“Whether we hear Bach or Mozart in church, we always have an inkling of what Gloria Dei, the glory of God, means. The secret of infinite beauty is there and lets us experience the presence of God more truly and vividly than in many sermons.” Josef Ratzinger said that when he wasn’t yet Benedict XVI. was. The deceased pope is said to have been a connoisseur of music, a “Mozart of theology”, as the Archbishop of Cologne, Meisner, who has also died in the meantime, once euphorically called him on his 80th birthday. A bold comparison, very bold.
Whereby Ratzinger’s great adversary, the theologian Hans Küng, immediately comes to mind. He, too, is a great music listener and has even written a book about the relationship between music and religion. “Very fine and thin” is the limit. “In certain moments it is given to the human being to open up so far that he hears the sound of the infinite in the infinitely beautiful sound.” Ratzinger could have said the same thing.
During Holy Week, many people will be sitting in the pews again, who hardly ever enter a church during the year. In buildings with stunning acoustics, they still let themselves be moved by Mozart’s “Requiem”, Bach’s monumental passions or Pergolesi’s tenderly sad “Stabat Mater”, they let themselves be overwhelmed by choirs and the thunder of the organ. This symbiotic relationship between music and church functioned splendidly throughout the centuries in which the Church, especially the Catholic Church, was a patron of great and greatest art. Whether it was exceptional works or music for everyday use on Sundays, they had to serve the church, were lures, ornaments, expressions of power.
Precisely because it is now a sponsor with an enormous image problem, the Catholic Church still likes to play the role of enabler. In art, including the visual arts, this otherwise hopelessly rigid apparatus is often surprisingly open, as can be seen in the grandiose exhibition “Damned Lust!” in the Freising Diocesan Museum. able to see. But even the most lavish cultural budget and the most progressive art concepts will not save this institution if it does not finally say goodbye to the traditional, misogynistic dogmas of Rome and honestly faces its criminal past of abuse. Because at some point, possibly very soon, even Mozart’s divine music will sound hollow and empty in a church because the substance there, the credibility, has rotted away. And that’s very sad.