"'This is why her God will be my God.'"

"During this period, since Daphrose [Rugamba] was a Christian, she prayed and cared for her husband.  Cyprien told me:  'After everything I did to her, she didn’t leave me, even when I got sick.  Instead, she took care of me.  This is why her God will be my God.'"

     Xaverine Kabihogo, in the film J’entrerai au ciel en dansant =Nzinjira mu ijuru mpamiriz, by François Lespes (2018), 14:24.  According to the film, Cyprien was struck, in the early 1980s, by "a mysterious illness" that affected not just his appetite, but "all . . . his senses":  touch, hearing, sight, etc.

"joint heirs of the grace of life"

     1 Pet 3:7 RSV.  Photo is of Servants of God Cyprian and Daphrose Rugamba (m. 7 April 1994).

Exorcism "is beginning to acquire again today that urgency which it had at the dawn of Christianity."

      "What does this [first] standard signify for our question?  Anyone who applies it comes upon an amazing result.  Whereas just now, in the question about creation and in the question about the Law, we found that the New Testament, as compared to the Old, contracts the matter into a simple central truth, exactly the opposite happens here, in a movement of expansion.  The notion of demonic powers enters only hesitantly into the Old Testament, whereas in the life of Jesus it acquires unprecedented weight, which is undiminished in Paul's letters and continues into the latest New Testament writings, the captivity letters and the Gospel of John.  This process of amplification from the Old Testament into the New, along with the extreme crystallization of the demonic precisely in contrast to the figure of Jesus and the persistence of the theme throughout the New Testament witness, is telling."

     Joseph Ratzinger, "Farewell to the devil?" (Spring 1973), trans. Michael J. Miller, in Dogma and preaching:  applying Christian doctrine to daily life, trans. Michael J. Miller and Matthew J. O'Connell (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2011 [4th ed. of Dogma und Verkündigung, 2005]), 200 (197-205).  "Only after the belief in the one God, with all its consequences, had become the unshakable possession of Israel could the view be widened to include powers that overrun the world of man, without letting them challenge God's uniqueness" (201).  Ratzinger goes on to name three additional standards or "aids to judgment" that can "keep the  faith from being truncated for the sake of modernity" (199), and it is under no. 3 the following occurs (203):

the more visible and powerful holiness becomes, the less the devil can conceal himself.  In this respect, one could even say that the disappearance of demons that supposedly leaves the world without danger goes hand in hand with the disappearance of holiness.

"Gradually we have stopped laughing"

     "Did we not also have, in the ten years after Gaudium et spes, experiences that, despite the differences of level, were not entirely unlike those that lay behind the metaphorphosis of Don Quixote?  We started out boldly and full of confidence in ourselves; there may have been, in thought and, perhaps, also in reality, many an auto-da-fé of scholarly books that seemed to us to be foolish novels of chivalry that led us only into the land of dreams and made us see dangerous giants in the beneficial effects of technology, in the vanes of its windmills.  Boldly and certain of victory, we barricaded the door of a time that was past and proclaimed the abrogation and annihilation of all that lay behind it.  In conciliar and postconciliar literature, there is abundant evidence of the ridicule with which, like pupils ready for graduation, we bade farewell to our outmoded schoolbooks.  In the meantime, however, our ears and our souls have been pierced by a different kind of ridicule that mocks more than we had wanted or wished.  Gradually we have stopped laughing; gradually we have become aware that behind the closed doors are concealed those things that we must not lose if we do not want to lose our souls as well.  Certainly we cannot return to the past, nor have we any desire to do so.  But we must be ready to reflect anew on that which, in the lapse of time, has remained the one constant.  To seek it without distraction and to dare to accept, with joyful heart and without diminution, the foolishness of truth—this, I think, is the task for today and for tomorrow:  the true nucleus of the Church's service to the world, her answer to 'the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men of our time' (Gaudium et spes, 903)."

     Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic theology:  building stones for a fundamental theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 1987 [1982]), 393 ="Der Weltdienst der Kirche:  Auswirkungen von 'Gaudium et spes' in letzten Jahrzehnt," Internationale katholischen Zeitschrift Communio 4 (1974):  454.

Forgive the sin that we have wrought; | Increase the good that we have sought

Laxa malum, quod fecimus,

Auge bonum, quod poscimus. . . .

Forgive the sin that we have wrought;

Increase the good that we have sought. . . .

Undo the bad that we have wrought;

Increase the good that we have sought. . . .

     Ex more docti mystico.

Prayer renders one objective

"If you were still to ask me now before I go, and finally go, whether I know of a magic key to open the final door to wisdom, I would answer you:  'Yes, indeed!'  And the magic key is not reflection, as you might expect to hear from a philosopher, but prayer.  [Prayer, understood as ultimate surrender, renders [one] still, renders [one] childlike, renders [one] objective.  For me, a man grows deeper and deeper into the expans[iveness] of humanity (I don't mean humanism) to the extent that he is able to pray, provided only that the right [kind of] prayer is meant.  Prayer characterizes all ultimate 'humility' of mind.]  The great things of existence are only given to praying [minds].  [But one learns to pray best in suffering.]"

     Peter Wust, Abschiedswort (18 December 1939), as translated in Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI:  a life, vol. 1:  youth in Nazi Germany to the Second Vatican Council, trans. Dinah Livingstone (London:  Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020), 164.  I have filled the Livingstone translation out on the basis of the Peter-Wust-Gesellschaft German below, translating Geist somewhat riskily as mind.

"Und wenn Sie mich nun noch fragen sollten, bevor ich jetzt gehe und endgültig gehe, ob ich nicht einen Zauberschlüssel kenne, der einem das letzte Tor zur Weisheit des Lebens erschließen könne, dann würde ich Ihnen antworten: 'Jawohl'. - Und zwar ist dieser Zauberschlüssel nicht die Reflexion, wie Sie es von einem Philosophen vielleicht erwarten möchten, sondern das Gebet. Das Gebet, als letzte Hingabe gefaßt, macht still, macht kindlich, macht objektiv. Ein Mensch wächst für mich in dem Maße immer tiefer hinein in den Raum der Humanität - nicht des Humanismus -, wie er zu beten imstande ist, wofern nur das rechte Beten gemeint ist. Gebet kennzeichnet alle letzte 'Humilitas' des Geistes. Die großen Dinge des Daseins werden nur den betenden Geistern geschenkt. Beten lernen aber kann man am besten im Leiden."

     Peter Wust, Abschiedswort (18 December 1939) =Gesammelte Werke 7 (1966), 339-340, as quoted on the last page of Werner Schüßler, "Peter Wust - eine biographische Skizze," under "Biographie," under "Peter Wust," at http://www.peter-wust-gesellschaft.de/ (Peter-Wust-Gesellschaft).

"Sensibility to the truth"

"The danger for the western world—to speak only of this—is that today, precisely because of the greatness of his knowledge and power, man will fail to face up to the question of the truth. This would mean at the same time that reason would ultimately bow to the pressure of interests and the attraction of utility, constrained to recognize this as the ultimate criterion. To put it from the point of view of the structure of the university: there is a danger that philosophy, no longer considering itself capable of its true task, will degenerate into positivism; and that theology, with its message addressed to reason, will be limited to the private sphere of a more or less numerous group. Yet if reason, out of concern for its alleged purity, becomes deaf to the great message that comes to it from Christian faith and wisdom, then it withers like a tree whose roots can no longer reach the waters that give it life. It loses the courage for truth and thus becomes not greater but smaller. Applied to our European culture, this means: if our culture seeks only to build itself on the basis of the circle of its own argumentation, on what convinces it at the time, and if—anxious to preserve its secularism—it detaches itself from its life-giving roots, then it will not become more reasonable or purer, but will fall apart and disintegrate."

     Pope Benedict XVI, Lecture by the Holy Father Benedict XVI at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" scheduled for 17 January 2008 but undelivered.  "Jürgen Habermas articulates a vast consensus of contemporary thought when he says that the legitimacy of a constitutional charter, as a basis for what is legal, derives from two sources: from the equal participation of all citizens in the political process and from the reasonable manner in which political disputes are resolved. With regard to this “reasonable manner”, he notes that it cannot simply be a fight for arithmetical majorities, but must have the character of a 'process of argumentation sensitive to the truth' (wahrheitssensibles Argumentationsverfahren). The point is well made, but it is far from easy to put it into practice politically. The representatives of that public 'process of argumentation” are – as we know – principally political parties, inasmuch as these are responsible for the formation of political will. De facto, they will always aim to achieve majorities and hence will almost inevitably attend to interests that they promise to satisfy, even though these interests are often particular and do not truly serve the whole. Sensibility to the truth is repeatedly subordinated to sensibility to interests. I find it significant that Habermas speaks of sensibility to the truth as a necessary element in the process of political argument, thereby reintroducing the concept of truth into philosophical and political debate."