In 2008 I returned to Ireland after five years working around the world on international humanitarian programmes – in Afghanistan, North Korea, Sudan and Liberia – ostensibly to take a break by doing a masters degree in Human Rights. Unbeknownst to me until very recently, this decision set me on a path to writing a book on Pope Benedict XVI, “The Pope and the World: the Thoughts of Pope Benedict XVI” and editing a volume of contributions, “The Best of Benedict: An Irish Perspective” in 2020.
It is a long way from 2008 to 2020 and the path was not at all straight. Coming from a Catholic background, the immersion in a human-rights course opened a Pandora’s Box of questions about myself, about the work I was doing and the sector I was involved with, but also about the faith I was brought up in and had taken somewhat for granted. International development work is intrinsically tied up in the idea of justice and charity: historically considered a charitable endeavour with many working on social-justice causes yet often (but not always) eschewing the fundamental understanding of charity.
This caused me some internal consternation. The apparent incompatibility, or so I was told, of these concepts and practices sat uneasily. I was not able to articulate why without great difficulty as secular frames of justice overtook what was considered to be a religious and anachronistic notion of charity. It was during this period of study, in parallel rather than through the course itself, that I first stumbled on the writing of Pope Benedict in his third and final encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (2009), which built on much that he had written in his first, Deus Caritas Est, in 2006.
For many working in the international aid sector, any association with religion is to be at best denied and the historical – religious – origins of both international and domestic charity (as well as State education and healthcare institutions) is to be erased or acknowledged as something to be overcome. Entering into the human-rights academic discourse, engaging with identity debates and starting to understand the narrative that takes place amongst the policy arms that influence the overall direction of overseas aid, this was somewhat of a shock to the system after spending five years doing the very practical work of engineering: wells, bridges, town and village water systems.
Fortunately, stumbling is what I did best, and Benedict’s encyclical landed in my emails at the right time. Benedict XVI agreed that charity – caritas – may not be right for modern-day charitable entities, but it is more, rather than less, than the offerings of rights-based development: “Caritas is not a mere organization like other philanthropic organizations, but a necessary expression of the deepest act of personal love with which God has created us, awakening in our hearts the impulse to love, a reflection of the God of Love who makes us in his image.” (Audience, 18 January 2006).
It was this deeper understanding that helped resolve some of the questions that were being posed to me and set me on a path of discovering Benedict’s many and layered writings, reading everything I could get my hands on over the next seven or eight years, from his early Introduction to Christianity through the first of his Collected Works: Theology of the Liturgy and everything in between, including his Messages, Letters, and Audiences throughout his papacy.
In the meantime, I had completed the degree and turned my dissertation into a short book on the rights of Travellers to lead a nomadic life, a memoir of my three years in North Korea and a book that related to one of the conceptual aspects of humanitarian assistance. I had the writing bug and was waiting for my next inspiration while doing some voluntary work pulling together a free monthly Catholic newspaper, Alive!, when I decided, without a clear plan, that I wanted to re-read all that I had of Joseph Ratzinger’s writing with a little more purpose.
So began two years of reading, taking notes and transcribing, until I had compiled what I thought was a reasonably comprehensive encyclopaedia on everything the theologian Pope had said about anything. Well, not quite, but it was something of a reference document of nearly 1 million words, ordered by subject, alphabetically. I was left wondering what to do with it all.
At the same time, my work on Alive! offered me contacts and a network of Catholic writers and a small bit of recognition within the small circle that overlapped into ecclesial circles. This led, eventually, to pulling together The Best of Benedict: An Irish Perspective at the same time as I turned the reference document into a structured narrative in a vain attempt to do what Joseph Ratzinger admitted he failed to do due to the demands placed on him by the call of his superiors and ultimately the Holy Spirit – to create a comprehensive theology of his own.
Of course, The Pope and the World does no such thing, but is a humble attempt of articulating how Pope Benedict XVI saw the spiritual and supernatural interacting with the physical world where man exists. Often accused (amongst many things) of being too academic, lacking pastoral sensitivity, and of being out of touch with the struggles of everyday living, I learned, as many who encountered the Pope beyond the caricatures created of him, that what he offered was a clarity of though -, whether discussing liturgy, dogmatics, hermeneutics, or debating secular philosophers such as Jurgen Habermas – and a way of cutting through to the essentials, the essence, of whatever subject he was required to lay his words upon.
Reading Ratzinger is a commitment to moving beyond simplistic truisms such as the juxtaposition of charity and justice as a zero-sum game and to seeking to understand the depths of things, to see beyond the natural world into the supernatural, beyond the physical life to the eschatological, beyond the body to the soul, without ever embracing any false dualism but rather interrogating knowledge and life, orthodoxy and praxis, as an integrated whole.
Love – caritas – will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbour is indispensable. The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person – every person – needs: namely, loving personal concern.
Deus Caritas Est, 28b
Photo: FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP via Getty Images
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