For decades, as Cardinal Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and as Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, who has died at the age of 95, set the rules of theological debate in the Church, drawing clear lines and investigating those who crossed them.
He was quick to defend his theological positions and pursue a cautious interpretation of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, which had unleashed the forces of contemporary Catholic renewal.
As a result, he earned a reputation as the enforcer of doctrine, the “Panzer Cardinal”, or “God’s Rottweiler”. Despite expending so much of his theological capital in putting the brakes on internal debate in the Church, Pope Benedict XVI will be remembered as a reformer.
Why?
His brave and historic decision to resign from the papacy in 2013, which set off an earthquake inside the halls of clerical power. It wasn’t just that he became the first pope in some 600 years to renounce the Office of St Peter, which in itself was enough to earn a place in the history books.
No, the real legacy of his resignation decision was twofold: he both reformed the office of the papacy by making it much easier for his successors to step down, and opened the way to the Francis pontificate.
The resignation of Benedict was a dramatic step towards the demystification of the papacy, a development Francis continued by replacing the older monarchical style of papal governance with a servant-leadership model.
Joseph Ratzinger’s death is the end of an era. It opens the next phase of the Francis pontificate, making it possible for the 86-year-old Roman Pontiff to press his foot more firmly on the accelerator of reform.
Throughout his papacy, Francis has had to contend with the court around Benedict XVI, many of them deeply opposed to the direction of this papacy and working actively to undermine it.
The late Pope Emeritus, an honest and upright man who had a warm and respectful relationship with Francis, never sanctioned their behaviour, but neither was he strong enough to stop it.
When he assumed office, Francis inherited a Roman Curia to which Benedict had made many of the senior appointments, and his room for manoeuvre was constrained. Cardinal Gerhard Müller had been chosen as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith just a few months before Ratzinger’s resignation.
At the same time, pressure from traditionalists – and, it has been suggested, Benedict himself – led Francis to choose the traditionalist Cardinal Robert Sarah as head of the liturgy office.
Ratzinger’s theology, which saw the community of believers as fighting a battle against the “dictatorship of relativism”, attracted those drawn to the Church as a refuge from modernity. His ecclesiology was in fact more subtle, and he spoke prophetically of Christians acting as a leaven in society and witnessing to the Gospel with integrity.
During Benedict’s 2010 visit to Britain, one of the high points of his pontificate, he won plaudits for his speech to political leaders and lawmakers in Westminster Hall which eloquently made a case for why the religious voice should be heard in the public square.
Benedict wrote about the harmony between faith and reason, showing a thoughtful and sophisticated mind that wrestled with existential questions. His most compelling theological contributions are found in his early book, Introduction to Christianity, the three-volume study of Jesus of Nazareth and in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, which set out the truths of the Christian faith with learning and conviction.
But it was his hardline positions on sexuality, his scepticism about inter-religious dialogue, his investigations of allegedly errant theologians and his encouragement of the pre-Second Vatican Council liturgical rites that generated the headlines. Lurking beneath his caution there was a fear that what he saw as “the spirit of the world”, the ultra-radicalism of the 1960s, had infected the Church.
As a young theologian, Ratzinger had served as a reform-minded expert adviser during the Second Vatican Council. He never recovered from the time student hecklers from that period interrupted his lectures in Tübingen, and when the parish in which he was active at the time became radicalised. The young academic was “disgusted” and left Tübingen. It was an episode that deeply shaped his thinking and life.
In 2016, I bumped into Archbishop George Gänswein, Benedict’s private secretary, in the Vatican gardens and introduced myself as The Tablet’s Rome correspondent. I was unsure how he would react, given that over the years Cardinal Ratzinger, his boss, had sparred with the editors of the weekly. In 1991 the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote to the editor John Wilkins asking to correct two articles that he felt misrepresented his views on papal primacy and divorce and marriage.
Throughout the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, The Tablet had critiqued what it saw as centralisation from Rome and the unnecessarily harsh crackdown on some theologians by the Ratzinger-led doctrine office. During our exchange in the Vatican gardens, Archbishop Gänswein was friendly and agreed to arrange a meeting for us to talk. But I remember being struck by his warning about not viewing the world as a “1968-er”, a reference to the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
With Benedict XVI’s death, the Church is now forced to choose between looking backward and looking forward, and finding the new paths for evangelisation that Francis has been pursuing throughout his pontificate. The Second Vatican Council no longer needs to be litigated, it is time for it to be implemented. Francis and Benedict are very different personalities, with very different pastoral styles, who have tried to communicate the Christian faith in different ways. In Netflix’s The Two Popes, Benedict XVI (played by Anthony Hopkins) tells Cardinal Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) bluntly, “Change is compromise”.
As the pair talk in the gardens of Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence, the man who will become Pope Francis replies, “Nothing is static in nature.” Benedict retorts: “God is unchanging.”
Yet despite their differences, and the attempts to drive a wedge between the two popes, the fates of Benedict and Francis are entwined. Without Benedict’s resignation, there would be no Francis pontificate; without Bergoglio, after collecting enough votes in the first ballot in the 2005 conclave to block the election of Ratzinger, urging his supporters to support him, there would never have been a Benedict papacy.
The unprecedented situation of having two men living in the Vatican, both wearing the white papal cassock and calling themselves Pope, has meant that while Benedict was still alive, Francis has been unlikely to resign. Having two popes was confusing enough, but three would have led to chaos. Francis is now freer to decide just what he wants to do as Pope and how long he wants to continue in office.
It is worth remembering, too, that Benedict’s decision to step down also shifted the dynamics of the 2013 conclave, as it will of every future conclave. It made it possible for the cardinals to choose Francis, the first Latin American Roman Pontiff, the first from the global south and the first to take St Francis of Assisi as his patron.
Without a papal death, the cardinals were freed to have an honest discussion about the state of the Church and make a bold choice about who should lead it. By contrast, in 2005, following the death of John Paul II, the pressure was on to elect someone who would push forward the Polish Pope’s legacy, and all eyes turned to Ratzinger, who had since 1981 worked by John Paul’s side as his doctrinal chief.
But that conclave also saw significant support for Bergoglio; eight years later, the cardinals processed into the Sistine Chapel, looked up at Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment, and cast their votes for the man who would be Pope Francis.
The view of the Professor Pope as a tough “enforcer” was also something of a caricature. In private, Ratzinger was known for his kindness and gentleness; his love of the piano and animals. Those who knew him say he did not like confrontation. Some, however, could never forgive Benedict for stepping down, particularly some of those who have tried to resist the Francis papacy.
The resignation opened the door to the Bergoglio pontificate and destroyed their hopes for a Church that they thought Benedict would make timeless: monarchical, traditionalist, liturgically ornate and ideologically pure.
But this had never been Benedict’s vision.
Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, reformed the papacy by resigning, heralding a new era for the Church. To use the phrase of Malcolm in Macbeth: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”