Joseph Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927 in the Bavarian town of Marktl am Inn. Since it was Holy Saturday, the newborn Joseph was baptised in the fresh baptismal water of Easter.
It was an auspicious start for the man who would lead the Catholic Church as Pope Benedict XVI for eight years, between 2005 and 2013. Holy Saturday has a special significance in the liturgical life of the Church. As he would later explain, on that day, the Church is “already on the way to Easter, but not yet there, for it is still veiled”.
Gestures and symbols, depth and wisdom came to characterise his life. His biographer, Peter Seewald described his papacy as “something like the great retreat the Church needed to buttress the interior castle and strengthen her soul”.
As a child, he was somewhat underrated. He was considered unremarkable at school due to being shy and withdrawn. This character trait led to many misunderstandings later in his life.
Ratzinger believed that there was something God wanted from him that could only be attained through the priesthood. He recalled the confirmation of his calling as he was returning home after the war. It was the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and he heard music and prayers from the church in Traunstein: “The heavenly Jerusalem could not have appeared more beautiful to me at that moment.”
The road to ordination was not easy. It was interrupted by the experience of Nazi terror. This was instrumental in shaping his public ministry. He envisioned a Church which would not yield to the spirit of the times, a Church which would remain a bulwark against the dictatorship of relativism which viewed the self and the spirit of the age as the ultimate arbiter of truth.
Truth could not be redefined according to the fashions of the time. It transcended public opinion or majority vote. He warned: “The renunciation of truth solves nothing but leads, on the contrary, to a tyranny of arbitrariness... Man is degraded if he cannot know truth, if everything, in the final analysis, is just the product of an individual or collective decision.”
Truth had to be rooted in the message of Jesus Christ. The great theologian understood that the Gospel did not complicate the world; Christ’s message was not one of sophistry. Instead, the Gospel helped one to make sense of the world and to understand its very essence.
Throughout his life, Ratzinger never stopped writing; as archbishop of Munich and Freising, as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and as pope, he remained prolific despite his heavy schedule. His biographer writes: “Ratzinger regarded his theology and his work as a gift and a commission from God, as an apostolate. He was concerned to hand on the faith.”
His theological work brought him to the Second Vatican Council as one of the peritus of Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne. In later years, he was to reflect on the tragic misinterpretation of this council. The bishops wanted to “renew the faith, to deepen it”. Others with less honourable intentions “interpreted many things in a completely new way”.
In his book-length interview “The Last Testament”, Benedict XVI remarked that “since 1965, I have felt it to be a mission to make clear what we genuinely wanted and what we did not want”.
He led me back to a faith which spoke to the heart- Andre DeBattista
The misinterpretation of the Second Vatican Council led to a sad situation. For the traditionalists, it went too far, sowing the seeds of interminable decline. Yet, it did not go far enough for those who subscribed to the popular wishy-washy interpretations.
Ratzinger’s views were much more nuanced. In a 1970 essay, he wrote: “The future of the Church can and will come, even today, only from the strength of those who have deep roots and who live on the basis of the sheer fullness of their faith. It will not come from those who just offer formulas.
“It will not come from those who always choose only the more comfortable path – those who avoid the passion of faith and declare everything that makes demands on man, everything that is painful and forces him to sacrifice himself, to be wrong and obsolete, mere tyranny and legalism.”
This neatly sums up his papacy, which began 35 years later. At his election, aged 78, Ratzinger had already wanted to retire though his resignation had always been rejected. Upon the announcement of his election, the media labelled him “God’s Rottweiler”. Allegations of scandal and abuse beset his papacy.
He was portrayed as inflexible and obstinate; he was wrongly blamed for the ills of the Church.
After he resigned, Benedict XVI quipped that “if a pope is only getting applause, he has to ask himself whether or not he is doing things right”. He adds, that “the message of Christ is a scandal for the world, beginning with Christ himself. There will always be opposition and the pope must be a sign of contradiction. This is a criterion which concerns him.”
Comparisons were made with his predecessor. While John Paul II needed “companionship, life and encounters”, Benedict XVI needed silence “but precisely because we were very different, we complemented each other well”. The same can be said about his successor. Benedict XVI describes the election of Jorge Bergoglio to the papacy as a sign that the Church is “flexible, dynamic and open and that it is developing from within”.
On February 11, 2013, he announced that he would renounce the papacy at the end of that month due to his advancing age. From that day until his passing, he lived as a contemplative on the grounds of the Vatican.
He was the person I admired most. He led me back to a faith which spoke to the heart. His works led me to discover a faith which is ever ancient, ever new. But, above all, he is one of the few people who could articulate God and faith in a lucid, beautiful manner:
“If you look into the world, you do not see heaven but you see traces of God everywhere. In the structure of matter, in all the rationality of reality. Even where you see human beings, you find traces of God. You see vices, but you also see goodness, love. These are the places where God is there.”