When I heard the other day that the “pope emeritus,” Benedict XVI, had become seriously ill, I searched through what I and others had written about him over the years. But it was especially the illustrations to these writings, the pictures of Benedict himself, that I found moving. From the years of his papacy there were so many images of a kind, friendly, smiling man. In his dress and demeanor, he perfectly represented the dignity of his office as well as his own personal modesty. It contrasts with the disturbing images, deeds and revelations that emanate almost daily from the Vatican under the regime of Benedict’s successor.
A Theological Leader
In the 1950s Joseph Ratzinger commenced a career as an academic – always his first love. Early on he became involved in the progressive circles of the Catholic Church in Germany. He acted as part of the team that pushed through the documents of the Second Vatican Council. In retrospect, Ratzinger never conceded any issues with his advocacy at this time, never felt any remorse at the effects of some of those decisions. Yet, he had been one of the movers in the revolution in the Church. At about this time he even took up a teaching position side by side with Hans Küng in Tübingen.
Very shortly thereafter, however, his path diverged from that of the German Catholic establishment. By the late 1960s, as his major theological works were published, he came to be seen by the orthodox minority of the German Church as a potential theological savior. Already people were turning with hope to him to find spiritual leadership in the midst of the growing chaos within both the Church and society.
By the 1980s he had emerged as the most articulate defender of the Catholic tradition within the establishment (and the hierarchy). In books such as the famous Ratzinger Report he acknowledged the damage inflicted upon the Church by disregarding Catholic tradition in the liturgy. This was a breath of fresh air. Indeed, Joseph Ratzinger was by far most effective as a theologian and spiritual writer. I know people (and have read of more) who have been inspired and even transformed by the reading of his books. His influence on priests was remarkable.
But in the 1970’s and 80’s he found papal favor as well, first from Paul VI, and then from John Paul II. For, as his “conservative” admirers had already discovered, he seemed to offer both loyalty to the Council and reverence for Catholic tradition. In 1977 he was appointed to the prestigious see of Munich and was also made Cardinal.
As Bishop and Vatican Prefect
We find, however, that Ratzinger early on encountered difficulties in a position requiring leadership and management skills. The best that can be said about his five years in Munich was that he was little different, both for better and for worse, than his colleagues in the German episcopate. Some of the decisions he took at this time later came back to haunt him (e.g., regarding a specific abusive priest or the “Catholic Integrated Community”).
In 1982 he was appointed to the Vatican as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and chief theological adviser to John Paul II). He remained in this office for the next 23 years. Both in his public statements and in behind the scenes advocacy he worked for the preservation of Catholic faith – in theology, morality, and liturgy.
As a professor in Germany, Joseph Ratzinger had already attracted the hostility of the Church progressives. Their animosity intensified drastically during his service as prefect and, thanks to the media, spread far beyond the borders of his homeland. The media depicted this kind, gentle and scholarly man ludicrously as a merciless authoritarian in contrast to the outgoing, warm personality of John Paul II. A near riot would be staged against a lecture Ratzinger gave in New York.
It seems that Joseph Ratzinger had sought neither elevation to the see of Munich nor his subsequent appointment to the Vatican. It is reported that he tried to retire from his Vatican office several times. Certainly, at the Vatican he insisted on continuing, in addition to his administrative duties, his scholarly writing and the interaction with his circle of students. I get the sense from accounts such as those of Seewald that he remained isolated in the Vatican, failed to develop the contacts and networks necessary for getting things done in such an incompetent bureaucracy, and that the actual management of the affairs of the Church rested in other hands. He could not necessarily restrain John Paul II even in theological matters (e.g., the first Assisi meeting).
The Pope
Accordingly, it must have come as the greatest shock of all to Joseph Ratzinger to have been elected Pope in 2005. Benedict XVI, in his Christmas address of that year, signaled that he wished to promote a shift in the culture or attitude of the Catholic Church and her relationship to her own past. Famously, he advocated a “hermeneutic of reform…in… continuity,” distinguishing it from a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.” Yet, in practice, his implementation of this vision was extremely limited and fragmentary. As for the liturgical reform of the reform, for example, Pope Benedict made only some timid gestures in the matter of the arrangement of candlesticks and crucifix on the altar and continued to promote exact translations of the liturgical texts. On the administrative level, he addressed some of the more egregious situations bequeathed to him by his predecessor ( such as the matter of Fr. Maciel and the Legionaries of Christ) and tried to start a reform of the curia and its finances.
Pope Benedict’s limitations as a leader became increasingly evident. His selection of associates in the Vatican was just as erratic as that of his mentor John Paul II; his management decisions were often inexplicable. His official statements could be disappointing; his encyclical on the economy had several luminous paragraphs, apparently written by him, buried in pages of meaningless verbiage. His political sensibility, in both theory and practice, was limited. Although a man of great musical and artistic sensitivity, Benedict now and then celebrated Masses wearing vestments or accompanied by music of an ugliness and incompetence that were scandalous even in the opinion of progressives. Pope Benedict found it difficult or impossible to directly confront opposition inside or outside of the Church – even that in his own Vatican. On at least one occasion, Benedict‘s own staff forced him to abandon his own decision – an abortive deal in 2012 for the recognition of the FSSPX. When the files are opened, I would not be surprised to discover that this specific incident first led Benedict to consider resignation.
Yet, in one case Benedict by his personal engagement overrode intense internal opposition – the hostility of the Vatican bureaucracy, the mainstream religious orders and much of the hierarchy – to finally give freedom to the Traditional Mass. The implications of this were profound. Benedict undoubtedly sensed that the prohibition of the Traditional Mass was only one aspect of an attempt to cancel (as we say today) the entirety of Catholic tradition. Furthermore, by assigning the initiative for obtaining Traditional Masses in the laity, Benedict was putting his finger on the monstrous failure of the Catholic hierarchy, bureaucratic or progressive or both, to respond to the needs of the Church today. It was even perhaps the first step in a reform of the centralized, ultramontane structures of the Church. Associated with this action, Pope Benedict partially regularized the status of the FSSPX. Thus, Benedict sought to end the exclusion of Traditional Catholics from the Church and heal the resulting tragic divisions. Yet Pope Benedict would not go further – he would not celebrate the old liturgy publicly as pope.
The Resignation
After his election as Pope, the animosity to Ratzinger that had been building for decades exploded into outright hatred on the part of the clergy, academics and the secular news media. The assault on the pope now took on international dimensions as well. He was depicted as a fanatic, a persecutor, a mindless disciplinarian. He was indicted for triggering hatred towards Islam, for advancing “holocaust deniers,” for trying to restrict birth control (condoms). No matter what he did, he encountered the same relentless drumfire from the media.
Clearly, insidious clerical circles, both inside and outside the Vatican, were also conspiring against him. His own butler betrayed him. Of course, we do not yet know the full story of what exactly happened in the Vatican in 2010- 2013, but it seems that Benedict finally had convinced himself that he could no longer effectively govern the Church. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude that the pressure of an organized and treacherous opposition in his pope’s own curia played a decisive role in the pope’s stunning decision to resign.
It was a shattering blow to the Church and to Benedict’s personal mission of reconnecting the Church to her own Tradition. With the election of Pope Francis, moreover, the “pope emeritus” Benedict soon had to witness a regime coming to power that set out to undo everything he and John Paul II had done to preserve or even recover Catholic tradition. By his resignation, Benedict had jeopardized the labors of decades. As in the case of his actions during the Second Vatican Council, however, Benedict was unable to acknowledge publicly that he had done anything wrong by resigning.
As “Pope Emeritus”
In retirement, Pope Benedict resided in Rome for almost another 10 years – longer than the period of his active pontificate. Again, we do not know the details of all that happened during this period. I don’t think we would be very wrong, however, to surmise that Benedict provided support, either directly or through his mere existence, to the forces trying to slow down the Francis revolution. The most obvious example of this was the book Benedict co-authored with Cardinal Sarah which undoubtedly played a role at derailing – for the time being – Pope Francis’s push for a married clergy and female deacons. Some very plausibly think that this incident was the genesis of Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis’s subsequent attack on the Traditional Mass – and accordingly on Benedict himself. Characteristically, as a media uproar ensued upon publication of this book, Benedict immediately tried to dissociate himself from its co-authorship.
The relentless hounding of Benedict by the media and the official Church continued throughout his retirement. The new pope’s minions celebrated Francis as a liberator, as the new John XXIII, with Benedict playing the role of Pius XII. Benedict lived to see his sole major legislative accomplishment, Summorum Pontificum, abrogated and the reasoning behind it misrepresented by Pope Francis and his academic and media followers. A book was published (with some discrete Vatican input) depicting Benedict as an effete, eccentric aesthete obsessed with lavish vestments and ceremonies. In early 2022 there was yet another all-out attack on Ratzinger in Germany, this time in regard to how he handled the case of an abusive priest while archbishop of Munich. The renewed rage of the German media and the “German Catholic Church” against Benedict knew no bounds – a poisonous atmosphere to which Benedict contributed by various gaffes and misstatements. Indeed, legal action was initiated against Benedict to obtain a kind of declaratory judgment against him for his management of this matter ( the case was dropped on December 31 after Pope Benedict’s death)
Even after his death, the castigation of Pope Benedict continued. The (official) German Catholic media seemed to damn him with faint praise (amid the obligatory platitudes). But we are also told, for example, that he was a reactionary, that his theology no longer has any influence in the official German theological world. In the United States, the secular media accompanied the announcement of his death with sound bites summarizing Benedict’s reign as a series of scandals or describing his primary accomplishment as worsening ecumenical relations.
A Spiritual Man in a distressed, fossilized Church
As a bishop, as prefect of a major Vatican Congregation and especially as pope, Ratzinger’s accomplishments were more limited than his intellectual talents and spiritual vision would have led his many supporters to expect. Yet, this negative assessment is not at all the whole story. His pontificate may not have been successful; but were those of Paul VI, John Paul II, and the current incumbent any more so? In many respects, Benedict’s papacy appears to have been more positive than theirs. We have referred to his public style and external image – dignified yet modest – forming such a contrast with the ceaseless self-promotion of Benedict’s successor (and predecessor)! We have mentioned his willingness to give to the laity the initiative in reclaiming the Traditional Mass – as opposed to issuing decrees from on high addressed to the clergy. And with Summorum Pontificum he took a courageous decision which his immediate predecessor had been unable to make. For, as a rule, John Paul II was content to adopt a passive, laissez-faire attitude to governing the Church. Paul VI and Francis, in contrast, have indeed been capable of taking actions that have shaken the whole Church. However, they could do this only because they enjoyed the support and prompting of the ruling secular powers of our day.
Pope Benedict’s significant presence in the Church did not disappear with his resignation. We get a sense of the hidden influence that the “pope emeritus” exercised by comments after Benedict’s death in German–language media, both Catholic and secular. It is there asserted that now Pope Francis will enjoy greater scope of action, that he at last will be able to speak more directly on issues. The NZZ (one of the two main German-language newspapers) even entitles an article: ”After the death of Benedict XVI Pope Francis is now, for the first time, sole pope.”
The difficulties Benedict experienced as pope were not, however, primarily attributable to his acknowledged lack of leadership and management skills. For the fundamental faults of Benedict’s papacy were not personal to him but institutional. In my view, the real issue of the Church is the need to respond to the spiritual void that had developed in the West since the 18th century and to reconvert the people to the Faith. Yet, this intuition of the need for spiritual change and renewal contrasted sharply with the establishment’s simultaneous commitment to the “system” of the Church with all its attendant weaknesses: bureaucratic complacency, lack of transparency, the avoidance of unpleasant problems, eagerness to reach an easy accommodation with the world and its ideology.
This contradiction became even more glaring under Pope Benedict, a man endowed with genuine intellectual and spiritual gifts. More than most Catholics, he sensed that the Church was at the point of a great transformation – even a great trial or purification. Yet, at the same time, he remained the quintessential man of the establishment: loyal to the Council, devoted to academic bureaucracy, always taking great pains to avoid conflict (and the appearance of conflict)within the Church and trying to maintain a public facade of unanimity and harmony. To balance an intensely spiritual, dramatic, almost apocalyptic vision with complacent, even conformist practice was an impossible task, inevitably doomed to failure. But it was a failure Pope Benedict shared with whole Conciliar Church! The defects of Pope Benedict were shared by many; his virtues only by a very few.
There are far more enduring aspects to Benedict’s legacy. I see them every day in the great renaissance of the Traditional Mass movement, made possible by Summorum Pontificum. It is heartening that many priests and young people rediscover the full Tradition of the Catholic Church. These priests, religious and laity are now standing firm in their faith in the face of renewed attempt by the current Pope to exclude them from the Church and to eliminate Catholic Tradition. All this was a made possible by Summorum Pontificum, its implementing regulations, and its predecessor indults. Pope Benedict either issued these or, as prefect, was involved in their creation. Moreover, it was Benedict’s ( or Joseph Ratzinger’s) writings that had helped to create broad awareness within the Church of the significance of liturgical issues in the first place.
Outside of traditionalism in the strict sense, Benedict’s legacy also continues to inspire. So many still discover “orthodox” Catholicism by reading the theologian Ratzinger’s works and addresses. Benedict also authorized the Ordinariate of the Anglican patrimony which is enjoying success in some regions. Even the reform of the reform seems to retain its adherents! We owe an immense debt of gratitude to Benedict for all this. In future generations the spiritual and intellectual legacy of Pope Benedict, I am confident, will continue to be studied and flourish.
UPDATE: A clarification or correction to the statement above on the German legal procedure against Benedict. Although it had announced the legal action would be terminated upon Benedict’s death, the court said later that the case will continue against Benedict’s “heirs.” No such “heirs” have been identified, nor has any property of Benedict’s been found in Germany. So it is very unclear what will happen next. The entire purpose of this proceeeding is to rehash in public allegations embarrasssing to Benedict (or now, to his memory); monetary damages are reported to be precluded by the applicable statute of limitations.
The denigration of Benedict in his own homeland continues even after his death.
Below are relevant links from katholisch.de (in German).
Landgericht Traunstein: Verfahren geht gegen Erben Benedikts weiter.
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