimaginable situation: their neighbor was waging war against them. This was all the more unimaginable as Ukraine, unlike Russia, had never been at war as an independent state. The last war that Ukraine had experienced on its territory was the Second World War. This deeply peaceful country gradually dismantled its army, in which the population had no confidence. Therefore, when the uprisings in the Donbass turned into a war waged by the Russian army, among others, it was initially citizens who joined volunteer battalions to fight, as the army was unable to defend the state. Such a situation would be unthinkable in France: If the country were attacked, the population would undoubtedly rely on the army to defend the territory. In Ukraine, the citizens immediately took up arms. The Ukrainian army has consolidated considerably since then, but the civic fighters have not really broken away. On the evening of February 23, 2022, Ukrainians were living their normal lives, but this life they were used to was taking place in a country at war. On February 24, the nature of the war changed, but Ukrainians were ready.

Since February 24, a dramatic change has taken place: President Volodymyr Zelensky has gained astonishing political strength and the army has become very popular.

The army’s popularity had been growing steadily since 2015 because it knew how to reform itself. It had been purged of numerous elements considered pro-Russian. A large number of Ukrainians have served in the army, some have enlisted permanently. During these years, the army had also forged partnerships with other European armies and with NATO – new practices were introduced. At the same time, Ukrainians began to trust their armed forces, but only moderately, because they were always suspicious of their institutions anyway. Those who knew Ukraine were not surprised by the resilience of the population and the Ukrainian army. What was surprising, however, was the resilience of the state, from the highest to the very local level. Few mayors or local and regional officials have failed.

 Local authorities and public services have shown unexpected resilience. Ukrainians had constantly denigrated their municipal electricity and water utilities, which were the presence of the state in the countryside. But these institutions have proved to be much more efficient than they were given credit for. That is the big surprise: not only has the state not disintegrated, but it has consolidated itself in the war, even at the local level, where it meets the citizens directly. This will not prevent the population from criticizing its institutions again immediately after the end of the war and going so far as to dismiss anyone with whom they are not satisfied, perhaps even Zelensky… This dissatisfaction was wrongly interpreted as a sign of the weakness of the Ukrainian state, insofar as Ukrainians were constantly denouncing the corruption of the state and the incompetence of political personnel. But this constant criticism also turned out to be a powerful driving force.

In a way, the figures of Zelensky and Putin are antipodes. If both have been able to increase their popularity, it is not the same kind of popularity.

There is also a major generation gap that affects not only the person of Zelensky and that of Putin, but also the political milieu in both countries. Ukrainian politicians today are between 40 and 50 years old. They are people who have traveled and gained experience abroad, including in Russia. They are clearly a post-Soviet generation. In contrast, the Russian political system is increasingly resembling a gerontocracy. Political figures remain in place indefinitely. So this system leaves no room for younger generations. The youngest is Dmitry Medvedev… Russia today is ruled by a state power that does not represent it demographically. That is a big difference between the two states. The style of government is clearly not the same, the values on which the state is based are not the same, the adaptability and intellectual agility are not the same. Zelensky is a typical entrepreneur of his time, and his time requires above all an extraordinary ability to adapt under already difficult conditions; he is mobilizing these abilities today. The ruling class around Putin, which is much more rigid, even rusty, is completely different.

    François Euvé is editor-in-chief of the French Jesuit cultural magazine “Ètudes” and teaches at the Center Cèvres in Paris.

    Anna Colin Lebedev teaches political science at the University of Paris-Nanterre. Her research focuses on post-Soviet societies and the development of the international security apparatus.
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Confrontational declarations of religion
By Klaus Mertes
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/2-2023/konfrontative-religionsbekundungen/.]

In Berlin-Neukölln, an “office against confrontational expressions of religion” was set up last autumn, a contact and registration office for religiously motivated “dominance behavior” by young people at school. This refers to bullying by pork-eating classmates, insulting classmates who are perceived as Christian as “crusaders”, violence against girls who do not wear headscarves, and so on. “Experts” are now to investigate the relevant cases on the basis of the reports. The position is funded by the federal government and is supported by DEVI e.V. (Association for Democracy and Diversity in Schools and Vocational Training), which “has been successfully involved in the prevention of confrontational expressions of religion in Berlin schools for several years.” (Neukölln district office, press release from 9.9.2021).

In January 2022, an alliance of around 120 academics, members of civil society and organizations spoke out against the project in a statement. From an educational and practical perspective, the project threatens to exacerbate conflicts “contrary to the declared aim of contributing to peace in schools”. There are no “reliable criteria” for classifying behavior as “confrontational”. This increases the risk of misjudgements of all kinds. Of course: “In Neukölln classrooms too – as in society as a whole – cases of anti-Semitism, homophobia, transophobia and sexism are a serious problem. These cases are well known and are widely discussed in the media, especially with regard to pupils who are perceived as Muslim.” But if teachers are now asked to report unspecified incidents of “confrontational expressions of religion” to an external body, this will only establish a culture of denunciation and thus shatter the trust between teachers and pupils. Instead, the signatories are calling for the establishment of an independent complaints office for discrimination in schools and nurseries, which would provide legal certainty and certainty of action in cases of discrimination.

If you take a closer look at DEVI e.V. (presentation of the project in the preliminary version for the Neukölln district office, December 2021), you will notice the focus on preventing Islamism, with a sideways glance at comparable problems and attempts to find solutions in France, especially in the Parisian banlieux. In this context, the association defends itself against accusations of Islamophobia. On the other hand, it wants to dispel the premise of the current philosophy and practice of prevention, as is also prevalent in the German government’s 16th Children and Youth Report (Berlin 2020), for example. There, the phenomenon of religious/Islamist radicalization is approached “almost exclusively through structural racism and structural discrimination” in the host society. The young people are thus “subscribed to the role of victim”. Discrimination discourses in the host society, labelling as Muslims (= Islamophobia) and deeply dormant racism would then be seen as the actual causes of religious radicalization among pupils, not the religion itself.

With recourse to the developmental psychology of Erik H. Erikson, the association puts forward the counter-thesis. Religious worlds of origin are deeply woven into the fabric of adolescent psychology. Not taking them seriously means not taking the young people themselves seriously. “The assertion that all this has nothing to do with Islam ultimately denies the young people any seriousness – both as individuals and in the educational process itself. Prevention, which essentially perceives young people along the lines of victim narratives, encounters them in a patronizing attitude that takes out of their hands the few remaining means of solving the existential crisis as which youth can be described with Erikson” (52).

I can only agree with this. But this also raises a very fundamental question for society as a whole: does it still recognize the “question of God” as a serious question at all? You can only take the religious question – not only that of religiously influenced children and young people from all possible denominations, but also those from agnostic and non-religious homes – seriously as an acting teacher or as an expert intervening from the outside if you take it seriously for yourself, i.e. if you consider it worthy of discussion. The “question of God” is not only important for prevention concepts. Otherwise, not only those young people who attract attention through confrontational expressions of religion will not be taken seriously, but also all the others.

    Klaus Mertes

    Superior of the Ignatius House in Berlin, editor of the cultural magazine STIMMEN DER ZEIT, studied classical philology and Slavic studies in Bonn and, after joining the Jesuit order, philosophy in Munich and theology in Frankfurt. He has worked as a teacher since 1990, first in Hamburg from 1990-1993 and then at Canisius College in Berlin from 1994-2011, where he was rector from 2000. From 2011 to 2020, he was Director of the International Jesuit College in Sankt Blasien.

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The called out ones: Church as pulse and encounter

Socialist doctrine included a sophisticated liturgy. The dictatorship of the proletariat resembled a religious path in its departure towards communism. It took on religious forms that resembled those of the church. But why were religious forms so excellently suited to demonstrating power? Christian Lehnert reports on his first encounters with the church and spirituality in the GDR. He looks for connections between language and transcendence. The author is a Protestant pastor, award-winning poet and managing director of the VELKD Institute for Liturgical Studies in Dresden.
By Christian Lehnert
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/2-2023/die-herausgerufenen-kirche-als-puls-und-begegnung/.]

Where the word “church” tastes of the past, where its meaning has become fragile, subjective, unstable, where it can hardly hold its own against internal contradictions and external pressure, I search for its roots of image and meaning in myself – that is the poet’s craft, combined with the hope of finding more than the personal. Remarkably, my earliest encounters with the “church” in my childhood in the GDR are connected with reading experiences. This is no coincidence.  Verses were written across my temples at night,

“…when deserted are
the rooms in which answers are given, when
the walls fall and hollow paths, from the trees
the shadows fly, when abandoned
underfoot the grass,
white soles tread the wind …”

I had read that poem a dozen times that evening and understood nothing. I had never heard anyone speak like that. There was nothing like it in literature lessons, not on the radio, not in the books I usually read. I was fourteen years old and had taken a volume by Johannes Bobrowski from my parents’ bookcase. Spells had caught up with me, misunderstood vocabulary that created a whirring that made me feel deeply insecure. I couldn’t say what the verses meant in the slightest, no connection could be made between the mysteries, “hollow paths”, “white soles”, “shadows fly from the trees”.

The words echoed in my sleep. In the morning, I woke up with a question dominating my mind that initially had nothing to do with the verses and yet had inexplicably sprung from them: Is there a God?

I knew that there was none. The question had been discussed hundreds of times at school: Church was a consolation for an afterlife to keep people down in oppression. Religion had no place in socialism, among the free owners of the means of production who were building a better world here and now. But the word “God” was there that morning like a splinter in my overtired head, just like Bobrowski’s verses, which meant nothing to me and did not let go, echoes,

“… the thorn bush flames,
I hear its voice,
where there was no question, a body of water
goes, but I do not thirst.”

When I am asked to talk about my first contacts with the church in my youth, I often fall back on certain patterns and hear myself say: I suddenly became interested in the church because it was an alternative world to the narrow forms of thought and language in the real socialist school. Or: Church was as far away as New York or the Amazon delta, and yet I could go there. I only had to cross the street into the dilapidated brick house, hidden behind high wooden walls, and through the barred gate into the dubious zone. The hint of the forbidden and danger lent the musty communal rooms a special charm. This is where the Other began.

But I had long been familiar with the church, had grown up in strict forms of worship, only without knowing it. When I took the streetcar with my friends across the bridge over the Elbflutgraben to the Dresden district of Übigau on the way to school, when we crossed the small housing estate there on eternally muddy paths and the “42nd Polytechnic High School” approached, it was unspokenly clear to us that we were leaving ourselves behind. We would fill roles even as the noisy boys chasing across the schoolyard. The reality here was a liturgy, a subtle, delicate and inescapable cult before the altar of the party, as the “vanguard” of a “new age” that was to grow in our midst.

The muster ground: standstill, the childlike bodies, surrounded by snowflakes in winter, mosquitoes in summer. The tiny limbs of insects, external skeletons, and those of adolescent humans, internal scaffolding, formed a humming chorus. We waited for the party secretary or the principal of the school. Silent – the neck, the throat, the shoulder girdle. We pupils were ordered by height. Disciplined geometry under streaming

Folds and flags. We shrank.
Children fell into one,
swiveled their heads in the dull
dance of children’s legs.

The initial long silence was a silent confession of our guilt – of violated discipline, of laziness, of whispers from the class enemy, of lack of faith. Then an introit was sung: “Brothers to the sun to freedom, brothers to the light…” The teachers entered, with the principal in their midst. He stepped up to the lectern and spoke a greeting: “Be ready!” “Always ready!” rang out from hundreds of throats.

A high altar was set up behind the college. There stood a wall of flags with a large picture of Comrade Erich Honecker, decorated with flowers. Proclamations, speeches and speeches followed. I hardly remember them, we were busy keeping quiet. The disparity was enormous: here our fidgety bodies, there the stern priest “without God” who showed us the way to another world. There were sacraments on high days: certificates and small gold, silver or bronze badges for the best school achievements and the most empty bottles and piles of waste paper collected. People were proud, they were transformed.

The socialist doctrine included an elaborate liturgy, I realize that today. The dictatorship of the proletariat resembled a religious path in its departure towards communism, it was a secularized form of transcendence (as it still exists today in a politics that relies on fears and exaggerated hopes), and so it took on religious forms that resembled those of the church. But why were the forms of worship so excellently suited to demonstrating power?

I don’t know how I came to ring the doorbell of the local priest, a complete stranger to me, one late autumn afternoon in the early hours of darkness and suddenly ask him if I could be confirmed – without knowing what exactly that was, or even what I actually wanted to ask him, because the word “confirmation” was just a cipher for something I didn’t yet know. And if I had walked left instead of right down the street that evening, I would have rung the bell at the Catholic parish office and my biography would have been different. Had verses by Bobrowski blown across the street ahead of me? But I didn’t understand them at all. They were mediators without a message, just triggers for the sudden feeling of not being at home inside me. A “voice / where there was no question”.  How could I encounter the “church” so diffusely and yet as a defining longing when I didn’t even know it?

The Ekklesia

The German word Kirche stands for ekklēsia in the Greek language, and I start digging in the New Testament. Paul was probably the first to use the word consistently. The word has it in it. It responded to the strange idiosyncrasies of that ancient movement that we now call “Christian” and distinguish from others. But the emerging Christianity had little interest in creating new cult spaces or special spheres of the sacred. The first Christians drew their spiritual strength from everyday life, from the customs of eating and drinking, washing and socializing. They put the simple life into a new context. Their faith was expressed in small physical gestures – in the washing of feet and the comforting laying on of hands, in a cup of wine on the lips and bread on the tongue. Nothing higher was built over the profane everyday life, but everyday life itself was transformed. The unobtrusiveness, even superficial invisibility of the Christian faith with a simultaneous abolition of valid norms and laws disturbed and fascinated the contemporaries of the new movement. Something was at work here that allowed no particularity, no boundaries in space and time, in class and people, no classification of interests, not even priests were recognizable, and the inner lawlessness was the program. 

What had happened?

Paul called it ekklēsia. What had happened was ekklēsia. It was said in the uncertain gesture of a first naming. People fell out of their life plans, out of their destinies and became others. They said that they were “in Christ”, in the Messiah. This was a sudden event, a current that also affected Paul himself. He did not yet see any form. What else would have been more obvious for Paul than to call the emerging churches synagōgē? In its meaning, synagōgē encompassed everything that could have been assumed in the middle of the first century as the self-image of a young religious movement on Jewish soil. Synagōgē was a common Greek translation of the Hebrew words qahal and ‘eda – designations of the congregation of God, their assembly in the name of the Lord, chosen people. And isn’t that exactly how the first Christians felt? As a true assembly of saints? As a new people of God?

But Paul did not say synagōgē. Paul said ekklēsia. The word sounds as if it is searching for its meaning. Among the Greeks, ekklēsia meant the assembly of free citizens, the entire people, when they were called out of their homes by a herald – a profane word: those called out. In the Greek language, the ekklēsia could not represent a special association, a group of believers or a cult community. Paul did not mean any of this. Paul also never spoke of “the Christians” as if this were an attribute, a “Christian” distinguishing feature from other religious groups. No: ekklēsia is nothing among other things, it is something different, a sudden change, not something we are familiar with. When Paul refers to an individual church as ekklēsia, it always implies that he is actually referring to the whole – the entire ekklēsia. It only exists in this way. Wherever it happens, it is whole, no matter how many there are who are gathered in Christ, because it is always everyone, and the dead and those to come are also part of it. It is not a divisible crowd. The event of ekklēsia is not to be understood in the sense of a quantity or a definable phenomenon. Ekklēsia is most likely the description of an interruption, such as a disturbance of consciousness. It resembles the afterimage of a glaring light when you close your eyes blinded and rings melt away, yellow and orange, now without correspondence in external reality. Something happened, and what remains?

Ultimately, the church cannot know what it is, because it is not grounded in itself.

Ekklēsia – a searching word. Christians cannot speak of themselves in any other way, because they do not yet know who they are: “Even I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with lofty words and high wisdom to declare to you the mystery of God. For I thought it right to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in great trembling …” …” is how Paul articulates this in his First Letter to the Corinthians. What Christians can know about themselves is not knowing. They cannot connect to anything. After all, all explanations of the new would come from the context of reality before the event of Christ, and from there it cannot be understood at all, because it was not conceivable before it happened. But this also applies to the future: as long as time passes “afterwards”, it does not lead any further, but basically always back – to Christ, coming and having come.

How could such a distortion of Christ become sustainable? What the “church” is solidifies itself in the Bible by subliminally echoing the constant questioning of its own identity: Ultimately, the church cannot know what it is, because it is not based in itself. It owes itself to an unavailable call: Out! That is why it does not determine its boundaries and never knows for sure who belongs and who does not. It is constantly falling forward, stumbling through time without finding its balance. Those who maintain this precarious state are faithful to the Christ event. He speaks of God and contradicts himself; he says what he cannot say; he remains silent and yet he cannot remain silent. He tries to understand what was there when Christ happened – a crack in reality, and the words falter. They no longer make sense, and they do not yet make sense; they are only tentatively approaching the object that makes them necessary. People ask, babble and plead (whether in tongues or in supposedly clear reasoning): “Come soon! Come into the syllables! Come into our hearts, into the rites, into the images, into the concepts…” That is church.

How the church grows where it shrinks

I entered a darkened room. A group of young people sat at a long table. Most of them were my age, fifteen or sixteen. It suddenly became quiet as I entered. The table ended in front of a window that was covered with a black blind and at first glance looked like a hole in the wall. Today, the house where this high room on the first floor was located would be called a ruin. It stood alone in a wide backyard. Here in the second row, Dresden was still a pile of rubble in the mid-1980s. I only vaguely knew what praying was. As a small child, I had secretly placed pieces of sugar or streetcar tickets on the windowsill and expected a foreign power to take them. Everything to do with the old word “God” seemed to me to be something from which it was better to keep quiet.

I was drawn to this room by an attraction that had been growing for a long time. Until just now, I had been a staunch outward advocate of the Marxist party line, docile, one hundred percent. At the same time, I was starved of linguistic formulas, dark cells of feeling. Now I was standing in this space capsule. It was floating. Its engine was the light of a slide projector that projected an image onto a wall. On it you could see two folded hands. I don’t remember what the priest was talking about. I also don’t remember how I found a seat at the table. I only remember how my brain seized up in a language in which the words had a very unusual meaning – a vibration, as if nothing named remained itself, and something jumped out at me, spinning me faster and faster around an unknown axis. What the word “peace” meant here had nothing to do with the nuclear threat from the West. When “truth” was mentioned, there was no scientific world view looming in the room – just a nebulous undertow, groping words that sounded magical: “trinity” and “two” in the “natures” and again and again the enigmatic word: “God”.  From then on, nothing was clear. Church was initially a permanent irritation.

Today, “faith in the word” resembles a dwindling ice floe floating on the Elbe in spring. The resilience of language appears to be under threat, above all from rampant secondary discourse, blatant lies, compartmentalization and the deliberate flooding of every remarkable statement by a legion of others. You can say anything – but it immediately disappears in the countless whirlpools, the confusing whirlpools. The stream of what we can say becomes narrower, more channeled and therefore more torrential.

In my youth in the GDR, while reading the Bible, Meister Eckart, Rudolf Bahro and Friedrich Nietzsche (a strange combination due to the coincidence of the incoming Western parcels), I had the oppressive and hopeless feeling that my thinking must have been deformed by language since my kindergarten days. I would lie in bed for hours reading the Gospels or the forbidden alternative, reading Zarathustra, and then I was strangely unfit for life, no longer equipped for daylight, for the view of the facades of the apartment blocks outside the window, the blowing laundry on the balconies, the pants and jackets that resembled each other like the flower pots and curtains everywhere, image sequences as if the arm of a record player on a scratch kept jumping back into the same groove. The readings irritated me so much that I almost fell silent.

Church is the figure of the unspeakable, a permanent creature of crisis.

The sound of old prayer texts still echoes through my head, as I never heard them again during my first anxious visits to a church: complete novelties, turning points of thought, without me being able to say what they consisted of. The difference to the reading was simple: here sat living people who really sang and prayed and spoke differently than I had ever experienced: “Our Father …” To this day, despite some disappointments, the church has remained indispensable to me as a way of life, and I hope for it – because it has other powers than the silent scriptures from which it is nourished. It consists of breathing bodies, of voices and eyes, of readers and listeners and praying people who are always more than they know, of the living and the dead. But the greatest gift of the church is that people can be silent together in it. In silence, the word, the logos, is authenticated again.

The fact that “church” is susceptible to power and ideology is possibly due to this dual nature, which shines through my memories of a religious childhood: disturbed silence meets an opening, lively saying. The church touches the boundaries of reality, is concerned with unattainable horizons of meaning – and in every expression of this lurks the seed of self-exaltation, the hubris of ultimate certainty. But this is not the end of “church”, it is also the admission that in every expression there is a disturbing unspeakable. It is the figure of the unspeakable, a permanent creature of crisis.

This becomes all the clearer to me when I look at theological definitions and pictorial spaces for the “church” from my early experiences. It is called the “body of Christ”, which means that it is an interval between the fundamental tone of the Logos, which expresses God’s love and presence in everything, and the dark cry of Christ on the cross in desperate remoteness from God. She finds herself in a foreign place, missing God, at an infinite distance from him – and at the same time she is close to him, as a vessel of the unspeakable. I have exposed myself to this paradox in an epigrammatic verse:

The God who does not exist, in me a dark crack,
is close to my soul as often as I miss him.

Sometimes it seems as if the churches in Europe are collapsing like glass molds that can no longer withstand the external pressure. Their inner emptiness is palpable in many places. Where is God? The bang of this implosion is salutary. A questionable vessel is freed from its form. At the point of highest compression in the inward plunge – if you want to follow the image – the direction is reversed and the pressure now strikes outwards, into the open. We are back at the point where Paul stood and asked: Who are we?

No one knows, and that is the happiness of Christianity. How happy I am sometimes about the shrinking, the dwindling! Then secretly say to myself: Praise be to the statistics of decline! The dark shadow of farewell: it emphasizes the truth of Christianity, which does not lie in a form, not in a popular church, not in any kind of institution, but in an invisible, unnamed form of existence, which cannot be counted or delimited, a pull and longing, a blowing into another world. The few are the many, the last are the first, the weak are the strong, the low are the high. Swirls. Whirlpools. God calls, and everything is lost, and so new things come to light: Let’s go into the truth of loss!

    Christian Lehnert, born 1969, Dr. hc., poet, Protestant pastor and scientific director of the Liturgical Science Institute of the VELKD in Dresden. Member of the Saxon Academy of Arts and the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz.
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About weariness
By Stefan Kiechle
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/1-2023/vom-ueberdruss/.]

If you pay attention to the emotional vibrations in society and the church, you can sense a sense of doom and gloom at the moment. Something is tipping: the pandemic has shattered the earlier certainty that science and technology can get nature and its dangers under control. The war of aggression against Ukraine is waking the West from its naïve political slumber, believing that everything will continue in peace and with ever greater prosperity. Climate change is almost impossible to handle and is becoming increasingly threatening. New streams of refugees – millions are leaving their homes for political and climatic reasons – are appearing on the horizon and frightening us rich people. Inflation is eating away at our assets. Trust in states and their ability to regulate is dwindling. In politics, the tendency towards authoritarianism is increasing, at the expense of democracy and human rights – in China and Russia, in India and in many African countries. Right-wing populism is also winning elections in Europe, for example in Poland, Hungary and Italy. In the USA, MAGA populism has just been curbed somewhat, but for how long? And the churches in Europe? They are bogged down in directional battles; they are unable to come to terms with old burdens, they are falling silent and shrinking.

The crisis phenomena are so massive that many people are no longer able to cope with them. The mood is changing, but where to? Everything seems to be coming to an end: Church and state and the world. Apocalyptic fantasies are in vogue. Many people are suffering from anxiety. Mental illnesses are on the rise. Many are fleeing into consumption while their bank accounts are still full and enjoyment is still permitted: Frankfurt Airport is expecting 50 million passengers again this year – was there something about the climate crisis? Others are worried about the future, especially the younger generation, and they are protesting – this seems somehow understandable and yet also desperate given the choice of means. Some are afraid of the cold winter: In comfortable apartments – 48 square meters, centrally heated, is the average German’s home – people are complaining at a very high level; in other countries, people are starving. Some are committed, toil away, work themselves to the bone; others are tired of work, retreat to their little garden of paradise, want to enjoy: “After us, the deluge”. We could go on and on about heroic or selfish, desperate or irrational or even absurd reactions to the crisis.

Some ask the question about God: Where is he? Why doesn’t he intervene? But the classic theodicy question can also have a convenient relief function. God created people with freedom, reason and dignity, and he gives them the freedom to shape their own lives – why don’t they do it? For many Christians, the crisis is not just a church crisis, but a crisis of faith: because God has obviously turned his back on us, we are weary of him and turn away from him. Earlier generations reacted differently: read Paul Gerhardt’s songs, for example, written in the midst of the chaos of the Thirty Years’ War, full of faith and warmth of heart. Or the testimonies of faith of Alfred Delp SJ or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, written during the persecution by the Nazis: “Wonderfully protected by good powers, we confidently await whatever may come…”. They did not turn away from God because they thought he could not help, but they turned to God because they were convinced that he was the only one who could and would help – in his own way, when and how he wanted to for our salvation.

The monk fathers had a special word for situations of spiritual crisis: acedia. The Latinized word, which comes from the Greek, means something like drowsiness (in the midday heat), laziness and weariness, lack of drive, boredom; also sadness, despondency; finally reluctance, disgust, stubbornness; then annoyance, weariness, indifference and listlessness; finally gloom, melancholy, melancholy, also distance from God. For the monk, acedia is a disease of the soul when it overtakes his soul and forces it down without it being able to defend itself, and then a sin when he willingly and perhaps lustfully surrenders to it and thereby harms himself and others. Those who surrender to acedia do not trust God and leave him to one side. Acedia can lead to hectic travel activism or, on the contrary, to total chill-out. The German translation is probably best “Überdruss”: it expresses a bad mood, sluggishness, but also nervousness and unwillingness, mistrust and withdrawal, negation – is this the mood of our time? As an antidote, the monks suggest staying at home and doing one’s work faithfully.

 Believers in Christ trust in God. God does not fulfill all our wishes, but he does fulfill all his promises. The multiple crisis of our time is not the end. This year, too, does not call for weariness or world weariness, but for hope and commitment.

    Stefan Kiechle SJ, Dr. theol., born 1960, was a university pastor and novice master, city chaplain and provincial (head of Germany) of the Jesuits. He is currently editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine “Stimmen der Zeit” and commissioner for Ignatian spirituality.

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Life, freedom and language: On the death of Jean-Luc Godard

When Jean-Luc Godard died on September 13, 2022 at the age of 91, people in France spoke of an “earthquake for cinema”. The co-founder of the Nouvelle Vague was the last star to represent the entry of cinema as an art form into the modern age. Piero Loredan SJ studies theology at the Centre Sèvres, the Jesuit college in Paris. This article first appeared in La Civiltà Cattolica and was translated from Italian by Johannes Beutler SJ.
By Piero Loredan
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/1-2023/leben-freiheit-und-sprache-zum-tod-von-jean-luc-godard/.]

I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy”. These words from Patricia (Jean Seberg) – the protagonist of the film Out of Breath (À bout de souffle, 1960) – express director Jean-Luc Godard’s elusive unease with his time and his cinema. The film – a story about the misadventures of a car thief who is wanted for the murder of a policeman – is Godard’s first revolutionary feature film and a milestone in world cinema. The quoted sentence from Patricia, which defies unambiguous interpretation, forms an open framework in which the multifaceted work of the French director can be categorized and re-read. The restless search for a vital, total, unconditional freedom – the stylistic and thematic cornerstone of Godard’s cinema – comes up against the limits of localization in a specific time and social context. At the base of this difficulty we can find the limits of language, of communication and of the relationship to the other.

With Godard, we are thus faced with a discomfort that cannot be fully deciphered, as is ultimately the case with his cinema. However, the results of this complexity are dramatic both on an individual level – many of his films end with the tragic and irrational death of the protagonists – and on a socio-political level – wars, social inequality and the tragedies of humanity are a recurring theme in his cinematography. The painful and frustrated search for freedom is first and foremost thematic: it is the center of the lives or attitudes of the often anarchic and illogical protagonists of his films. Godard’s freedom, however, is above all stylistic. Beginning with Out of Breath, the French director never tired of playing with film language and breaking stylistic conventions in an almost unnerving search for new ways of communicating.

But who was Godard? What was his contribution to the world of cinema? And above all, why is it possible to love and hate him at the same time?

A life of rupture

Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris in 1930 and grew up on the shores of Lake Geneva. He came from a wealthy bourgeois family: his father Paul was a doctor and hospital director, his mother Odile belonged to a respected and influential French family. In this privileged social environment, young Jean-Luc soon disappoints the family’s high expectations: his results at school are anything but brilliant. Godard preferred traditional schooling to attending the Cinémathèque française and the cinemas of the Latin Quarter, where he became an avid and intense regular. It was there that he began to develop his consuming passion for the world of cinema.

Another less elegant attitude takes shape in the future director: a penchant for petty theft. Family members, acquaintances and friends are often his innocent victims. Although he comes from an environment where nothing is lacking, Jean-Luc starts stealing despite the anger and incomprehension of his relatives. A systematic but sentimental petty thief, he always leaves some small change behind. Just as in a sequence of Out of Breath, in which the protagonist takes a small sum from his girlfriend Liliane’s wallet without too many scruples.1 The theme of theft as part of an anarchic lifestyle appears in several of Godard’s films, including The Outsider Gang (Bande à part, 1964) and Eleven O’Clock at Night (Pierrot le Fou, 1965). On a personal level, the tendency to petty theft represents a first clear element of the break with the world from which he comes. The contrast – as a protest against contexts, traditions, “established” languages – characterizes his personal life and his artistic work.

In the 1950s, Godard began his adventure as a film critic for the magazine Cahiers du cinéma. Young and passionate film enthusiasts such as François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer worked there. Inspired by their desire for innovation and experimentation, they became characteristic directors of the nouvelle vague, a term that is emblematic today, breaking with tradition and pointing to a new way of making cinema. Beginning with his first big hit Out of Breath, Godard never stopped. He constantly turned cinematographic grammar on its head in search of expressive novelties in order to create new communication possibilities with the medium.

At the end of the 1960s, together with director Jean-Pierre Gorin, he founded the Dziga Vertov group (named after the famous Soviet documentary filmmaker), a film collective with the aim of making militant films with a Marxist orientation. When the group disbanded in 1972, Godard continued to explore different techniques and styles. His tireless path of creative research led him to a progressive transition from the figurative to the abstract. His films become a collage of images, sounds and words. They not only tell stories, but also evoke situations, provoke emotions and awaken thoughts. Closer to philosophy than fiction, his is a “maieutic cinema” that challenges the viewer: It invites them to question and reflect or to be moved by the director’s intellectual provocations.

Jean-Luc Godard about Jean-Luc Godard

The path of rupture – an experimental attitude that is inexorably renewed – characterizes both his life and his art. Personally and artistically restless, Godard is characterized by his provocations, in an attempt to shake up clichés, as if to avoid the risk of conforming to something specific. A tendency that can be seen in the expression au contraire (“on the contrary”), with which he often begins his sentences.2 Contrast has been his hallmark on various levels throughout his decades-long career. “You could say that Jean-Luc Godard is an unbearable director. His talent is undeniable,” wrote “Le Monde” one day after the release of Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963). “I am the most famous of the forgotten men,” Godard confided to filmmaker Alain Bergala almost four decades later.3

It is from his cinema that we can approach the director’s personality. In his works – as if the screen were the “grille of a confessional”, as Virgilio Fantuzzi happily put it – it is possible to read the director’s personal confession between the lines. The starting point could be the film Eleven o’clock at night: The film recounts the last days of Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a wealthy and dissatisfied Parisian who flees with babysitter Marianne (Anna Karina) and begins an anarchic and criminal life with her. There is no shortage of affinities between Ferdinand and the young Jean-Luc: the break with the upper middle-class milieu of origin, the desperate search for freedom, the penchant for theft, attempts at artistic expression. The heart of the film is a tender poem dedicated to Marianne Ferdinand: “Tender … and cruel, real … and surreal, terrible … and funny, nocturnal … and daytime, ordinary … and unusual, beautiful like everything”. This short poem, a simple and beautiful juxtaposition of opposing concepts of great expressiveness, first helps us to get to know Ferdinand’s character (and Godard himself), and then to discover this film and a large part of the director’s work in general.

His masterpiece Contempt also makes subtle autobiographical allusions. The film tells the dramatic torn love story between the writer Paul (Michel Piccoli) and his wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot). Summoned by an American producer (Jack Palance) to rewrite the script of a Fritz Lang film (it is the director playing himself), Paul proves indifferent to the producer’s courtship of Camille, arousing his wife’s contempt. In the film, Piccoli wears Godard’s clothes, and in a long and masterful scene in their apartment, Bardot at one point wears a wig reminiscent of Anna Karina, the director’s muse and wife, whom he would divorce a few years later. Karina will later claim to have found some of her words spoken by Bardot.

Thanks to these aids, a direct dialog with the director emerges. It is Godard himself who enters into conversation with us, especially when he tells us about cinema and everything that goes with it: art, language, relationships, love, freedom; in a word: life. And the camera as a means of capturing it. The greatness and originality of Godard’s cinema perhaps lies precisely in this: it is not only in the cinema that he talks about himself, he brings in his own questions, fears and longings, but the cinema becomes his magnifying glass through which he observes the world.

“The attempt to see life is the true wisdom to be sought,” emphasizes Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) in the film Masculin – Feminin (Masculin, Féminin, 1966). This is the wisdom that Godard sought in his cinema – and in his life. It is first and foremost meta-cinema. With his films, he speaks, he formulates theories about cinema; in doing so, he speaks and formulates theories about life. The desired freedom in his own life – and in that of the characters in his films – becomes stylistic freedom.

Everything, from the often illogical stories to the disturbing style, reminds us that we are in front of a screen; the fourth wall no longer exists, the director speaks to the audience, dispels all illusions. The scenes in which characters address the audience directly are destabilizing. One in particular in Eleven o’clock at night is unforgettable: Ferdinand, at the wheel, in the middle of a conversation with Marianne, turns around and comments on the girl’s last sentence by looking into the camera. Stunned, she looks around and asks who he is talking to. Unconcerned, Ferdinand admits that he is talking to the viewer.

Godard’s cinema

Life, then – and cinema as a means of approaching its understanding. But life is not linear, it does not follow predefined actions, it eludes full understanding. Marianne’s words are beautiful in view of this observation: “What makes me sad is that life is different from novels … I wish it were similar … clear … logical … organized … but it’s not like that”. Like life after Marianne, Godard’s films are anything but clear, logical and organized. More and more extreme, they do not want to tell stories, but to show situations. Many of his films are divided into small chapters whose titles are not linked to a chronological development of the story, but evoke certain conditions and circumstances. This is the case, for example, with The Story of Nana S. (Vivre sa vie, 1962) or the subsequent A Married Woman (Une femme mariée, 1964), whose title is accompanied by the allusive caption Fragments of a film shot in 1964. The chapter of Masculin – Feminin entitled “Dialogue with a consumer product” is revealing, in which a young woman interviewed on controversial topics of the time, including the war in Vietnam and contraception, shows disinterest and distance from social issues. The combination of title and content opens a critical window onto the state of mind of many young people at the time, with a power that is otherwise difficult to achieve. Furthermore, this sequence presents an essential aspect for Godard and his cinema: the urgency of a militant engagement in the contemporary world, a dimension that the filmmaker himself attempts to live out with the founding of the Dziga Vertov Group.

These first attempts at collage cinema became increasingly radicalized in Godard’s film career: the narrative thread receded in favour of evocative combinations of images, sounds and words, inspired by a growing stylistic freedom. His restless experiments lead him to draw on the most diverse materials from the history of film, photography, painting, literature, music and philosophy. With a fine sense for quotations, Godard uses the cinematographic medium to process content from the cultural world into a unique synthesis of the arts.

However, the cinema of his last films is often incomprehensible, a series of poetic flashes and philosophical insights. The freedom with which Godard overturns the language of film makes it inaccessible, hermetic. We are not faced with a cinema that wants to be understood; the viewer is called upon to surrender and allow himself to be carried away by the suggestions evoked. It is the end of language, perhaps an admission taken to the extreme of the impossibility of clear and unambiguous communication between people. “You speak to me with words and I look at you with feelings,” says Marianne in Eleven o’clock at night. The titles of his latest films are telling: Adieu au langage (2014) and Bildbuch (Le livre d’image, 2018). Are we perhaps on the verge of renouncing it – after the desperate search for any form of freedom – to enter into a non-one-sided dialog with the viewer? It is another rupture on the part of the filmmaker: in cinema as in life, the possibility of an authentic encounter with the other is denied. And this is precisely the basis of the unease felt by the protagonists of his films.

In the film Contempt, the aforementioned scene full of autobiographical references in the apartment of the married couple Paul/Camille represents nothing other than a long misunderstanding between two people who cannot find a common language.4 And yet, as the young protagonist of the film This is my life emphasizes: If the more we talk, the less our words say, the more we can’t help but talk. Godard’s entire film oeuvre can therefore be read as an arduous struggle against the limits of language, for a freedom that is as expressive as it is existential: his cinema unleashes the desire for freedom on both a stylistic and thematic level.

Stylistically, the innovation of the jump cut in his first film Außer Atem is striking: A single sequence is cut up into several frames, which are strung together discontinuously. The illusion of temporal continuity within a sequence, one of the founding forms of classical cinema, disappears. The montage later becomes central to Godard’s film work, right up to the collage effect mentioned above.

The use of the hand-held camera is also characteristic, resulting in less fluid and more dynamic shots. In this case too, the camera clearly “asserts” its presence to the detriment of the cinematic illusion, and the same result is achieved through fragmented editing and by addressing the viewer directly, as in Eleven at Night.

Especially in Godard’s first films, shooting in real environments that give space to improvisation is another typical element that all directors of the Nouvelle Vague cultivate. This search for freedom of expression, which breaks with traditional cinematography, reflects on a thematic level the restless striving of the protagonists of Godard’s films for existential freedom, the burning desire for a life outside the conventions or projections of contemporary society.

The epilogues of these stories are often tragic, as if to suggest the impossibility of achieving true and complete independence. The quest for a free life without constraints and limitations is reinforced by the composition of memorable sequences in which the desire for youthful freedom is magnificently evoked. Among these, some dance scenes are beautiful: how can we forget Nana-Karina’s magnificent dance in The Story of Nana S.? Godard’s beautiful muse, with a proud and carefree look, throws herself into a wild dance of joy, alone and oblivious to her surroundings: she seems to proudly proclaim her right to exist and her own life.

The scene of the carefree run through the Louvre in Die Außenseiterbande (Bande à part) is also unforgettable. The goal of the three protagonists is to cross the Parisian museum in less than 9 minutes and 45 seconds, the previous record set by an American. They manage the feat in 9 minutes and 43 seconds. It is difficult to remain unmoved in the face of the boys’ bold and joyful run in the great symbol of French culture, indifferent to the major works of world art history. The scene is later taken up by Bernardo Bertolucci in The Dreamers (2003).

Another iconic scene, sympathetically taken up by Woody Allen in Rifkin’s Festival (2021), is the conversation in bed between the two characters in Out of Breath. Both sit motionless next to each other and are completely covered in sheets.

Fragments of the sacred

With his pictures, his revolutions and his films, Godard shaped an era that influenced generations of directors. As a multifaceted artist, closer to painting than to the novel because of the open allusions in his works, he can be compared to Picasso. In sixty years of work, it is difficult to identify a single defined period or style. A characteristic element of his work is the great freedom with which he attempts to capture and evoke fragments of life and the world. Like any true artist as an observer of man and his mystery, Godard cannot omit from his art the sacred dimension of reality that is invisible to the eye. This dimension has been particularly present since the films of the 1980s, such as Passion (1982) and Mary and Joseph (Je vous salue, Marie, 1985).

Passion tells the story of Jerzy, a Polish director who is making a film based on tableaux vivants and masterpieces by Rembrandt, Goya, Delacroix and El Greco. The film’s scenes, rich in color, light and beauty and accompanied by wonderful sacred music, contrast with the sequences that tell the daily lives of the characters. Nevertheless, there are convergences and interferences between the parts that illustrate the moments of filmmaking and the moments outside the recording studio. We are faced with a confrontation between an ideal world full of flashes of truth and everyday life.

Since it is impossible to analyze the entire film, it is worth pausing at a sequence of great subtlety, an example of the evocative power of Godard’s images and of the opening of interpretative horizons that he offers. It is an almost marginal scene in the overall plan that easily escapes a distracted gaze. It concerns the moment when the Polish director, in order to move from one part of the set to another, passes by one of the film’s extras dressed as an angel. Jerzy quickly tries to avoid the actor in order to continue. This leads to a small confrontation: for a moment, the camera juxtaposes the two figures of director and angel. Iconographically, the surviving painting takes up one of Delacroix’s most enigmatic and extraordinary works, Jacob’s Struggle with the Angel (1849-1861). This highly expressive fresco has given rise to various interpretations of a number of details – including the angel’s imperfect wings – that go beyond the biblical narrative described. Is it the painter’s personal struggle with his spiritual and metaphysical doubts? Or with the limits and hardships of his artistic production? These are also legitimate questions for the film, for the director and for his work in general.

Je vous salue, Marie is another outstanding film. Without claiming to reveal a mystery or a theological interpretation – we are dealing with the work of a director and not a theologian – Godard approaches the mystery of the virginal incarnation by hypothesizing the event in our time. What is beautiful to see is the ability to creatively stage the sequence of a scene from the Holy Scriptures, that is – according to an Ignatian term – to build the scene. The filmmaker plays out Mary and Joseph’s problems, which he assumes will arise when the fiancée suddenly becomes pregnant, despite being a virgin. This mystery of faith is incomprehensible to people, even if the familiarity of Christians with the story often leads them to no longer perceive the upheaval.

Joseph, who is portrayed in the film as a young cab driver, finds it difficult to believe and accept the event that upsets the life of his beloved Mary. He will have to follow a path in which all his doubts, confusions, desires and expectations are put to the test. Godard’s film can remind us of the small-great holiness of Joseph, a simple man willing to undertake a journey with all his humanity to welcome with love and effort a mystery beyond his imagination. Perhaps we too can imagine his uncertainties, struggles and difficulties. Taking holiness for granted is the first step in relegating it to the “world of ideas”, unfortunately making it inaccessible. In the last part of the movie, a tender smile tears apart the image of little Jesus, who doesn’t want to get into the car because “he has to take care of his father’s things”, which makes Joseph angry.

Je vous salue, Marie is a film that is open to different interpretations and in which one will understand Godard’s taste for provocation – it can be welcomed as the contribution of an artist who tries to imagine a central episode of salvation history and to show its human side at the expense of the divine one, with all its concrete implications.

There is no lack of references or quotations from the Bible in the rest of Godard’s work either, whose narrative power he recognizes: “The strength of the Bible is that it creates a beautiful setting and people need it,” he says in an interview.5

Furthermore, in Je vous salue, Marie, as in other films, a lyrical view of nature can be observed. The final shot of Contempt is striking: the horizon line over the sea and the word “silence, silence” repeated in French and Italian. Are we faced with the realization that the only possible answer to so much talk is the mysterious contemplation of the infinite?

“Quo vadis”, Godard?

A complex director, often indecipherable. So is it possible to love and hate the filmmaker’s work, symbolic of the Nouvelle Vague, at the same time – or is it better not to love it? To want to understand his cinema – perhaps this applies to every artistic product – and to classify it into well-defined categories would mean destroying it, suffocating its evocative power. In this respect, a scene from the film The Carabiniers (Les Carabiniers, 1963) is suggestive: one of the characters, after entering a movie theater, tries to grab, embrace and possess a woman depicted on the screen, ruining the projection and use of the film in the auditorium.

And yet the freedom of his artistic production opens the way to free interpretations and evaluations. One will appreciate his restless stylistic research and his innovative role in the world of cinema. Unlike artists who, once successful, became accustomed to recreating the same work over and over again, attracted more by commercial logic than by the desire to express flashes of truth and beauty, Godard remained faithful to his original quest for a cinema of language that serves life. We admire the originality of his works and the glimmers of reflection and poetry opened up by his extraordinary creativity in producing highly evocative film collages. We allow ourselves to be personally challenged by the provocative nature of his films and the expressive power of some of his images. We notice his influence on some of the great masters of contemporary cinema.

However, the difficult accessibility of some of his films allows us to develop a critical reflection. Indeed, in some, especially the later films, one can criticize the director’s temptation to give in to an excessive self-satisfaction, a narcissistic taste for innovation and provocation that revolves around itself and distances itself from the audience and from the possibility of entering into a real dialogue. Like the characters in his films, who do not speak a common language, Godard’s cinema speaks a language that is uniquely his own. What if the secret of communication in all possible fields and contexts was listening rather than the tireless creative expression of one’s own ideas and thoughts? We, the viewers of Godard’s films, are prepared to do this by watching his films – the director and his characters probably a little less so…

Many of his works are the result of a great desire for control: over the actors – despite the great scope for improvisation in the first films -, over the dialogues, the production, the stories…; a total control that paradoxically contradicts the freedom so coveted and the situations lived. A decision not to be dependent which, if taken to extremes, can prevent authentic contact with the other. It is an attitude that Godard consistently maintained to the end, both in his cinema and in his private life, choosing to resort to assisted suicide when his life and his strength failed him.

We are grateful to Godard for the gift of his cinema, for the breadth of his reflections and for the questions he raised with his work. Having written so much, we conclude with the last image of Contempt: a boundless horizon, the sea and the sky united in a peaceful blue, and the word silence!

    Piero Loredan SJ studies theology at the Centre Sèvres, the Jesuit college in Paris.