No Love without Truth: Benedict XVI’s Message to the World

Pope Benedict XVI, the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, died this morning at the age of 95. Professor Tracey Rowland is the St. John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia and author, among other books, of Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Benedict XVI.  In 2020, she won the Ratzinger Prize for Theology. 

As the news broke of the pope emeritus’s passing, Rowland took some questions about Pope Benedict’s life and legacy from NR’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What’s Benedict XVI’s place in history? 

Tracey Rowland: I think he will occupy more than one special place in history. Some will include: one of the most learned men ever to occupy the Chair of Peter; a man with a masterful grasp of fundamental theology; one of the most significant periti at the Second Vatican Council; an intellectual partner of St. John Paul II; a German pope after the disgrace of the Holocaust; a pope who had to contend with the ideologies of the New Left; a pope who had to defend the sanctity of marriage to the generation of ’68; a pope who cared about beauty in addition to truth and goodness.

KJL: What about the resignation? Was he a quitter? Or is there more to the story? 

TR: I don’t think he was a quitter; he was way too dutiful. But at the same time, he wasn’t a politician. I think he had a very deep trust in Providence and simply thought that others could do a better job.  

KJL: What made him so special?  

TR: His knowledge of the faith or what he called the memoria ecclesiae, and indeed the whole history of the philosophy and religious traditions of the West, was completely awesome. At the same time, he was humble. Joachim Cardinal Meisner said of him that he had the intelligence of twelve professors combined with the piety of a child on his First Communion Day. Whenever I picked up one of his books or homilies to read I always found myself thinking, “This is the truth.” Reading Ratzinger was a way of discovering the “true North” in theology.

KJL: There are caricatures out there of Benedict that I see in comment threads — a Nazi, a rottweiler, etc. Who was he really? 

TR: These names are just malicious. It seems to me that a lot of the nastiness stems from the fact he used his episcopal authority to block an academic appointment of Johann-Baptist Metz. He thought that Metz’s political theology and especially the influence of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy on Metz was simply unsound. He thought that it was his duty as a bishop to see to it that people under his authority were not led astray by bad theology. That was also his duty as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. Someone has to be responsible for keeping the memory of the Church uncorrupted and in theory this is one of the responsibilities of a bishop, but many bishops are reluctant to exercise this power for fear of becoming unpopular, as Ratzinger certainly did become unpopular in some quarters — hence the names.

KJL: As a theologian, what drew you to him? 

TR: I read The Ratzinger Report when it was released in 1985 and I thought, “This man understands what’s wrong with the Church!” I was in my 20s at the time. I was born during the Second Vatican Council, so this meant that as I was growing up, I saw both the tail end of the pre-Conciliar Church and the ecclesial chaos of the 1970s. I am one of those people who think that there were many good things in the documents of the council, but it all depends on how the documents are read.  There is a hermeneutic of rupture and a hermeneutic of reform and both St. John Paul II and Ratzinger/Benedict read the documents with the latter. Further, for me personally, one of the worst side effects of the Council was the liturgical experimentation. Ratzinger really understood the problems with this. In his God and the World interview he said that people who did not like the dumbing down of the liturgy had been treated like lepers and that this was very unfair. When I came to write my doctorate, I examined his theology of culture and combined it with Alasdair MacIntyre’s philosophy of culture.

KJL: What is the Ratzinger Prize for Theology? Is it shocking that you, a woman, would be awarded it? Or does it make some perfect sense for those who followed Benedict? 

TR: It is a very significant prize, awarded to two people each year. Usually one is a theologian and the other is often a philosopher or artist. I don’t think that the people on the selection committee care about a person’s gender, but the general idea is that the recipient’s work needs to be in the spirit of the works of Ratzinger/Benedict. How I won it is in one sense a mystery — I don’t know who put my name forward or why — but I had certainly written quite a lot about the theology of Ratzinger, including two books and about a dozen articles. I think at least four women have won the prize.

KJL: Is there one concept or witness you hope people take from his life as we reflect on it? 

TR: Yes. Following theologian Romano Guardini, Benedict often argued that “logos must precede ethos.” In other words, we can’t have love without truth, and we can’t have freedom without truth. If I had to condense his academic teaching into one sentence that would be it — no love without truth, no freedom without truth. Many so-called liberation theologians thought otherwise.

KJL: Do you have a specific intention when it comes to praying for the legacy of Pope Benedict XVI?

TR: Only that his works become better known to the younger generations of Catholics going forward. To that end, I have been involved in a project called The Ratzinger Lexicon. Seventy-two scholars from around the world have contributed essays on 100 topics in Ratzinger’s theology. The essays have been collated and edited and will be published in multiple languages, beginning with the English edition later in 2023. Ignatius Press is publishing the English edition.  

For more from Rowland on the legacy of Benedict XVI, read her piece “The piety of Pope Benedict XVI and his passion for the truth.”