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How Joseph Ratzinger saw past
the Church’s established structures
For the future Pope, the Holy Spirit was 'speaking up'
through the new movements which bypassed old bureaucracies
by Fr Raymond de Souza, SJ
13 December, 2018
This year a likely Catholic Christmas gift will be the new biography of the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI: His Life and Thought. Elio Guerriero’s book first appeared in Italian in 2016, and now is available in English from Ignatius Press.
In a lengthy book, one thing that caught my attention was the long relationship of Ratzinger/Benedict to new movements. This most conservative of figures was inclined to see the future of the Church not in the established structures of German Catholicism, but in the new movements that often challenged those structures.
Indeed, the establishment of German Catholicism battled with Ratzinger/Benedict in Rome, not knowing that its moment would come under his successor. There is nothing that the German establishment wants – liberalisation regarding divorce and remarriage, local authority over liturgical translations, Holy Communion for Protestants – that does not seem to be tacitly encouraged under Pope Francis. The abdication of the German pope surprisingly gave way to the German pontificate.
The biographer faces an impossible challenge. Joseph Ratzinger’s long service to the Church – brilliant professor, gifted writer, theological expert, editorial founder, diocesan bishop, chief lieutenant of St John Paul II, pope himself – is simply too much to fit neatly into some 600 pages.
Nevertheless, it’s an admirable book, and a friendly one. Guerriero treats the question of the abdication by simply presenting Benedict’s own explanation, namely that the trip to Rio for World Youth Day 2013 was impossible for him owing to “jet lag” and so resignation necessarily followed. The biographer refrains from noting the utter insufficiency of such an explanation in the face of the destabilising impact of something never done before in the history of the Church: a papal abdication absent a crisis of legitimacy.
[But why not a papal renunciation for reasons of advanced age, which is, in itself, a disease??? Which was the formal reason given by Benedict XVI, and all he needed. And a most courageous and considered decision he made because the obvious reaction would have been - and was - "But John Paul II continued to the very end despite his advanced state of Parkinson's!", beside which example he would look weak and cowardly and all other sorts of negative adjectives compared to the saintly perseverance of his predecessor to the very last tortured second of his life. But Benedict XVI's honesty won through - aided no doubt by the prayers he must have devoted to making his final decision - which means he decided to risk mockery and worse by becoming, in the eyes of many, the feeble polar opposite to John Paul II.
Moreover, I had always found it strange that even intelligent persons like Fr De Souza - and in this case, biographer Elio Guerriero - should have seized on Benedict XVI's statement about how on physician's advice, he would be unable to travel to Rio for WYD, which he obviously used as an example of the physical constraints brought on him by his advancing age and never-very-robust state of health! Yet how many otherwise intelligent persons I read at the time mocked Benedict XVI mercilessly for citing that as an example and considering it 'the excuse' he was making for renouncing the papacy. He hadn't yet actually stepped down as pope and already, he was being pilloried and derided for even citing the Rio trip, as if he were a dotard who was no longer making any sense! Did De Souza and all those other mockers really think so?
As for the 'destabilizing impact' De Souza mentions, can we not turn that around and say that Benedict XVI's decision to step down was also an expression of his faith in the soundness of the procedures in place for choosing another pope worthy of the office? That the last thing he - or anyone else, for that matter, expected - was for the Conclave to choose a man who has turned out to be what Jorge Bergoglio is????
The book must necessarily treat two pontificates. “No important decision was made in the pontificate without first consulting Ratzinger,” Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz told the author regarding St John Paul II’s service. And it was as the chief lieutenant for John Paul that Ratzinger’s appreciation of the new movements gained prominence.
“As a bishop and a cardinal, Ratzinger had watched the ecclesial movements with interest,” writes Guerriero. “He saw in them the possibility of new blood flowing into the somewhat sclerotic arteries of the old ecclesiastical institutions. He had looked at them with joy and hope during the toughest moments of the student protests, when it seemed that the young people were going to abandon the Church en masse.”
“Here was something nobody had planned on,” Cardinal Ratzinger said in 1998. “The Holy Spirit had, so to say, spoken up for himself again.”
“Within [the Church] there are merely human institutions relating to administration, the organisation of events, and the like,” writes Guerriero on the novelty of Ratzinger’s approach. “Precisely because they are not essential, these organisations must be reduced to a minimum and, above all, must not extinguish listening to the Spirit, attention to his outpourings that bring renewal.
This was the great newness, which for many bishops, especially those from countries with an ancient Christian tradition, seemed almost a provocation. It was not primarily up to the movements to fit themselves into the organisational structures of the dioceses and of the associations. The bishops, on the contrary, were called to reduce their organisational structures drastically and to welcome the new phenomena mandated by the Spirit.”
The new movements were central to Ratzinger’s life. When in the 1970s he and others launched Communio, the important theological journal, the Italian edition was not entrusted to the academic guild, but to bright theologians from Communion and Liberation, a young Angelo Scola first among them.
The professor with traditional liturgical leanings would [did] not entrust his papal household to an order of Tridentine nuns, but rather members of Memores Domini, consecrated lay women from Communion and Liberation. The Holy Father would join their weekly “school of community” meetings, where a future Doctor of the Church would listen attentively to the reflections of the women of his household.
The figure that emerges from Guerriero’s book is not so much the guardian of orthodoxy – though that was his mission for the long years at John Paul’s side – but rather a disciple who is convinced that the disenchanted modern world needs a fresh encounter with the friendship offered by Christ. As a pastor, he is convinced that bishops and their administrations can no longer offer this, and so have to make way for those who can in the new movements of the Spirit. We thus see a continuity from the young Ratzinger, frustrated with the old theological schemes and identified as a liberal at Vatican II, to the mature Ratzinger, frustrated with the ossified thinking of institution-minded bishops, and looking for new pastoral methods.
The subtitle then is incomplete; Benedict is more than a man of thought. He is a pastor searching for new methods. The future of the Church for him lay not in correcting the errors of the theological guild, but in bypassing them altogether to new methods, new movements, a new evangelisation which comes from a “new outpouring of the Spirit”.
Not that Joseph Ratzinger's faith in the new movements was always upheld. In the earlier days, Peter Seewald recounts in one of his books how a German new movement had captivated the cardinal at first until the movement sought to make him their 'captive' by seeking to hijack Seewald's first interview book project with the cardinal and make it 'their project'. Which was, in fact, delayed for more than a year until Seewald was sure they would have no say on the book at all (even if they lent one of their places in Frascati as the site for the interview). The other big disappointment was the Neo-Cathechumenal Way with its insistence on its own 'liturgy' to the point that Benedict XVI had to admonish them in public to desist from their 'liturgical autonomy' (a problem that nonetheless continues). And who knows what he has to say about Comunione e Liberazione today. Or even the Opus Dei, for that matter.
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