This is good. If you don’t have time to read it today, file it, save it and keep it in your head to send it on to folks who still don’t get what this pontificate is all about, who are clinging to the Rottweiler imagery or, on the other hand, who are summarizing 2006-the-Year-in-Pope as "An encyclical on love (snort) and an ill-conceived speech by a Pope who obviously really needs some better handlers."

Sandro Magister reports on a talk Cardinal Ruini gave last week to the priests of Rome:

Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope’s vicar for the diocese of Rome, periodically meets with his priests to present and discuss pastoral projects, liturgical questions, catechesis, etc.

But on Thursday, December 14, he made a spectacular break from the program.

He convened the priests behind closed doors in the main hall of the Pontifical Lateran University, to give them a lecture on nothing less than the “heart” of the teaching of Benedict XVI.

snip

In concluding his lecture, Ruini recognized that Ratzinger “certainly holds no illusions about the current state of health of the Catholic Church, and of Christianity more in general.”

But he faces the greatness of his task – which is even “excessive” – with the certainty that “he who believes is never alone.”

Cardinal Ruini delivered his lecture and responded to questions with a zest and a measure of optimism that greatly impressed those present.

Next February he will turn 76 years old, the canonical age that normally leads to retirement.

But while leaving the hall, some of his priests commented: “A lecture like that is not a goodbye. It is a new beginning.”

He includes the entire text of the Cardinal’s talk. Some excerpts:

Having taught fundamental theology at first and later dogmatic theology, he has an approach to issues in which theoretical and philosophical exploration is placed within a perspective that is above all historical and concrete.

Furthermore, his formation is essentially biblical, patristic, and liturgical, and he confronts current problems in the light of this. His attitude toward these problems certainly denotes acute critical capacities, but it is marked above all by the desire to be constructive, by openness, and by friendliness. His autographical book, “My Life,” is of particular interest for gaining an idea of how he himself views his formation and his work as a theologian.

Coming now to our topic, I think it’s right to take as our point of departure the conviction, expressed by cardinal Ratzinger, that “at the end of the second millennium, Christianity finds itself, precisely in the place of its original diffusion, Europe, in a profound crisis, based upon the crisis over its claim to truth” (“Faith,” p. 170).

This crisis has a twofold dimension: mistrust toward man’s ability to grasp the truth about God and about divine things, and the doubts that the modern natural and historical sciences have raised about the tenets and origins of Christianity.

What follows is a restatement and reflection on much of what was said in the Regensburg speech and so, consequently, the aspects of Ratzinger’s thought which was expressed in that speech: the role of reason, the relationship between Christianity and other faiths, etc. But why Jesus? Why the focus on Jesus?

At this point, we are able to understand better Benedict XVI’s theological and pastoral approach.

He devotes great attention to the relationship between faith and reason, and to the assertion of the truth of Christianity.

But he does this in a way that is not at all rationalistic. On the contrary, he views as a failure the Neo–Scholastic attempt to demonstrate the truths of the premises of faith (the “praeambula fidei”) through a form of reasoning rigorously separated from the faith itself, and he maintains that similar attempts are also destined to fail, as failure has met the contrary attempt by Karl Barth to present the faith as a pure paradox, which can subsist only in total independence from reason (cf. “Faith,” pp. 141-142).

So in concrete terms, the way that leads to God is Jesus Christ, not only because it is only in Him that we can know the face of God, his attitude toward us, and the mystery of his intimate life itself, of the one and absolute God who exists in three Persons totally “interrelated” – all of the implications of this mystery for our lives and our understanding of God, man, and the world have yet to be elaborated – but also because it is only in the cross of the Son, in which God’s merciful and steadfast love for us is displayed in its most radical form, that a mysterious but convincing response can be found for the problem of evil and suffering, which has always been – although it has new power in our humanistic age – the source of the most serious doubts about the existence of God. For this reason prayer, the adoration that opens us to the gift of the Spirit and frees our hearts and minds, is an essential dimension not only of the Christian life, but also of the believer’s understanding and the theologian’s work (cf. the Verona address; “Introduction,” pp. 135-146; and the 1959 inaugural address at the University of Bonn).

It is not out of mere personal taste, therefore, that Benedict XVI is using “all his free moments” to carry forward his book “Jesus of Nazareth,” the first part of which will be published soon, and portions of the preface and introduction of which have already been released.

The separation between the “Christ of faith” and the real “historical Jesus,” which exegesis based upon the historical-critical method seems to have deepened more and more, constitutes a “dramatic” situation for the faith, because “it brings uncertainty to its authentic point of reference.”

For this reason, J. Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has dedicated himself to demonstrating that the Jesus of the Gospels and of the Church’s faith is, in reality, the true “historical Jesus,” and he does this by employing the historical-critical method. He willingly acknowledges the many positive results of this, but he also goes beyond it, taking a broader perspective that permits a properly theological interpretation of Scripture, and which thus requires faith without dispelling the need for historical seriousness (cf. the published sections of the preface).

BTW, Michael’s rather moving memory of seeing Cardinal Ruini in Rome this past February.

…. I attended a Mass that he said in the Clementine Chapel one morning that included a priest, three Italian women and me.  More.