"Faith Is the Center"

A slight, white-maned old man with large, dark eyes was working steadily last week amid masses of congratulatory mail, which had come to him from all over the world on his 78th birthday. His three-room apartment in the quiet Munich suburb of Bogenhausen is a center of Roman Catholic intellectual life in Germany, with an almost equally strong attraction for many Protestants. Just out of the hospital (where he underwent surgery for an ailment described only as neuralgia), Monsignor Romano Guardini again presided over his "Laboratory of Ideas," with its long refectory table, its delicate Gothic Madonna standing against red velvet, its record collection, and its thousands of books, including three shelves of his own writings on everything from theology to movies.

Romano Guardini's hand was speeding its tiny writing over page after page of foolscap to complete his major work, a study of Dante, on which he has been laboring for some 40 years. He was also jotting down notes for a new book on the problems of faith and ethics. To his thousands of German followers, the best news of all was that he plans to resume his lectures at Munich University when the next term begins in May, and that this spring he will once again mount the pulpit of Munich's Ludwigskirche to preach to his perennial audience of Roman Catholic intellectuals, society bluestockings, young people, and aging playboys who come to ogle the pretty girls--said to be found in greater numbers at a Guardini sermon than at a Fasching party.

Said one of his fans last week: "Guardini is like a Renaissance humanist--he seems to have the key to everything. If he speaks about atomic science, one feels he knows all there is to know about modern physics. He can plumb the depths of Freud or analyze the mysticism of Paul Klee's paintings; he can throw new light on the obscure poetry of Hoelderlin and Rilke, or expound the strengths and weaknesses of Communist dialectic. Guardini seems to control the bridges that lead from art, from literature, from philosophy --to religion."

Silence & Dancing. Romano Guardini was born in Verona, Italy, but he was taken to Germany at the age of three, where his Italian diplomat father was posted at the consulate in Munich. He grew up in Mainz, attended the University of Tuebingen, where he first began to specialize in biology and physics. But, as he wrote later, "the deeper I went into the study of science, the more I became convinced that there was not the full answer." His parents reluctantly gave him permission to study for the priesthood; he was ordained in 1912, received his doctorate in theology three years later.

His first book, published in 1918, was titled The Spirit of the Liturgy. Its theme: "To play a game before God. to perform a work of art; not to create, but to be--that is the deepest meaning of the liturgy." In the '20s, as professor of Christian philosophy at the University of Berlin, Father Guardini was one of the luminaries of an intellectually glittering city that included such disparate men as Producer Max Reinhardt, Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, Boxer Max Schmeling.

But often, Berlin hostesses would be unable to track him down. For long periods he would disappear into the tiny village of Lohr in the Frankish Spessart Mountains, the center of the Catholic Youth Movement he had helped found after the war, which now has 700,000 members. There, in romantic Rothenfels Castle, Guardini spent his time with workers, farmers and students, who eventually came from all over Germany. Some 400 young people once followed his suggestion to spend all of Holy Week in complete silence. "At Mass on Easter Sunday," remembers one of them, "we felt the Resurrection with every fiber of our body. Afterwards we ate together and drank and danced. There was no frivolity. We were all sure we knew how the disciples must have felt when they saw the empty tomb."

Another Ideology. Soon after Hitler's invasion of Poland, a Gestapo officer appeared in Father Guardini's office and told him that his chair as professor of Christian ideology was abolished forthwith. "We already have an ideology," he said. "We don't need any professors for it." Eventually, friends warned him that he was about to be sent to a concentration camp, and Guardini took refuge at a house in the Black Forest for the remainder of the war.

Since World War II, Guardini has been more active than ever, lecturing, preaching and writing. His biography of Christ, The Lord, has sold more than a million copies, has been translated into English, French, Italian. Spanish, Dutch, Greek and Japanese. Pope Pius XII appointed him a papal house prelate in 1952, and loved talking philosophy in German with him by the hour. Two years ago, when the German government awarded him its distinguished civilian decoration, the order Pour le Merite, the Protestant Easier Nationalzeitung wrote: "Guardini's influence now reaches far beyond the realm of his own church. He has returned faith to circles which had been considered lost to it. [He is] one of the great religious figures of our time."

Christian Up a Tree. Guardini has founded no theological schools, and his power lies more in the eloquence of his preaching and writing than in any specific theories. He himself sums up his work this way: "I have tried to help people find faith. I know that nothing is more needed than this. I have simply tried to counteract the atomization of ideas which has upset our minds for the past 150 years. After all, the world doesn't consist of facts alone. Interpreting it this way either leads to a completely materialistic world or, in revulsion, to the pseudo-mystic ideology which formed the roots of Naziism.

"I believe that all there is to know in this world has been revealed to us by the words of the Lord. Faith is the automatic center, the Archimedic point from which any problem can be approached and solved . . . True Christianity pervades and forms the entire personality, the character, the thought, each gesture, each movement. One must be able to recognize the true Christian by the very way in which he climbs up a tree."

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