Rupert Shortt writes:
POPE BENEDICT XVI, who died on 31 December aged 95, will be remembered as much for his departure from office — it was the first papal abdication in 600 years — and for shaping his predecessor’s reign, as for his own term as Pope. Even Vatican insiders were shocked when Benedict told a gathering of cardinals on 13 February 2013 that his eight years at the helm of the Roman Catholic Church would end within weeks. The announcement was at first greeted with confusion as well as consternation, because the Pope was speaking in Latin.
Yet, an option previously considered unthinkable by many suddenly appeared reasonable and even far-sighted. Benedict was approaching his 86th birthday. He had been advised by his doctors not to travel outside Europe. The dual scandals of widespread clerical child abuse, on the one hand, and growing evidence of its widespread concealment, on the other, had taken a heavy toll on the Church’s credibility.
Parish-based movements in the German-speaking world and elsewhere had been voicing growing demands for across-the-board reform: not only greater transparency, but also a more open style of government and changes to teaching on sexual ethics. The so-called Vatileaks scandal of 2012, during which Benedict’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, released classified documents covering areas including alleged financial fraud in the Church, added to a sense of drift shading into crisis.
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict had previously displayed far more vim. He spent 23 years in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) before his election in 2005, becoming the chief architect of a return to more centralised forms of church government. Critics charged him with high-handedness; even many neutral observers saw the Cardinal as a contemporary Grand Inquisitor. But what struck liberals as flaws were held to be virtues by traditionalists concerned that the Roman Catholic Church of the 1960s and ’70s had made too big an accommodation with the world.
Ratzinger himself was a poacher turned gamekeeper. As an independent-minded young priest, he supported many of the changes heralded by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) before he decided that its reforms were excessive. The puzzle that he presents runs deeper than his headlong shift to the theological Right, however. He could be a generous, self-effacing figure, as well as a controversialist, and did not emerge triumphant from the conclave that elected him as the continuity candidate alone.
In his new position as pastor, Pope Benedict shunned the cult of personality surrounding John Paul, and travelled far less, in the process reviving a more traditional papal style. None the less, official RC teaching on matters of substance remained fixed. This emphasis on holding the line reinforced a widespread impression that Benedict was a caretaker Pope who put off a day of reckoning for one of the few remaining absolute monarchies.
Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born on 16 April 1927 in Marktl am Inn, a village 60 miles east of Munich. His parents and two siblings were intensely devout: their Catholic loyalties formed a principal source of their hostility to Nazism. The young Joseph shared the family outlook ardently: Milestones, a brief memoir covering the first 50 years of his life, includes a detailed indictment of Hitler’s interference in church affairs. Surprisingly, though, it never mentions either the Holocaust or the plight of German Jews in general.
Ratzinger’s father, Joseph, Snr, was a policeman with an abiding hostility to the Brownshirts. Milestones suggests that his career was jeopardised as a consequence. In 1932, after spending three years in Tittmoning, a sizeable town on the Austrian border, the family moved to a rural backwater 20 miles closer to Munich. It was here that Joseph first felt the effects of National Socialism in the classroom.
Although the concordat drawn up between Hitler and the Vatican put religious education under notional church control, the reality was very different. Soon, in Ratzinger’s words, his school’s spiritual foundation “was no longer to be the Christian faith but the ideology of the Führer”. Milestones grants that Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pius XII), who negotiated the concordat, was Hitler’s unwitting pawn, especially as Roman Catholics paid a heavy price in other spheres of life. The Centre Party, a bastion of democratic moderation led by a priest, Ludwig Haas, was disbanded at the request of the Nazis.
Despite his indirect criticism of Pacelli, Ratzinger always maintained that Roman Catholics were a bulwark against Nazism, and that their witness was a vindication of tight leadership. Both of these claims are questionable. Although individual prelates (including Bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster and Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich) risked their lives to condemn Nazi crimes, the RC community in general colluded in implementing provisions such as the Nuremberg laws, which forbade marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans. It is more plausible to infer that German RCs were hamstrung by a tradition of docile obedience to authority. In continental Europe, only Protestant Denmark could claim a solid record in standing up to the Nazis.
The picture of Ratzinger which emerges in Milestones is of a shy, bookish boy with few if any friends, but a sharp intelligence. Although not untouched by the sense of national pride prompted by Hitler’s initial successes, Joseph knew almost at once that Germany had overreached itself in invading the Soviet Union. But the schoolboy’s prime focus was spiritual. Until he was called up in 1944, religion ministered to his emotions as well as his intellect: he entered the junior seminary at Traunstein, in eastern Bavaria, two years before the outbreak of war, never seriously contemplating a non-clerical career.
Joseph’s vocation precluded his recruitment into the SS — priests or would-be priests were mistrusted by those charged with finding fresh recruits. His military service did not extend beyond trench-digging and tours of duty at Flaks (anti-aircraft units) in the Munich area.
The conscript’s boldest act in 1945 was to abandon his company in early May, having heard of Hitler’s suicide several days earlier. Joseph might have been shot on sight for desertion, and was at one point intercepted by two soldiers as he emerged from a railway underpass. They waved him on, perhaps deciding to show mercy because his arm was in a sling. He briefly returned to his parents, but was then interned for several weeks by the Americans, as were thousands of other German servicemen.
After his demobilisation, Ratzinger began full-scale studies for the priesthood at Freising, the ancient heart of the Munich diocese, later moving to Munich University. As a young man, he continued to display three qualities above all: seriousness, exceptional academic ability, and considerable independence of mind.
Unexpectedly, perhaps, given his later reputation as the embodiment of hardline orthodoxy, Ratzinger supported one of his teachers, Hans Maier, who had suffered severe sanctions for backing some of the (largely correct) findings of Protestant biblical scholarship. More broadly, Ratzinger thought that Pius XII’s reign was a time of intellectual sterility, and that Rome was improperly muffling the voices of distinguished figures at the cutting edge of RC theology in Northern Europe.
Ratzinger was especially attracted to the nouvelle théologie pioneered by the great French Jesuit Henri de Lubac. This sprang from the reformist style known as ressourcement: the impulse to refresh contemporary discussion by returning to the sources of Christian thought in the patristic era.
Ratzinger’s enthusiasm for ressourcement was dangerous in the 1950s (de Lubac and another major figure, Yves Congar, were silenced at this time before their subsequent return to favour), and it almost destroyed his hopes of an academic career at a stroke. His Habilitationsschrift (a post-doctoral thesis), on St Bonaventure’s conception of salvation history, was thought to be saturated by “subversive” French influences: this prompted the examiners to request changes. (Ratzinger received a second chance when a sympathetic examiner persuaded the authorities in Munich that a less contentious part of the dissertation could be recast and expanded.)
After ordination, he served a year-long curacy in a suburb of Munich before embarking on doctoral studies. He was now qualified for a post in the Catholic faculty of a German university. He briefly taught in Freising, before being appointed to a chair at Bonn in 1958. The move proved a fillip to his career. He got on well with the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joseph Frings, and was invited to be peritus, or theological adviser, to his patron when the Second Vatican Council began in 1962.
Though still only in his mid-thirties, Ratzinger played a substantial part in fomenting the largest shake-up in RC life for 400 years. Frings was perhaps the most important voice on the Church’s more liberal wing. He became especially famous for denouncing the methods of the CDF (then called the Holy Office) as “a source of scandal to the world”.
Ratzinger himself helped to draft the Council’s Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, and put his name to a statement complaining that the hierarchy had “reins that are far too tight, too many laws, many of which have helped to leave the century of unbelief in the lurch, instead of helping it to redemption”.
He continued to display liberal leanings after the Council, by helping to found the progressive journal Concilium. As late as 1968, Ratzinger signed a declaration, with 1300 other RC scholars, on the right of theologians “to seek and speak the truth, without being hampered by administrative measures and sanctions”. Yet, underneath, Ratzinger’s outlook was changing. Augustine, often associated with a gloomy estimation of human nature, had always been his chief intellectual mentor; Ratzinger’s downbeat verdicts on Church and society alike became notably more Augustinian from his early forties onwards.
The abiding influence of Augustine helps to explain why Ratzinger showed greater consistency than he is sometimes credited with. Despite his relative liberalism during the Council, he was hostile to Gaudium et Spes, its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. This document recovered a long-dormant tradition of Christian humanism: “The joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the men and women of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.”
Even at the time, however, Ratzinger (together with the future John Paul II) began to wonder whether the Church had not embraced the world just as secular society was moving in another direction. He judged Gaudium et Spes to be spiritually flabby, grafting Christian vocabulary on to what was essentially sociological analysis, and reflecting a neglect of the gospel’s status as Good News, not merely good advice.
His fears were boosted by what struck him as the gross excesses of the student sit-ins of 1968, which he witnessed as a newly appointed professor at Tübingen University, in Swabia. While some of his colleagues saw the tide of rebellion as ephemeral, or at most as a dialectical moment in a setting in which teachers and parents had previously enjoyed too much deference, Ratzinger saw a more sinister influence at work. He became convinced that Marxism was deeply rooted in intellectual life, and that its influence was poisoning the Church. When a chance arose for him to leave Tübingen in 1969 for the newly established university at Regensburg, an old town on the Danube north of Munich, Ratzinger seized it.
Before the move, he had written his most celebrated work, Introduction to Christianity. Structured as an exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, the book also amounts to a bravura piece of intellectual history. It begins by tracing the roots of modern atheism, and the allied belief that science provides the only legitimate source of objective knowledge.
Rejecting this model as entailing an impoverishment of our God-given faculties, Ratzinger sought to revive Augustine’s vision of the intellect, in which faith and reason are seen as interlaced. From this springs the characteristically Augustinian notion (also championed by Radical Orthodoxy, the theological movement pioneered by British Anglicans) that it is not reasonable to think that only reason discloses the world. The texture of reality is revealed by reason harnessed to our ethical and aesthetic impulses. Cardinal Franz König, sometime Archbishop of Vienna and a leading liberal, said that Introduction to Christianity constituted a virtue that outweighed all his reservations about the author’s character.
AlamyCardinal Joseph Ratzinger with Pope John Paul II in April 1995
Some observers believe that Joseph Ratzinger would have died in obscurity had he not produced this work. Although a tough read for the layperson, it became an international bestseller. Pope Paul VI was among its chief admirers. This papal approbation, together with Ratzinger’s more conservative profile after Vatican II, account for his otherwise unexpected appointment as Archbishop of Munich in 1977.
The post came with an automatic red hat, meaning that the newly elevated Cardinal had taken part in two conclaves within 15 months. The year of three popes, as 1978 has come to be known, also gave Ratzinger an opportunity to form the most important alliance of his life. A sense of unease pervaded the Church at this time, not only because of John Paul I’s untimely death, but because Paul VI had been widely criticised for a spasmodic-style leadership, by turns authoritarian and weak.
Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected as a youngish candidate who could operate with greater vigour. He and Ratzinger were on the same page theologically. The newly installed Pope offered the Archbishop of Munich a Vatican post (as Prefect of the Congregation for Education) as early as 1980. Ratzinger declined, feeling that the promotion would look premature. He made what would turn out to be the final move of his life two years later, when Cardinal Franko Seper retired from the CDF.
Many among Ratzinger’s Munich flock welcomed the prospect of his departure for Rome. Delegates at a clergy conference broke into spontaneous applause on hearing the news. Their grievances were broadly based. “The Cardinal was a scholar,” according to a priest who held a senior position in the diocese at this time. “He gave the impression of living inside his head. Administration was not his strong suit, and that burden tended to be shouldered by those around him.”
Others have spoken of Ratzinger’s capacity for hard work, and his skill as a public speaker. But he was also accused of lacking warmth and “Menschenkenntnis”, the capacity to size people up. One cleric who asked his chief pastor for an urgent meeting was told that there were no slots in his diary for five months. On at least one occasion, Ratzinger accused a priest of failing to observe correct ceremonial at mass, but did not apologise when it emerged that the complainant had acted out of malice. The Cardinal also refused even to meet lay representatives seeking to discuss the Church’s ban on contraception.
These indicators were a herald of Ratzinger’s style at the CDF, especially as he became an ex-officio member of the Congregation dealing with episcopal nominations. The appointment of unpopular hardliners to vacant sees during the 1980s and ’90s, especially in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, had much to do with the Cardinal’s influence.
His stewardship of the CDF nevertheless needs to be assessed with care. At least four substantial arguments have been voiced in his defence.
First, the Prefect’s post was perhaps inherently unappealing, because it entailed the exercise of discipline. Almost anyone teaching in the Church’s name is bound to feel ruffled by complaints that their work is defective. Second, the number of people silenced on Ratzinger’s watch was very small. CDF procedures are cumbersome; admonitions were delivered only after long investigations.
Third, the reining-in of figures such as Hans Küng, the German ecumenical pioneer, and Charles Curran, the American ethicist, should not be seen purely as a limitation on free speech. Since the Roman Catholic Church takes institutional responsibility for what its teachers say, it has to be sure that their teaching is authentic. Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP, formerly Master of the Dominican Order, puts the matter as follows: “People are perfectly free to express their opinion; but it is proper that the authorities can say, ‘Well, if you do argue such-and-such, we’re not going to expel you from our ranks, but we can declare that in so teaching, you are not teaching the faith of the Church.’”
A fourth point that could be made in Ratzinger’s support is that some of his alleged victims were asking for trouble. Fr Roger Haight, an American Jesuit, had his missio canonica, or licence to teach, withdrawn in 2005 because his views leaned towards Unitarianism. Fr Tissa Balasuriya, a Sri Lankan theologian, was excommunicated for several months in 1997-98 for denying the Marian dogmas and official teaching on Original Sin.
Leonardo Boff, the Brazilian Franciscan, successfully represented his temporary silencing in 1984 as an act of naked authoritarianism. But, like some other liberation theologians such as Hugo Assmann, Dr Boff sometimes gave the impression that Christian preaching should be refashioned on the procrustean bed of Marxism. He was also in a sexual relationship with his future wife long before leaving the priesthood in 1992.
Yet, the case against Ratzinger is also weighty. He set an important condition for becoming Prefect in the first place — that of being allowed to continue writing books. Critics tend to base their arguments on concern about his joint status as referee and player. Few clerics apart from Fr Haight, Küng, and Professor Curran had their missio canonica withdrawn by the CDF, but Ratzinger wanted to make an example of them. He selected cases that centred on particular subjects, such as liberation theology and sexual morality, to fire a shot across the bows of other dissenters working in the same fields.
Curran got into hot water for denying that sex outside marriage is always inherently sinful. Part of his argument was that the Church should allow room for disagreement on this subject, as on other second-order issues such as pacifism and the use of force. He also maintained that the Magisterium, or teaching office of the Church, was too narrowly defined. The term should not be applied to the Roman Curia alone, but stretched (as during the Middle Ages, for example) to include universities and other forums.
These ideas met with a dusty response from Ratzinger: although Curran won backing from a group of eminent theologians, he was forced to resign his chair at the Catholic University of America in 1986. Other ethicists then spoke of a chill wind blowing through Catholic seats of learning during the years that followed.
That CDF staff sometimes displayed excessive zeal is also evidenced by the stream of fiercely worded documents flowing from Ratzinger’s pen during the period. The most contentious of these was The Ratzinger Report (1984), which originated as an extended interview with Vittorio Messori, an Italian journalist.
Giving an almost unremittingly downbeat verdict on church life during the previous two decades, the book is also clear about who was to blame: “A new Catholic unity had been hoped for. Instead, a dissent has divided us which, in the words of [Pope Paul VI], has gone from self-criticism to self-destruction. . . I have the impression that the misfortunes that the Church has encountered in the last twenty years are to be ascribed less to the ‘true’ Council than . . . to the fact that latently present polemical and centrifugal forces have [generated] a cultural crisis in the West, where the affluent middle class . . . with its liberal-radical ideology of individualistic, rationalistic, hedonistic character, is placing Christian values fundamentally in question.”
Ratzinger’s arguments were rejected as “morbid” by Fr Fergus Kerr OP, a leading British theologian. Even some bishops elsewhere in Europe argued that the interviewee had overstepped the mark. If anything, though, the Cardinal’s supporters wanted him to go further. “Delation”, the reporting of alleged doctrinal irregularity to Rome, became common during the 1980s and ’90s as Roman Catholics divided along familiar liberal-conservative lines.
Though less overt than clashes between Anglicans, these splits were similar in substance. They derived from core debate about the terms on which the faithful should engage with those outside their ranks. Should the Church moderate its teaching in the face of external influences, on the grounds that the Holy Spirit is at work among those who do not march under the Christian banner? Or should Christ’s followers ignore the siren voices of secularism, and abide by unambiguous formulas from the past?
With the discrediting of Marxism’s claim to truth, Ratzinger began to feel that relativism, or disbelief in truth as such, was the deepest intellectual peril in the Western world, and that many Catholics had become uncritically influenced by it. His response included a series of declarations from the CDF instigating new controls on theologians. Even national episcopal conferences were told that they could not issue statements on doctrinal matters unless these were either agreed unanimously or issued with Rome’s prior approval.
Other contentious declarations bearing Ratzinger’s stamp were probably Ad Tuendam Fidem (1998), which listed the alleged invalidity of Anglican orders as an essential tenet of RC belief, and Dominus Iesus (2000). This latter document effectively insulted other Christians by declaring that they were in grave spiritual peril.
Such developments foreshadowed the setting up of the Ordinariate for former Anglicans in 2010. Although the move allowed those concerned to retain their spiritual “patrimony” (including use of a great deal of the Book of Common Prayer), members were obliged to assent to The Catechism of Catholic Church — not normally a requirement for reception into the RC Church.
The CDF’s 2001 statement on civil partnerships for same-sex couples was also judged very harsh in many quarters. It failed to mention either the love displayed by gay partners for each other, or the Church’s love for them. Overall, Ratzinger’s stock as a theologian fell sharply during this period, although many conservatives, especially in North America, appreciated his firm hand.
When Pope John Paul died after a protracted illness in April 2005, some liberal commentators tripped up in supposing that a traditionalist group of cardinals would consider a conservative mindset to be a drawback among the papabili. Almost all the electors at the ensuing conclave had been appointed by John Paul: Ratzinger was hailed as the man to maintain the Church on its established course.
He was 78, but age was not necessarily a handicap. Long pontificates have often been followed by briefer reigns. In any case, very few of Ratzinger’s rivals possessed his experience or intellect. One who did — the former Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Maria Martini — was already ill with Parkinson’s disease.
As Pope, Benedict gained an early reputation for personal diffidence. Despite sporting a Cartier watch and reviving some outré items of papal garb, he was a reluctant performer on the papal stage. His reserve was encapsulated by a British journalist who saw him officiate at a service in one of Rome’s basilicas: “Halfway down the nave, he veers to the side. It is as if a light bulb has gone off in his brain, telling him: ‘Kiss baby.’ A baby is duly kissed, with unfeigned tenderness. But one can’t help thinking that John Paul II would have managed the gesture more smoothly.”
Another frequently repeated verdict on Benedict XVI’s early period in office was that the former watchdog had failed to bark. This was accurate in certain respects. It reflected both his change of post (his register was now that of the shepherd) and the mixed signals that he had, in any case, always given off, even at the CDF. The man who had warned Roman Catholics against yoga and Eastern meditation practices in 1989 was later asked how many paths there were to God. “As many as there are human beings,” he answered.
Benedict’s first papal encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (2006), again evinced a more open-handed approach. It included a refreshing paean to physical love. His reign was far from toothless, though. Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, the Vatican’s senior British official and its only first-rate Arabist, was unwisely removed as head of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, and demoted to the Cairo nunciature. Cardinal Stephen Hamao was not even informed of his sacking as head of the Vatican’s migration and tourism department in 2006.
As many pointed out, such behaviour seemed shocking when compared with the standards expected of a well-run secular organisation, and would probably count as a violation of employment law. The Synod of Bishops in late 2005 set the tone for the remainder of Benedict’s reign in many respects. Arenas of discussion were restricted, and one participant complained that he had “never been in a meeting where it was so obvious that the Cardinals bullied others and tried to call the shots”.
In September 2006, Benedict visited his old university at Regensburg in Bavaria, using an academic lecture to quote the view of Manuel II Palaiologus, a 14th-century Byzantine Emperor, that Islam was based on violence and inhumanity.
Although the opinion was not Benedict’s own, and was cited in the context of arguments emphasising the complementarity of faith and reason, he failed to distance himself from it until the matter had flared up into a full-scale crisis. The lecture prompted furious protests from Muslims, some of whom even called for the Pope to be killed. Cooler heads simply saw further evidence that Benedict had always been insensitive to the international echo chamber in which his pronouncements were voiced.
Internally, hardline aspects of RC teaching were never softened on Benedict’s watch. Soon after his election, he authorised the Congregation for Education to issue an Instruction on gay clergy, which contained the startling (and, in many eyes, absurd) stipulation that men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should not be ordained. Episcopal conferences continued to be dominated by conservatives; appointments to the College of Cardinals reflected a European bias.
At the same time, evidence suggesting a lack of transparency in official circles over clerical paedophilia regularly resurfaced. In January 2022 — nine years after his resignation and by then in very poor health — he was obliged to admit that he had attended a meeting with local church officials in 1980 to discuss a suspected paedophile priest. Benedict blamed a previous written statement to German investigators, in which he had said that he was absent from the meeting, on an editorial error.
The acknowledgement came several days after a report on the investigation said that, as Archbishop of Munich, Ratzinger had failed to take action against four priests accused of child sexual abuse, and that his denial of being at the meeting in question lacked credibility.
Part of the puzzle embodied by Joseph Ratzinger will go with him to the grave. But the policies described here give us a good deal of insight into his personality. On 19 April 2005, the day of his election, he famously described himself as “a humble servant in the vineyard of the Lord”. This was dismissed as cant by some, who saw evidence of barely concealed triumphalism in the new Pope’s body language.
It is probably truer to conclude that Benedict’s private feelings reflected the complexity of clerical ambition. His deepest wish was almost certainly to retire to Bavaria alongside his brother Georg (also a priest) and his beloved cats. But he was also eager to see the policies that he had influenced take root more deeply. He is, therefore, unlikely to have approved of Pope Francis’s reforms: the Church is now a good deal more heterogeneous than in 2013.
Unlike some conservative cardinals who publicly criticised Francis, however, Benedict for the most part maintained a wall of silence, passing out his days at a converted convent in the shadow of St Peter’s Basilica, visited daily by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, his amanuensis and former private secretary.
Rupert Shortt is a Research Associate at the Von Hügel Institute, University of Cambridge, and was religion editor of The Times Literary Supplement from 2000 to 2020. His books include Benedict XVI: Commander of the Faith (2006).