Following the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, The Plough magazine re-released the transcript of a 1995 interview with the future pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The magazine is a ministry of the Bruderhof, a contemporary Hutterite Anabaptist community. Bruderhof elder Johann Christoph Arnold, met with Cardinal Ratzinger, for a conversation with a group of German Catholics. Excerpts and a link to the entire article follow.
In response to two accounts of Anabaptist martyrs, which Arnold had begun by reading:
What is truly moving in these stories is the depth of faith [of these men], their being deeply anchored in our Lord Jesus Christ, and their joy in this fact, a joy that is stronger than death. We are distressed, of course, by the fact that the church was so closely linked with the powers of the world that she was able to deliver other Christians to be executed because of their beliefs. This should be a deep challenge to us, how much we all need to repent again and again, and how much the church must renounce worldly principles and standards in order to accept the truth as the only standard, to look to Christ …
On the true path to Christian unity:
I think, too, that it is important [to realize] that we cannot bring about unity in the church by diplomatic maneuvers. The result would only be a diplomatic structure based on human principles. Instead, we must open ourselves more and more to him. The unity he brings about is alone true unity. Anything else is a political construction, which is as transitory as all political constructions are. This is the more difficult way, for in political maneuvers people themselves are active and believe they can achieve something. We must wait on the Lord, that he will give us unity, and of course we must go to meet him by cleansing our hearts. …
This is how I would see such a gathering, that we don’t try to negotiate how [Catholics and Anabaptists] can unite in the Catholic Church, but that together we allow the Lord to cleanse us and learn the truth from him, the truth that is love, and that we let him work so that he brings us together.
On the source of Christian unity:
As a Catholic one should wish that a Hutterite becomes a better Hutterite, and the other way around, a Hutterite can wish that a Catholic becomes a better Catholic, as long as one is convinced that in both cases it is the center that actually matters. To become fully Catholic means to enter fully into communion with Christ; if becoming fully Hutterite means the same thing, if it does not mean the canonization of relativism – each to his own – but on the contrary the deepest unity of truth, which is Christ himself. He is the source of the unity, and from this source it will go out into the world.
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