Maurice Zundel

Maurice Zundel OblOSB (born January 21, 1897 in Neuchâtel , † August 10, 1975 in Ouchy , Lausanne ) was a Swiss Roman Catholic clergyman and theologian.

Life

family

Maurice Zundel was the son of the senior postal worker Werner Zundel and his wife Léonie, nee. Gauthier. His mother came from the French-speaking part of the canton of Friborg and was brought up in a ritual Catholicism. His father was "active liberal" according to the liberal Catholic liberalism that operated the abolition of monasteries in the 1840s, rejected the new papal dogmas after Vatican I (1869/70) and welcomed the establishment of Old Catholic communities. The Protestant grandmother was anti-Catholic. She also had the greatest influence on his life because “she stood up for the dignity of the poor and lived constantly in the awareness that God was present. She was the most Christian person in my family ”. His uncle Auguste was a member of the Order of Christian School Brothers and a teacher at the Catholic diaspora school in Neuchâtel. But his father only let him go to the daily school mass and breakfast at that school; he had to attend classes at the public school with Protestant teachers.

Career

education

He attended high school in Neuchâtel; one of his classmates was Jean Piaget , who later became a Geneva psychologist, with whom he founded the Friends of Nature Club . He continued attending school at the St. Michael College in Freiburg. A formative experience was the encounter with a Protestant classmate who lived in poor conditions, read the Bible, but could not study for economic reasons. With this he discussed the living conditions of the poor and the biblical Sermon on the Mount , later he learned that his friend had chosen suicide in the hopelessness .

In this situation he decided to become a Catholic priest and, in preparation for the seminary , attended the collegiate school at Einsiedeln Abbey from 1913 to 1915 ; as "Brother Benedict" he became a Benedictine wafer .

He completed his theology studies at the Collegium Borromaeum seminary in Freiburg .

Work in Geneva

In 1919 he was ordained a priest in the diocese of Lausanne-Geneva and until 1925 he was vicar in Geneva . After a short time he drew attention to himself because he criticized the conventional image of God and man and used “profane authors” instead of the catechism in religious instruction and discussed social issues, marriage and gender education with young people. In 1921 he published an essay on women's suffrage , which was only introduced in Switzerland in 1971.

Wandering time

Because his bishop , Marius Besson , found him too independent, "he was a lateral thinker and privateer, and the Church just doesn't particularly love privateers", he forbade him from 1925 onwards from any activity in the diocese. The bishop sent him to the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome to “follow up” his theology there . Maurice Zundel chose philosophy as a subject and wrote a doctoral thesis on the influence of nominalism on Christian thought . From Rome he published his first book Le Poème de la sainte Liturgie in 1926 under the name “Brother Benedict” . After receiving his doctorate in 1927 as Dr. phil. he hoped to return to his home diocese, but the bishop does not allow him to do pastoral or academic work there.

Friends found Maurice Zundel a job in Paris in 1927, first as the third vicar in the parish of Charenton . After six months he became a chaplain to the Benedictine Sisters of Saint Louis du Temple on Rue Monsieur in Paris . During this time he also met Giovanni Battista Montini from Milan , who later became Pope Paul VI. know; he recognized in him “a genius as a poet, as a mystic, writer and theologian, and all of this from a single source, with flashes of inspiration”.

Based on the figure of Francis of Assisi, he experienced “poverty” as the life impulse of everything: letting go, becoming empty, longing beyond oneself. He concluded that “everything had to be changed, everything to be questioned: the entire Bible, the entire tradition, the entire liturgy, the entire Christian morality, the entire philosophy, the entire understanding of knowledge and science, of property and law , including the entire understanding of hierarchy, “everything had to be turned around, from the outside to the inside.

He became a chaplain to the Assumptionists in London , where he sympathetically studied Anglicanism . Because he still wanted to go back to Switzerland, he managed to get the job of chaplain in a girls' boarding school, but after a short time the bishop forbade him to do this too. A school of the same order of women near Paris accepted him, also as a chaplain.

From Paris drove Maurice Zundel in 1937 for a year of study at the Bible school of Dominicans in Jerusalem ; there he devoted himself to the biblical languages Hebrew and Greek as well as more recent questions of exegesis .

Back in Paris, he published his new book Recherche de la personne (Search for the Person) in 1938 . At the behest of the home bishop it was withdrawn from trading. It treats marriage and love issues too realistically; that is not appropriate for a priest.

At the beginning of the Second World War he managed to get accommodation in the bell tower of Bex in the canton of Vaud , but by order of the bishop he remained unemployed, so that, following advice from friends, he moved to Cairo ; there the Carmel Matarieh offered him shelter and made various pastoral services possible for him in Egypt . In Egypt he encountered Islam , read the Koran and learned Arabic . He studied Islamic mystics, in particular Al-Hallādsch (857-922), who had said of himself “I am the divine truth” and was therefore executed and crucified as a false teacher.

Return to Switzerland

After the death of Bishop Besson, he was able to return home in 1945 and became an assistant priest in Ouchy-Lausanne and worked as a preacher, lecturer, writer and spiritual master at home and abroad until his death. His brilliant knowledge of modern philosophy, literature and science was famous; But even after his return it remained controversial and in the 1960s it was recommended in French-speaking Switzerland to avoid his lectures and writings.

In 1965 Giovanni Battista Montini asked him, who has since become Pope Paul VI. was, in the Vatican, at the end of the Second Vatican Council , to give the lectures on the fasting retreat. In February 1967 the Pope asked him to write “a book on the religious problems of our time”. The Pope expressly referred to him in the encyclical Populorum Progressio on the progress of the peoples of March 26, 1967 and in his address at the International Thomist Congress in Rome in 1970 and invited him in 1972 as a retreat master. These lectures appeared a year after his death under the title What Man and What God? "" With the support of the Pope, he was now increasingly gaining acceptance.

Maurice Zundel was buried in the Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption basilica in Neuchâtel. The University Library of Neuchâtel looks after the private library that he bequeathed to it.

Act

Maurice Zundel wrote numerous theological and mystical writings. As a mystical thinker and unconventional theologian, he stood in the tradition of personalism and Francis of Assisi.

His main concern was to criticize the theistic image of God. There can be no omnipotent and omniscient being that works from outside into the world and into our life. To the address of the church people, Maurice Zundel said: “Keep this God for yourselves, gentlemen. It is your invention, your monopoly. Under his name you worship your own image and the safeguarding of your privileges - and the people die from him. ”And looking at the theodicy :“ I get angry when I hear you say that God allows evil. ”So he repeated often: "Il faut changer de Dieu - We have to change God."

Because Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche wrote in Also Spoke Zarathustra : “Man is a rope, tied between animal and superman - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous look back, a dangerous shudder and stopping, "remarked a high school teacher to him:" You remind me of the Nietzsche dancer on a high rope. "

He published his ideas in many works. His best-known book was the liturgical book , which the liturgical movement wanted to have in German as well. The translator was Paula von Preradović (1887–1951), a Viennese poet and writer of Croatian origin, who later became known as the author of the text of the Austrian national anthem , to whose Viennese circle of friends Cardinal Theodor Innitzer , cathedral capitular Karl Rudolf and the canon Pius Parsch , who dated from Klosterneuburg Abbey , which drove the liturgical movement, belonged. Her religious poetry related to liturgical texts and church festivals, so she was entrusted with the task of translating Maurice Zundel's liturgy book. It was published in 1937, with imprimatur of the Archdiocese of Vienna , in the Tyrolia publishing house under the title The Song of Holy Mass . In 1938 the SA banned the production of all Tyrolia newspapers and severely restricted Tyrolia's book production. As a result, the printing plates of the Zundel book were also destroyed; Only in 1948 did the Rex publishing house in Lucerne bring out a new “authorized licensed edition”.

His work L'Évangile intérieur consists of 15 reflections that he gave on Radio Luxembourg from July to October 1935 .

Commemoration

• Four Zundel companies disseminate Maurice Zundel's thinking at conferences and in discussion groups: in France , Belgium , Canada and Switzerland.
• The theological faculty of the University of Freiburg im Üechtland organized a conference on Maurice Zundel from April 16 to 19, 2012. The numerous lectures on the life and work of the priest, who was born in Neuchâtel, are given in French.

• Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI. , wrote in 1990 to Bernard de Boissière SJ, an important biographer of Marcel Zundel, that Zundel was a spiritual master of our time , but Benedict XVI said. also on February 14, 2013 when he said goodbye to the clergy of his diocese of Rome with a speech that could not be a big, real speech, but only una piccola chiacchierata ( a little chat ), about the Second Vatican Council, like me saw it . In it he says: One has criticized the fact that the council spoke about many things, but not about God . He opposed this and said that it had spoken of God from the very beginning, with the liturgy at the beginning, God, adoration. The Pope can probably only have meant the priest Maurice Zundel, who in 1972 at the request of Paul VI. the fasting retreat in the Vatican held on the subject of which man and whichhere god? .

Fonts (selection)

• De influxu nominalismi in cogitationem christianam . Thèse de doctorat, Angelicum, 1927.
• The mystère de la connaissance . La Tour-de-Peilz, Suisse: Pensionnat Bon Rivage, 1931.
• Maurice Zundel; Antonín Medek; Karel Chlad: V hlubinách Oběti . Olomouc: Dominikánská edice Krystal, 1938.
• Research de la personne . St. Maurice, Suisse: œuvre St. Augustin, 1938.
• The spend of the liturgy . London, Sheed and Ward, 1941.
• L'évangelie intérieur . St. Maurice: œuvre St. Augustin, 1942.
• Maurice Zundel; Paula von Preradovic: The Song of Songs of the Holy Mass . Lucerne: Rex-Verlag, 1948.
• L'homme passe l'homme . Paris, La Colombe, 1948.
• Maurice Zundel; Marie Fabien Moos: Rencontre du Christ . Paris: Éditions ouvrières, 1951.
• Maurice Zundel; Domenico Sella: Madre della Sapienza . Milano: Ed. Corsia dei servi, 1954.
• In search of the unknown God . New York, Herder and Herder, 1959.
• Morale et mystique . Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1962.
• Dialogue with the vérité . Paris: Dexlée de Brouwer, 1964.
• حنين, ادوار. ادوار حنين .; Idwār Ḥunain; Maurice Zundel: لبنان الغد / Lubnān al-ġad . الندوة اللبنانية, Bairūt: An-Nadwa al-Lubnānīya, 1966

literature

• Maurice Zundel in Alois Odermatt: “I never speak of God” - approaching Maurice Zundel (1897-1975) .

Web links

• Marc Donzé / MS: Zundel, Maurice. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Portrait of Maurice Zundel on the website Aufbruch - independent journal for religion and society .
• Website Maurice Zundel (French).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Maurice Zundel - a lasting visionary - departure. Retrieved May 7, 2019 .