Chapter Five

WHO IS JOSEPH RATZINGER?

Though Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been a known quantity in the Catholic world since the Second Vatican Council, 1985 was the year that made him a star. In that year, his book-length interview with Italian journalist Vittorio Messori, titled in English The Ratzinger Report, became a publishing sensation around the world. Ratzinger’s tart diagnoses of the problems facing the Church made him into a hero for Catholic conservatives, who had wondered if anyone in Rome saw the same crisis they did, and a lightning rod for the Church’s liberal wing, a symbol of what they saw as a reactionary desire to “turn back the clock” on Church reform. Public discussion of the book was intense. During the 1985 Synod of Bishops, called to take stock of Vatican II twenty years after its close, Cardinal Godfried Danneels became so sick of answering questions about The Ratzinger Report during a press conference that he snapped, “This is not a synod on the book, it’s a synod on the council!”

From that year on, Ratzinger occupied a place all by himself in the pantheon of Catholic celebrities.

As proof of the point, when Ratzinger turned seventy in 1997, two of the biggest secular publishing houses in Germany brought out new editions of his books, his picture appeared on the front cover of the largest mass-market newsmagazine in Italy, and virtually every newspaper and TV network in Europe prepared extensive profiles to mark the occasion. Just by virtue of having a birthday, Ratzinger was news.

By the standards of the normally shadowy world of the Roman Curia, Joseph Ratzinger, as the Vatican’s top doctrinal official, was not just a star, but a mega-star. After being elected pope, the Italians quickly dubbed him “Papa-Razi,” a play on the term paparazzi for those photographers who trail celebrities around, and the term has a curious fittingness for the preexisting celebrity status of Benedict XVI. He’s perhaps the first pope of modern times who truly needs no introduction.

In that sense, offering a biographical sketch here of the new pope almost seems an exercise in redundancy. Still, as William Wordsworth once put it, “the child is father of the man,” and so a brief overview of Ratzinger’s life, especially his experiences in Nazi Germany and his later career as one of the most promising Catholic theologians of his generation, will be helpful in approaching the question of what kind of pontificate he is likely to lead.

In this regard, we are helped by the fact that Ratzinger himself has outlined the story of his life, at least prior to being made a bishop, in his 1997 memoir Milestones. This slim volume is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the mind of the new pope. Moreover, there is Pope Benedict’s own prodigious literary output to draw upon, both as a theologian and a cultural critic. Prior to his election as pope, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, widely regarded as one of the more thoughtful members of the College of Cardinals in his day, had written three major books: The Acting Person, Sign of Contradiction, and Love and Responsibility . Pope Benedict, on the other hand, has written more than fifty books, along with a seemingly infinite series of journal articles, popular essays, and lectures, which range from the late 1950s up to just days before the conclave.

Given the abundance of this primary material, only the briefest of profiles is offered here, just enough to situate the Pope in time and place as a sort of backdrop to the coming drama of his pontificate. Doing so is perhaps especially important with respect to what is likely to be the characteristic struggle of his papacy—the battle against what he called a “dictatorship of relativism,” and to recover the Christian roots of Europe.

CHILDHOOD

Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, on Holy Saturday, in a small Bavarian town called Marktl am Inn, just across the border from Austria and the city that enchanted his youth, Salzburg. He was the youngest of three children in a lower-middle-class Bavarian household, and his parents were named Joseph and Mary. Joseph was a policeman, while Mary stayed at home during some periods of her life, and worked as a cook in bed-and-breakfast establishments in others.

Joseph’s sister, Maria, was born in 1921, and his older brother, Georg, in 1924. Georg, like Joseph, became a priest (they were ordained the same day in 1951), and also like his brother has a passion for music. Georg went on to be a choir conductor. Maria spent most of her adult life as a caretaker for the brothers, especially Joseph; when Joseph was a professor, and later a senior churchman, she looked after his office and household. Maria died in November 1991, in the Roman apartment in the Piazza Leonina she shared with her brother, while Georg is retired in Regensburg.

In Bavaria, Ratzinger grew up in a homogeneous, deeply practicing Catholic environment. While his mother was the new pope’s primary catechist, his father was deeply faithful as well, sometimes attending as many as three Masses on Sunday. In Milestones, Ratzinger recounts fond memories of his mother teaching him devotional practices, and of the deep impression that the Easter liturgies made on his religious imagination. It does not seem that the Pope ever seriously contemplated any other career than the priesthood (though he said at one point he considered working as a house painter); unlike his predecessor, Karol Wojtyla, he was never tempted by the theater or other walks of life. He also does not seem to have had any serious romantic relationships as a young man, though when asked at a press conference in Germany for the launch of Milestones why he didn’t discuss any girlfriends in the book, he jokingly replied that “I had to keep the manuscript to one hundred pages.”

As a young man, the Pope developed a lifelong love of music, especially Mozart, that native son of Salzburg whose melodies became the sound track of Pope Benedict’s life. Of Mozart, he said in 1996: “His music is by no means just entertainment; it contains the whole tragedy of human existence.” The Pope himself became an accomplished pianist, and in an interview published in the 1980s said he tried to get in at least fifteen minutes a day at the keyboard playing Mozart and Beethoven. Brahams, he sighed, is too difficult. His brother Georg was the conductor of the famed Regensburg choir, which had the honor of performing at the closing session of the Second Vatican Council. The new pope’s musical tastes are not “catholic,” however, in the sense of universal; he is not a fan of rock and roll, which he once called “a vehicle of anti-religion.” One strains to imagine Pope Benedict, like John Paul II did in 1997, tapping his toes to a performance by Bob Dylan, or being dubbed by U2’s Bono as “the first funky pontiff.”

NATIONAL SOCIALISM

The main historical shadow that hung over Ratzinger’s youth was the rise of National Socialism in Germany. He was six when Hitler came to power in 1933, and was eighteen when the Second World War ended in 1945. The Nazi period thus coincided with the formative period of his life, and his reflections on that experience continue to exert influence on his theological and political outlook today.

First, to clarify the relationship of the Ratzinger family, and the new pope specifically, with respect to National Socialism, it can be said with crystal clarity that the Ratzingers were not “pro-Nazi.” The father on more than one occasion expressed criticism of the Brownshirts, and concern about the potential implications of those views for himself and his family triggered a series of relocations to progressively less significant Bavarian assignments, until in 1937 he retired and the family moved to the Bavarian city of Traunstein. Ratzinger has written that his family belonged to a political tradition in Bavaria that looked to Austria and to France rather than to Prussia, and that therefore had little sympathy for Hitler’s form of German nationalism.

In The Ratzinger Report, Ratzinger disassociated his cultural roots from Hitler and the Nazi movement: “The poisonous seeds of Nazism are not the fruit of Austrian and Southern German Catholicism, but rather of the decadent cosmopolitan atmosphere of Vienna at the end of the monarchy.”

In 1941, when Joseph Ratzinger was fourteen, membership in the Hitler Youth became compulsory, and both he and Georg were enrolled. Yet Joseph did not attend activities, and as he recalls in Milestones, a sympathetic teacher in the high school in Traunstein allowed him to qualify for a reduction in tuition even though he did not have the mandatory Hitler Youth registration card.

In 1943, after Joseph had entered the seminary, he and his entire class were conscripted into the German army, spending most of his time as part of antiaircraft battalion guarding a BMW plant outside Munich. In a 1993 interview with Time, Ratzinger said he never fired a gun “in anger” during his military service, and eventually deserted. He ended up in an American prisoner-of-war camp, and was eventually released to continue his studies for the priesthood.

On the basis of this record, it seems clear that while Ratzinger did not take part in active resistance to the Nazi regime, he was by no means a supporter of the Nazis either. He and his family opposed Hitler.

(I pointed all this out on CNN after the Pope’s election, in response to rumblings in the British press about Ratzinger’s “Nazi past.” My comments earned a kind of immortalization from Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, who said of the Hitler Youth controversy: “To be fair, membership in that group was compulsory, and as Ratzinger’s biographer John Allen has noted, Ratzinger’s tenure in the group was brief and unenthusiastic, as evidenced by his basement full of unsold Hitler Youth cookies.”)

The brutality of the Nazi regime once touched the Ratzinger family personally. A cousin with Down’s syndrome, who in 1941 was fourteen years old, just a few months younger than Ratzinger himself, was taken away in that year by the Nazi authorities for “therapy.” Not long afterward, the family received word that he was dead, presumably one of the “undesirables” eliminated during that time. Ratzinger revealed the episode on November 28, 1996, at a Vatican conference organized by the Pontifical Council for Health Care. He cited it to illustrate the danger of ideological systems that define certain classes of human beings as unworthy of protection.

Perhaps more important than these biographical details is how Benedict XVI looks back on the Nazi period today, especially in the context of the lessons to be drawn for institutional Christianity. First of all, Pope Benedict is proud of the resistance offered to National Socialism by the Church. In Milestones, he writes:

Despite many human failings, the Church was the alternative to the destructive ideology of the brown rulers; in the inferno that had swallowed up the powerful, she had stood firm with a force coming to her from eternity. It had been demonstrated: The gates of hell will not overpower her. From our own experience we now knew what was meant by “the gates of hell,” and we could also see with our own eyes that the house built on rock had stood firm.

In The Ratzinger Report, he echoed the same point: “It is well known,” he said, “that in the decisive elections in 1933 Hitler had no majorities in the Catholic states.” The Nazi assault on the Catholic Church is inarguable; some twelve thousand priests and male religious were victims of persecution and harassment during the Hitler era, representing 36 percent of the diocesan clergy at the time.

As a historical matter, the extent of this resistance offered by the Church, and its impact on the course of events, is still a subject of debate. Ratzinger is obviously aware that some Catholics backed the regime, but he sees them as exceptions to an overall pattern of opposition. The point here is not to resolve those controversies, but to understand how the new pope remembers them.

Ratzinger has been critical of the way some Christian denominations in Germany, especially those he regarded as more “liberal,” were corrupted by National Socialist ideology. In a 1986 lecture in Toronto, he said that “liberal accommodation . . . quickly turned from liberality into a willingness to serve totalitarianism.” In The Ratzinger Report , he said that many Protestant churches were more easily co-opted by the Nazis because the idea of nationalism and a national church was more attractive to them, having decoupled themselves from the concept of a transnational institutional Christianity with a strong teaching office.

The Pope’s conclusion, on the basis of these experiences, is that only a form of Christianity clear about its core beliefs, and equally clear about its system of authority, will have the inner strength to stand up against alien forces attempting to seduce or hijack it. While the threat posed by hostile cultural currents is not as clear today—because in Europe at least there are no Brownshirts burning churches or rounding people up in the middle of the night—the risk remains, especially in the form of rampant materialism and relativism in the West. The Church, he believes, must be equally vigilant to be sure it is not gradually assimilated to the prevailing cultural ethos. A system of theology decoupled from the institution or its authorities, Pope Benedict worries, leaves itself prey to other powers, which can manipulate that theology to sap the Church’s strength from within.

RATZINGER THE THEOLOGIAN

After ordination in 1951, the young Joseph Ratzinger pursued a career as a theologian, teaching in a succession of German universities that were among the most vital and productive centers of theological energy of the time: Freising, Bonn, Münster, and, in 1966, Tübingen. These were the places where much of the intellectual scaffolding that would support the reforms of the Second Vatican Council was erected. So indebted was Vatican II to the German theological contribution, in fact, that one of the most famous early books about the council, by Fr. Ralph M. Wiltgen, was entitled The Rhine Flows into the Tiber.

Ratzinger was present for all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council as the peritos, or theological expert, for Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne, Germany, whom Ratzinger had met and befriended while teaching at Bonn. Broadly speaking, Frings was part of the progressive majority at the council that spoke in favor of greater collegiality among the bishops, liturgical reform, greater ecumenical and interreligious openness, and a more transparent style of governance within the Church.

Ironically, Ratzinger was the principal ghostwriter of a speech Frings gave on the floor of the council on November 8, 1963, that denounced the “methods and behavior” of the Holy Office, today the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as “a cause of scandal to the world.” Less than two decades later, Ratzinger was the prefect of that office himself, drawing some of the same kind of criticism he had once helped express. More than one critic accused Ratzinger of having come down with “scarlet fever”—that is, the ambition for high ecclesiastical office—though defenders point out that Ratzinger’s career did not follow the traditional track of someone seeking a bishop’s miter.

What changed between the Ratzinger of 1963 and the Ratzinger of 1981, the year he moved to Rome at John Paul’s invitation to head the doctrinal office?

Ratzinger himself has long insisted, as he did in an interview with Time magazine in 1993, that his positions have not changed, but rather the context has. There’s undoubtedly truth to that assertion. To speak in generalities, at least two currents were in play within the progressive majority at Vatican II: one, known as ressourcement, or a “return to the sources,” looking to recover earlier stages of Christian tradition; another known as aggiornamento, or “renewal,” looking to reconcile the Church with the modern world. One impulse, in other words, looked back, another looked forward. Ratzinger, under the influence of figures such as Augustine, Romano Guardini, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, was always more comfortable in the ressourcement camp. As the aggiornamento group gained dominance in the immediate post–Vatican II period, he worried that too much of the tradition was being squandered based on an uncritical reading of the goodness of “the world.”

In The Ratzinger Report, he put the point this way: “I have always tried to remain true to Vatican II, to this today of the Church, without any longing for a yesterday irretrievably gone with the wind, and without any impatient thrust toward a tomorrow that is not ours.”

At the same time, there’s little question that on some issues, from the theological status of national bishops’ conferences to liturgical reform, the later Ratzinger has struck more traditional and “conservative” notes. Though it is overly simplistic to express this in terms of a shift from “Ratzinger the liberal” to “Ratzinger the conservative,” nevertheless something did change in his thought in the critical years since 1965, at the close of Vatican II, when Paul VI made him archbishop of Munich.

The pivotal point seems to have come in 1968, with the student revolutions that swept across Europe, including Tübingen, where Ratzinger was teaching. More troubling still, those uprisings often had the explicit support of sectors within the Catholic Church, which tended to identify Marxist socialism with Catholic social teaching. This was deeply troubling for Ratzinger, who felt he had already lived through one ruinous attempt at the ideological manipulation of the Christian faith in Nazi Germany, and therefore felt himself obliged to resist another. In the lengthy interview with German journalist Peter Seewald that became 1997’s Salt of the Earth, Ratzinger said of this period: “Anyone who wanted to remain a progressive in this context had to give up his integrity.”

The new pope himself has not shrunk from describing his attitude toward the postconciliar period in terms of the need for a “restoration,” saying in The Ratzinger Report: “If by ‘restoration’ we understand the search for a new balance after all the exaggerations of an indiscriminate opening to the world, after the overly positive interpretations of an agnostic and atheistic world, then a restoration understood in this sense (a newly found balance of orientation and values within the Catholic totality) is altogether desirable and, for that matter, is already in operation in the Church.”

Yet it would be a mistake to regard the story line of this stage of Ratzinger’s life as centering on the revision of his previous positions. This was also the most creative period of his career as a theologian, resulting in the production of significant books that rank among the most impressive theological output of the era. Pride of place goes to his 1968 book Introduction to Christianity, a contemporary presentation of Christian faith. The book was no legalistic manual stuffed with rules and regulations; it was a meditation on faith that reached into the depths of human experience, a book that dared to walk naked before doubt and disbelief in order to discover the truth of what it means to be a modern Christian. Many found it exhilarating. Another significant title from this period is Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life (1977), which Ratzinger himself once called “my most thorough work, and the one I labored over the most strenuously.” In it, Ratzinger argues for the need to “detach eschatology from politics,” to never construe the Reign of God with some this-worldly social or political order. This, he argues, does not mean disengagement from politics, but rather a relativization of politics that sets limits to power and ultimately upends totalitarianism.

ARCHBISHOP OF MUNICH

After relocating to Regensburg to continue his theological career, a new twist came in 1977, when Paul VI named Ratzinger archbishop of Munich and then, just weeks later, made him a cardinal. Suddenly Ratzinger found himself at the pinnacle of the career ladder in the Catholic Church, despite never having served in a chancery, never having worked in the Vatican, and never having served as a diocesan bishop. It was a daring choice by Paul VI to elevate a thinker rather than a bureaucrat; the Pope obviously felt that, given the way the winds were blowing in Western Europe, and especially Germany, the Church had to do more than “business as usual” in order to mount a credible response. Upon his appointment, the future pope chose as his episcopal motto Cooperatores Veritatis, “coworkers of the truth,” reflecting a concern for objective truth that runs through his thought and career.

The Pope’s brief stint as archbishop is of interest because it marks his only direct experience as a pastor prior to being elected the Bishop of Rome in the conclave of 2005. How those years look depends to a great extent upon whom you ask.

As archbishop, Ratzinger played a minor role in the decision by Pope John Paul II to strip Hans Küng, his old colleague from Tübingen, of his license to teach Catholic theology. He also blocked Johann Baptist Metz, another erstwhile colleague, from an appointment at the University of Munich in 1979 (a right he enjoyed under the Bavarian concordat of 1924). Many in the theological community complained that Ratzinger had forgotten his roots, such as famed German Jesuit Karl Rahner, who called the move an “injustice and misuse of power.” Some of the priests in the Munich archdiocese also complained that Ratzinger was aloof and did not communicate well with them, although others dispute this. Defenders of Ratzinger recall him as a devoted shepherd, whose actions only made the German press when they had some disciplinary connotation; his gentleness with ordinary believers and his simplicity, they say, remained largely hidden.

As a footnote to the Metz episode, Ratzinger appeared at a 1998 symposium to mark Metz’s seventieth birthday. Metz described that appearance in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter as “a gesture of reconciliation towards the theological community.”

Ratzinger’s appointment as a cardinal in 1977 also meant that he was on hand to take part in the two conclaves of 1978, which elected John Paul I and John Paul II. In the interregnum leading to the second conclave of 1978, Ratzinger warned in a newspaper interview against the “Marxist presuppositions” underlying liberation theology in Latin America, which he said opened the door for “ideological struggle.” At the same time, he said, the reality of social injustice, coupled with what he termed a “pushy Americanism” demanding conversion to free-market principles, created a real basis for social protest. Some Vaticanologists believe Ratzinger played a role in the election of the cardinal of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, as John Paul II; prior to both conclaves, Ratzinger made some short lists of papabili himself.

In November 1980, Ratzinger was responsible for organizing John Paul II’s trip to Munich. Also in 1980, John Paul appointed Ratzinger as the relator, or chairman, of the Synod of Bishops on the Family, and in that capacity he won high marks as a listener and synthesizer of the bishops’ concerns, despite the fact that in his own speeches at the synod he strenuously defended traditional positions on birth control and other issues of sexual morality. His professorial capacity to bracket off his own views and listen to those of others, coupled with his reputation as an eminent theologian, made it little surprise when John Paul called Ratzinger to Rome in 1981 to take over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, becoming the first truly first-rate theologian to become the pope’s top doctrinal authority since St. Robert Bellarmine in the sixteenth century.

RATZINGER IN THE VATICAN

In many ways, Ratzinger’s twenty-four years at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are so well-documented as to make reviewing them here unnecessary.

Critics remember Ratzinger as the driving force behind some of the most controversial aspects of the pontificate of John Paul II, including the disciplining of theologians such as Fr. Charles Curran, an American moral theologian who advocates a right to public dissent from official Church teaching; Fr. Matthew Fox, an American known for his work on creation spirituality; Sr. Ivone Gebara, a Brazilian whose thinking blends liberation theology with environmental concerns; and Fr. Tissa Balasuriya, a Sri Lankan interested in how Christianity can be expressed through Eastern concepts.

Ratzinger also reined in a series of bishops seen as unacceptably progressive, including Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, Washington, reproached by Rome for his tolerance of ministry to homosexuals and his involvement in progressive political causes, and Bishop Dom Pedro Casaldáliga of Sao Félix, Brazil, criticized for his political engagement beyond the borders of his own diocese.

It was Ratzinger who in the mid-1980s led the Vatican crackdown on liberation theology, a movement in Latin America that sought to align the Roman Catholic Church with progressive movements for social change. Ratzinger saw liberation theology as a European export that amounted to Marxism in another guise, and brought the full force of Vatican authority to stopping it in its tracks.

Ratzinger sought to redefine the nature of bishops’ conferences around the world, insisting that they lack teaching authority. That campaign resulted in a 1998 document, Apostolos Suos, that some saw as an attack on powerful conferences such as those in the United States and Germany that to some extent acted as counterweights to the Vatican. He also expanded the borders of “infallibility” to include such disparate points as the ban on women’s ordination and the invalidity of ordinations in the Anglican Communion under the umbrella of a de facto infallibility as part of the “ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church.”

It was Ratzinger who, in a famous 1986 document, defined homosexuality as “a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.” In the 1990s, Ratzinger led a campaign against the theology of religious pluralism, insisting that the traditional teaching of Christ as the lone and unique savior of humanity not be compromised. This effort culminated in the 2001 document Dominus Iesus, which asserted that non-Christians are in a “gravely deficient situation” with respect to Christians. The same effort led to critical notifications on the work of two Jesuit theologians, Jesuit Fr. Jacques Dupuis of Belgium, and Fr. Roger Haight of the United States.

Despite Ratzinger’s reputation as a stellar theologian, critics also say that occasionally he can be sloppy, relying on misleading assessments by aides and consultors. English Presbyterian writer John Hick, for example, pointed out in 1997 that in a public lecture criticizing his work, Ratzinger erroneously identified him as an American, and cited page numbers in one of his books that had nothing to do with the matter under discussion. In the Dupuis case, Ratzinger’s office prepared a highly critical notification that it asked Dupuis to sign, only to have Dupuis defenders object that once again the citations were incorrect and the statements attributed to Dupuis were, in fact, nowhere to be found in his book. Ratzinger took the point, and a milder version of the notification was drafted.

This track record means that some in the Catholic theological community, especially on the more liberal wing, are not great Ratzinger admirers. A Jesuit who followed the Dupuis case closely, asked for his thoughts on the possibility of a Ratzinger papacy days before the conclave opened, said tersely: “It fills me with dread.”

Ratzinger also has a reputation for making occasionally provocative comments that stir controversy. He once called Buddhism an “auto-erotic spirituality,” and in Salt of the Earth was critical of Islam: “Nor must we forget that Islam was at the head of the slave traffic and by no means displayed any great regard for the blacks. And above all Islam doesn’t make any sort of concession to inculturation,” he said. He later added, “One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society.”

Ratzinger has also said on many occasions that the Church of the future may have to be smaller to remain faithful, referring to Christianity’s short-term destiny as representing a “creative minority” in a world largely hostile to its message. He has also used the image of the “mustard seed,” suggesting a smaller presence that nevertheless carries the capacity for future growth as long as it remains true to itself. Such views have drawn criticism in some quarters for being excessively pessimistic. The English Catholic writer Eamonn Duffy, for example, said in 1985 of Ratzinger’s judgment about the contemporary world: “The ‘world’ is not entirely inhabited by hedonistic bourgeois materialists, any more than it is by abortionists, pornographers or concentration camp commandants. The ‘world’ is the place where ordinary men and women live and must find their salvation.”

Finally, Ratzinger has insisted that his primary responsibility in the doctrinal office is not primarily to make life easy for theologians, but to protect the right of the 1.1 billion Roman Catholics in the world to have the faith presented to them fully and accurately. As he put it in 1997, “Those who, as it were, can’t fight back intellectually have to be defended—against intellectual assault on what sustains their life.” He has suggested that theological “creativity,” as it has come to be understood, may be partly to blame for the decline in Catholic religious practice in some quarters: “Theologians should ponder to what extent they are to blame for the fact that increasing numbers of people seek refuge in narrow or unhealthy forms of religion. When one no longer offers anything but questions and doesn’t offer any positive way to faith, such flights are inevitable,” he said.

All these positions, and many others, have made Ratzinger a polarizing figure, at least within center-left circles in academia and ecclesiastical life. Fr. Charles Curran, one of Ratzinger’s targets for his views on sexual morality and theological dissent, blames Ratzinger for artificially shutting down theological discussion.

“The problem is that he has too readily identified the truth with what the magisterium has taught at a given moment,” Curran said in 1999. “The Holy Office cannot have a copyright on what it means to be Catholic.”

Yet Ratzinger’s fans, and they are many, insist that focusing only on the public controversies associated with his tenure leaves two essential pieces of the picture out of focus: the personal qualities of the man, and the abiding concerns upon which the specific battles he’s waged are based.

As for Ratzinger’s personal side, those who have worked with him insist that he is not the bruiser that a quick rehearsal of his public record, like the one above, might suggest.

“He is an extraordinarily refined, calm, and open-minded person,” said Archbishop William J. Levada of San Francisco, who worked on Ratzinger’s Vatican staff in the early 1980s. “He can listen and synthesize a group of people’s thought and find much of value in almost anything that is said. He has the uncanny ability to articulate those things we meant but forgot to say,” Levada told the National Catholic Reporter in February 1999. Obviously the respect is mutual, since the new Pope named Levada his successor at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on May 13, 2005.

That graciousness is reflected in the fact that, as prefect of the doctrinal congregation, Ratzinger on many occasions has accepted invitations to dialogue with intellectuals of other faiths and of none, often in very public settings, and has always come off as open, willing to concede points when they were well articulated and cogent, and never defensive or arrogant. On October 25, 2004, for example, he took part in a colloquium with Italian lay thinker Ernesto Galli della Loggia, a conservative nonbeliever, at Rome’s Palazzo Colona. In his opening remarks, Ratzinger called contemporary society “truly ill,” and said that humanity’s moral capacity has not kept pace with its technological skill. In such a context, he argued, there is an urgent need for religious believers and secularists of goodwill to join forces in an attempt to revivify moral reasoning.

“I’ve come with this realization of needing to make common cause,” Ratzinger said.

During the discussion, Galli della Loggia challenged Ratzinger, objecting to what he called the Church’s tendency to blur “life” with “personhood,” saying he agreed that an embryo is life but not that it is a person, and not all the same moral categories apply.

Ratzinger readily conceded the point.

“I think a use of the word ‘life’ that sometimes substitutes ‘person’ is mistaken,” he said. “After all, a plant is life.”

At the end of the evening, the audience roundly applauded Ratzinger’s stamina and openness, and most scored him the winner of the exchange.

A similar event took place in a jam-packed Roman theater in 2000, when Ratzinger agreed to an exchange with Italian philosopher Paolo Flores d’Arcais, a self-described atheist. Many in the crowd of several hundred people arrived skeptical of the Vatican’s “enforcer,” but were gradually won over by his charm, quick wit, and willingness to listen to the other party. When Flores drew cheers for suggesting that sometimes nonbelievers have done a better job of living gospel values than believers, Ratzinger said: “I’m satisfied with the applause. It’s good for both of us to be self-critical, to reflect anew.”

Admirers say Ratzinger’s kindness is not just hauled out for public display at this sort of event, but is a fundamental quality of the man. After his election as pope, for example, Ratzinger went by his apartment in the Piazza Leonina to pick up whatever personal effects he wanted to collect. The apartment is on the same floor with the apartments of three other cardinals, and as he left, Pope Benedict rang the doorbells of the other three apartments to thank the startled religious women who act as the household staffs for the cardinals for being such good neighbors during his years in that location. (As a footnote, many of these sisters are Americans, members of the Mercy Sisters of Alma.) Those who know the new pope well say it was a vintage gesture.

The devotion Ratzinger inspires among his staff at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is also the stuff of legend. When he visited the office shortly after his election, he was accompanied by the secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, and the sostituto, or “substitute,” Archbishop Leonardo Sandri, both men known for maintaining rather formal and distant relationships with subordinates. One staff member at the congregation described the two as “stunned” by the outpouring of affection for the new pope from his former aides; most staffers, when introduced to the Pope, choked back tears. One said he was literally unable to speak when his turn came, and had to content himself with later writing a note to Pope Benedict trying to describe his emotions.

Further, defenders insist, the positions articulated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith over these twenty-four years are not the personal musings of Joseph Ratzinger, but represent the collective judgment of the staff of the congregation, as well as the other cardinals who are its members. Ratzinger himself made this argument in Salt of the Earth: “I would never presume to use the decisions of the Congregation to impose my own theological ideas on the Christian people. . . . I see my role as that of coordinator of a large working group,” he said. “When the Cardinals meet, we never make decisions if the consultors aren’t in substantial agreement, because we say that if there are markedly different opinions among good theologians, then we can’t declare by some higher light, as it were, that only one is right. Only when the advisory team has come to at least a large degree of unanimity, a basic convergence, do we make decisions as well.”

This point was made by Washington’s Cardinal McCarrick after Pope Benedict’s election.

“The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is not just Ratzinger going into his office, closing the door, and writing documents,” he said. “Everything he does has to be in continuity with the tradition of the Church.”

To some degree, therefore, Ratzinger admirers, including many of the cardinals who elected him pope, believe that he has unfairly shouldered the public blame for a quarter-century for conclusions that virtually any prefect of the doctrinal office would have been obliged to reach. Behind the scenes, they argue, he has sometimes had a moderating effect, such as his widely rumored intervention during the drafting of the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor to argue that the Church’s teaching on birth control, because it is not directly a matter of divine revelation, cannot be declared formally infallible.

As for Ratzinger’s core concerns, which presumably will extend to his new role as Pope Benedict XVI, admirers insist that he has no interest in choking off theological debate simply for the sake of exercising power, or for offending constituencies who may find some of his public pronouncements painful, such as homosexuals or women who feel called to the Catholic priesthood. He is not, they say, by nature a head-knocker.

Instead, they argue, the underlying passion of Ratzinger’s life has always been truth. No doctrine, Ratzinger believes, can truly liberate, and no theological discussion is truly free, if it leads human beings into false conceptions of the meaning and purpose of their lives. In that sense, Ratzinger sees no contradiction between doctrinal and pastoral imperatives —the best pastoral service the Church can offer, he believes, is to tell someone the truth. Drawing on his own experience of National Socialism in Germany, Ratzinger argues that he has witnessed the ruin that lies on the other side of wrong ideas, false doctrine. Insisting upon the capacity of the human intellect to attain truth, and that this truth is offered in its fullest form in the Christian gospel, is, he believes, the only secure basis of authentic humanism.

“A lot of people read everything I may say as part of a mechanism that basically wants to keep mankind in tutelage and not as a genuine, honest, intellectual attempt to understand the world and man,” Ratzinger said in Salt of the Earth.

For this reason, Ratzinger’s admirers have long scoffed at characterizations of him as a kind of “control freak.”

“I do not believe any credible case could be made for him as an authoritarian,” Dominican Fr. Augustine Di Noia told the National Catholic Reporter in 1999. At the time, Di Noia was the chief theological adviser for the U.S. bishops conference; later, he would come to Rome to serve as Ratzinger’s undersecretary in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a position he holds today.

“Faith is not the suppression of intelligence, but its exaltation,” Di Noia said in 1999. “The fundamental divide between dissenting or revisionist theologians and the mode of John Paul II and Ratzinger lies along this fault. Ratzinger is stating points which would have been totally non-controversial even fifty years ago,” Di Noia said. On the rare occasions when he has had to rein someone in, Di Noia said, it is because “a clear line in the sand” was crossed.

A FINAL CASUALTY

Just two weeks after Benedict’s pontificate began, a final casualty was claimed in the battles fought during his tenure at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, one last echo of the controversies rehearsed above. Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., editor of the respected Jesuit-run America magazine, resigned after the congregation asked the Jesuit authorities to remove him as editor, capping five years of largely hidden tensions between Ratzinger’s office, the Jesuit order, and Reese himself.

Ironically, Reese got the news just days after returning to New York from Rome, where he covered the conclave that elected Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.

Over the course of a five-year exchange between the doctrinal congregation and the Jesuits, the congregation had raised objections to various editorial choices at America under Reese’s leadership, including:

An essay exploring moral arguments for the approval of condoms in the context of HIV/AIDS;

Several critical analyses of the doctrinal congregation’s September 2000 document Dominus Iesus, on religious pluralism;

An editorial criticizing what America called a lack of due process in the congregation’s procedures for the investigation of theologians;

An essay about homosexual priests;

A guest essay by Congressman David Obey (D., Wis.), challenging suggestions that the Church should refuse Communion to Catholic politicians who do not vote pro-life.

In each case, defenders note, while these contributions in some respects challenged official Church positions, they were published as part of America’s broader coverage of the topic, which always included substantial contributions making the opposing argument.

The formal correspondence about Reese’s fate was carried on between the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the superior general of the Jesuits, Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach of Holland, with the content then relayed to Reese’s Jesuit superiors in the United States. Although critics of Reese both in the United States and Rome have occasionally accused him of an “antihierarchical” mentality, supporters noted in their responses to the congregation that over his seven years as editor, America routinely published weighty pieces by prominent members of the hierarchy, at one stage including Ratzinger himself.

In February 2002, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith proposed creating a three-member commission of America bishops to act as “censors” for America, though in the end this never came to pass. Throughout the back-and-forth discussions, the congregation told the Jesuits that it was acting in response to concerns from bishops in the United States. Whatever the source, the tensions did not diminish, and by early spring of 2005 it was clear that Reese would have to go. A letter requesting that he be removed was dated in mid-March. Observers speculate that had someone other than Ratzinger been elected pope, Reese might have waited to see how policy would develop, but given Ratzinger’s victory, Reese believed he saw the handwriting on the wall. He elected to take a sabbatical in California while considering his next move.

Reese’s departure will be seen as puzzling in some quarters, given that America has long been seen as a moderate, though clearly left-leaning, sophisticated publication that tried to steer between extremes. Perhaps, some speculated, Reese’s high profile in the American media as a commentator on Church affairs was a factor in making him a “target,” though if so, the intervention seemed destined to be futile. Reese was already widely cited in the press prior to taking over at America in 1998, and presumably the notoriety of having been “fired by the new pope” will do little to reduce his visibility. Others concluded that it was America ’s reputation for intelligent, nuanced commentary that made it a “threat.”

Defenders of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on the other hand, argued that it is not unreasonable to expect a publication sponsored by a religious order, and with a member of that order as editor, to uphold the teaching of the Church.

Whatever one makes of the debate, it should be emphasized that the pressure for Reese’s removal dates from the end of Ratzinger’s term at the doctrinal office, and it may be unfair to treat it as a sign of where Benedict’s pontificate will go. Further, despite the fact that the buck at the congregation stopped on Ratzinger’s desk, it is unclear to what extent he was personally involved in the deliberations surrounding Reese. Still, the fact that the congregation targeted Reese and America will be troubling to some trying to discern where Benedict XVI may want to take the Church. If America is not safe, some observers in the Catholic Church will wonder, who is?

A COMPLEX MAN

This, then, is the complex man who has become Pope Benedict XVI: a serious intellectual, an ardent defender of the faith, a man with deep doubts about the health of contemporary culture, willing to use the disciplinary tools of the teaching office when a matter of faith is at stake, but also a man of deep kindness and humility, someone capable of stirring remarkable love and devotion in those close to him, a man with a reputation for being both tough and collegial, erudite yet concerned with the common person. Given these facets of his history and personal character, which sometimes rest in uneasy tension with one another, his promises to be a fascinating pontificate.