Servant of God Romano Guardini (1885-1968) is one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the 20th century: an Italo-German priest, theologian, philosopher, and writer, he reconciled generations of intellectuals with the faith of the Church at a time when modernity seemed to make it unthinkable.[1][2] Spiritual father of the liturgical movement, author of a now-classic Christology — Der Herr (The Lord) — and a clear-sighted prophet of the crisis of technology, he formed a German Catholic elite from his chair in Berlin and later Munich, and counts among the acknowledged mentors of Benedict XVI as well as Pope Francis.[3][4]
But behind the famous professor stood a man whose entire thought was born of a conversion: the decision, made around the age of twenty, to step out of himself and "entrust" himself into God's hands.[5][6] This experience — which he called self-acceptance before God — irrigates each of his books. Guardini was never an intellectual of the head alone: he was first and foremost a believer who had staked his life on a word from the Gospel.
Dying in Munich on October 1, 1968, Guardini left behind an immense body of work — more than seventy-five books and a hundred articles, translated worldwide — and the memory of a priest who took modern culture seriously without ever compromising on faith.[7] On December 16, 2017, the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising opened his cause for beatification, making him a Servant of God.[8][9] This article is part of the Ignispedia series devoted to venerables and servants of God, alongside Venerable Fulton Sheen, Venerable Jérôme Lejeune, and Venerable Robert Schuman.
A Child of Verona Who Became German
Born in Verona (1885), Childhood in Mainz
Romano Guardini was born on February 17, 1885 in Verona, Italy, the eldest son of Romano Tullo Guardini (1857-1919), a wholesale poultry merchant, and his wife.[10] He was only one year old when, in 1886, the family moved to Mainz, in the German Rhineland, where his father expanded his business.[11][12] The child thus grew up in Germany, among three younger brothers, without ever denying his Italian roots: he retained Italian citizenship until his naturalization as a German in 1911, obtained specifically so he could teach theology at a German state university.[13]
A Soul of Two Homelands
Guardini embodied throughout his life a fruitful dual belonging: the Mediterranean sensitivity of Italy and the intellectual rigor of Germany. He spoke and wrote fluently in Italian and German, and read Latin, Greek, French, and English.[14] From this position as a man of the borderlands likely arose his particular perspective: neither fully inside nor fully outside, able to see German culture from within while maintaining the distance of a son of the South. He attended the Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasium (secondary school) in Mainz from 1894 to 1903, where he passed his examinations in 1903, before beginning his studies in chemistry at Tübingen.[15]
Tentative Studies: Chemistry, Economics, then Theology
The young Guardini searched for his path for a long time. He began with chemistry at the University of Tübingen (two semesters), moved on to political economy in Munich and then Berlin (three semesters), before giving up these disciplines.[16] This hesitation was not only academic: it was accompanied by a profound spiritual crisis. At the end of this uncertain journey, Guardini finally turned to theology, which he studied at Freiburg im Breisgau and then Tübingen.[17][18] His priestly vocation did not come from a continuous impulse, but from a reversal.
The Crisis of Faith and Self-Acceptance
Losing Inherited Faith (circa 1905)
As a student in Munich, around 1905, Guardini went through a true dark night of faith. Confronted with Kantian criticism and the intellectual climate of his time, he lost the faith he had received in childhood: he could no longer pray or affirm the existence of God without rational proof. He would later recount, with moving simplicity, his disarray:
“When I was about to say my evening prayer, I did not know to whom I should address it.” — Romano Guardini, Berichte über mein Leben (trans. P. Ide)[19]
This sentence says everything about a generation: not a proud rejection of God, but the silent collapse of a certainty that could no longer sustain itself.
“It is so” — “Let it be so”: Self-Surrender
The turning point came during conversations with his friend Karl Neundörfer. Guardini stumbled over a saying of Christ in Matthew 10:39: “Whoever found his life will lose it; whoever lost his life for my sake will find it.” (AELF translation). The source that retraces his conversion reports it in the abbreviated wording “Whoever loses his life will find it.” In a flash of understanding, without emotional excitement, he realized that to save one’s life is precisely to stop clinging to it for oneself.[20][21]
“It was the perfectly clear intuition: ‘It is so,’ immediately followed by the imperceptible and silent movement: ‘Let it be so!’” — Romano Guardini, “Der religiöse Gehorsam” (1923) (trans. P. Ide)[22]
Guardini then decided to place the center of gravity of his life outside himself: to renounce self-enclosure and entrust himself to God. It was not an emotion, but an act of freedom. The days that followed did not bring him euphoria, but a calm and luminous peace—the sign, in his eyes, that the truth was there.[23]
Self-Acceptance Before God, the Matrix of All His Thought
From this experience, Guardini would draw one of the major axes of his work: the idea that authentic faith begins with self-acceptance—accepting to exist as a received creature, and not positing oneself as one’s own origin.[24] To receive oneself from God instead of manufacturing oneself: for him, this is the true path to freedom. This is why his readers, including those who, like the future Pope Francis, would seek to write about him, saw in this pedagogy of conversion the heart of his message.[25][26] Here Guardini touches on the most central evangelical intuition, the very one that runs through the spirituality of abandonment to God: life is possessed only by surrendering it.
The Priest and Theologian
Ordination in Mainz (1910)
Guardini entered the Mainz seminary and was ordained a priest on May 28, 1910 by Bishop Georg Heinrich Kirstein.[27] He first served a brief parish ministry in the diocese. Throughout his life, despite his academic fame, he always wanted to be, first and foremost, a priest: it was as a priest that he taught, wrote, accompanied generations of students, and celebrated the liturgy of which he would become one of the greatest interpreters.
Doctorate and Habilitation on Saint Bonaventure
Guardini’s mind was shaped by contact with the great scholastics, especially Saint Bonaventure, the Franciscan doctor of the 13th century. In 1915, at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, under the supervision of Engelbert Krebs, he completed a doctorate in theology devoted to Bonaventure’s doctrine of Redemption.[28] In 1922, at Bonn, he obtained his habilitation in dogmatic theology, again on Bonaventure.[29] This companionship with the Seraphic Doctor—more mystical and affective than the Thomistic line—left a lasting mark on his approach: a theology attentive to experience, to beauty, to symbol, without ever letting go of objective truth.
Benedictine Oblate of Beuron
Guardini became a Benedictine oblate at the archabbey of Beuron, where he took the name Odilio.[30] Beuron, a center of German liturgical renewal, gave him a taste for the prayer of the Church, for chant, for the rhythm of the hours, and for the beauty of worship. It was from this monastic soil that his first masterpiece would be born.
The Man of Liturgical Renewal
Vom Geist der Liturgie (1918)
In 1918, Guardini published with Herder a small book destined to become a classic of twentieth-century Catholicism: Vom Geist der Liturgie (The Spirit of the Liturgy).[31][32] The work offers a careful reading of the liturgy as a total language of humanity before God: sacred play, symbol, communal act of the Church, and not a matter of individual feeling. The success was immediate and lasting; the book would become a major influence on the German liturgical movement, and through it, on the reform desired by the Council.[33]
In The Spirit of the Liturgy, Guardini presents, in paraphrase, the liturgy not as a matter of individual feeling, but as the objective reality of the action of the Church itself, praying and adoring through Christ.[34]
Eighty years later, in 2000, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would publish a book of the same title, Der Geist der Liturgie, as an explicit homage to Guardini, whom he acknowledged as his master.[35] On this subject, the Ignispedia article dedicated to the liturgical movement develops Guardini’s exact place in this history.
Rothenfels and the Quickborn Youth Movement
From the 1920s onward, Guardini became the soul of the Catholic youth movement Quickborn, whose home was the castle of Rothenfels (Burg Rothenfels), on the Main.[36] There, with thousands of young people, he experimented with a living liturgy: Mass celebrated facing the people, active participation, silence, singing, austere beauty. These intuitions, long before Vatican II, made him a recognized forerunner of the active participation of the faithful. Rothenfels was also a place of discreet cultural resistance to the rise of Nazism, before its closure by the regime.
Sacred Signs
In another small book, Von heiligen Zeichen (Sacred Signs, 1922-1923), Guardini teaches his readers to re-read the gestures of faith: the sign of the cross, genuflection, the flame of the candle, holy water, silence.[37] Each liturgical gesture becomes speech again; the body once more becomes a place of prayer. This sense of the embodied symbol would remain a hallmark of his thought.
The Berlin Chair and the Nazi Ordeal
A Chair for the “Catholic Worldview” (1923)
In 1923, the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin created for him a chair with a singular title: philosophy of religion and Catholic worldview (katholische Weltanschauung).[38][39] A unique position: at the heart of the Protestant and liberal capital, a Catholic priest officially taught the Catholic way of viewing the entire world—art, culture, science, existence—in the light of faith. His lectures attracted crowds of students; Guardini became a national intellectual figure, without ever losing his priestly rigor.
Der Heiland (1935): Recalling the Jewishness of Jesus
Under the Third Reich, Guardini refused to yield. In 1935, he published an essay, Der Heiland (“The Savior”), which denounced the Nazi mythologization of Jesus and forcefully recalled the Jewishness of Christ—at the very moment when the regime claimed to “de-Judaize” Christianity.[40] It was an act of doctrinal courage: to affirm that the Savior was born a Jew, in the midst of racial ideology, was to directly contradict state propaganda.
Dismissal by the Regime (1939) and Retreat to Mooshausen
The penalty fell: in 1939, the Nazis suppressed his chair and forced him to resign.[41][42] Removed from public teaching, Guardini withdrew to Mooshausen, in the Allgäu, with his friend the parish priest Josef Weiger, where he spent the war years in silence, prayer, and writing (1943-1945).[43] It was in this trial, far from the lecture halls, that some of his most profound spiritual work matured.
The Master of an Entire Generation
Der Herr (1937): Christology Becomes Classic
In 1937, in the midst of turmoil, Guardini published what would perhaps remain his most beloved book: Der Herr (The Lord), a vast collection of meditations on the person and life of Jesus Christ.[44][45] Far from being a scholarly or skeptical life of Jesus, the work seeks to show the real Christ, Son of God made man, rejecting both the rationalism that dissolves him and the sentimentality that weakens him.[46]
In The Lord, Guardini maintains, in paraphrase, that seeing Christ presupposes a conversion, that is, the acceptance of reality as it is given.[47][48]
Translated into every language, The Lord would nourish millions of readers—including the young Joseph Ratzinger, who regarded it as a model of prayerful theology. Here Guardini reveals his unique strength: thinking through dogma without ever leaving the posture of adoration.
Postwar: Tübingen then Munich (1945–1962)
The fall of the Reich returned Guardini to teaching. In 1945, he received a chair at the faculty of philosophy in Tübingen; in 1948, he joined the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he would teach until his retirement in 1962.[49][50] In Munich, Joseph Ratzinger, a student of philosophy and theology in Munich and Freising from 1946 to 1951, listened to Guardini as a student and read him as a master; he was never his professor colleague in Munich, since after his ordination in 1951 he taught in Freising, then became professor in Bonn in 1959.[51] Guardini then received the highest German cultural honors: the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1952) and the Erasmus Prize (1962).[52]
The End of the Modern World (1950): Prophet of the Technical Crisis
In 1950, Guardini published Das Ende der Neuzeit (The End of the Modern World), a prophetic diagnosis of the crisis of modernity.[53] He shows that the increase in technical power, when severed from a corresponding inner growth of man in wisdom and responsibility, becomes a mortal danger. This analysis would prove so accurate that Pope Francis would cite it eight times in his encyclical Laudato si'—more often than any other modern thinker who was not a pope.[54][55]
“In fact, technology has a tendency to try to encompass everything within its iron logic, and the man who possesses technology “knows that, in the final analysis, what is at stake in technology is neither utility nor well-being, but domination: a domination in the most extreme sense of the term”. And that is why “he seeks to grasp the elements of nature as well as those of human existence.”” (Pope Francis, Laudato si', no. 108, official French text on vatican.va; the fragments in English quotation marks are those of Guardini, Das Ende der Neuzeit, cited in notes 87 and 88, pp. 63-64)[56]
For more on this critique of technical excess and its relevance today, see the Ignispedia article Technology and Man, largely built around Guardini and Laudato si'.
| Work (German title) | French Translation | Year | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vom Geist der Liturgie | L'Esprit de la liturgie | 1918 | Meaning and beauty of the liturgy |
| Von heiligen Zeichen | Les signes sacrés | 1922–1923 | Symbolism of Christian gestures |
| Der Gegensatz | L'Opposition polaire | 1925 | Philosophical method of reality |
| Der Herr | Le Seigneur | 1937 | Meditative Christology |
| Das Ende der Neuzeit | La fin des temps modernes | 1950 | Crisis of technical modernity |
A Prophet for the Church and the Popes
Refusal of the Cardinalate (1965)
In 1965, Pope Paul VI, who admired him deeply, wished to make him a cardinal. Guardini declined the honor, out of humility and fidelity to his vocation as a man of study and prayer.[57] This refusal says much about the man: at the height of his renown, he sought neither title nor purple, but remained what he had always been—a priest-thinker at the service of truth.
Vatican II: Spiritual Father of Renewal
Guardini was not a peritus at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), but his influence there was immense: his liturgical insights, his theology of the Church as a praying body, his way of dialoguing with modern culture deeply nourished the Council Fathers.[58] The Catholic Herald of London called him "one of the most important theologians of the 20th century" and "a key thinker for the Council Fathers".[59] The renewal of active participation by the faithful, first experienced at Rothenfels, found its consecration at Vatican II.
Ratzinger, Francis: Two Popes as His Disciples
A rare fact: two popes claim Guardini as an influence. Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI cites him as a master and even borrows the title for his own Spirit of the Liturgy; in paraphrase of his judgement, he saw in Guardini a great figure and a Christian interpreter of the world of his time.[60] Jorge Mario Bergoglio / Pope Francis, in the 1980s, undertook a doctoral thesis on Guardini, left unfinished, and quotes him abundantly in Laudato si'.[61][62] Francis declares: “I am convinced that Romano Guardini was a thinker who has much to say to the people of our time, and not only to Christians.”[63]
| Disciple | Connection with Guardini | Legacy |
|---|---|---|
| Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) | Student in Munich and Freising (1946-1951), auditor and reader of Guardini | Der Geist der Liturgie (2000), explicit homage |
| Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis) | Unfinished doctoral thesis on Guardini (1980s) | Laudato si' (2015), eight citations |
| Hans Urs von Balthasar | Reader and interpreter | Spread of the theology of beauty |
The Spirituality of Romano Guardini
To See Christ Is to Be Converted
All of Guardini's spirituality is contained in a gaze: it is not first a matter of demonstrating Christ, but of seeing him — and to see him, of being converted, that is, of accepting reality as God gives it.[64][65][66] Faith is not a conclusion, but a self-surrender that opens the eyes. This is the very lesson of his youthful conversion, which became his theological method.
Liturgy, Silence, Adoration
Guardini restored to generations the sense of the sacred. Against both rationalism and sentimentalism, he showed that the liturgy is a school of contemplation: through gesture, silence, and rhythm, man learns to stand before God. His emphasis on liturgical silence — the condition for any real listening to the Word — remains burning with relevance, touching the heart of Eucharistic adoration.
Guardini links, in paraphrase, the capacity to truly listen to the word of God to learning silence.
The Courage to Be a Creature
The common thread of his work is a Christian anthropology of consent: accepting being finite, received, dependent — not out of resignation, but because it is there that God awaits man.[67] Guardini rejects both the Promethean pride of modernity, which wants to make man his own god, and the despair of one who believes himself abandoned to nothingness. Between the two, he opens the narrow and free path of trust — the very one that Catholic spirituality calls abandonment to God.
Death and Cause for Beatification
Death in Munich (October 1, 1968)
Romano Guardini died in Munich on October 1, 1968, at the age of eighty-three.[68][69] He bequeathed his possessions to the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, which he had helped to found, and was first buried in the priests' cemetery of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Munich; in 1997, his remains were transferred to the Ludwigskirche, the university church of Munich.[70] He left behind a body of work translated worldwide and a legacy that has only continued to grow.
Opening of the Cause (2017): Servant of God
Half a century after his death, the Church began the process of recognizing his holiness. On December 16, 2017, in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Munich, the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising, under the authority of Cardinal Reinhard Marx, opened the cause for Guardini's beatification, conferring on him the title of Servant of God.[71][72][73] The diocesan inquiry examines the heroicity of his virtues; if successful, it will be transmitted to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints for possible recognition as Venerable, and then for beatification.
| Stage of the Cause | Date | Actor |
|---|---|---|
| Death in reputation for holiness | October 1, 1968 | Munich |
| Transfer of remains to the Ludwigskirche | 1997 | Archdiocese of Munich |
| Opening of the diocesan cause (Servant of God) | December 16, 2017 | Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Munich-Freising |
| Recognition of heroic virtues (Venerable) | To come | Dicastery for the Causes of Saints |
| Beatification | To come | — |
Why the Church Regards Him as a Possible Blessed
Guardini's case is unique among the servants of God: he is neither a martyr, nor a founder of an order, nor a spectacular wonderworker. His possible holiness is that of an intellectual priest who served the truth and saved the faith of thousands of modern minds — an apostolate of thought lived out in humility, priestly fidelity, and a profound life of prayer. In this, he joins, in the Ignispedia series, other laypeople and clerics of the twentieth century whose holiness took the face of believing intelligence, such as Venerable Jérôme Lejeune, a scientist at the service of life.
Further Reading
- Read The Liturgical Movement: the great history of which Guardini was, with Vom Geist der Liturgie, one of the fathers — up to Vatican II.
- Read Technology and Man: the dossier built around Guardini's critique of technological excess, taken up by Laudato si'.
- Read What to Think of Ecology?: the encyclical Laudato si', which cites Guardini eight times, is discussed at length.
- Read The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965): the council of which Guardini was one of the spiritual fathers through his liturgical and cultural insights.
- Discover Venerable Fulton Sheen and Venerable Jérôme Lejeune: other great twentieth-century figures whose holiness the Church is examining.
- Remember the essentials: the Servant of God Romano Guardini (1885-1968), Italian-German priest, was one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the century: father of the liturgical movement, author of The Lord, prophet of the technical crisis, mentor of two popes. But everything in him goes back to a youthful conversion — the decision to place himself in God's hands. His cause for beatification, opened in 2017, makes him a Servant of God.
Notes and References
Wikipedia (FR), "Romano Guardini": fr.wikipedia.org. Reference French-language entry — born February 17, 1885 in Verona, moved to Mainz in 1886, attended the Gymnasium (secondary school) in Mainz from 1894 to 1903, examinations in 1903, studied chemistry (Tübingen), economics (Munich, Berlin), then theology (Freiburg, Tübingen), doctorate 1915 and habilitation 1922 on Bonaventure, chair of "philosophy of religion and Catholic worldview" in Berlin (1923), dismissed by the Nazis (1939), Tübingen (1945), Munich (1948-1962), major works, refusal of the cardinalate offered by Paul VI in 1965, death on October 1, 1968 in Munich. Used for dates, titles of works, and the refusal of the cardinalate.
1 12 15 18 32 39 42 50 57 69Wikipedia (EN), "Romano Guardini": en.wikipedia.org. Detailed encyclopedic article — full name Romano Michele Antonio Maria Guardini, father Romano Tullo (1857-1919) poultry wholesaler, three younger brothers, Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasium in Mainz, Benedictine oblate of Beuron (name Odilio), ordination May 28, 1910 in Mainz by Georg Heinrich Kirstein, German naturalization in 1911, doctorate 1915 in Freiburg under Engelbert Krebs, habilitation 1922 in Bonn, Berlin chair (1923), essay Der Heiland (1935) recalling the Jewishness of Jesus, forced resignation in 1939, retirement in Mooshausen (1943-1945), Tübingen (1945), Munich (1948-1962), Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1952), Erasmus Prize (1962), refusal of the cardinalate (1965), disciples Ratzinger and Bergoglio, Laudato si' citing Guardini eight times, death October 1, 1968, transfer of remains to the Ludwigskirche in 1997, opening of the cause for beatification in December 2017 by the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising (Servant of God). Main source for cross-checking facts.
2 3 10 11 13 14 16 17 25 27 28 29 30 31 33 34 36 37 38 40 41 43 45 49 52 53 54 61 68 70Adoremus / Catholic News Agency, "Liturgist Priest Romano Guardini's Cause Opened" (January 14, 2018): adoremus.org. Confirms the opening of the cause on December 16, 2017 in the Munich cathedral, the influence of The Spirit of the Liturgy on the liturgical movement and on the Fathers of Vatican II (Catholic Herald: "one of the most important theologians of the twentieth century," "key thinker for the Fathers of the Council"), the judgment of Benedict XVI ("a great figure, a Christian interpreter of the world of his time") and of Francis ("a thinker who has much to say to the people of our time, and not only to Christians"). Source for papal judgments and data on the cause.
4 8 35 58 59 71Pascal Ide, "The Trinity, Source of All Conversion. Example of Romano Guardini": pascalide.fr. Study tracing Guardini's crisis of faith around 1905, the conversation with Karl Neundörfer, the word from Matthew 10:39 and the decisive experience of self-surrender. French wording of the quotations follows P. Ide's translation; primary references given by the author: account of the crisis ("When I was about to say my evening prayer…") in Berichte über mein Leben. Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen, ed. Franz Henrich, Düsseldorf, 1984, p. 68 f. (n. 1); account of the conversion ("It is so" / "Let it be so!") in "Der religiöse Gehorsam", Auf dem Wege. Versuche, Mainz/Wiesbaden, 1923, p. 9 (n. 3) — references borrowed from H.-B. Gerl-Falkovitz, Romano Guardini. Sa vie et son œuvre 1885-1968 (trans. Greisch/Todorovitch, Salvator, 2012), pp. 64-69.
5 19 20 22 23Nouvelle Revue Théologique (NRT), "Personal Conversion and the Salvation of the World in Romano Guardini": nrt.be. Theological study on the pedagogy of conversion, self-acceptance before God, and the anthropology of consent in Guardini. Source for spiritual analysis ("to see Christ is to be converted, that is, to accept what is").
6 21 24 26 48 64 67Robert A. Krieg, Romano Guardini: A Precursor of Vatican II (University of Notre Dame Press) — publisher's description: wob.com. Guardini is credited there as the author of "more than 75 books and 100 articles." Source for the volume of his output.
7National Catholic Register (Nicholas Wolfram Smith), "Romano Guardini, Beloved Theologian of Two Popes — and Potential Saint" (December 15, 2017): ncregister.com. Announces the official opening of Guardini's cause by the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising at a Mass on December 16, 2017 (jointly with the cause of journalist Fritz Gerlich). Replaces the former CNA link, which now redirects to an article unrelated to Guardini (cause of a White Rose member, Willi Graf).
9 72Wikipedia (EN), "The Lord (book)": en.wikipedia.org. Entry on Der Herr (The Lord), Guardini's Christological book published in Germany in 1937, meditations on the life and person of Jesus Christ, rejecting both rationalism and sentimentality, with the theme "to see Christ, one must be converted." Source on The Lord; the reference French edition is the translation by R.P. Lorson (Alsatia).
44 46 47 65Holy See, “Biography of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI”, vatican.va: vatican.va. Joseph Ratzinger studied philosophy and theology at the University of Munich and the Freising higher school from 1946 to 1951; he was ordained priest on 29 June 1951 in Freising, then taught in Freising, then became professor in Bonn in 1959. Source of the correction of the link between Ratzinger and Guardini in Munich: student auditor and reader, not professor colleague in Munich.
51Pope Francis, Laudato si' (May 24, 2015), citing Romano Guardini, Das Ende der Neuzeit (The End of the Modern Age, 1950). Full text at vatican.va. Exhaustive census verified on vatican.va (October 4, 2026): eight notes — no. 105 (notes 83, 84, 85: Ger. ed. pp. 87 and 87-88; Fr. ed. pp. 92-93, including "modern man has not received the necessary education to make good use of his power"), no. 108 (notes 87, 88: Ger. ed. pp. 63-64; Fr. ed. p. 68, including "what is at stake in technology is domination"), no. 115 (note 92: Ger. ed. p. 63; Fr. ed. p. 68), no. 203 (note 144: Ger. ed. pp. 66-67; Fr. ed. pp. 71-72) and no. 219 (note 154: Ger. ed. p. 72; Fr. ed. p. 77). Source for the papal reception of Guardini's critique of technology.
55 56 62Joseph Ratzinger, Perché siamo ancora nella Chiesa, p. 186. Judgement on Guardini given here in paraphrase, without quotation marks, the French translation not having been checked word for word against the printed edition.
60Pope Francis, address to participants in the congress of the Romano Guardini Foundation, 13 November 2015, official French text on vatican.va: vatican.va. Quotation reproduced word for word: “I am convinced that Romano Guardini was a thinker who has much to say to the people of our time, and not only to Christians.”
63Catholic Culture, "Romano Guardini — Christ's Offering of Self": catholicculture.org. Spiritual commentary based on Der Herr (The Lord): to see Christ, one must be converted and accept the gift of existence; the true struggle is to let Christ give himself in us rather than to hold him for ourselves. Source for the spiritual reading of conversion and self-offering in Guardini.
66The Catholic Herald (London), "Archdiocese prepares to open Cause of Romano Guardini": thecatholicherald.com. Catholic press article confirming the preparation and then the opening by the Archdiocese of Munich of Guardini's cause, presented as "one of the most important theologians of the twentieth century" and "key thinker for the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council." Complementary source on the scope of the cause and the ecclesial appreciation of his work.
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