“In our time what most undermines faith in God is the invisibility, the silence of God, his concealment, in a world in which only what it visible counts: concrete facts, tangible results, real data, everything that must be totally visible and perceptible”, said Archbishop Julián Barrio of Santiago di Compostela. The archbishop was speaking at the 8th Days of Theology promoted by the Compostelan Theological Institute from 3 to 5 September, on the theme “breaking the silence about God: reason, faith, love”. According to Barrio, there is a “conflict between the claim of Catholic faith and the contemporary consciousness of truth”. For the latter can be summed up in the following formula: “I can believe only what I see. Without exaggeration, we may speak of a ‘popular spirit of positivism’ that determines the mentality of our time”. In short, according to this way of seeing the world, “only what exists and that can be perceived by the senses, and be empirically proved, is true, responding to the needs of evidence that hold good in the field of the exact sciences of nature”. In this context, the Archbishop of Santiago declared that “breaking the silence about God” is a task both for the believer and for the theologian. He urged the development of a theology that would take into account “the character of the living word that appeals to man in every age”. “Man – he concluded – must learn anew that he and his world are referred to the mystery which belongs to man in his relation to God just as the shadow belongs to the light and the wave to the tide. If understood in this way, the mystery of supernatural faith, the ‘silence’ or the ‘invisibility’ of God, will be perceived not as an adversary of the life of the natural world, but as its culmination”.
