It is anomalous that Joseph Ratzinger—who was Pope Benedict XVI from 2005 to 2013, and afterwards Pope Emeritus until his death at the Vatican on 31 December 2022 at the age of 95—came to be seen as a rigid conservative. As Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith under Pope John Paul II he was known as the Panzerkardinal who reined in (some might say thwarted) many of the bold attempts made at reform in the name of the Second Vatican Council. It was at the same Council that he had made his name, as the liberal peritus of the Archbishop of Cologne.
Cardinal Josef Frings had asked this brilliant young theologian from Bavaria to compose an address that he was to give at Genoa, laying out his hopes for what the Council would achieve. “Che bella coincidenza del pensiero,” Pope John XXIII told Frings when he read the text. “What a beautiful harmony of thought! You have said everything that I’ve thought and wanted to say, but was unable to say myself.” Frings confessed that he had not actually written the lecture. “Herr Kardinal,” replied Pope John, “I did not write my last encyclical myself either. You just need the right adviser.”
Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927 in Marktl, a village in Bavaria close to the Austrian border, where his father was the local policeman. The Ratzingers loathed the Nazis, but had to tread carefully when Hitler came to power in 1933. The young Joseph could not avoid joining the Hitler Youth and as a teenager during the war served in an anti-aircraft unit. Both Joseph and his older brother Georg later became priests; in 1951 they were ordained together by the Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, who in 1939 had written the draft of Pope Pius XI’s blistering attack on the Nazis, Mit brennender Sorge.
Ratzinger’s early years were devoted to his theological studies: the thesis for his PhD was on Saint Augustine and a university career followed. Mastering Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian and English, he taught successively at Bonn, Münster, Tübingen and Regensburg. In 1977 he was appointed Archbishop of Munich & Freising and made a cardinal. In 1982, after only five years as archbishop, he was summoned to Rome by Pope John Paul II to serve as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: the guardian of the Church’s orthodoxy.
In the same year as Ratzinger’s appointment to the CDF, the English author Paul Johnson published a book called Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Restoration. John Paul II’s appointment of Ratzinger was seen by many as initiating a conservative pushback against the radical developments that were taken place in the Church in the name of “the spirit of Vatican II”. Neither the Polish pope nor Ratzinger himself saw themselves in that light.
Both men had played significant roles in drawing up some of the Council’s decrees, and both would insist that Vatican II was to be inspiration of the pontificate. John Paul II was no more inclined to compromise with dissident theologians than he had been with Communist apparatchiks in Poland, and in the first year of his pontificate he doubled-down on the contentious issue of contraception in a series of talks that were published as The Theology of the Body.
Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical confirming the Church’s teaching about artificial contraception, had been published in 1968. It was a year of violent anti-authoritarian riots and demonstrations in western Europe and the United States, particularly on university campuses. Tübingen, where Ratzinger was teaching at the time, was not exempt; although stories of his being confronted by rebellious students proved untrue, the spectacle of the widespread rejection of authority undoubtedly influenced his move to a more conservative outlook.
In 1972 Ratzinger had founded, with other like-minded theologians such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, a theological journal called Communio. It was intended to counter the influence of Concilium, which had been started in 1965 by reformist theologians like Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx and Hans Küng. Küng had taught at Tübingen at the same time Ratzinger; his books promoting unorthodox views were best-sellers and he became, in effect, the leader of the widespread liberal dissent.
While Küng drove around Tübingen in an Alfa Romeo, Ratzinger cycled; his only other personal possessions were a piano and a cat. Some bishops within they hierarchy sympathized with the liberals, while others were intimidated by the reputations of dissident theologians. Ratzinger, however, outclassed them all. The main issues at stake were birth control, intercommunion, priestly celibacy, authority, the ordination of women and “liberation theology”.
In 1984 Ratzinger published an Instruction on Some Aspects of Liberation Theology, which was interpreted by liberal critics as a condemnation of all efforts to bring about social justice in the Third World. The Prefect of the CDF was constantly attacked in the liberal media: in Britain by Guardian columnists like as Polly Toynbee and Hugo Young; in Germany by Der Spiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. His many works disappeared from the shelves in German bookshops, and students citing them in academic treatises found themselves being marked down.
The burgeoning schism between orthodoxy and dissent burst into the open in 1985 with the publication of an interview with the Italian journalist Vittorio Mesori, entitled Rapporta Sulla Fide. It was published in English as The Ratzinger Report. In it he denounced the proponents of a Conciliar anti-spirit which seemed to hold that the history of the Church started with Vatican II. “Every theologian now seems to want to be ‘creative’,” he wrote, “which has led to confusion among the People of God. The Church is more than a human reality over which theologians and sociologists decide what is true.” An emphatic measure was taken to thwart dissident theologians with the publication of The Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992.
The new edition of the Catechism was Ratzinger’s idea, and he chaired the committee of bishops that oversaw its compilation. John Paul II shared the views of his Prefect but was confident that his own encyclicals such as Veritatis Splendor would persuade dissidents of the error of their ways, and few disciplinary measures taken against heterodox priests, bishops or academics. Küng was deprived of his licence to teach as a Catholic theologian at Tübingen on the grounds that he was not teaching the Catholic faith, but another post was established for him as a professor of Ecumenical Theology. Nevertheless John Paul II appointed conservative cardinals, and the conclave after his death in 2005 chose Ratzinger to succeed him, who took the name Benedict XVI.
John Paul II was a hard act to follow. Although both men were products of a similar European Catholic culture, and both saw eye-to-eye on doctrine, the former had a powerful, demonstrative personality while the latter was retiring and shy. Paul VI had initiated the peripatetic, missionary papacy, and John Paul II had taken it further. Benedict, however, was an academic, longing to retire to write in his native Bavaria and ill-at-ease during the jamborees of papal visits abroad. He preferred to communicate with the pen, rather than the megaphone; he wrote three encyclicals (Deus Caritas Est, Spes Salvi and Caritas in Veritate) and was determined to complete, despite his new responsibilities, his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy. He therefore delegated the governance of the Church to others, with some unfortunate results.
In the speech he had made as Dean of the College of Cardinals prior to the conclave that elected him, Benedict had denounced moral relativism as the source of evil in the modern world. On his state visit to Britain in 2010 he warned the members of the Houses of Parliament assembled in Westminster Hall of the dangers of relativism; he was listened to politely by David Cameron and Nick Clegg whose Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition soon afterwards established same-sex marriage. Secularism had become impervious to criticism. The only feathers that Benedict ruffled were those of Muslims when, in a lecture in the university of Regensburg, where he had taught for so many years, he quoted the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus’s view that Muhammad’s only contribution to religion was “evil and inhumane”. Seized on out of context, it led to furious protests throughout the Islamic world.
One of the leitmotifs of his reign, as with that of John Paul II, was that reason was compatible with faith, and beauty with truth. Benedict described the powerful effect on him as a boy on first hearing a Mozart mass; he did what he could to restore the beauty of the liturgy and in 2007 issued a moto proprio, Summorum Pontificum, to make it easier for priests to say Mass in the Tridentine Rite. It was not a rejection of the Novus Ordo; it simply confirmed, in the face of what had amounted to a decades-long clampdown in many dioceses, that the Traditional Latin Mass had never in fact been banned: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred for us, too.” In 2009 the establishment of the Personal Ordinariates with Anglicanorum coetibus allowed groups of former Anglicans to use distinct rites with poetic cadence, and so to continue to worship in the tradition of the beauty of holiness which Benedict so appreciated.
More proactive than either his predecessor or successor in dealing with what Benedict called the “filth” of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, it was during his papacy that the Mexican founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel, was finally condemned by the Vatican. However, as Benedict himself conceded, “Practical government is not my strong point.” Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, his loyal secretary at the CDF, whom he appointed Secretary of State, proved ineffective; after the death of his sister Maria, who had cared for him over the decades, his domestic household became chaotic. His butler Paulo Gabriele, seeing disorder and suspecting corruption in the Vatican, took it upon himself to filch documents from the papal apartments and pass them on to a journalist.
By then Benedict was old and unwell: his doctor told him that he could never fly across the Atlantic again. Feeling that he lacked the strength to fulfil his duties as pope, he decided to follow the example of Celestine V, who had abdicated in 1294. With the title of Pope Emeritus, he retired to live in a former convent in the Vatican gardens. He kept his promise to be loyal to his successor and the expression of any differences was oblique, but it is easy to imagine his disappointment when Pope Francis reversed the teachings of his two predecessors on the question of admission to the Eucharist of divorced and remarried Catholics, and also rescinded the relaxation of the rules that had allowed priests and laypeople to rediscover the spiritual riches of the Traditional Latin Mass.
Pope Benedict XVI may not have inspired the same affection of some the popes who reigned after Vatican II, but history will judge him as perhaps the most significant, standing beside Anastasius, the fourth-century Bishop of Alexandria, who in the face of the Arian heresy preserved and handed on the truth – and the beauty – of the Catholic faith as it had been received by the Apostles.
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