Waldstetten
Christmas Eve 1985

Dear Father Natterer,

Sincere thanks for enabling me to become acquainted, in the Priory belonging to the Society of St. Pius X in Stuttgart-Feuerbach, with the pure and unadulterated Catholic teaching that is expressed and reflected in the liturgical actions and texts of Holy Mass.

I had not counted on having the undeserved good fortune (or rather, receiving the grace) to witness in these times of ours people living and translating into reality the Catholic teaching that I had painstakingly pieced together for myself until the individual fragments and indications formed an absolutely logical whole, i.e., the truth. This process has been fraught with repeated temptations in the form of contrary opinions expressed by people close to me and numerous ways of thinking and speaking learned and internalized in my youth, but now I have been allowed to see and feel that there are people who believe—believe from the depths of their hearts—and what they believe in is true. This is an incomparable experience! "It is true! It is right! That is the truth!" were the exclamations repeated on leaving Holy Mass by someone who could not, and still cannot, grasp what God did for man and continues to do unceasingly anew while men, in their pride and willfulness, presume to declare God dead, to "abolish" Him and to resist His will.

My own way back to the Catholic faith was an extremely arduous and stony one, a constant inner struggle. It began—how could it be otherwise in the present confusion of truth, half-truth and lie, in this state of linguistic and intellectual disarray?—with the failure, with the radical collapse of the view of God, the world and man that I had been taught and had adopted and which was an atheistic-materialistic one even though it had not been presented to me as such in my childhood and adolescence but had been couched in such terms as "scientific," objective," "neutral," "rational," "intellectual," "differentiated consideration and judgment," "tolerance," etc.

At the beginning there was nothing but failure, the inevitable recognition that I was an atheist, a materialist, that I knew nothing because my whole life long I had been learning errors even though I had come second in the school graduation examinations. What use is that when errors are graded as excellent achievements?

No, I did not know much. I knew nothing except that I had been living a fundamental error with grave consequences, which had been created and maintained by my school education, and that I must succeed in finding the truth—no matter what the cost. For in the face of death—and even a completely godless unbeliever will have to admit there is no point in our lives when we are safe from death—my life up to then would, I knew with unerring clarity and certainty, be misspent, the goal would not have been achieved. This I knew even though I was not a believer. I was merely surprised that no one except me seemed to notice the lie in which our lives are spent. For any life without God is a lie, self-deception, deluded folly with all its consequences. Likewise any life without prayer, i.e., without direct contact with God, on Whom man is totally dependent, is blasphemy. Science, research, culture, politics without God, without prayer lead to a fate that is of our own making. Man simply cannot sever himself from God. It is contrary to nature. It is his certain death.

This central truth, this condition of man's existence was made clear to me in my personal life in a really drastic manner; I experienced it physically. When my sight began to fail more and more, the doctors could not explain the reason for it but took refuge in technical terms, which, although I understood them, were of no help to me as I was suffering beyond words in the face of the growing darkness and (like others who know they are going blind) had a sensation of dying alive, of being cast into nothingness, of losing the world and people, who had turned into undefinable shadows. I was enveloped in a loneliness that cannot be expressed in words—but in this loneliness God was closer to me than ever before in my life. I began to realize how much I had been cheated, allowed myself to be cheated, although in my heart of hearts, I had suspected that I was wasting my time living a complete lie. But, I thought, all my teachers (including the four religious instruction teachers I had at high school), the priests, the professors and lecturers, cannot surely all be wrong.

Perhaps, I said to myself, I am merely taking refuge in an illusion, a fabrication, to enable me to cope with the difficult situation of going blind. Perhaps they are right in their unbelief and I am simply crazy to turn to God. You see what a tolerant education open to ideas from all sides can lead to! Instead of being able to pour out my troubles directly to God without reflection I first had to seek a lost God.

However, before I was to be "Catholic" myself, I first had a great deal of mental work to do in order to rid myself of all false ideas I had developed and to allow a new kind of thinking and feeling, one that had to be closer to reality, to be "true," to take root and grow.

The mental work in my own life began, as mentioned above, with the recognition of my situation, which was for me like waking—a rude awakening—from a dream. I realized how far from God, how godless I was. I remember vividly the pain I felt on writing in my diary, "I have lost my soul." So I started to look for the truth even though I had been taught that there was no such thing as the truth with a claim to being absolute and exclusive. It had been inculcated into me that all religions are conceivable forms of expressing religious sentiment, all ways of salvation leading to God, who likewise created them all, or that all religious systems are expressions of man's belief in God and as such possess equal value and equal rights. These opinions were voiced by priests and religious instructors belonging to the Catholic Church.

Yes, I embarked on a desperate search for the truth. It took the form of permanent, unrelenting prayer, a persistent and tenacious plea to God that He might grant me insight into the truth, that He might guide me and preserve me from error. What was initially a general prayer for guidance in the right direction and along the right path was one day transformed—very suddenly and without any intervention or conscious rational decision on my part but rather from an inner urge—into praying the Hail Mary, which I still knew by heart from childhood (but had practically never prayed), and finally into praying the Holy Rosary.

Apart from this I sought the counsel of the saints—and the saints I encountered in my reading were all "Catholic" in a sense that I had not come across before in the Catholic Church. I read biographies of saints by a wide variety of authors and it was instructive to see how differently there were presented; I read writings of the saints themselves, taking personal instruction from them.

When I was inwardly convinced (and, as I said, this was a complicated, lengthy and difficult process) that Catholic teaching is the truth with a well-founded and justified claim to being the absolute and exclusive truth, I started to try to attend Catholic "divine worship" again regularly on the basis of this newly-found firm conviction. In spite of participating in it very frequently I was unable to discover any inner connection between the ideals of the saints that saw before me and this Catholic "divine worship." What alternative did I have but to resort once again to prayer? "Please, God, let me become a Catholic! Help me, Mother of God, to overcome the inward and outward resistance that is still present! I do not deserve it, but let me, please, become a Catholic. Padre Pio, Cure d'Ars, Don Bosco, you must help me! Holy Ghost, you must lead me!"

To put it differently, I had, as a result of my reading the lives and works of the saints, an inkling of the Catholic Faith, of its truths and revelations and of the beauty it possesses independent of time and circumstances and I was now seeking it in the reality of the closing decades of the twentieth century. The problem was that I found no faith, no reverence, no depth, no God—either inside or outside the Church.

I was deeply disappointed and asked myself whether everything I had read about and by the saints of the Catholic Church was all an illusion and fabrication, whether what I was seeking existed merely as a pious wish in my imagination. But, I also asked myself, why should people living only a century later than Don Bosco, only seventy years after Pope St. Pius X, or a mere seventeen years after the death of Padre Pio, be so fundamentally different from these blessed men, whose insights and wisdom, based on an intimate relationship with God as they are, surpass many times over or are even diametrically opposed to my own (and those of my teachers and professors). What plausible reason can there be for the yardsticks by which their lives are measured, the rules according to which they lived, no longer to be valid for people today? How can what they believed no longer be eternally true?

I searched on and on. I went to meditative retreats at various convents and monasteries belonging to various religious orders in the area around my home (Carmelites, Benedictines, Franciscans); I participated in the daily routine of convents; I talked to priests, monks, nuns, people I encountered. What I found was a foggy, vague religious feeling which bore the traits of contemporary trends and ideas and was often marked by an extreme faith in science, by the myth of modern man and his need for rational justification of his faith and by the common error that the Catholic Faith, or at least some of its central tenets, is a child of its time, subject to change and now out of date.

What I failed to find was belief in the saints and the spirit of God. God's Spirit has yielded to the spirit of the times and of the world. Truth has been replaced by human ideas and theories expressed in formulations that please the ear.

But my search was not restricted to "divine service" in parishes, to convents, to talking to people I met; I also pursued it in lectures, in seminars, in the writings of Catholic theologians. The heresies I found there are not worth mentioning since they were exactly the same errors as I had been taught in the course of my education at a state [public] school: prejudices, half-truths, lies—in short, a world without God. There was a time when I wished I had never attended that high school, which may have given me excellent grades, but which paid no attention to my faith, to my love of God, and destroyed them.

We are, after all, not on earth to accumulate mountains of knowledge (which are, in any case, often nothing more than products of human imagination and the times, relative and quickly forgotten), but to live in truth with a constant eye to the immortality of our souls and permanently conscious of our earthly limitations in our orientation towards God. Indeed, the recognition of the lies contained in my non-Catholic education was hard to swallow. There have been saints who became such without the help of scholarship but solely on the basis of intensive prayer and by making use of the means of grace offered by the Church, of Holy Mass and of a way of life orientated towards their fellow men. I, however, had an education and an academic training without God, was brought up on countless theories such as those of Marx, Engels, Freud, Lessing, Marcuse, to name but a few, which were all worthless.

The ideas learned at school reappeared at university. The system of manipulation via education seemed to be working perfectly, had not God's grace intervened and transformed me. As I have already mentioned, I took the path of prayer. It would take too long here to relate the crucial exterior stages in my return to the Catholic Church, but Divine Providence was to be felt along the whole way, often in a surprisingly clear and obvious manner. When I prayed for guidance, I was guided…

I shall spare myself all the details of my further wanderings. I shall not tell of my search for a faithful priest, a Catholic priest. Nor shall I describe the nightly vigils I spent in prayer and reading as I struggled to discover the truth, that truth I had been shown but failed to find genuinely existing anywhere. I wanted but one thing: to be allowed to live as a Catholic, to be allowed to believe the truth. I had learned so much from "my" beloved saints and now all that was no longer supposed to exist!

Now I alone, the victim of my reading of the lives of the saints, seemed to continue to believe in the truths of the Catholic faith. Nor did I know if and how I should receive Holy Communion. I should have liked to go to confession as my guilt before God was of veritably vast proportions, but where was I to find the priest who still diagnosed sin as sin and called it such instead of making light of it on pseudo-psychological or sociological grounds? Where was the priest to be found who believed, who prayed? Where was the priest who acted with divine authority, who cleansed the soul of sin, who made a piece of bread into God, who administrated and administered all the means of grace? Where was the priest to be found with a nearness to God? I was looking for a priest like those who appear in the contemplations of the saints, like the kind of priest the Cure d'Ars depicted:

After a long time I did "find" such a priest, an elderly monk who had spent thirty years in the missions and had been working as a hospital chaplain since his return to Germany; he no longer understands his confreres—many of them at least—and on top of that has constant difficulties with the competent bishop. My meeting with this monk is a story that would fill pages and which was preceded by a long series of experiences forming an integral part of it. Hence I shall cut the story short and come to what is, for the time being, the end of my letter and my story, namely my becoming acquainted with Holy Mass according to the old, the traditional rite.

First Station (September 1985): More or less by chance I attend my first (traditional) Holy Mass since childhood. I still have no idea of the meaning of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, but it "appeals" to me even without my being able to understand it.

Second Station: I dig out an "old" Missal¹ and pray my way right through it, filled with wonder and joy at how "true" these texts are. I learn prayers by heart, prayers that have been abolished, forgotten and lost. I read the texts of Holy Mass in Latin and German (I did Latin as a main subject at school and have always had a special liking for the language). I recognize how truncated and falsified the way "divine worship" is celebrated today is. I make comparisons and come to the conclusion that we no longer celebrate Holy Mass in the Catholic Church: we have destroyed our most valuable possession on earth.

Anyone who considers this Mass boring lacks spirits, the Holy Spirit. On the contrary, it is the new forms of Mass that are deadly boring with all their constant variations (films, dancing, slide shows, new texts, different prayers, etc.) since they are banal in their lack of depth and truth—quite apart from the fact that they often come close to extreme blasphemy, or rather are indeed blasphemous in their ignorance of God's greatness.

Pages upon pages could be written on the differences between the two Orders of Mass, but they all boil down to the same conclusion: Holy Mass according to the traditional rite is a Mass in the spirit of truth, which takes into account man's true greatness in the eyes of God, which serves to glorify God and to save and sanctify the souls of both the living and the dead, whereas the new Mass often dissolves into empty chatter without any sacramental depth. Indeed, the central loss in the new Order of Mass is perhaps the loss of adoration, the loss of prayer itself. In Stuttgart-Feuerbach I had for the first time in my life the feeling (and it is common knowledge that the heart has its reasons which are quite unknown to the head, meaning that the heart's logic is superior to that of the intellect) that people were praying together, that God and the angels and the saints are present at Holy Mass and join us in our celebration, our prayers and our petitions.

Third Station: The Mass still exists. There are still priests. What grace at last to have found what I had been seeking! I scarcely dare to believe it. I thank God for it. I thank Our Lady, I thank the saints and the angels, I thank the Holy Souls in Purgatory that the Mass has not finally disappeared from this world—and I do so in spite of my years as an unbeliever.

Fourth Station: After several weeks of abstinence I return to my parish church to attend "divine worship" there. (Incidentally, what was celebrated there never took the form of those degenerate assemblies that cannot from the start lay claim to being called "divine worship.") I suffer. I can find no other word to express what I feel in the course of the activities performed in this "divine worship." It is the same painful suffering that I experienced in theology seminars at university when I was in the process of finding faith: we are not taking God seriously, we are degrading Him to a plaything of our theories, in the words of the Old Testament we are making a graven image of Him. We do not even take God as seriously as we do human interlocutors. God means less to us than human beings do.

I am glad when the sad spectacle is over. And I am shattered and horrified.

What strikes me above all is the fact that the Mass according to the old rite is an action performed by the priest with his extraordinary powers and divine authorization whereas the new "divine worship" is a constant commentary, a perpetual process of explaining and talking. To put it simply, the old Mass seems to me to be a doing, to be priestly activity without a lot of words, whereas the new celebration of the Eucharist seems like talk without deeds. According to my subjective feeling the sacrifice is not truly offered up in the latter, the sacrament is not effective and in the last analysis the grace imparted through the sacrament is missing.

The effects are catastrophic, however, when such lies are presented to children as the latest findings of scholarly research, as the truth, and then required to be regurgitated in order to pass, for example, tests and examinations. In religious instruction they learn, for instance, the following about the Resurrection:

These passages, which could be added to at will, are quoted from Wege des Glaubens, a textbook intended for pupils in their seventh and eighth years of schooling.

And now I beg you to forgive the length of this letter. I only wanted to write a few lines to express my gratitude and now they have become pages. Please continue along the path you have chosen without making any compromises; it is the only true path and one day people (or, perhaps, one single person) will comprehend what it means to be Catholic, what it means to be allowed to come to know the grace and glory of Jesus Christ.

Now I finally conclude my letter with heartfelt gratitude. Yours sincerely