Portrait of Pope Benedict XVI
Por Henri Tincq, jornalista do jornal Le Monde
It was just after the first of the year when faced with the failing health of John Paul II that the thought of Cardinal Josef Ratzinger as a successor to the ailing pontiff began to materialize. The American press began spreading the rumor, which was picked up in Italy and then by the rest of the world. The rumor was founded on the intellectual brilliance of a man whom the US press and the Bush Administration were to discover only belatedly. The rumor first provoked surprise, then scandal—and not only in progressive Catholic circles where the Cardinal is viewed as Public Enemy No. 1.
Josef Ratzinger had become the emblematic figure of doctrinal conservatism marking the pontificate of John Paul II. It was hard to believe that the Conclave could fix itself on such a personality and elect him as history’s 265th pope. The more the rumor gathered momentum, the more the election of Cardinal Ratzinger became not only plausible but the natural and logical choice. His reputation and his age—he turned 78 on April 16th—did not diminish the facts: the widely-held opinion in the Curia that he was above all the others, superior in intellect and in spirituality; the loyal, sincere and unflagging friendship displayed for him by Pope Wojtyla, who kept Ratzinger by his side in the Vatican for twenty-three years against hell and high water as Guardian of the Doctrine; and the class and the elegance of Ratzinger which came shining through during the last agonizing weeks of John-Paul II.
At the beginning of 2005, this friend became “brother” to the ailing pope. A “brother” who visited him, held his hand, shared his last confidences and who kept himself above the rumor and speculation of a papal resignation. During these weeks of doubt and concern, Cardinal Ratzinger rose to the occasion. Between the Cardinal and the Pope, a sort of passing of the torch took place. By tradition, a dying pope does not designate a successor. But during the last moments his life and papacy, John-Paul II conferred upon Ratzinger one of the most cherished honors: the Good Friday Meditation on the Passion of Christ.
The Passion of Christ and the passion of the Pope coincided this past Good Friday, March 25th, at the Coliseum. It was a stunning yet overwhelming passion for both the pope and his friend. Ratzinger acquitted himself perfectly in his role as stand-in. In his meditation along the Way of the Cross, he impressed the world in denouncing the “stains of the Church”.
Events unraveled quickly after that: the cardinals, shocked by the death of the sovereign pontiff and inexperienced in the preparation of the Conclave, began to perceive in Ratzinger a natural leader. It is Ratzinger, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, who presides at the papal funeral, delivers a remarkable homily, and receives the condolences of the entire world which has rushed to assemble in Rome. Again, it is Ratzinger who invokes a vow of absolute silence on the pre-conclave proceedings to avoid any and all pressure. It is to Ratzinger that the novice cardinals turn and upon whom their hopes converge.
The Church, orphaned by John-Paul II and exposed to the risks of controversy and division, needed an able helmsman, a solid and experienced leader possessing both great spirituality and intellectual courage. Quite apart from a transition papacy, it should be recalled that conservative leaders of the Church, like conservative statesmen, are often the sole individuals able to initiate reforms.
Josef Ratzinger hails from a modest rural family. He was born on April 16th, 1927, in Marktl-am-Inn near Passau in ultra-Catholic Lower Bavaria. His father was a police inspector but his roots are clearly agricultural. The economic hardship endured by his family and looming war prevented him for some time from attending school. He studied on his own, at home. He loved music and listened to Mozart. Raised in the traditional Catholic faith, he entered the seminary in Traunstein at a very young age where his family, generally believed to be anti-Nazi, sought refuge.
Together with his older brother, Georg—who today is 81—, the future Benedict XVI was compelled in 1941 to join Hitler Youth, as are all German youngsters. He performs his military service from August 1943 to September 1944. Like many boys of his age, he is assigned to the anti-aircraft auxiliary within the national armed forces. He was among a generation of adolescents from whom the state of ruin in which the country existed, both materially and morally, was concealed. His memories would be rekindled sixty years later in Caen, as the papal delegate to the 60th Anniversary of the Normandy Landing.
In 1946, following the war, he began his studies at the University of Munich and at the College of Law in Freysing, Baveria, during a period of great intellectual effervescence in German Catholic circles. Ordained a priest in 1951, Ratzinger received his first Theology degree after arguing a thesis on The People of God in Saint Augustine. In 1957, he earned his Ph.D. after defending a doctoral thesis on The Theology of the History of Saint Bonaventure.
He was then assigned as a parish priest in Munich, which he covered from one end to the other by bicycle. He was, however, quickly recognized as one of the youngest and most brilliant minds in Theology. A promising university career seemed to open up before him in a country where Theology is part of the Classical Studies curriculum both in high school and at the university level. In 1957 he is offered the Chair in Dogmatic and Fundamental Theology at Freysing. As his academic career progressed, he was offered teaching positions in Bonn (1959-1969), Münster (1963-1966) and Tübingen (1966-1969).
One of his faculty colleagues at Tübingen was none other than Hans Küng, the brilliant heteroclite, who will later have his faculty position revoked by Pope Paul VI. He will also become the determined adversary of both Pope John-Paul II and Josef Ratzinger. In 1969, Ratzinger is appointed Professor of Dogmatic Studies and History of the Dogma at Regensburg University as well as Vice President of the institution. One of his former students in Tübingen, Stanislas Lalanne, the current Secretary General of the French Bishops Council, recalls not only Ratzinger’s high intellectual caliber but his willingness to listen to his students.
During the 1960’s, Josef Ratzinger underwent two traumatizing experiences which will leave a great imprint on his life and work: the anarchic upshot of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the events of May 1968.
At Vatican II, Ratzinger sat on the Council as the peritus (expert theological observer) appointed by Cardinal Josef Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, a militant reformer. During this period, he was known for his rather open mind. Defending reforms envisaged by the Council, he went as far as arguing for “decentralization” of the ancient patriarchal model of Church administration and for reform of the methods used by the Holy Office.
As soon as Ratzinger returns to Germany, he is frightened by the frenzy of change and the controversy which has seized the Church, as in nearby France. Seminaries and ecclesiastical training institutions latch on to the most innovative and liberal theologies. He is alarmed by the increasing interest Marxism. A number of seminarians and priests abandon their orders and get married. Together with Hans-Urs von Balthazar, the great Swiss theologian whom he frequents, he perceives the risk of being cast adrift as Vatican II is applied, especially in liturgical reform, ecumenical relations (with Protestants) and the role of laypersons. As early as 1966, during the Katholikentag (Catholic Assembly) in Bamberg (Baveria), he warns against vogue and unmooring. According to Ratzinger, these effects are not what the Fathers of Vatican II desired. At the Würzburg Synod he enters into controversy with Juliusz Doepfner, the Archbishop of Munich and a notable within the German Church.
Young Ratzinger is bowled over by May 1968, synonymous in his eyes with the end of the world. Ratzinger is one of those university professors and men of the Church who were knocked off kilter by events of 1968 and who never admitted their liberalizing and prophetic character. At the Sorbonne in Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger felt equally traumatized. The two made it clear a hundred times: nothing good was going to come out of this funfair. In May 68, Ratzinger sees nihilist trends.
Consequently, he sought refuge in intellectual tasks. He breaks his ties with the theologians with whom he founded the international review, Concilium, and starts up with Hans-Urs von Balthazar and others the theological review, Communio. His goal? He wants an "authentic" interpretation of Vatican II and a stronger Catholic identity to prevail in modern society and in a Church where the confusion of the minds reigns. He publishes Introduction to Christianity in 1968 and Dogma and Revelation in 1973. Josef Ratzinger publishes a great deal and his notoriety rises inside German theological circles. Another remarkable publication: a manifesto entitled, Why have I remained inside the Church? In these profoundly troubled years, this text is an affirmation of faith in a Church which is under attack from all sides.
To his great surprise, Pope Paul VI names him Archbishop of Munich and Freysing on March 24, 1977. Josef Ratzinger is then only 50 years old. His consecration as archbishop takes place on May 28 and he is promoted to cardinal during Paul VI’s first Consistory on June 27, 1977. This permits Ratzinger to participate in two conclaves—August and October 1978—which elect John Paul I and John Paul II. His friendship with the latter goes back to the Bishops’ Synod of 1977 on the Cathechism in Rome and the conclaves of 1978. He exchanges books with Karol Wojtyla and is attracted by his frankness and his simplicity, his openness and his cordiality, and his philosophical and theological culture.
Very early on, Josef Ratzinger discerns a prophetic figures in the Archbishop of Cracow, not only a man who will contribute to the reconciliation of the Polish and German Churches, but also an capable observer who will soothe the tensions arising out of Vatican II. For Cardinal Ratzinger, Karol Wojtyla is an icon of the Silent Church under the Communist yoke. He sees in him a kind of shield against contemporary atheism and what he is to call later in his homily of the mass inaugurating the conclave on Monday 18 April, dehumanizing secularism, and the dictatorship of relativism and agnosticism, which are to become his chief nemeses.
This precocious friendship with the Pope from Poland will transform itself into a direct collaboration. In Munich, Cardinal Ratzinger finds himself embroiled in a dispute over the legacy of the the Vatican II Council between traditionalist and progressive currents. The experience is draining for him. His name is proposed to John Paul II when he begins his search for a Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, that is, the man who, in the Roman Curia, is responsible for the indispensables, who must set the course, oversee the creation of theologians and enforce discipline in the clergy, in training institutions and within the orders. It is a crushing task before which he recoils more than once to the point of asking permission of John Paul II to go back to Germany to return to teaching theology, which is his true calling. But Karol Wojtyla turns a deaf ear: he ties him down to his post.
Nothing is more representative in the new pope than his reputatioin as a rigid German theologian and an inquisitor, soon nicknamed the Panzerkardinal by progressives within his own country. However, in Rome, in the bureaus of the former Holy Office, he takes his visitors by surprise by his courteous welcome, the gentleness of his blue eyes, his soft voice and the subtlety of his intelligence. He charms people with his humility.
France, along with other countries, discovers Ratzinger’s iron fist when beginning in 1983 in Paris and in Lyon the new Prefect of the Doctrine holds a conference criticizing the catechism and Catholic pedagogy, viewed as too modern, developed by the Church of France inside its handbook, Pierres Vivantes (The Living Stones). The humiliation of the French episcopate is the first confirming of a malaise between France and Rome which require time to dissipate. A malaise which began with the first visit of the Pope to Paris in 1980 and the famous reprimand: France, what has become of your Baptismal oaths?
In Rome, Cardinal Ratzinger becomes both the impetus and the executor of disciplinary measures directed at the liberation theologists of Latin America (supporters of a peoples' Church) and other dissidents (Hans Küng, and later Charles Curran and Eugen Drewerman...). In 1984, he imposes a one-year penitential silence on the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff. In 1983 and 1985, he drafts two instructions (doctrinal documents) on liberation theology, suspected of connivance with Marxism. He reminds his audience that true liberation in Christ cannot be terrestrial; it is integral.
In a book translated in France under the title Conversation on the Faith (Entretien sur la Foi, Ed. Fayard, 1985) and published just prior to the extraordinary bishops’ synod called by John Paul II to discuss the outcome of the Vatican II Council, Cardinal Ratzinger clearly defends the idea of doctrinal recalibration, which he qualifies as restoration, a word which carries a certain connotation for Frenchmen and which will foster a great deal of controversy.
During the same period, he publishes bludgeoning texts attacking the Freemasons and walks away from the dialog which Vatican II had opened with them, and homosexuals. In 1987, in an instruction entitled, Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life), Ratzinger condemns any form of medically-assisted conception, even in the case of a married couples faced with sterility. Controversy breaks out. The Church is accused of a lack of compassion for persons unable to have children. An increasing number of physicians and couples leave the Church. In institutions where artificial insemination is studied, for example at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, researchers are peremptorily called to obedience by the German cardinal.
Every Friday night in Rome Ratzinger conducts working sessions with John Paul II; on Tuesdays he lunches with him to discuss bioethics, ecumenism and liberation theology. The crowning exemplar of his work in Rome is the drafting of the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church. This work, published in 1992, is the result of six years' labor. It sums up all his doctrinal and disciplinary positions as seen through the strictest of Roman orthodoxy.
Even John Paul II’s encyclical Splendor Veritatis (The Splendor of Truth, 1993) dealing with the relationship of freedom and truth is a mirror image of the ideas of Josef Ratzinger on the rudderless drift of a modernity which cannot distinguish good from evil. This text reflects Ratzinger’s ideas on the limits of a freedom that is devoid of all transcendental reference, on the obligations of obedience by Catholic theologians and on the moral betrayal of Western Christianity. The restrictions placed on seminaries and Catholic Universities, religious orders, research institutions become tighter and tighter and little by little theological advances the world shrivel to nothing. Plenty of other theologians are censured, like Jesuit Jacques Dupuis, an expert on oriental religions, and Sri Lankan theologian Tisa Balasurya.
However, Cardinal Ratzinger shares John-Paul II’s audacious steps in favor of rapprochement with the Jewish community and apologies for the Inquisition, the anti-Jewish pogroms and the condemnation of Galileo. In challenging a reticent Church, John Paul supports efforts at purification of Christian memory and conversations with non-Christian faiths. But then there was the jolt of the Year 2000 Jubilee: this anniversary of the birth of Christianity should have been celebrated in the unity of all Christian families. But a few rare, joint ceremonies (at St. Peter’s Baslica) did not soften the disappointment in Protestant circles when the practice of granting Jubilee indulgences was reintroduced.
On September 5, 2000, using the same tone, Cardinal Ratzinger published a document entitled, Dominus Jesus, which provokes a violent reaction in progressive and ecumenical circles. In this instruction, the Prefect of the Doctrine affirms that the Catholic Church has exclusive claim to the truth of Christian faith. If Orthodox churches are true Churches because have kept alive the principle of apostolic succession, then the Protestant Churches are merely, in his eyes, ecclesiastical communities disinherited from the legacy of the faith in Jesus Christ as handed down through the Apostles. The document provokes an earthquake. This declaration is considered as a provocation and a regression from all the progress attained through ecumenical dialog since Vatican II.
In the margin of his duties, Josef Ratzinger continues his personal work on several books. The Christian Faith, Yesterday and Tomorrow and Salt of the Earth are volumes of dialogs in which he answers questions on Christianity and the Church from its origins to the Third Millennium.
During the final years of the pontificate of John Paul II, Josef Ratzinger reiterates his warnings against homosexuality, access to sacraments by divorced and remarried couples, feminism, and abuses in the practice of the Eucharist. He specifically targets intercommunion (Catholics and Protestants taking Communion together). During Kirchentage (literally, Churches Day, a Christian gathering) in Berlin in 2003, he sanctions a priest for having distributed Communion to Protestants. All these writings increase his unpopularity and harden the perception of the Church ias an irritating and authoritarian institution out of touch with the modern world and taken over by the ultraconservatives of the Curia while the papacy of John Paul II was nearing its end.
This is the man whom the Conclave of Cardinals has elected Pope. This intransigent individual, incapable of making a single concession where the truth of the Catholic Church is concerned, is convinced that knowing how to say “no” is an act of charity. The new Pope is 78 years old, the age at which John Paul XXIII was selected by the Conclave, paving the way towards the Vatican II Council and an updating of the Church. Because of his intelligence, considered to be “radiant” in Rome, his culture, his experience and his critical vision of modern secularism and his capacity to dialog with the modern, globalized world the Bavarian Cardinal was doubtless the best placed person to ensure the legacy of John Paul II. But the controversies which were buried at the end of the papacy of his predecessor will doubtlessly resurface.
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