Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (66 page)

VI T
HE
P
ROFESSOR

The unprecedented publicity surrounding the death and burial of Pope John Paul II helped determine the outcome of the Conclave to elect his successor. Wojtyla’s long and dramatic pontificate made the election of an older and less flamboyant man a virtual certainty. The cardinals would not want another quarter-century pontificate, and were therefore likely to opt for a transitional figure, who would provide continuity with the previous regime, while allowing a breathing-space for reflection on new challenges and new directions. But the scale of the media coverage of the death and burial of Papa Wojtyla brought home to them as to everyone else how much his personal stature and celebrity had transformed the world’s perception of the papal office itself. A holy and cheerful mediocrity on the pattern of John Paul I was not this time a serious option. Whoever was elected must look like a pope, able to occupy Wojtyla’s chair with conviction, even if by common consent there was no one in the Sacred College capable of filling his shoes. For there were few obvious giants among the cardinals. Had Wojtyla died five years earlier, the imposing Jesuit Cardinal Martini of Milan, a first-rate and progressive theologian who had packed his cathedral week after week with crowds of young people who came to listen to his challenging expositions of the New Testament, would have been a virtually unstoppable candidate. But Martini, seventy-eight and retired, was now living for much of the year in Jerusalem. More to the point, he was said to be in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, and though he did in fact attract substantial support on the first ballot, in reality another ailing pope was not to be contemplated. There were very few notable Italian
papabili
among the 115 cardinal electors, and the Conclave would feel freer than ever to look outside Italy for Wojtyla’s successor. Speculation ranged round a number of African, Indian and Latin American cardinals, and the Jesuit Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, known for his personal holiness and passionate commitment to the poor, attracted many votes. In the event, however, a German, Joseph Ratzinger, was elected on the fourth ballot, in one of the shortest conclaves of modern times, on Tuesday, 19 April 2005. By a coincidence which passed largely unremarked, it was the feast day of St Leo IX, the greatest German pope of the Middle Ages.

Born in Bavaria in 1927 into an intensely Catholic family, Joseph Ratzinger was the youngest of three children of a policeman whose dangerously outspoken contempt for Hitler led him to take a series of progressively lower-profile rural postings, and eventually to early retirement in 1937. Ratzinger himself, like his elder brother Georg, had determined on ordination, but he was co-opted into the Hitler Youth, and served from 1943 in an anti-aircraft unit, though he later claimed never to have fired a shot. At the end of the war he deserted from the army, but was arrested anyway by the Americans. On his release he returned to the seminary. His théological training was in the Catholic Faculty of Theology at Munich, where he combined ordination preparation with work towards a doctorate on St Augustine, and he and his brother were ordained together in 1951. After a year as a curate he was appointed to a teaching post in the seminary at Freising, while he worked on his
Habilitation
, the post-doctoral higher qualification required of anyone wishing to take up a teaching position in a German University. Ratzinger’s theological vision had been shaped by the revival in patristic studies pioneered by exponents of the Nouvelle Theologie like Henri de Lubac. His ‘great Master’ was Augustine, and he disliked what he saw as the excessive intellectualism of the neo-Scholasticism which even then dominated Catholic theology (and in which Karol Wojtyla was at the same moment being trained at the Angelicum in Rome). He therefore chose to write his
Habilitation
dissertation on the more mystical theology of St Bonaventura, for whom revelation, Ratzinger argued, was not a matter of the transmission of truth to the intellect, but the unveiling of mystery in the activity of God in history. While he was still at work on this study, he was offered the chair of Dogmatic Theology at the University of Freising (the success of his
Habilitation
being considered a foregone conclusion) and his parents, now in their seventies, sold up the family home and moved into his professorial residence with him. He was therefore devastated when one of the examiners of his
Habilitation
failed the dissertation, placing the young professor’s new position in jeopardy, and threatening his family’s security. Ratzinger feverishly reworked his dissertation, and resubmitted successfully within a matter of months, but the embarrassment and fright of this early (and, he was convinced, unjust) failure stayed with him. Forty years on he would devote an entire chapter of his short memoir,
Milestones
, to the episode, clearly still a neuralgic point with him.

In fact, however, he was now launched on a stellar rise as one of the brightest hopes of German Catholic theology. A series of increasingly
prestigious appointments took him to Bonn, Munich and Tubingen, where in 1966 his appointment to the new chair in Dogma was secured by an admiring friend, Hans Kung. In 1969 he moved back to Bavaria, to a senior position in the new University of Regensburg. But his celebrity extended far beyond the university world. With the opening of the Second Vatican Council, Ratzinger had been appointed
peritus
or adviser to the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Josef Frings, one of the key progressive spokesmen in the Council, famous for a sensational speech attacking the most powerful of the Roman curial congregations, the Holy Office, as ‘a source of scandal’. Ratzinger made common cause with the other leading Conciliar theologians, including Yves Congar, Karl Rahner and Hans Kung, in attacking the ossified Scholasticism dominant among the ‘Roman theologians’, arguing that the Church 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’.
⁴²
He helped draft key sections of the Council’s Constitution on the Church,
Lumen Gentium
, and played a major role in the composition of the decree on Revelation,
Dei Verbum.
In his commentaries on the work of the Council he was vocal in support of the notion of collegiality, what he called an ‘ordered pluralism’ in the Church, and attached special importance to the work of the local episcopal conferences as expressions of the shared responsibilities of the whole episcopate. With Congar, Rahner, Kung and others he was a founding member of the editorial board of the progressive theological journal
Concilium
, and in 1968 he was one of more than 1,300 signatories of an outspoken declaration, organised by
Concilium
, on the right of theologians ‘to seek and speak the truth, without being hampered by administrative measures and sanctions’. The declaration offered a trenchant critique of the secretive methods of the Holy Office in censuring theologians, calling for greater openness, and the right of accused theologians to a proper hearing.
⁴³

Yet already by 1968 Ratzinger had become alarmed by some of the post-Conciliar developments within the Church, and even by some of the Council’s own documents. An enthusiast for the decrees on the Liturgy, the Church, and on Revelation, he had been consistent in an Augustinian scepticism about the value of human culture without grace, a scepticism which the horrors unleashed by the ‘atheistic pieties’ of Nazism and Marxist materialism seemed to confirm. He was therefore dismayed by what he saw as the vapid and theologically naive optimism of the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,
Gaudium et
Spes.
In a laudable attempt to engage with modern culture, its (mostly French) authors, he believed, had presented a naively unproblematized account of human existence with insufficient religious content. The document, he thought, was full of benign generalities, ‘whereas what is proper to theology, discourse about Christ and his work, was left behind in a conceptual deep freeze, and so allowed to appear … unintelligible and antiquated.’ The Constitution also overused the notion of the ‘people of God’, thereby encouraging merely sociological and political conceptions of the Church, at odds with the more firmly and centrally Christological and spiritual emphases of the constitutions on the Liturgy and on the Church. Here was an account of humanity which left sin out of the equation, and which forgot, as he would later say, that the one legitimate form of the Church’s engagement with the world was ‘mission’.
⁴⁴
Ratzinger’s alarm about the direction of post-Conciliar Catholicism was dramatically heightened by the revolutionary upheavals which swept through the universities in 1968. The political radicalization of many theology faculties included Ratzinger’s own department at Tübingen. Campus pamphlets which denounced the Cross as ‘the expression of a sadomasochistic glorification of pain’ and the New Testament as ‘a document of inhumanity, a large-scale deception of the masses’ horrified him, and he came increasingly to relate these excesses to his fears that the Council itself was being hijacked and distorted. Its true legacy, he believed, lay in its texts, read conservatively in the light of earlier teaching, not in the so-called ‘Spirit of Vatican II’, which he considered was becoming a hold-all justification for a rationalizing theology without roots, the erosion of what was distinctively Christian by ‘lightening loads, adapting, making concessions’. He concluded that ‘anyone who wanted to remain a progressive in this context had to give up his integrity’.
⁴⁵
‘Progressive’ joined ‘speculative’ in his vocabulary as a term of severe disapproval. He began to distance himself from former theological collaborators like the great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, whom he considered had allowed himself ‘to be sworn in according to the progressive slogans’ and increasingly in thrall to a radical, speculative and politicized mind-set remote from scripture, the Fathers, and the concrete realities of Catholic tradition.
⁴⁶

A further source of horror was the post-Conciliar transformation of Catholic worship. The beauty and antiquity of the Roman liturgy was one of the anchors of Ratzinger’s own faith and vocation as a priest. As a young theologian he had been an ardent supporter of the Liturgical
Movement, but he was now dismayed by its radicalism and, as a gifted musician himself, by the aesthetic desolation of the liturgical reforms which followed in the wake of the Council. For him the essence of the liturgy was its ancient ‘givenness’. It was not something devised by committees, but ‘a mysterious fabric of texts and actions which had grown from the faith of the Church over the centuries’. It bore ‘the whole weight of history within itself, and was in essence an organic growth, not a scholarly construction. The new Missal authorized by Paul VI in 1973, and the subsequent outlawing of the ‘Tridentine Rite’ which it now superseded, by contrast, became for him a symbol of the drastic discontinuities which he thought had been introduced into the life of the Church in the wake of the Council. As he later declared, ‘A community is calling its very being into question when it suddenly declares that what until now was its holiest and highest possession is strictly forbidden, and when it makes the longing for it seem downright indecent. Can it be trusted any more about anything? Won’t it proscribe again tomorrow what it prescribes today?’
⁴⁷

In the fraught years after the Council, Ratzinger’s double credentials, as one of the architects of the great Conciliar documents, yet as an increasingly outspoken critic of what he saw as post-Conciliar excesses, commended him to Pope Paul VI. In 1977 Paul took the daring step of appointing this professor, whose sole pastoral experience was a single year as a country curate, to be Archbishop of Munich, and, in a matter of months, a cardinal. He was perceived in Munich as conscientious, but shy and somewhat lacking in warmth. But as cardinal archbishop he was now in a position to act on his growing disenchantment with the theological trends of the previous twenty years. He played a part in the German episcopal campaign to remove the licence to teach as a Catholic theologian of his former friend and mentor in the Catholic Faculty at Tubingen, Hans Kung, who had published a work denying the doctrine of papal infallibility. Archbishop Ratzinger also personally vetoed the appointment to a chair at Munich of another former colleague and protege, Johann Baptist Metz, because he considered that Metz had allowed political ideology to distort his theology. Ratzinger was convinced the time had come to draw a line in the sand, to emphasize that in the end it was the pope and bishops, not the scholars, who must protect and preserve the simple faith of Catholic people: corrosive scholarship could be at least as tyrannical as the Holy Office. To former colleagues and the
wider theological community, the mild-mannered Archbishop seemed seduced by ambition, poacher turned gamekeeper, eroding by authoritarian action the very freedoms for which he had once campaigned. Karl Rahner published a bitter open letter to him, denouncing his action against Metz as ‘injustice and a misuse of power’.

Ratzinger remained only four years at Munich. During the first Conclave of 1978 he had struck up a friendship with young fellow-cardinal Karol Wojtyla. They recognized in each other a similar set of theological priorities, and a similar understanding of the legacy of the Council. John Paul II admired Ratzinger’s theological sophistication, and in 1981 he summoned him to Rome as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the former Holy Office of the Inquisition, the very body which his former mentor Cardinal Frings had denounced as ‘a cause of scandal’. As head now of the Congregation of which, as a younger man, he had been a notable critic, he did seek reform by extending its membership to be more representative of an international church. Its secretive procedures remained, however, and as Rome’s principal watchdog of orthodoxy, Ratzinger would become the architect of some of the most distinctive and most controversial acts of Papa Wojtyla’s pontificate. These included in 1984—6 the campaign against Liberation Theology which resulted in the temporary silencing of the Brazilian Franciscan theologian Leonardo Boff, and his subsequent abandonment of the priesthood. In 1986 the Congregation withdrew the licence to teach of the American moral theologian Charles Curran, whose objections to the teaching of
Humanae Vitae
Ratzinger felt constituted an assault on the authority of the papal magisterium. As a consequence, Curran was dismissed from his chair at the Catholic University of America, and the Curran case was part of the background to the CDF’s 1990 Instruction ‘On the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian’, which was widely perceived as an attack on the autonomy and integrity of Catholic academic theology. Already in 1998 theologians teaching in Catholic institutions were required to sign a profession of faith and an oath of fidelity to which many objected. Between 1986 and 2003 the CDF issued a series of documents and instructions insisting in sometimes pastorally insensitive language on the intrinsic immorality of homosexual acts. Cardinal Ratzinger’s own anxieties about the dangers of relativism in Catholic theological dialogue with other religions seemed to be reflected in 1997 in the scrutinization of the Jesuit theologian
Jacques Dupuis, whose book
Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism
became the focus of a prolonged investigation. In 2001 Ratzinger’s determined insistence on the uniqueness of Christ and the centrality of the Roman Catholic Church to human salvation was expressed in the document
Dominus lesus
, which caused widespread offence (not least in the Vatican congregations responsible for relations with other churches and other faiths) by its blunt characterization of non-Christian religions and even of other Christian denominations as ‘gravely deficient’. These and similar official actions seemed to give rise? gave rise to a widespread feeling that under Ratzinger’s prefectship, relations between the official Church and the theologians were at their lowest ebb since the worst years of Pius XII. Despite his courteous and even charming personal manner, Ratzinger was widely perceived as the hard man of John Paul II’s regime, the ‘panzer cardinal’, the Vatican’s rottweiler.