Abstract
The first volume of this biography described Joseph Ratzinger’s early life, growing up in a seriously devout anti-Nazi family, and his emergence as a leading theological thinker after the Second World War, keen to relate the Christian faith to what he perceived as a growing scepticism. He also became an influential adviser or Peritus at Vatican II. This volume sees him move from a Catholic university to the prestigious, but more pluralist, Tübingen, where he and Hans Kung each drew 400 students to their lectures. The year 1968, the year of the student riots, which badly affected Tübingen, has usually been seen as when Ratzinger changed from being a progressive thinker to an allegedly reactionary one. Seewald refutes this. He argues that, from the close of Vatican II, there were two divergent ways of interpreting the council, one of continuity with the past and one of rupture, with Kung representing the latter and Ratzinger the former. This, of course, depends on how you define continuity and rupture. Nevertheless, Ratzinger came to the conclusion that he had been naïve in going to Tübingen in the first place, so he relocated to Munich. From here, however, he was called by Pope John XXIII, to whom he remained very close in both outlook and friendship, to head the department for the defence of the faith. Dealing with difficult cases like that of the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, his public image as Nazi youth turned God’s rottweiler grew. In fact, according to Seewald, Ratzinger dealt with people gently and never before had there been such an outstanding figure in the role.
Having had two strokes and being in poor health, Ratzinger was reluctant to become Pope, but during his turbulent eight-year tenure he was exhaustingly busy and achieved much. There were the crises – his reinstatement of Bishop Williamson, a holocaust denier, a fact that no one in the Vatican seemed aware of, and the leaking of reams of confidential documents by the Pope’s valet. The valet was sentenced to 18 months in a Vatican prison, but the Pope visited him, remitted his sentence and found him another job. Above all, of course, there were the revelations about the scale of sexual abuse by priests. At the same time, there were powerful addresses to multiple audiences, three important encyclicals, and his bestselling books, with the result that Benedict XVII became, by the time of his surprise retirement, a much loved pope. This despite the continuing hostility of the secular press, especially Der Spiegel, and the lack of support from his fellow German bishops.
As someone who lived through his times and was engaged in some of the same issues, his life provides a yardstick by which to measure my own attitudes and those of many Anglicans who think as I do. On the plus side, his great priority – trying to convince a secular Europe of the centrality of Jesus for the life of humanity, which he did with an eloquent prayerfulness and intelligence – is much to be admired and needs to be emulated. But his unwillingness to bring about any real change on some key ethical issues raises a question.
I have a personal niggle, in that when I was Vicar of All Saint’s Fulham in the 1970s, the local Roman Catholic priest and I were good friends and we set up local Anglican/RC study groups on the ARCIC documents. What hopeful days! Then a bucket of cold water was thrown over them from the Vatican in the form of ‘Clarifications’, which posed proper questions but showed no real desire to move closer together. Benedict was not temperamentally a reactionary, in that he did not see his role as defending the Church’s traditional ethical positions at all costs; rather, he wanted people to focus on the spiritual poverty of a godless Europe and he really loved the Church. But his unwillingness to consider any real change on women priests, contraception and same-sex relationships poses the question of whether he or we are right. Either we have succumbed to the spirit of the age, as he was constantly warning, or the Vatican failed to discern the leading of the Spirit in our time. In the end, the issue cannot be fudged. The sad irony revealed after this book’s publication is that the inquiry into sexual abuse in the Munich archdiocese when Joseph Ratzinger was archbishop heavily censored him.
Peter Seewald is a distinguished journalist and writer on religion in Germany and he tells a vivid story with plenty of background detail, although this is not a book for a serious analysis of Benedict’s thought.