Vatican News: Venite ad Me: An encounter that attracts and captivates
Our Editorial Director reflects on the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s new document entitled “Venite ad Me: Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in an Epochal Change.”
By Andrea Tornielli – link to article
“When, in the view of many people, the Catholic faith is no longer the common patrimony of society […] only with great difficulty can the faith touch the hearts of people by means simple speeches or moral appeals, and even less by a general appeal to Christian values. The courageous and integral appeal to principles is essential and indispensable; yet simply proclaiming the message does not penetrate to the depths of people’s hearts, it does not touch their freedom, it does not change their lives. What attracts is, above all, the encounter with believing persons who, through their faith, draw others to the grace of Christ by bearing witness to him.”
When Pope Benedict XVI spoke these words in Fatima on May 13, 2010, the epochal change repeatedly evoked by his successors, Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV, had long been underway, but was not yet so apparent.
READ THE FULL TEXT OF “VENITE AD ME”
Sixteen years later, Pope Benedict’s words offer an incisive summary of what it means to bear witness to the Gospel, especially in places where this proclamation has never reached, or where the transmission of the faith has broken down.
They also aptly sum up the heart of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s new document, Venite ad me, which reflects on how to evangelize amid an epochal change. Its purpose is to offer material for pastoral reflection that encourages every local Church, in its own particular circumstances, to explore new ways of passing on the faith.
Doctrine of the Faith: Returning to kerygma amid crisis in passing on faith
The weakening of the Christian proclamation in lands with a long history of evangelization is hardly a recent development. The very need to speak new languages in presenting the faith lay behind the Second Vatican Council, conceived through the insight of Pope John XXIII and brought to completion by Pope Paul VI.
In Ecclesiam suam, Pope Paul VI explained that the Church approaches the contemporary world with “something to say, a message to give, a communication to make,” convinced that the Gospel must be offered through a relationship of listening and encounter.
Secularization was already underway in the decades before the Council, as the most perceptive observers had recognized. One need only recall the experience of Giovanni Battista Montini, who in the mid-1950s left the Rome of the great gatherings around Pope Pius XII for a rapidly growing Milan, where significant sectors of society were beginning to display a detached indifference toward faith and religious practice. Throughout his years as Archbishop of Milan, and later throughout his pontificate, one insistent question ran through his ministry: how can we proclaim the Gospel to the men and women of today, who seem increasingly distant?
That question is even more urgent at this moment in history, marked, as the Dicastery’s document observes, by the “sovereignty of the self,” the gradual unraveling of interpersonal relationships, and the mediation of digital technology, which ends up altering—almost genetically—our DNA as human beings in relationship with one another.
The question of how to transmit the faith today concerns both the wealthiest and most secularized countries and developing nations, where the number of Christians has grown but which are certainly not immune to this epochal change. This makes the document’s inclusion of contributions and reflections from so many Bishops’ Conferences particularly striking.
The answer, clearly discernible also in the teaching of the most recent Successors of Peter, is first and foremost to return to the kerygma: the proclamation of the essentials of the faith.
This requires an awareness—unfortunately still not sufficiently widespread—that appeals to moral values and Christian principles can never take for granted what must come first: the encounter with Christ. Passing on the faith today cannot begin simply with teaching a body of doctrinal content or religious information, as might still have been possible many decades ago, when the Gospel permeated daily life in the family and society.
Yet in a time like ours, it is equally shortsighted to think that passing on the faith can be entrusted to marketing and pastoral strategies devised on paper. We live submerged in an ocean of shouted words and often unreliable information, in a world where everyone speaks and almost no one listens.
We need witnesses who let the beauty of Christian life shine through. We need to allow ourselves to be drawn by the grace of encounters that touch our hearts, wound us, and bring us closer to the merciful embrace of a God who is love.
We need living communitiesm, and living communities attract. Life is something to recognize, nurture, and accompany, rather than plan or manage from behind a desk. We need communities that introduce adults, as well as children, to the beauty of the experience of faith. In this way, we can proclaim to everyone, in new languages and drawing more fully on the liturgy, popular piety, art, and music, a Gospel message expressed through closeness and welcome.
It is a message embodied in life, one that attracts us and reaches us through the witness of those who have gone before us throughout a history spanning two thousand years. And it reminds all the men and women of our time: “Jesus Christ loves you; He gave His life to save you; and now He is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.”
When a document intentionally subordinates the fides quae (the objective content of the faith) to the fides qua (the subjective act of believing), it inevitably risks diluting the clarity of Dogma.
Contrast His Eminence Cardinal Fernandez with Fr. Ludwig Ott and his landmark book “Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma “.
Fr. Ludwig was always so clear. So wonderfully unambiguous. Maybe it was my Engineering background which made me appreciate his work and his style!
From the perspective of traditional dogmatic theology and confirmed by my own lived experience, Dogma is not an obstacle to personal encounter; it is the very framework that makes a true encounter with Christ possible.
Without the crystal-clear boundaries and definitions of the fides quae, the Faith quickly shifts from an objective, unchanging Divine Revelation into something fluid, sentimental, and vulnerable to the spirit of the age. Anathema Sit!
To present a lighter note. Fides quae and Fides qua “you can’t have one without the other.” (Love and Marriage) popularized by Frank Sinatra.
Dermot’s alarming account of the new document is very unfair to it. The document is about the experience of faith as described in the Gospels, especially the Gospel of John. This experience is what must first be transmitted, in lived encounter with Christ and his community. Instruction in the fides quae fills out the basic act of faith whereby one turns to Christ (the fides qua — not to be caricatured as something merely subjective). The document is not a doctrinal treatise to be compared with Denzinger or Ott, but a set of pastoral considerations for open discussion. Its emphasis is what we are used to since Vatican II (John XXIII and the nouvelle théologie of De Lubac, Rahner, Balthasar, Congar, Schillebeeckx, and less known figures such as Jean Mouroux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mouroux).
The constant noise of those who make a mighty fuss about points of dogma, with no concern for the “hierarchy of truths” or for the embeddedness of dogmatic teaching in the act of supernatural faith, has generated a false Catholicism which creates great confusion, reducing the transmission of faith to a battle of ideological theses and opinions (and which swerves into schism because of this lack of perspective). Hammering dogmatic points in disregard of the horizons opened by the Council transmits not the vision of faith but the amputation of faith by reducing it to its dogmatic bones, a skeleton, or rather the dispersed bones in a grave. The Vatican is clearly alarmed about this. Interestingly, one of the people most concerned to ground the fides quae in the fides qua is Joseph Ratzinger, as quoted above.
Joe,
I reject Vatican II and everything that came from it. Including the Scholars you cite.
Pax Tecum!
Chi mangia papa crepa — The one who eats the pope dies of it. So how about 7 popes, and a Council, and the church itself? St Augustine has the answer: Securus iudicat orbis terrarum — the whole world is a safe judge.
Ludwig Ott would not approve of you dragging his name into the cesspool of antisemitism in which those who invoke him against Vatican II recklessly bathe. (Talk about septic tanks! He did not throw out the baby with the bathwater…)
Ott had queried the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity in his Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma but he reaffirmed it in his later editions in view of Vatican II’s affirmation of it. He accepted the authority of the Council and died in communion with the Church.
Checking the surprising story about Ott querying the virginitas in partu I found that he does indeed offer a modernizing interpretation of it:
“Mary bore her Son without any violation of her virginal
integrity. (De fide on the ground of the general pro-
mulgation of doctrine.)
“The dogma merely asserts the fact of the continuance of Mary’s physical
virginity without determining more closely how this is to be physiologically
explained. In general the Fathers and the Schoolmen conceived it as non-injury
to the hymen, and accordingly taught that Mary gave birth in miraculous fashion
without opening of the womb and injury to the hymen, and consequently also
without pains (cf. S. th. III 28, 2).
“However, according to modern natural scientific knowledge, the purely physical
side of virginity consists in the non-fulfilment of the sex act (“ sex-act virginity “)
and in the non-contact of the female egg by the male seed (“ seed-act virginity “)
(A. Mitterer). Thus, injury to the hymen in birth does not destroy virginity,
while, on the other hand, its rupture seems to belong to complete natural mother-
hood. It follows trom this that from the concept of virginity alone the miraculous
character of the process of birth cannot be inferred, if it cannot be, and must not
be derived from other facts of Revelation. Holy Writ attests Mary’s active rÓle
in the act of birth (Mt. 1, 25 ; Luke 2, 7 : She brought forth “”) which does not
seem to indicate a miraculous process.
“But the Fathers, with few exceptions, vouch for the miraculous character of
the birth. However, the question is whether in so doing they attest a truth of
Revelation or whether they wrongly interpret a truth of Revelation, that is,
Mary’s virginity, from an inadequate natural scientific point of view. It seems
hardly possible to demonstrate that the dignity of the Son of God or the dignity
of the Mother of God demands a miraculous birth.
“Mary’s virginity during the birth of Jesus was contested in the Early Church by
Tertullian (De carne Christi 23) and especially by Jovinian, an opponent of the
Church ideal of virginal purity ; and in modern times by Rationalists (Harnack
calls it: “a Gnostic invention “”).
“Jovinian’s teaching (virgo concepit, sed non virgo generavit) was rejected
at a Synod at Milan (390) under the presidency of St. Ambrose (cf. Ep. 42),
which recalled the invocation of the Apostles’ Creed : Natus ex Maria virgine.
Her virginity during the birth of Jesus is included in the title of honour
“perpetual virgin ” (aeiparthenos), which was given to Mary by the Fifth
General Council at Constantinople (553) (Denzinger 214, 218, 227). The doctrine is
expressly taught by Pope St. Leo I in the Epistola Dogmatica ad Flavianum
(Ep. 28, 2) which was approved by the Council of Chalcedon ; it was taught
also by the Lateran Synod (649) and by Pope Paul IV (1555) (D 256, 993).
Pope Pius XII in the Encyclical “ Mystici Corporis ” says: “‘ It was she who
gave miraculous birth to Christ our Lord (mirando partu edidit ).” The
Church’s general teaching is expressed in her Liturgy also. Cf. the Respon-
sorium to the fifth Lesson of the Feast of Christmas, and to the eighth Lesson
of the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord.” (translated by my co-diocesan Canon Bastable from the 1954 edition)
Joe,
If you re read my Original comment, you will see Vatican II isn’t mentioned.
I reject Vatican II. Where did I ever state I was speaking per pro Fr Ludwig on Vatican II? I admire his Clarity and Precision and Scholastic Methodology.
Pax Tecum!
Joe,
Please could you point out where I have ever, on this site, or elsewhere, engaged in antisemitism?
The Consultant leading the Team looking after me in Hospital at the moment is Jewish. Well known. I have zero issues with her and the excellent care she provides.
I would be grateful if you could adduce where I have ever cited Fr. Ludwig to support antisemitism.
Furthermore, excommunications are not Infallible. A man with your excellent academic background, is doubtless aware of Pope Callistus III rescinding the excommunication of Saint Jeanne d’Arc, 25 years after the event. In other words her excommunication was invalid from the beginning.
Semper Idem, as Cardinal Ottaviani had on his coat of Arms. Pax Tecum.
Well said Joe. At first I was in some doubt that yet another 144 paragraphs on the catechetical conundrum could be useful, but Venite Ad Me does a good job of delineating that conundrum without being prescriptive as to solutions.
§79 “… it is a fact that the large number of children and adolescents who drift away from the Church and the sacraments immediately after completing their Christian initiation or their course of formation in a Catholic school indicates that catechesis still struggles to find the most appropriate ways to foster a solid and lasting personal encounter with Christ.”
I simply cannot understand the pov that separates the fides qua from the fides quae, as though simply shouting out the dogmas more loudly would be certain to ‘transmit’ them. If this was true there would not even have been a need for the Incarnation. God the Father could simply have put the whole Catechism on an entire quarry of stone tablets and dumped them on some other prophet.
It was above all the vulnerability of Jesus, his willingness to suffer for the truth rather than to impose it, that touched the hearts as well as the minds of the first Christians. Separated from that quality dogma on its own is totally unpersuasive – mere proposition without witness.
Having experienced both rote catechesis and the loving witness of parents and others I know for certain that it is Christian love alone that can ‘transmit’ Christian faith – and that Pope Francis is entirely right to insist that if the faith cannot be proclaimed succinctly and lovingly – and then lived – it cannot be transmitted. Dogmatism per se is not faith or catechesis – because it must always fail to convey the most important truth of all – that God is gentle love.
Venite Ad Me does not ever ask if indoctrination without kerygma – proclamation of God’s loving presence – might actually have been the cause of this catechetical failure. This could have been researched in Ireland too, but never was – probably out of fear of the likely result. This document frankly admits the need for a catechetical reformation – in a new era – and is therefore helpful in grounding Ireland’s synodal approach.
The document could be seen as an upgrade of Vatican II on “The Church in the Modern World” (Gaudium et spes), a modern world that has changed greatly because of the digital revolution. In no way does it attempt to dilute the Creed or the content of catechesis. Rather it faces honestly the huge difficulties facing transmission of the faith today and attempts to tackle them bravely, recalling the power and primacy of the kerygma and the role of the family that “prays together.” It’s an unusually well-written text, engaging and even gripping.
Venite ad me, a document pulsating with hope. My take away after reading it: We humans have our small role to play in the transmission of faith and love but the bigger story is being written by our loving God. She is transforming lives so others will be attracted to what they have and profess.
“Jesus is indeed the true light that illuminates every person, for he has revealed what no one had ever seen or could have seen: the unconditional love that dwells in the heart of the Triune God.” [Venite Ad Me §10]
Sometime soon, surely, a pope will also insist that belief in the unconditional love of God for all forbids the inference that the Father’s forgiveness of sin was conditional upon Jesus’ acceptance of the cross – an inference all to easily derived from the answer to Q98 in YouCat and §615 of the CCC?
That the cross represented instead a rejection by the Trinity of the options of violence and domination follows naturally from §1 of Dignitatis Humanae (1965), especially: “The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.”
The truth referred to there is obviously that God is love alone. Only the church’s long association with state power stands in the way of a final rejection of that option of domination, in imitation of the vulnerability of its founder.
Nowhere does Venite Ad Me refer to the results of any research conducted with the recipients of school catechesis – on, for example, the conception of God that teenagers typically received from their experience. This is mysterious – given that such world-wide research was conducted in 2017 – via an online questionnaire – in preparation for the Youth Synod of 2018.
The new emphasis upon the kerygma – the proclamation of the ever-kindly presence of Jesus – suggests strongly a realisation by the DDF that Catholic school catechesis alone has often failed to be effectively kerygmatic, and that the side-lining of the role of the family, as happened in Ireland, was a catechetical disaster. Nothing in Venite Ad Me forbids that conclusion.
Dermot, “Ludwig Ott would not approve of you dragging his name into the cesspool of antisemitism in which those who invoke him against Vatican II recklessly bathe” was a reference to Louie Verrecchio and his cronies who see Vatican II as a “Talmudic enterprise” and who invoke Ott against Vatican II’s teaching on ecumenism. These people hold back from joining SSPX. You have joined their way of thinking by using Ludwig Ott as your chief modern authority in your crusade against Vatican II. Ott could not be happy to be used in this way as probably his main fame today.
Joe,
You are being egregiously unfair and you dodge the questions I put to you.
I am an excommunicated Layman for adhering formally to the July 1st SSPX Schism.
You seem to have gone off at an inexplicable tangent. If people other than myself have used Fr. Ludwig to advance an antisemitic agenda, that is their affair.
I ask as a matter of natural justice, where have I ever expressed antisemitic views adducing Fr. Ludwig?
Please ditch the evasion that pervades your previous reply, and indicate where I adduce Fr. Ludwig to advance an antisemitic agenda.
If you have become so impacted by Synodal ambiguity that you won’t restore my good name by giving a binary answer, so be it. I neither have the time nor the energy left to me to pursue this further.
Pax Tecum.
This is what I mean by a cesspool of antisemitism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSdWRyPIclM&list=PLt31tSlc3bkoc6mCPzACsx0Xfepyu62oX&index=6
Once again Joe, you didn’t answer my question regarding where I cite Fr. Ludwig to support antisemitism, which I have never done. I think Joe you will do anything but admit you cannot adduce me adducing Fr. Ludwig in support of antisemitism.
Nunc Dimittis Servum tuum Domine…..
Apologies, Dermot, for lumping you in with those who use Ott in their crusades against Vatican II.
The point I was trying to make could have been phrased as follows: “Ludwig Ott would be unhappy to see his name being dragged into the cesspool of antisemitism in which those who invoke him against Vatican II recklessly bathe.” You yourself admire him for his merits with no strings attached. I wanted to say I feel sad that you do not follow him in his support of the Council, and find it ironic that you break with your mentor on this all-important point.
When SSPX says it rejects Vatican II, this is the text they have chiefly in mind:
NOSTRA AETATE 4. As the sacred synod searches into the mystery of the Church, it remembers the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham’s stock.
Thus the Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God’s saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. She professes that all who believe in Christ-Abraham’s sons according to faith are included in the same Patriarch’s call, and likewise that the salvation of the Church is mysteriously foreshadowed by the chosen people’s exodus from the land of bondage. The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles. Indeed, the Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles. making both one in Himself.
The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: “theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary. She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church’s main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ’s Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people.
As Holy Scripture testifies, Jerusalem did not recognize the time of her visitation, nor did the Jews in large number, accept the Gospel; indeed not a few opposed its spreading. Nevertheless, God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues-such is the witness of the Apostle. In company with the Prophets and the same Apostle, the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and “serve him shoulder to shoulder” (Soph. 3:9).(12)
Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues.
True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.
Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.
Besides, as the Church has always held and holds now, Christ underwent His passion and death freely, because of the sins of men and out of infinite love, in order that all may reach salvation. It is, therefore, the burden of the Church’s preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ as the sign of God’s all-embracing love and as the fountain from which every grace flows.
*This text was the first step in the Jewish-Catholic dialogue that has flourished since, producing many more documents. SSPX says that NA 4 contradicts older texts from popes and councils, and indeed it does, stepping back to St Paul instead. The alternative is to embrace those texts which declared Jews to be under a curse and rightly condemned to perpetual servitude, and which confined them to ghettos (up to 1882 in the case of the Roman ghetto) [Cum nimis absurdum, issued by Paul IV in 1555 and ratified by later popes]. Moreover, Jews who did not become Catholics were declared incapable of sharing in eternal life and doomed to hellfire (Council of Florence in 1474). A human note is struck by Urban VIII and Benedict XIV in sternly forbidding the practice of baptizing Jewish babies against their parents’ will. This did not prevent the scandal of Pius IX abducting a Jewish child who had been de facto baptized.