Centuries hence, he’ll be recognized for having buried the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ that so menaced the world in his time.
Centuries hence, he’ll be recognized for having buried the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ that so menaced the world in his time.
P ope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the most consequential churchman and theologian of this and several preceding eras, died earlier today, December 31, 2022. I predict confidently that he will be one of the only figures of his era to be remembered, celebrated, studied, and beloved in the future.
In the near term, Benedict will be misremembered as a tough-minded reactionary, the “Panzer Cardinal,” when in fact he was a pioneering liberal, frequent innovator, and gentle-souled cleric. He will be mislabeled as a man whose reputation was fatally compromised by the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, when he was perhaps the sole figure of his era at the top of the church that took on the treacherous responsibility of reform — centralizing the handling of clerical abuse cases in his office and drastically speeding up the process of defrocking criminal priests (a project that has been thrown into reverse by his successor). Benedict will be hailed only for his resignation of the papacy, the first in six centuries, and arguably a great precedent to set, but which was effected at the wrong time. It came many years before he lost his clarity of thought and long before his papacy’s work was complete, or its legacy secured by worthy succession.
Joseph Ratzinger was born on Holy Saturday in 1927 in Marktl, Bavaria, Germany. His grand uncle was a priest-politician, Georg Ratzinger. His elder brother, also Georg, became a priest. Ratzinger’s devoutly Catholic family was deeply suspicious of the Nazi regime. His policeman father’s opposition to Naziism resulted in demotion. In 1941, his 14-year-old cousin, who suffered from Down Syndrome, was euthanized as unfit by the Action T4 program of Nazi eugenics. Like all 14-year-old Germans who were deemed fit, Joseph Ratzinger was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, though his brother testified he was an unenthusiastic member who skipped out on his duties to the organization. He soon joined the seminary. In 1943 he was conscripted into the anti-aircraft corps, which he deserted as Allied troops approached two years later.
After the war and the completion of his studies, Ratzinger embarked on a distinguished church and academic career. After serving as a chaplain at a Munich parish, he became a professor at the University of Bonn by 1959, and in 1963 went to University of Munster. He participated in the Second Vatican Council as a “peritus,” a theological consultant, to Cardinal Frings of Cologne. Fifty years later, just before his resignation, he would claim that the council’s legacy had been divided, between a council of the Fathers, evidenced in the Vatican II documents, and a “council of the media,” that excited popular misapprehension of Vatican II’s work. But at the time of the council, Ratzinger himself was inarguably part of the latter, cutting a dashing reformist figure in suit and tie, rather than clerical collar, and being in league with theological progressives such as Karl Rahner, Hans Kung, and Edward Schillebeckx.
In 1968, he issued the book Introduction to Christianity, which has become a theological classic, and which was clearly inspired by and intended to continue the work of the great Italo-German priest Romano Guardini. After the council, Ratzinger helped form a journal of Catholic theology, Communio, which stood implicitly against his more radical Vatican II colleagues, who soon began pushing for the abandonment of priestly celibacy, the church’s moral teaching on human sexuality, and so on. In 1977, he was made archbishop of Munich and Freising.
In 1981, the new Pope John Paul II named Ratzinger as the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF, formerly the Holy Office of the Inquisition). There he became, in the words of columnist Ross Douthat, a traitor to his class, condemning his former academic theologian colleagues for their errors, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly. In this office, he gave theological heft to the grand, spectacle-driven papacy of John Paul II.
The crowning achievements of Ratzinger’s collaboration with John Paul II were the documents Veritatis Splendor (1993) and Dominus Iesus (2000). The first championed the “universal validity” of the natural and divine law against the supposition that an individual conscience could morally license acts that the church understands to be sinful. “The commandments thus represent the basic condition for love of neighbour; at the same time they are the proof of that love,” it held. The second reproved those theologians whose work tended to pit the mercy of God, or the saving operation of the Holy Spirit, or the Church’s appreciation of some elements in other religious traditions, at odds with the doctrine that Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and man, and that all who are saved are saved by him, and through their incorporation into the church. Ratzinger’s work as chief doctrinal policeman under John Paul II thus preserved the heart of the Gospel against the humanistic and relativizing excesses popular among theologians after the Second Vatican Council.
Then there was Ratzinger’s monumental contribution to combating the sexual abuse crisis. Contrary to much erroneous reporting, before 2001 the vast majority of priestly sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church were handled (or mishandled) entirely by local bishops, and only rarely reached Rome in the form of canonical trials, or in the recommendations of the Congregation of the Clergy concerning accused priests.
Firm and energetic Vatican action against the scourge of clerical sexual abuse only began when John Paul II transferred responsibility for cases to Ratzinger’s CDF. Ratzinger soon thereafter issued a letter, De delictis gravioribus, which clarified how the Church would respond to grave crimes against the faith. “Prior to that 2001 motu proprio and Ratzinger’s letter, it wasn’t clear that anyone in Rome acknowledged responsibility for managing the crisis; from that moment forward, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would play the lead role,” wrote Vatican reporter John Allen in 2010.
More than 3,000 abuse cases would eventually be referred to CDF. And Ratzinger’s office, reviewing the files, proceeded to take swift disciplinary actions in 60 percent of the cases, referring the remainder to the cumbersome, and uncertain Vatican courts. Under Ratzinger, in other words, the protection of minors decidedly outweighed the traditional rights of priests to formal trials. Against considerable internal Vatican opposition, Ratzinger re-opened the sex-abuse investigation into the Legion of Christ founder, Marciel Maciel, and removed him from active ministry. Among his first acts as pope was to punish Maciel and other high-profile abuser priests who had been protected by other offices at the Vatican.
Shortly after being elected Pope Benedict XVI, the new pontiff gave a lecture at Regensburg on the relationship between faith and reason. It is widely remembered for the pope’s quotation of a disparaging remark about Islam made by a medieval Christian, which was used as an excuse for subsequent rioting among Muslims in several cities and the murder of Christian nuns. But the speech was a profound reflection on the recent withering of the concept of reason to merely what is scientifically falsifiable. This impoverished vision of reason robs men of not just their faith, but also philosophy and the speculative power that dignifies man from other creatures. In this lecture and in other homilies given during a visit to the United Kingdom, Benedict was outlining his response to what he saw as the “dictatorship of relativism,” where a pervasive skepticism robbed life of all grounded meaning and left the human person marooned and vulnerable to the tyranny of “one’s own ego and desires.”
As pope, Benedict XVI continued publishing his scholarship. He began his three-book series Jesus of Nazareth while still a Cardinal and head of the Church’s doctrinal office, and finished the final two as pope. While some, even I, questioned at the time whether it was appropriate for a pope to publish academic work while holding an office that is surrounded by the mystique of infallible authority, it is perhaps these books that represent his most enduring legacy.
The three volumes of Jesus of Nazareth are Benedict’s theological response to the faithless historical criticism of the Gospels that began in his native Germany two centuries earlier. Ratzinger’s method in these books is to survey the debris and flinders of the Gospels left by the wrecking ball of historical-critical method. He insisted on an approach to the Gospels that was “a synthesis between an exegesis that operates with historical reason and an exegesis that is guided by faith.” By doing so, he recovers the theological and liturgical vision that informs the choices made by Gospel writers, and vindicates their religious message as the only reasonable, and sophisticated reading of these ancient texts. The result was to redeem the scholarship of the Bible for faith after a 200-year project of using it to sow doubt. It is a single-handed and heroic accomplishment that’s influence grows still.
Benedict’s papacy will also be remembered for his rehabilitation of the pre-Conciliar form of the liturgy, the traditional Latin Mass. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful,” Benedict wrote liberating the old rite, articulating a principle so obvious and profound that his successor, Pope Francis, has been unable to overcome it, despite epic straining to do so.
Finally, Benedict will be remembered for his resignation, one clearly meant to set a precedent in an age where people live many years at the end of life with degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease, the latter of which afflicted his predecessor. For some Catholics, the papal resignation is the most bitter fruit of his papacy, an admission of defeat for a man who began his papal ministry by asking the faithful to “pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.”
Were not Benedict’s enemies now running wild, and frantically trying to undo his legacy? But any review of his achievements as a scholar, theologian, and churchman show they utterly dwarf his missteps.
In 1950, the cultural critic Jacques Barzun wrote about how we, in the present, look back to “great ages shining in history by their art, science, and the merged glory of worthy lives and deeds.” And how we “long for their clear outlines and envy their unchallengeable merit.”
There is something restful about what cannot be changed, and obviously Queen Anne is immovable. Versailles, Racine, Milton, Dryden, Molière, Pope, Louis XIV, Newton, Lock are — as we say — “fixed values,” whereas our own are in doubt and in flux. But this fixity is something which we enjoy, not they. They were in the same flux and perhaps at a greater disadvantage toward it than we to ours.
There is something restful and immovable about Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, already. His legacy as a theologian pope is so formidable, of such unchallengeable merit, that his detractors and enemies already appear as fools, and zealots, as rank amateurs, ignoramuses, and passing windbags. Benedict XVI was the greatest mind to reach the papacy in a millennium. I write his obituary now. But centuries hence, he will be recognized as the man who buried the dictatorship of relativism — and the doubts of the 20th century.