Faithful seeking help at the tomb of Saint Wolfgang in Regensburg,
painting by Jan Pollak, circa 1500
What, actually, should the credible politician, like the credible shepherd, look like? In a similar crisis of trust, Plato said that the blindness of average politics is due to the fact that their representatives fight for power “as if it were a great good”. The real statesman must be a man who has seen through this striving for semblance and appearance. He must be a person who understands politics to be service and accepts it as a burden, as a renunciation of the greater, which he has tasted: the beauty of knowing, being free for truth. The criteria for the right shepherd in the Church are not at all essentially different. Whoever would seek the priesthood or office of bishop as an increase in power and prestige has fundamentally misunderstood it. Whoever wants above all to become something himself with such offices will always be the slave of public opinion. He must flatter in order to maintain his importance. He must accommodate. He must agree with people. He has to accommodate himself to the changing currents and thus he becomes truthless, for he must condemn tomorrow what he praised today. Then he no longer really loves people at all, but in the end loves only himself, although at the same time he loses even himself to the opinion that happens to be the stronger. I do not need to continue with such descriptions. Unfortunately, we know such behavior clearly enough from various instances in public life.
Let us return to the question of the credible shepherd. What would he look like? Correspondence between outside and inside belongs to credibility. But that is not enough. For an evil person who openly professes to be such is also credible in this sense. Proper credibility requires that the inner life of this person correspond to the true sense of being human. We could simply say: Whoever wants to appear good outwardly must first, above all, be good interiorly. And good is the man who is as God intended him to be. Good is the man who is pleasing to God; the man in whom some of God’s light flashes. Good is the man who does not cover the light of God with his own I, who does not put himself first but rather steps aside to let God shine through. In this way the path leads on its own from the demand for credibility back to the word “sanctity”, when we understand it correctly only in its original simplicity.
What we have just suggested, however, actually applies to every person. For anyone who wants to serve the flock of Christ, these general indications must assume a quite specific form corresponding to this mission. I have said already that a priest or bishop may not seek his own prestige in this service, his own personal advancement. Saint Augustine once related that he wept inwardly after his ordination to the priesthood, not only because he had lost the freedom of the philosopher, but also because he was beset by the realization: Now you bear not only your own burden; you must carry the others too. Now you must take responsibility not only for your own life, you will also be asked about the many who have been entrusted to you. Will I be able to bear up under that? Will I be able to serve them as they deserve? We find something similar in the history of all the great callings. A Moses, a Jeremiah, a Jonah struggle with all their powers against God’s unreasonable demand that they be his mouth and his hand. They do not fear only, nor do they fear first, the contradiction of men, which they have amply experienced. They fear above all their own inadequacy. They see how far short, with their own human stature, they fall from what they should be. They fear that they will be unable to be credible when they take God’s words on their poor human lips. Only apparently is Isaiah an exception. The glory of the thrice-holy God has appeared to him. But then he hears the voice of the Lord, who says: Whom shall I send? Who goes in my behalf? And he answers: “Here am I! Send me” (Is 6:8). He does not offer himself because he wants to achieve something for himself, but because God has need of him and because he knows that he is in good hands when he puts himself into God’s hands.
With this confident awareness, Moses, Jeremiah, and the many ambassadors of God throughout history could accept their missions—credible, not through their own achievement and greatness, but rather credible through the humility with which they engaged themselves in service that they had not sought for themselves. Credible because they moved their own I to the side and gave God room.
And so we have come finally to the saint whom we have recently commemorated in a year-long celebration, Wolfgang von Regensburg, who died one thousand years ago, in 994. Wolfgang did not seek the office of bishop. His way of life appears over a long stretch of time as a painstaking search for his true vocation. He studied at Reichenau and in Wurzburg, then became cathedral scholastic in Trier. Finally Emperor Otto I called him to his chancellery in Cologne. He declined the bishop’s chair offered him by Bishop Bruno of Cologne. He had not yet made up his mind, and he did not want simply to enter the royal / ecclesial system that had developed in the meantime. He wanted to find his way. Wolfgang had turned forty years old before he came to his own life decision. He became a monk, not in the splendid monastery on Reichenau that he knew from his youth, but in Einsiedeln, which he had chosen because of the strict discipline of its rule. Thus a deeper and more struggling man appears before us. We may conceive of the rule of Saint Benedict, to which he now subordinated himself with his whole heart, as a kind of inner portrait of this man. There it says: “Having girt our loins with faith and the performance of good works, let us walk his ways under the guidance of the gospel, that we may be found worthy of seeing him who has called us to his kingdom.”
“Walk the ways of the Lord under the guidance of the gospel”—Wolfgang had not yet arrived at the goal; the gospel demanded more of him. Europe had become Christian, but this Christian Europe ended at the borders of Pannonia, today’s Hungary. Christendom stood armed against the belligerent tribes of horsemen in the East. In the Battle at Lechfeld even Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg had fought in 955. He ordained Wolfgang priest in 968. But now a new hour was there. Wolfgang left as once the great missionaries from Ireland and England had left for the continent. He went to Hungary, not with a sword, but with the gospel, as the defenseless messenger of the defenseless Lord Jesus Christ.
His attempt at proselytizing failed, but his way with the gospel and for the gospel was still a way of divine guidance. Bishop Pilgrim of Passau summoned the no doubt suspicious “vagabond monk” to himself, but through the personal encounter he recognized in this man a true servant of Jesus Christ and recommended him to the emperor to be the bishop of Regensburg. Imperial advisors expressed extreme reservations against the poor and unknown monk, but Pilgrim’s recommendation was accepted. So Wolfgang became bishop of the city on the Danube in 972 / 973.
Did he then succumb to career ambitions? His biographer Otloh of Saint Emmeram characterizes the transition to bishop’s office with the words: deserens monasterium, non monachum—he left the monastic home but not the monastic life. He arrived at that place about which Isaiah spoke: Here am I, Lord, send me. Or at the place of Jonah, who—spewed forth from the whale—knew that he could not no longer flee but rather had to proclaim God’s will. Now he could also do so, for he had indeed found his vocation. He was monk and priest, ready to walk the ways “that the Lord shows us”.
Saint Wolfgang’s years as bishop are characterized by two significant renunciations that are consistent with what we have previously considered. Wolfgang gave his agreement to the establishment of the bishopric of Prague and thereby to the separation of Bohemia from his diocese. For bishops who thought more like princes and of the question of ownership, that might seem odd. But this holy bishop did not regard his mission from the viewpoint of power. His question was how the gospel and, via the gospel, men could best be served. The words that he pronounced in this moment show the figure of the Good Shepherd. “We see hidden in the earth of that land a precious pearl that we cannot acquire without sacrificing our treasures. Therefore, hear: Gladly I would offer up myself and what is mine so that the Church might be strengthened there and the house of the Lord acquire solid ground.” Those are words that
reach into the present and concern us. The renunciation of Bohemia so that a new diocese and vibrant Church might develop there out of the inner strengths of the country could become a strong bond between Regensburg and Prague, between Bavaria and Bohemia. For here we meet in exemplary fashion that frame of mind that creates freedom and establishes friendship. The ability to do without does not make one poorer. Rather the ability to do without is again and again the condition for true greatness, for greatness has to do with selflessness, with inner freedom, with purity of heart, and with recognition of the other, with justice and love. When we think of Saint Wolfgang, we seek these dispositions. Remembering him means opening ourselves to the other in the common search of the way of the Lord, not according to our notions, but “under the guidance of the gospel”.
The other renunciation consisted in Wolfgang’s implementing the separation of the offices of abbot and bishop. It may have been the case that it was difficult for him, who had found his vocation in becoming a monk, to relinquish the abbot’s staff of Saint Emmeram in order to be only Bishop of Regensburg. But Wolfgang saw very clearly the distinctive profile of each of the commissions. The monastic community needs its father entirely. He holds them together in their service of prayer and daily work so that they may really be a “school of service for the Lord”, as Benedict formulated it. The bishop with his missionary charge must, however, always be able to go to the people. This decision, too, has left Wolfgang and his diocese richer. The bishop thereby became, not less, but more free for his mission. Thus Wolfgang’s second important decision not only teaches us that renunciations are holy; we can also learn from this about the harmony between religious life and Christian service in the world.
A person’s rank is probably best revealed in what he gives to other men, and in how he might form other men. Wolfgang was influential, not through books but also through men, to whom he communicated his strength of faith and his humanity, which proceeded from his faith. It would take too long to enumerate all the benefits Regensburg received from Wolfgang’s students. His favorite student, Tagino, became Archbishop of Magdeburg; the episcopal sees of Trier, Merseburg, and Luettich were occupied by students of Saint Wolfgang. A series of abbeys sought their spiritual father in Saint Emmeram of Regensburg. Emperor Henry II, the saint, was educated by Wolfgang. In an especially nice coincidence, his student Gisela was to become the wife of King Stephen of Hungary, and thus the christianization of Hungary succeeded in a new generation, something for which Wolfgang had labored in vain.
“Blessed are they who fear the Lord and walk in his ways”, the psalm tells us (cf. Ps 33:18). Every man wants to be happy. But how does he succeed? If we look at Wolfgang, the renunciations capture our attention first and above all. He declines the office of bishop. He looks for the hiddenness of the monastery, its quiet and its peace. But he must leave and then even become bishop. He must at the same time renounce his own life and take the burden of another on himself because the Lord wants this of him. Has he thus missed happiness? Has he missed his own life?
The opposite is the case. He who would find himself loses himself. Whoever always looks at himself experiences what Lot’s wife did: he becomes sour, turns into salt. Wolfgang’s life decision was: Walk the way the Lord shows us under the guidance of the gospel. And so he entered into the promise of the psalm precisely because he did not look at himself. Because he gave much, because he gave himself, for this reason he was an interiorly rich and happy man—a man from whom a great inner light streamed and continues to stream. Wolfgang is a credible shepherd; more: a holy man. We may trust him. He shows the right path.
Pieta, middle panel of altar tryptych,
Saint Mary of the Pieta, Campo Santo Teutonico, Rome
All Saints’ day
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At the Feet of Saint Peter’s Basilica
The “Campo Santo Teutonico”, the German cemetery of Rome, once belonged to Nero’s circus, which extended far into the Saint Peter’s Square of today. This is the place where the first martyrs of Rome died for Christ. Nero made death into a spectacle. Some he had burned as living torches; others he had sewn into animal skins and thrown to wild dogs, who tore them to pieces. The cemetery where Peter was buried was nearby. One can now visit large parts of it under Saint Peter’s Basilica today. The place where Nero played his macabre game of death has become a holy place for Christians. The tyrant took his own life, but even the presumably indestructible Roman Empire fell. The faith of martyrs, the faith of Peter, survived both the tyrants and the Roman Empire. It proved to be the force that in all downfalls was capable of building a new world.
Around the year 800 the Franks, at this point the supreme power of the West, founded a cemetery here in which they buried their pilgrims to Rome. The cemetery of the Germans in Rome evolved from this. It is not difficult to guess what the Franks were thinking to themselves. The tomb of Peter was no ordinary tomb. It bore witness to the stronger power of Jesus Christ, which extends beyond death. The sign of hope stands here over death. Whoever has himself buried in this spot holds fast to hope in the victorious faith of Peter and the martyrs. Peter’s tomb, like every tomb, speaks of the unavoidability of death, but it speaks above all of the resurrection. It tells us that God is stronger than death and that whoever dies in Christ dies into life. One wanted to rest in the vicinity of Peter, in the vicinity of the martyrs, in order to be in good company in death and in the resurrection. One bound oneself to the saints and thereby bound oneself to the saving power of Jesus Christ himself. The communion of saints embraces life and death. One holds fast precisely in death in order not to fall into the void, in order to be pulled up by the saints into true life, in order at the same time in their company not to be alone before the judge, in order to be able to withstand, with them, the hour of judgment.
Thus the cemetery, the site of mourning and transience, has become a place of hope. Whoever has himself buried here thereby says: I believe you, Christ, who rose from the dead. I hold fast to you. I do not come alone in the mortal loneliness of those who cannot love. I come in the communion of saints, who even in death do not leave me. The transformation of the place of mourning into a place of hope is seen also in the external form of this cemetery and of any Christian cemetery for that matter. Flowers and more flowers decorate it; signs of love and bonds adorn it. It is like a garden, a small paradise of peace in a world without peace and thus is a sign of new life.
Cemetery as place of hope. That is Christian. That is the applied faith of the martyrs, applied faith in the resurrection. But we must add: hope does not simply cancel sadness. Faith is human, and it is honest. It gives us a new horizon, the larger and comforting view into the expanse of eternal life. But it lets us at the same time remain in the place where we are. We do not have to suppress mourning; we accept it, and through the view into the expanse, mourning is slowly transformed and thereby purifies us, makes us more keen-sighted for today and tomorrow. It was very human that the funeral liturgy earlier omitted the alleluia and so gave clear room for mourning. We cannot simply jump over the Now of our lives. Only in accepting mourning can we learn to discover hope in darkness.
These connections are very poignantly expressed in the church to which this cemetery belongs. It is dedicated to the sorrowful Mother of God, who in Italian is called Madonna della Pieta, our Lady of Sympathy. Who could have held faster to the faith in the resurrection than Mary? Who could have been more certain of hope than she? But she suffers. Despite her certainty about the resurrection, death pains her; the moment of Good Friday is inexpressibly dark. She suffers as one who loves. She loves and suffers with us. Mary is depicted on the high altar of the church bending over the body of her son, who is carried by two men. Her face is full of sadness, but it is also full of kindness. The pain comes from the kindness and is therefore without bitterness or accusation. Let us take comfort in this picture. We learn from this picture that sadness, that pain accepted, makes us purer and more mature and helps us to see bett
er the perspectives of life. It teaches us to turn more and more to the eternal. It helps us to be more loving and compassionate with those who bear suffering.
So the message of the cemetery is multiple. It reminds us of death and of eternal life. But it speaks to us, also, precisely of our present, everyday life. It encourages us to think of what passes and what abides. It invites us not to lose sight of standards and the goal. It is not what we have that counts but rather what we are for God and for man. The cemetery invites us to live in such a way that we do not leave the communion of saints. It invites us to seek in life and to be that which can last in death and in eternity.
Fresco (Mother with Son) from the Cameterium Maius, Rome, first half of the second century
All Souls’ Day
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Places of Hope—
The Roman Catacombs
On the street of tombs we have wandered into the land of the past. With these words Johann Jakob Bachofen, the great nineteenth-century researcher of fallen cultures, characterized the path of his science. From the very beginning, human beings have cared for their dead, trying to give them a kind of second life through their ministrations. Thus the past world of those who were once living remains in the world of the dead. Death has preserved what life was not able to preserve. How men lived, what they loved, what they feared, what they hoped for, and what they detested—nowhere do we learn these things so exactly as in the tombs that remain for us as a mirror of their world. And nowhere do we experience early Christianity so much in the present moment as in the catacombs. When we wander through their dark passageways, it is as if we ourselves have crossed the time line and are being watched by those who have preserved here their grief and their hope.
Images of Hope Page 8