Evangelising requires a “healthy defence of the faith”

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

The director of the Benedict XVI Institute in Regensburg, Germany, says a “healthy defence of the faith” is necessary if Catholics are to credibly spread the Gospel in contemporary societies.

Evangelisation draws on “the beauty and radiance of faith,” Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer (pictured) of Regensburg told CNA Deutsch in an interview published 1 September.

“However, it (evangelisation) needs to go hand in hand with a ‘healthy’ form of apologetics, insofar as the proclamation of the faith has never, and certainly not today, taken place in a merely benevolent and affirmative atmosphere.”

Apologetics “should demonstrate the reasonableness of faith and the hope the faith can give in the face of critical inquiries,” Voderholzer, a professor of dogmatics, said.

Bishop Voderholzer said there was a specific canon of scandals that Catholics often find themselves confronted with: “The crusades, witch trials, the Galileo case, colonialism, complicity in totalitarian systems, corruption of the Jesus tradition, and recently especially sexual abuse.”

Apologetics does not mean a “defiant denial of the dark sides of the Church, or dogmatism at any price,” the theologian warned.

“What matters is a knowledge of history, discernment and the understanding that the ‘holiness of the Church’ does not mean the moral blamelessness of all its members, but the gift of the Lord to communicate his presence, his salvation, precisely in fragile vessels.”

Asked about role models for a “healthy form of apologetics,” the German prelate said he thought of Irenaeus of Lyon, Thomas Aquinas, Blaise Pascal, John Henry Newman, Henri de Lubac, and also Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI.

“They all know that the revelation of God, which is handed down to us in the Holy Scriptures and the faith of the Church, is self-evident,” he said.

Voderholzer is the founding director of the Pope Benedict XVI Institute, which was created in 2008 to compile and make available both published and unpublished writings of the theologian, bishop and pope emeritus.