Benedict XVI, 1927-2022
I have been meaning to write this essay since the death of Benedict XVI. I am just now getting to it.
Lots of light and heat have been released into the world by reactions to his death. Many people, inspired in most cases with much more genuine and personal emotion than my own, have written and spoken many things. With few exceptions, these have followed the trajectory of the generally-accepted understandings (and misunderstandings) of his life, and reactions thereto.
I don't wish to add to these reactions. This is for a few reasons, mostly coming down to my own lack of personal stake. Benedict was the Pope when I became Catholic; but only for about a year and a half. I have a lot of respect and a certain degree of affection for this paralyzingly shy academic lover of classical music, cats, and Orange Fanta, but nothing like the personal devotion or hatred that inspire many others. Likewise, as a convert and a historian, my investment in the internal mass-media and ideological and cultural conflicts within contemporary Western Catholicism is more remote than most.
I wanted to write something about Benedict XVI after his death, then, not to prove any particular ideological point or express any profound emotion, but simply to note and express my own recognition and cognizance of an enormous, epochal figure in the history of the Catholic Church.
The importance of Benedict XVI (or rather, of Joseph Ratzinger) exists regardless of how any particular person feels about him, positively or negatively. Whether he is a saint to you or an archvillain, dismissal is not an option.
Yet these are the two great paradoxes of Benedict XVI. First, that despite the bulk of his contribution to Catholicism coming as a theologian, as the priest-professor Joseph Ratzinger, he is largely being remembered, and will always be remembered, as Pope Benedict XVI. And secondly, that despite the incredible stature and breadth and sophistication and originality and boldness and even, dare we say, progressiveness of his theological thought, many who are devoted to him love him as an embodiment of security and tradition, and many who dislike him quite frankly despise him as the same.
Yet it is through these paradoxes that his importance most clearly emerges. For in the context of Catholic history, Joseph Ratzinger emerges as a quite definite type of figure, who is most of all defined by crossing between worlds: or rather, from crossing from some world of contemporary significance, artistic or intellectual or political, into the world of the clerical Church. His indelible impact--an impact that it is almost impossible to overstate--comes precisely from his status as, not just a theologian, but an ecclesiastical theologian, a clerical theologian, a Papal and Magisterial theologian.
The 19th and 20th centuries were periods of profound intellectual, moral, and artistic ferment for Catholicism. Despite exaggerated claims to the contrary, this was profoundly not a "post-Vatican-2" phenomenon, at least on a global level. The American Vatican 2 narrative of Catholic history in modernity is, alas, almost entirely false: or rather, it is merely aggressively parochial, based on the particular felt experience of immigrant backwardness and exclusion and self-segregation in secularizing Protestant America giving suddenly away to assimilation and elite access.
For the Church in Europe, the centuries following the Reformation represented a descending curve, at times slight, at times steep, of the loss or destruction of Catholic social, cultural, and intellectual life. The French Revolution and its aftermath represented the apocalyptic outcome of this trajectory, bringing to many parts of Europe the specter of total dispossession of Catholic institutions and total loss of access to elite intellectual and cultural society generally. This naturally had a devastating effect on Catholic intellectual and artistic life--but was met by a new, fervent wave of action from below, inspired and led by the new, muscular Ultramontane Papacy. Increasingly no longer in possession of secure institutional havens of their own, Catholics built new institutions, new movements, and increasingly recolonized elite institutions through individual acts of conversion or piety. The number and stature of converts to Catholicism in say, late 19th century France or early 20th century England was quite formidable--frequently numbering among the leading lights of the intellectuals, artists, and literati.
Many of the things that Catholics today are taught to regard as antinomies in fact fall within the basic upward curve of Catholic institution-building and colonization during this period. The Thomistic Revival of Leo XIII is an indelible and crucial part of the story--but so is the Patristic Revival of a half-century later, which would certainly have never taken place without the former event. The manuals were as much a fruit of this growth in intellectual confidence and sophistication as de Lubac. 19th century Ultramontane encyclicals, delivered with the morning newspaper to comment on the events of the time, are as much a modern development as World Youth Day. The liturgical movement of the early to mid 20th century is as indelibly tied to modernity as contemporary liturgical traditionalism. Vatican I, with its morally breathtaking assertion of ecclesiastical independence in the face of triumphant secular power, is as much a part of that trajectory as Vatican II, with its more nuanced, but if anything even more morally confident self-assertion in the face of the world wars and an American world order.
However, the issue with this inchoate growth, as with many such processes, was that it created as many new problems as it claimed to resolve--or rather, that it created movements and institutions, all of which expressed their energy through constant inquiry and conflict among themselves. This was one facet of the general golden age of mass democracy, when social clubs and ideological movements and trade unions and institutions of all kinds proliferated as never before, enabled by new technology, new egalitarian social structures, and new forms of mass education.
The joke is that the pre-Vatican 2 Church is portrayed, in America, as a period of intellectual backwardness and repression, and the post-Vatican 2 Church is portrayed as an era of openness and freedom--whereas it would be closer to the truth to say the exact opposite.
Here, then, is the importance of Joseph Ratzinger--that he is one of a few key figures to bridge the 19th and 20th century Church with the 21st century Church. And that in bridging these two eras of the Church, he established a synthesis and form that has endured and become a definitive synthesis and model for the Church going forward.
Joseph Ratzinger began as a figure on the forefront of the "liberal" progressive wing of the Church, a bold theologian committed to the Patristic Revival against the Neo-Scholastics, to a more sophisticated, more intellectual, more elite-friendly, more secular-friendly engagement with the modern world, and to a non-coercive and anti-war social and political ethos. In fact, the overriding mandate of Joseph Ratzinger's theology throughout his entire career--as is extremely visible in any reading of virtually any text written by him--is the need to translate Catholicism and make it understandable to and compatible with and compelling for modern secular Western human beings (among which loom large modern secular Western intellectuals). He was thus among the intellectual radicals who took over and made Vatican 2 their own--deliberately altering it from a more strident Vatican-I-style Council condemning particular modern errors to an innovative Council that would lay the groundwork for a new synthesis of theology and propose a new paradigm of ecclesiastical life for a new age.
One of the biggest and best jokes of Benedict XVI as a Pope was his association with movements opposed to Vatican 2 or suspicious of it--when even as Pope, Benedict was preoccupied to the point of obsession with Vatican 2, its meaning, its spirit, and its continuing overriding relevance for ecclesiastical life. And the other very good joke that flows from it is that his association with these movements is largely the result of him being perhaps the most properly liberal Pope to have ever reigned--liberal, that is, not in the accepted theological sense of rejecting Christian dogmas, but in the political sense of favoring freedom of speech and belief in Church and State and in the personal sense of a commitment to generosity and tolerance towards people with whom he disagrees. And no Pope of the last fifty years could possibly disagree more with those who reject Vatican 2 as heretical or irrelevant than Benedict XVI.
What happened next, though, after Vatican 2, is the crux of the conflicts that have followed him ever since. Ratzinger and his fellow intellectuals and clerics desired above all to establish a new, lasting synthesis and paradigm of Catholic theology and ecclesiastical life. This synthesis, it was hoped, would resolve the new questions and contradictions and differences created by the last century of grappling with secular modernity by Catholic movements and intellectuals and artists. This everyone agreed on.
What happened next, though, was a parting of the ways: on the one hand, Catholics, including especially Catholic intellectuals and artists and members of the new Catholic mass movements and institutions, followed their new synthesis, now in their mind achieved, right out of the Church and especially out of Catholic institutions and the ranks of the clergy. On the other hand, the radical priest-professor Joseph Ratzinger was appointed a bishop and shortly thereafter picked out by Pope John Paul II, taken to Rome, and made a Cardinal.
It is this first and foremost, and not any fundamental intellectual disagreement, that led to the schism between Ratzinger and most of his contemporaries. Both groups desired to develop a new theological synthesis, to resolve the same problems, along nearly the same lines--historical ressourcement, greater openness to the world, acceptance of modern life and modern secular governments, presentation of the Faith in new terms and modes and methods. For some, this meant, quite naturally, abandonment of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and increasing allegiance to secular institutions, ways of life, and movements. For Ratzinger, it meant becoming Pope.
Of course, it is certain that Ratzinger would never sought ecclesiastical advancement on his own, or even happily. His basic loyalty to the Church not just as a political-social "people of God," not just as an abstract theological supposit, but as a real-world institution spread around the world and led by clerics, was fundamental to him, and would likely have remained the same regardless of his circumstances. But it would not have led to him becoming Pope if it were not for John Paul II.
John Paul II is another profoundly misunderstood figure in Catholic history. Somehow, everyone forgets that he, as much as or more than Ratzinger, was first and foremost an academic--indeed, an academic of a particularly original and creative bent, focused on a grand synthesis of phenonemologist philosophy with Thomistic metaphysics, not just a theologian but a philosopher, metaphysician, artist, playwright, poet. Karol Wojtyla was also a man with charisma, that rare, indelible property that makes people focus on and follow a person. And this creativity and charisma, in the unique circumstances of a Polish Church formerly at the center of cultural life, but now suddenly under intellectual and cultural repression, led him to the forefront of the Polish Church, and from there, in the unique circumstances of a Conclave trying to take a deep breath after the dispiriting final years of Paul VI's pontificate, to becoming Pope himself. And John Paul II, charismatic academic philosopher, looked around to see what he needed to govern and shape the Church as he wanted, and saw and selected Joseph Ratzinger. And Joseph Ratzinger, with that core ecclesiastical loyalty that had, apparently, always been there beneath the apparent theological radical, bowed his head and went to Rome.
John Paul II chose well. He was a brilliant, elaborate, labyrinthine, creative, systematic thinker and inspirer--but not always the clearest communicator or the most deliberate in following out the implications of his own ideas. And he saw clearly that Joseph Ratzinger was the perfect collaborator to help him think things out and communicate the results.
Here, again, the schism rears its ugly head. For John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger, their intellectual collaboration was the natural fruit and outcome of Vatican 2. It was, indeed, in a broader ecclesiastical sense a successful revolution. Two progressive academics were now in charge of the Church, and they had the means and the time to fully and at length set out their new and comprehensive and creative synthesis of Catholic theology as a whole.
The hallmark of the post-Vatican 2 Magisterium, especially in contrast to the century or century and a half before, is its breadth and clarity. Two academics set out in detail, with exceptions marked, in sophisticated intellectual language, everything they could. With astonishing ambition, they set out to resolve the pre-existing conflicts and ambiguities and "new questions" in Catholic doctrine and moral teaching one by one, with astonishing precision. Catholic bioethics; the theology of the body and sexual ethics; ecclesiastical law and structure; Magisterial authority, dissent, and obedience; Papal versus episcopal authority; inculturation; liturgical development; levels of revelation and dogmatic authority. In every area they touched, they clarified the ambiguities and conflicts that had existed, and established a clear system.
(Part of the confusion on this point, I believe, is due to differing underlying ideas of clarity. Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors is not a very clear text intellectually; as the last great example of the propositional mode of Magisterial teaching, it is frequently difficult to determine in exactly what the propositions he is condemning mean or in what sense they are condemned or why. The propositional mode of condemnation, in fact, is almost by necessity unclear. Propositions condemned as scandalous to pious ears may not even be false; even the (rare) propositions condemned as heretical are often heretical only if taken in one sense or in a specific context. And pontiffs could and did fail to distinguish exactly why a given proposition was being condemned. This is not to say that such declarations are impossible to interpret; generally, taking the propositions together you can figure out what a specific Pope is intending to condemn as heretical or intending to assert authoritatively. With some historical context, you can determine when he is checking a particular modern movement or group or asserting a particular theological position. John Paul II and Benedict XVI aimed above all else for intellectual clarity and definition, setting out in exactly what sense what they were saying was to be taken and in exactly what sense they condemned particular errors and often even with what degree of authority. Yet in another sense, the ad hoc condemnations of contemporary ideas and propositions and figures by the early modern Papacy were clearer in the rather different sense of being rhetorically straightforward and direct and unqualified and thus easier to translate into particular action: stop saying this one thing or stop doing this one thing or stop following this one movement. And it is this sort of clarity that many modern Westerners crave.)
The greatest accomplishment of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, almost impossible to overemphasize in its present and continuing importance, is The Catechism of the Catholic Church. Traditionalists sometimes get mad about this, and try to assert the authority of the Catechism of the Council of Trent, or of Pius X, or any other against this supposed "Catechism of Vatican 2." This, though, is to emphatically miss the main point. The main point about the Catechism of the Catholic Church is that it is not a Catechism. The Catechism of the Council of Trent, and all other such texts, were catechisms: that is, catechetical tools designed to teach the basics (and not speculative or controversial aspects) of the Faith and Catholic moral life to beginners. They were not intended to summarize Catholic dogma or Christian doctrine, let alone authoritatively set them forth.
In the current Catechism, though, John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger created something truly new: a single, comprehensive, authoritative exposition of the Catholic Faith, consulted by Catholics everywhere for "Catholic teaching" or "the Catholic position," used as a principal test in admitting Catholics and reconciling heretics, referred to and consulted and appealed to as an authority not just by ordinary Catholics, but by bishops and even Popes. Popes did in fact before this produce ad hoc summaries of the Catholic Faith and its dogmas, especially to reconcile heretics or schismatics to the Church: and these were generally regarded as among the most authoritative of Papal pronouncements. And the Catechism of the Catholic Church's authority is not only not controverted--it is generally taken as a given even by its dissidents. For those who disagree with it as with those who submit to it, what the Catechism says is simply "Catholic teaching."
This, though, is a microcosm of what John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger did in every area of Catholic life they touched: they synthesized, formulated, and authoritatively and clearly set forward, in new language and a new degree of clarity for a new age, the Catholic Faith. To mention only one similar project, there is the massive Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching, which Pope Francis frequently references as an authority as well.
From a certain point of view, this new authoritative exposition of Catholic teaching by two academic-intellectual Popes was the ultimate triumph of progressive theology and the Catholic intelligentsia--just as the Gregorian Reform was the triumph of the monastic-ascetic reform movement, who successfully captured the Papacy in the persons of Leo IX, Hildebrand, Peter Damian, and their radical-monastic associates, and were thus able to implement their vision of reform throughout the Church. From another point of view, however, it was simply a betrayal--and the anger of this alleged betrayal has followed Ratzinger everywhere now for decades.
Many Catholic radicals had, in fact, in very basic social and intellectual and personal and moral ways, shifted their allegiance from Catholic institutions to secular institutions, especially secular governments and the secular academy and secular ways of life. This can be portrayed as a betrayal as well--as Ratzinger frequently did. For them, though, this was (and is) the true culmination or at least the necessary effect of the new theological synthesis demanded by modernity. And by embracing and embodying and using the Magisterium of the Pope, asserting his new synthesis with ecclesiastical and clerical authority for all time, even daring to censure and correct intellectuals and academics for theological errors, Ratzinger had gone over to the enemy.
Hence the particular virulence and contempt with which Ratzinger is treated, to this day, by secularizing Catholic theologians and academics. For them, clerical and ecclesistical and Magisterial institutions and those who inhabit them are almost by definition intellectually unsophisticated, at best merely ignorant, at worst repressive and dishonest and malicious. Ratzinger is the great enemy, though, because he was one of them, was a sophisticated and progressive theologian and academic, and instead chose to become unsophisticated and repressive and dishonest and malicious. Hence the contempt, hence the sense of despising Ratzinger and his theology and his pontificate, hence the very personal sense of betrayal. For academics have at least as strong a sense of overriding allegiance to each other and to their own causes and institutions as clerics do.
Becoming John Paul II's right-hand man was not what Ratzinger wanted, but it was in some measure a victory for him and his theological and ecclesiastical project. Becoming Pope, though, was perhaps the worst thing, considered personally, that ever happened to Joseph Ratzinger. He did not want to be Pope--he wanted to retire from his burdensome ecclesiastical duties, and go back to being a reclusive academic writer. He had, at that point in his life, after his decades with John Paul II, no real revolution remaining to achieve, no great project or reform to implement. When he saw that a major Curial reform was necessary, he saw also that it was beyond his remaining strength and resigned.
Considered merely as a Pope, Benedict XVI was an extraordinarily weak pontiff, who could not effectively control the Curia or effectively check opposition or effectively communicate his wishes and commands. In this sense and this sense alone it is true that the most notable act of his Papacy was his unprecedented decision to resign.
Considered as the culmination of the life and career of Joseph Ratzinger, however, the Papacy of Benedict XVI takes on a very different valence. As Pope, Benedict wrote some more brilliant intellectual speeches and texts, but did not really go beyond his earlier syntheses with John Paul II. By becoming Pope, however, by inscribing his name in the roll of St. Peter and continuing to implement and communicate this synthesis for another eight years, he was able to firmly cement its (and his) place in the Church. No longer would he be remembered merely as John Paul II's academic-intellectual advisor--he would be remembered as the Pope. And the theological thought of the Pope is different from even that of the most brilliant Cardinal Prefect.
The revolution is over. After Vatican 2, the extraordinary period of Catholic intellectual building and synthesis came to a quick end. Whether a profound betrayal or a natural culmination, Catholic intellectual and artistic life was simply absorbed wholesale into the Western secular intelligentsia and academia. "Dissent" became, not a sign of courage as it had been for Dollinger and his followers, but simply a necessary badge of belonging in the secular West. Many people apostatized and many people lived less faithfully to Catholic moral teachings or beliefs, not because the Magisterium had suddenly grown less clear (in fact it had grown more clear), but because the age of mass democracy was over. People did not build and live in institutions, or live by ideologies, any more. They did not live according to Catholicism--or according to Social Democracy, or Anarcho-Syndicalism, or Marxism-Leninism. They did not have the time or attention span to read Karl Marx, let alone John Paul II's brilliant and labyrinthine encyclicals. Mostly, they were increasingly not embedded in Catholic communities that would make living out Catholic ethics practicable. This process began before Vatican 2, and would have accelerated whatever the Papacy had done.
For many people, Benedict's successor Francis has been the Pope of novelty, of sophistication, of a new synthesis with modernity, of a new kind of Papacy. This is an enormous misapprehension. Pope Francis is neither a daring or original thinker nor an advocate of a particular new theological synthesis. In fact, when he refers to a theological synthesis, to definitions, it is universally to those of John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger: and especially to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which he clearly treats as an authoritative compendium of Catholic teaching for all time. Pope Francis is friendlier to some academic theologians and dissenters than Joseph Ratzinger was--naturally, since he is not an academic, and does not have a personal history or ongoing intellectual conflicts with such people as Ratzinger did. He is more hostile to American conservatives and their friends.
In most ways, Pope Francis represents a return to normalcy for the Papacy. He is far, far closer to the median of historical Pontiffs in personality and governing style than either Benedict or John Paul II. Intelligent but not an intellectual, empathetic but somewhat domineering, driven in his relationship with ecclesiastical figures more by personal likes and dislikes and associations (and shared religious orders) than by specific intellectual agreements or disagreements, somewhat emotional and prone to making decisions quickly and in relative isolation, rather interventionist and demanding of obedience, and deeply, emotively pious and pastoral.
Pope Francis' rambling, poetic encyclicals read in fact much more like 19th century encyclicals, with their personal invective and commentary on the issues of the day, than Benedict XVI's and John Paul II's carefully-planned, intellectually-weighed-out compendiums on a particular doctrine or set of doctrines. The encyclical was a modern form developed for mass media, and specifically for the age of mass literacy when ordinary people devoured on a regular basis huge amounts of text on contemporary issues. Pius IX devoted an entire encyclical to the problem of Freemasonry in Brazil; Pius IX to attacking the Italian fascists for breaking a specific pledge of their concordat. Francis has not yet done anything like this--he has in fact melded his own instincts with the Benedict-JPII-style compendium--but give him time.
Anyway: whether you love or hate Francis or Benedict, the undeniable fact is that a brilliant intellectual-academic Pope is not the norm, but the exception of the historical Papacy. Two brilliant, intellectual-academic Pontiffs in a row could hardly be followed by more.
Still, despite their obvious differences in style and personality and factional likes and dislikes, Francis has followed and accepted the Magisterial theology of Ratzinger and John Paul II. Because of this, Benedict's ten years as "Pope Emeritus" under Pope Francis have probably been as important for solidifying his legacy and the legacy of his and John Paul II's project as his time as Pope. In the background, but ever-present, consulted by the new Pope as an intellectual and moral and doctrinal authority, used by outsiders as a point of comparison in judging the new Pope and his doctrines and teachings...one could hardly find a better basic image of his ongoing status as the great Magisterial and ecclesiastical theologian of the 20th century.
This is what Benedict XVI, together with John Paull II, did: they set out the Magisterium of the Catholic Church in its (almost) comprehensive breadth for a new age. And Catholics today, whether they love them or hate them, whatever their relationship with theology or the Magisterium, are indelibly shaped by that.
Speaking for myself, I believe that their synthesis will endure. We will not have another period of profound theological and ecclesiastical creativity and ferment, I think, in my lifetime, and possibly for centuries. For the time being we will be looking back at Vatican 2, and John Paul II, and Benedict XVI--and their exposition of the Catholic Faith.
Requiescat in pace.
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