Pope Francis was asked about Germany’s controversial Synodal Path during his return flight from Bahrain.
This was his response:
Germany has a long religious history. Citing Hölderlin I will say: 'Many things have they seen, many...' Your religious history is great and complicated, [a history] of struggles.
I say to German Catholics: Germany has a great and beautiful Evangelical Church; I do not want another one, which will not be as good as that one; but I want a Catholic [one], in fraternity with the Evangelical. Sometimes we lose sight of the religious sense of the people, of the holy faithful People of God, and we fall into ethical discussions, discussions about contingent things, discussions that have theological consequences, but are not the core of theology.
What does the holy, faithful People of God think?
What does the holy People of God sense?
Go there and seek what it senses, that simple religiosity that you find in grandparents. I am not saying go backwards, no; but go to the source of inspiration, to the roots.
We all have a history of roots of faith; even peoples have it: Find it! That remark of Holderlin's comes to my mind, for our age: 'The old man should keep [faith with] what he promised as a boy.' We, in our boyhood... promised many things, many things. Now we get into ethical discussions, into contingent discussions, but the root of religion is the slap in the face that the Gospel gives you, the encounter with the living Jesus Christ: and from there the consequences [follow], all of them; from there you get the apostolic courage to go to the peripheries, even to the moral peripheries of people to help; but [it starts] from the encounter with Jesus Christ.
If there is no encounter with Jesus Christ, there will be an ethicism disguised as Christianity. This is what I wanted to say, from the heart.
