St. Bonaventure, Benedict XVI, and the New Evangelization | William L. Patenaude | Catholic World Report
For Benedict XVI, evangelization is what takes place when revelation slips through history.
The timing and intent of Pope Benedict XVI’s call for a “New Evangelization” have as much to do with his theological and pastoral pedigree as they do with the state of affairs in which the Church lives. His early contributions to the topics of revelation, human history, and the relation between the two—which brought the young Joseph Ratzinger both praise and charges of championing “dangerous modernism”—today assist the Church in engaging modern ills with the enduring truths of the Gospel.
Of course, with a mind as expansive as Pope Benedict’s, no one event, or even a series of them, can be said to be “the” development that defines him. Certainly, his upbringing in Catholic Bavaria, his forced participation in World War II as a teenager, and his days among bomb-damaged seminary buildings studying St. Augustine, Henri de Lubac, Romano Guardini, Martin Buber, and so many others all influenced who the man is today. Still, not every encounter with the past has equal influence.
Joachim of Fiore, St. Bonaventure, and salvation history
In the mid-1950s, Father Joseph Ratzinger began work on his second doctoral thesis—a standard requirement of the German theological academy. The study would introduce him to a dramatic moment in Church history, when rumors of the world’s end and the coming of a new age clashed with Christian orthodoxy. The players in this drama were Joachim of Fiore, an eccentric 12th-century Italian abbot; St. Bonaventure, a 13th-century leader of the Franciscan Order; and an overly idealistic group of Franciscans known as Spiritualists.
Ratzinger concluded that Joachim, Bonaventure, and the events of the 13th century brought to the Church a “new theory of scriptural exegesis which emphasizes the historical character” of Scripture. This new theory was, notably, “in contrast to the exegesis of the Fathers and the Scholastics which had been more clearly directed to the unchangeable and the enduring.” In finding value in such a view, Ratzinger aligned himself with a school of theologians that sought fresh approaches to orthodox Christian theology.
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