2014 Johannes Quasten Award Lecture and Presentation
Cardinal Walter Kasper, recipient
On Thursday, 6 November 2014, there was again standing room only in the Caldwell Auditorium for the visit of Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity from 2001-2010. Cardinal Kasper was here to receive the Johannes Quasten Award from the School of Theology and Religious Studies at CUA, an annual award for 'Excellence in Scholarship and Leadership in Religious Studies'. The Acting Dean of STRS, Msgr. Paul McPartlan, gave an address paying tribute to Cardinal Kasper as 'an outstanding bishop-theologian' and highlighting some interesting connections between the Cardinal and his work and the life and work of Quasten himself.
After receiving the award, Cardinal Kasper gave a fascinating lecture on 'The Theological Background of the Ecclesiological and Ecumenical Vision of Pope Francis', in which he identified and analyzed the spiritual and theological influences that have shaped Pope Francis. 'He is not a Franciscan in disguise, he is a Jesuit through and through', who reads the signs of the times, discerns them carefully, and then decides on practical action, and he is influenced by the specifically Argentinian version of liberation theology which is 'a theology of the people and of their culture', characterized by 'a concept of harmony and reconciliation'.
Pope Francis' principal emphases are that the Gospel is the source of our life and our joy as Christians, the antidote to the weariness of so much of modern life. Love and mercy are the core of the Gospel, and should be hallmarks of the Church. For him, the Church is the people of God on a journey, a people with a profound instinct for the truth of the Gospel, a real sensus fidei, and he wishes to decentralize, or better to re-balance, the Church so as to strengthen the role of local churches, with a renewed understanding of primacy and synodality, of the relationship between the pope and the bishops, using the very early Church as a guide. Particularly with the Pope's emphasis on evangelization, said Cardinal Kasper, 'the doors for ecumenism are wide open'.
To access the Public Affairs release regarding the lectures click here .
Click here to access a video of Cardinal Kasper's lecture.