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THE INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC WEEKLY FOUNDED IN 1840

THE PAPACY

THE LEGACY OF BENEDICT XVI

Any assessment of the late Pope Benedict must be founded on deep respect for him and his office, and include in its scope the many years when he was known by the name Joseph Ratzinger. As an outstanding theologian and an influential advisor at the Second Vatican Council, and later as the increasingly powerful Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for 22 years, he may well have had more impact on the Catholic Church than during his almost eight years as Pope. Although his predecessor Pope John Paul II was very much his own man, Cardinal Ratzinger was his essential ally. He must share some responsibility for the successes, and the failures, of that extraordinary papacy. It was a momentous partnership.

Ratzinger once wistfully remarked that he might have done better to have stayed a university professor. When he reached the most dramatic moment of his papacy – his sudden resignation from it in February 2013 – he gave as his reason that he was mentally and physically no longer fit to discharge his duties. Ratzinger’s particular gifts and temperament were not a perfect fit for the role of Pope. Paul VI asked him to be an archbishop; and then his fellow cardinals asked him to be the Pope. He said yes. But his memoirs suggest a man happier with his ideas, his books and his Mozart than with the unruly complexities of the lives of ordinary people – lives which he rarely encountered in a curtailed parish ministry. He had little appetite for leading a vast and sprawling institution or for mastering the colossal demands of modern mass communications.

The effects of a traumatic encounter with unruly students in 1968 seemed never to leave him. He may have believed that because he had advocated a less rigid Church authority he was in some way responsible for the breakdown of order. And, like most of his contemporaries, he was unable to comprehend the scale and significance of the global plague of clerical child abuse, even attributing it, like his 1968 experience, to what he saw as the evils of secularism and the collapse of discipline. On becoming Pope he moved to punish a notorious abuser who had been protected by senior Vatican figures. But his measures to deal with abuse were unsystematic and often misplaced and inappropriate. This undoubtedly compounded the damage – not least to the victims of abuse, whose emotional, spiritual and sexual lives as adults were overshadowed by childhood betrayal. Such misjudgements were not only Benedict’s by any means, but he stood at the apex of the Church’s disciplinary machinery. He set the tone.

Benedict’s papacy cannot be understood except as a sort of coda, or afterword, to the papacy of John Paul II, and this in turn requires a longer historical perspective. After the Second World War there emerged a generation of brilliant theologians, who questioned how effectively the Church was exercising its mission to preach the gospel to the world. Ratzinger was one of them. Pope John XXIII responded with aggiornamento, loosely translated as “updating”, symbolised by “opening the windows” to let in fresh air wherever Catholic belief and practice had grown stale.

The mood when the Council closed in 1965 was full of hope. The exuberance which filtered down to clergy and laity became known as the “spirit of Vatican II”. Catholics who had come to a new understanding of themselves as “People of

God” – more pilgrims than occupiers of a fortress – were to be disillusioned in 1968 when Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the absolute ban on the use of artificial contraception by married couples. Most Catholics were astonished and dismayed; there followed a messy attempt to herd dissenting voices back into the corral of orthodoxy. Increasingly, the theologian’s job was no longer to dialogue with the world, but to explain why Catholic teaching was the only correct one.

This trend was set before John Paul II arrived on the scene in 1978. The Polish Pope was in no doubt that he knew what was wrong with the Church. It was not Polish enough. Catholics, mainly in the West, were invoking this “spirit of Vatican II” to advocate a softer line on concerns of gender, such as female ordination; sexual issues, including tolerance of homosexuality; and even the embrace of some of the insights of Karl Marx. Ratzinger’s corrective was to emphasise the “continuity” rather than the “rupture” between Vatican II and the pre-conciliar Church, but this continuity had a strong impression of ultramontanism – that the “Holy Father knows best” and that bishops were his delegates. This was all the more surprising in that Ratzinger himself had been a champion of episcopal collegiality and had worked on the key doctrinal document of Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, which was intended by the Council fathers to be the foundation document of a new era of aggiornamento.

For someone so naturally courteous and often capable of exquisite language, Benedict sometimes seemed tone deaf, treading on toes as varied as those of Muslim leaders, offended by the tone of his Regensburg address; leaders of the Church of England, by springing on them the Ordinariate; gay men and women, by telling them their sexual dispositions were “intrinsically disordered” and suggesting that gay candidates should be barred from seminaries; and lay people, priests and liturgical scholars by imposing clumsy translations of the Mass and sweeping aside more elegant and accurate efforts approved by bishops’ conferences.

On the other hand – in spite of some faux pas – he solidified the rapprochement with Judaism advanced since Vatican II by John Paul II; he took Catholic Social Teaching a step further with Caritas in Veritate, written after the global financial crisis of 2008; and his state visit to Britain in 2010 was a remarkable personal triumph in the teeth of strong headwinds. But neither he nor his predecessor grasped the scale of the damage to the Church’s mission wrought by clerical sex abuse and its coverup. The Church may yet need to be shaken to its very foundations to rid itself of its shame and guilt, and it is by no means certain that the reforming agenda of Pope Francis is going far enough to bring redemption and healing.

A realisation that some such earthquake was necessary, and the intuition that he was not the man to trigger it may have been behind Benedict’s decision to resign. That took humility, imagination and considerable courage. He almost certainly knew who his successor was most likely to be. But the thing he prized most in the Catholic system – continuity – would be safe, thanks to his own quiet presence in the Vatican as Pope Emeritus. Apart from occasional stirrings, he refused to become the oppositional figure that Pope Francis’s critics wanted. And that secured for Francis the sufficient bedrock of support he needed to take the Church in a different direction.

2 | THE TABLET | 7 JANUARY 2023

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