Benedict XVI: The Pope and His Agenda
Joseph Ratzinger reproposed it in his last homily before the conclave: “being adults in the faith,” and not “children in a state of guardianship, tossed about by the waves and carried here and there by every wind of doctrine.” Entry by entry, the open questions of his pontificate
by Sandro Magister
ROMA, April 20, 2005 – They called him a conservative. But Joseph Ratzinger revolutionized even the conclave which, on April 19, made him pope, Benedict XVI, “a humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord.”
Never in the past century has the choice of a pontiff been spoken in a language so clear and sharp. And it came with a buildup which become more impressive as the hour of truth drew near. Until his last conference on the state of the world, which Ratzinger gave on the last day of the deceased pope’s life. Until, even more importantly, the last homily he proclaimed in Saint Peter’s at the mass “pro eligendo romano pontifice,” a few hours before the closing of the doors of the Sistine Chapel.
As a cardinal, Ratzinger put nothing “on sale” in order to be elected pope. The votes and consensus landed on him one after the other, month after month, scrutiny after scrutiny, attracted only by his agenda, hard as a diamond. At the last mass in Saint Peter’s he reproposed this with the words of the apostle Paul: the goal is that of “being adults in the faith,” and not “children in a state of guardianship, tossed about by the waves and carried here and there by every wind of doctrine.”
Because modern times are leading precisely toward this, he warned: to “a dictatorship of relativism which recognizes nothing as definitive and leaves as the ultimate standard one’s own personality and desires.”
Against this “deceit of men,” Ratzinger opposed the principle that “we have, instead, a different standard: the Son of God, the true man,” who is also “the standard of true humanism” and “the criterion for discerning between the true and the false, between deception and truth.”
The plain conclusion: “We must foster the maturity of this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith.” And it doesn’t matter if “having a clear faith according to the Church’s creed is frequently labeled fundamentalism.”
Over the years, accusations of fundamentalism have been scattered against this German theologian who today is the new head of the Catholic Church.
During the 1960’s, the young Ratzinger followed the second Vatican Council as an expert consultant for the cardinal of Cologne, Joseph Frings. He launched his first darts against the Holy Office, “out of step with the times and a cause of harm and scandal,” which he would direct many years later. But very soon after the end of the council, he began to denounce its effects, which were “crudely divergent” from what was to be expected.
The path he took was parallel to that of two other first-rate theologians of the time, his friends and instructors Henri De Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, both of whom also became cardinals, both of whom were also accused of having turned aside from progressivism to conservatism. Ratzinger never paid any attention to the label that was applied to him: “I have not changed; they are the ones who have changed.”
His was a strange conservatism, in any case. It was apt to disturb, rather than pacify, the Church. One of his favorite models is Saint Charles Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan who, after the Council of Trent, did nothing less than “reconstruct the Catholic Church, which was almost destroyed in the area around Milan as well, without returning to the Middle Ages to do so; on the contrary, he created a modern form of the Church.”
Today the transformations in civilization are no less epochal, in his eyes. The culture that has established itself in Europe “constitutes the most radical possible contradiction, not only of Christianity, but also of the religious traditions of humanity,” he argued on April 1 at Subiaco, at his last conference during the reign of John Paul II. And therefore the Church must react with all the courage it can muster, not conforming itself to the times, not falling to its knees before the world, but “bringing, with holy consternation, the gift of faith to all, the gift of friendship with Christ.”
Benedict XVI does not dream of the mass conversion of whole peoples for the Church of tomorrow. For many regions, he foresees a minority Christianity, but he wants this to be “creative.” He prefers the missionary impulse to timid dialogue with nonbelievers and men of other faiths.
Pessimism and angst have no place with him, and here also he breaks with the labels currently applied to him. He ended his homily-manifesto on April 18 at Saint Peter’s by invoking a world “changed from a vale of tears to the garden of God.”
He has been this way since he was a child: “The Catholicism of the Bavaria in which I grew up was joyful, colorful, human. I miss a sense of purism. This must be because, since my childhood, I have breathed the air of the Baroque.” He is distrustful of theologians who “do not love art, poetry, music, nature: they can be dangerous.” He loves taking walks in the mountains. He plays the piano, and favors Mozart. His brother Georg, a priest, is the choirmaster at Ratisbonne, one of the last pockets of resistance for the great tradition of sacred polyphony and Gregorian chant.
And this has been for years one of the points on which he has collided with novelties in the postconciliar Church. He has had harsh words for the transformation of the mass and liturgies “into spectacles that require directors of genius and talented actors.” He has said similar things about the dismantling of sacred music. “How often we celebrate only ourselves, without even taking Him into account,” he commented in his meditations for the Stations of the Cross last Good Friday. Here, “Him” refers to Jesus Christ, the one forgotten by liturgies changed into convivial gatherings.
Benedict XVI has never hidden his reservations even about the mass liturgies celebrated by his predecessor. No one in the curia of John Paul II was more free, or more critical, than he was. And Karol Wojtyla had the greatest respect for him for this reason, too. “My trusted friend”: this is how he defined Ratzinger in his autobiographical book “Arise, Let Us Be Going,” praise he never bestowed on any of his other close collaborators.
As prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger criticized John Paul II on many points, even the ones that most distinguished his pontificate.
He didn’t even go to the first interreligious meeting in Assisi in 1986. He saw in this an obfuscation of the identity of Christianity, which cannot be reduced to other faiths. Years later, in 2000, a document came to dissolve any sort of equivocation, the declaration “Dominus Jesus,” published with his signature. It unleashed a storm of controversy. But the pope defended it completely. And in 2002, Ratzinger attended the meeting at Assisi in its modified form.
Another point on which the new pope did not agree with John Paul II was the “mea culpas.” Many other cardinals disagreed with these, but said nothing in public, with the sole exception of the archbishop of Bologna, Giacomo Biffi, who set down his objections in black and white, in a pastoral letter to the faithful of his diocese. Ratzinger voiced his criticism in a different way: in a theological document that responded, point by point, to the objections that had been raised, but in which the objections were all elaborately developed, while the replies appeared tenuous and shaky.
As a cardinal, Benedict XVI also criticized the endless succession of saints and blesseds that pope Wojtyla raised to the honors of the altar: in many cases, these were “persons who might perhaps say something to a certain group, but do not say much to the great multitude of believers.” As an alternative, he proposed “bringing to the attention of Christianity only those figures who, more than all others, make visible to us the holy Church, amid so many doubts about its holiness.”
He has always ignored politically correct language. In 1984, in a document against the Marxist roots of liberation theology, he delivered a deadly series of blows to the communist empire, labeling it “the shame of our time” and “a disgraceful enslavement of man.” During that same period, American president Ronald Reagan was speaking out against the “evil empire.” The news was spread that Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican secretary of state and the architect of a policy of good relations with Moscow, had threatened to resign in order to distance himself from the prefect for doctrine. It wasn’t true. In any case, five years later the Berlin Wall came down.
Ratzinger has always distinguished himself as a man of great vision, not as a manager. He would love to see a Church that is simpler in terms of bureaucracy. He doesn’t want its central and peripheral institutions – the Vatican curia, the diocesan chanceries, the episcopal conferences – to become “like the armor of Saul, which prevented the young David from walking.”
Partly for this reason, he reacted strongly in 2000 when another talented archbishop and theologian, his friend and fellow German Walter Kasper, charged him with wanting to identify the universal Church with the pope and the curia, with wanting in effect to restore Roman centralism. Ratzinger replied, confuting Kasper’s thesis. The latter spoke again, provoking another public reply.
At the center of the dispute, which was fought on the terrain of advanced theology, was the relationship between the universal Church and the particular local Churches. This was the same question that the progressivist wing was discussing in more institutional and political terms during those same years, promoting a democratization of the Church, a balance of papal primacy with greater power for the college of bishops.
The controversy over the balance of power in the Church was also involved in the conclave that elected Benedict XVI, and a rejection of a greater role for collegiality was attributed to him, a rejection that would also create an obstacle to dialogue with the Orthodox and Protestant Churches.
But the reality is different. It was Kasper himself, whose motives are not suspect, who gave the name “the Ratzinger formula” to the thesis maintained by the present pope on relations with separated Christians, and called this “fundamental for ecumenical dialogue.” One written form of this thesis maintains that “in regard to papal primacy, Rome must demand from the Orthodox Churches nothing more than was established and practiced during the first millennium.”
During the first millennium, the college of bishops carried much greater weight. It will be, perhaps, a conservative pope like Benedict XVI who will clear the way for this reform.
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A Concise Agenda of the New Pontificate
Just having emerged from the election, pope Benedict XVI really does have the conclave behind him. Nothing is binding him anymore. Very strict rules forbid his electors from imposing upon him the decisions that they want, or the nominations that they prefer. And this is one more reason for the hyperactive attention with which we will study his first moves as head of the worldwide Church. All of a sudden a tremendous, limitless agenda opens up before the new pope. It is the agenda that John Paul II left to him as an inheritance. Here is a list of entries, in alphabetical order.
ASSISI. This is an unforgettable symbol of the pontificate of Karol Wojtyla: the representatives of the world’s religions praying side by side in the city of Saint Francis. But it is also one of the more destabilizing symbols: if every religion is itself a path to salvation, the Catholic Church can close its missions throughout the world for lack of reason to exist. The correction for this conclusion is found in the declaration “Dominus Jesus” of 2000, which reaffirms faith in Jesus Christ as the only savior of all men of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The new pope will therefore continue interreligious dialogue, but will hold firm the irreducible identity of Christianity and Jesus’s commandment to preach the Gospel to the whole world. “That includes the Dalai Lama and the Muslims,” Cardinal Giacomo Biffi once said.
BISHOPS. The Catholic Church governs itself through the pope and the bishops. But the latter of these, already reeling from the uncontrollable turbulence of John Paul II, have been suffering for some time from another restriction: that of the national bishops’ conferences. Some of these, especially in Central Europe and North America, have become gargantuan bureaucratic machines in recent decades, producing commissions and documents in increasingly massive doses, and usually to no purpose. If Benedict XVI wants to take in hand again the ordinary governance of the Church so greatly overlooked by his predecessor, he will need to take a scalpel to these new ecclesiastical bureaucracies. His best allies will be the best bishops.
CHINA. This represents a double threat for the Church of Rome. The first is the absence of liberty for the millions of Chinese Christians, whether clandestine or belonging to the “patriotic” Church set up by the regime. Not only was John Paul II unable ever to set foot in China, he didn’t even succeed in obtaining a guarantee that he would be able to nominate the country’s bishops. Until now, the Vatican has acted with the Beijing authorities the same way it acted with the Soviet empire in its darkest period – and as then, the results have been very scarce. The difference is that no collapse is foreseen for the Chinese giant. On the contrary; its ascent as a world power will challenge the Christian faith even more than Islam does now. And this is the second threat that the new pope will need to keep in mind. The Muslim creed provokes, as a backlash, a reawakening of Christian identity. Chinese religious belief doesn’t. As it is void of faith in a personal God, it could encourage the extinguishing of this identity.
CURIA. This is the pope’s executive branch. John Paul II paid little attention to it, and the ordinary governance of the Church suffered quite a bit as a result. But after a pontificate as charismatic as his, one made up of spectacular symbolic gestures, it is natural that his successor should take more closely in hand the rudder of the institution. The heads of the curial dicasteries lose their mandate between one pope and the next. The first real nominations, after the initial routine reconfirmations, will be the first test of how the successor intends to construct the team of his new government.
DEMOCRACY. Within the Church, and outside of it. Within, it is properly called “collegiality.” And it is the particular balance that is struck between papal primacy and the college of bishops. John Paul II almost always made his principal decisions alone, and against the opinion of many others. Every year or two he convened a synod of the bishops of the whole world, but then, once again, he made his own decisions. The next synod has already been convened, and is scheduled for October. Many hope that the new pope will increase the weight of this body in decision-making. A different equilibrium between the pope and the bishops is also a necessary step for bringing the Catholic Church and the separated Protestant and Orthodox Churches closer together. As for democracy as found in political systems, pope Karol Wojtyla took a hardnosed attitude toward and denounced its “subtle forms of totalitarianism.” Above all, the laws touching on human life from birth to death will be a minefield for his successor as well.
EUROPE. The new pope takes on a task ripe with fresh defeat: the lack of recognition of the Judaeo-Christian roots of Europe in the preamble of the new constitution for the European Union. On the Old Continent, The Church itself doesn’t seem to be in good health. In many of the nations of Central Europe, in Spain, in Poland, statistics on Church membership are falling, very sharply in some places. The only country bucking the trend is Italy. The new pope will have a hard time climbing back up this hill.
EXCOMMUNICATIONS. The pontificate of John Paul II, from this point of view, was one of the mildest ever. The only theology professor who incurred a temporary excommunication was an obscure priest from Sri Lanka, Tissa Balasuriya, found guilty of having denied the virginity of Mary and of having doubted the divinity of Jesus, but he recanted and was pardoned. The only major excommunication for which pope Wojtyla passed into history, which is still is force, is the one levied against the ultra-traditionalist bishop Marcel Lefebvre and his followers. Attempts to bring them back into the fold have been going on for years, and the new pope will certainly make other efforts to heal this wound.
HUMANAE VITAE. The encyclical of Paul VI forbidding artificial contraception produced one of the most serious ruptures between the papal magisterium and the practice of the faithful in recent decades. But today the focal point of the Church’s preaching has shifted: more than the pill and the condom, the Church’s attention is concentrated on the defense of every life from the moment of conception. The result is that even at the summit of the Church’s leadership calm discussions have begun again about the prohibition of “Humanae Vitae” as not definitive or rigid, but open to future corrections. Cardinal Georges Cottier, official theologian of the papal household, gave an authoritative first sign of a shift one month before John Paul II died: he admitted the use of the condom as a defense against AIDS, under accurately described special conditions. It is possible that the new pope will take further steps in the same direction.
INDIA. The immense country of Gandhi is an important frontier for the Church in Asia, and preoccupies the Roman papacy for at least three reasons. The first is that the Christians who live there are frequently the victims of extremist Hindu aggression and the intolerance of the civil laws themselves, which in many states forbid proselytism, or the missionary activity of the Church, and punish it severely. The second fear is connected with the foreseeable rise of India as a great power. Contact between the Christian West and Indian culture and religious belief, which are markedly polytheistic and inclusive, instead of strengthening Christian identity, will tend to weaken and absorb it, analogously to what is feared will happen in the case of contact with Chinese culture. The third concern is more internal. A broad section of India’s Catholic Church, including some of the bishops, promote an idea of dialogue between Christianity and Hinduism that places the two religions on the same level, and thus renders meaningless the proposition of baptizing new Christians, since the Hindus’ faith is already enough for them. “Dominus Jesus,” which stresses that Christ is the only way of salvation for all, was written in part as a reaction to what is happening in India. Benedict XVI will need to decide what practical consequences he should draw from this.
ISLAM. Up until now, the Church of Rome has reacted very cautiously to the attacks unleashed against the West by extremist Islam. Rome’s primary objectives include that of protecting the Christian minorities in Muslim countries. And the means it has adopted include friendly dialogue with Muslim exponents, some of them radicals, and realistic acceptance of the dictatorships that dominate many of these countries. This approach, however, has produced disappointing results, and is increasingly being brought into question. The new pope must necessarily go beyond the symbolic gesture John Paul II performed with his visit to the Grand Mosque of Damascus. This is true of the areas of both religion and geopolitics.
JEWS. Pope John Paul II performed extraordinary gestures of reconciliation with Judaism. Benedict XVI has the no less difficult task of rendering these a constant practice for the Church as a whole. The public discussion in recent years about the “Judaeo-Christian” roots of Europe has had a small side effect: it has contributed to spreading the idea that, for Christians, Judaism is not another religion, but the foundation of their faith and inseparable from it, just as in the Bible the Old Testament is all of a piece with the New. But complicating all of this is Israel as a political entity. The secretary of state that the new pope chooses, and the approach that the Vatican takes toward the Middle East, will also have an effect on religious peacemaking between Christians and Jews.
LIFE. This word can be found in the title of the most famous and most widely discussed of the encyclicals of Paul VI and John Paul II: “Humanae Vitae” of 1968 and “Evangelium Vitae” of 1995. But it will also be a key word for Benedict XVI. Or rather, it will be so to an even greater extent, because in the meantime the life sciences have made gigantic strides, and have become the new word for modernity. And this is an all-powerful word, because it not only interprets man, it decides his fate, transforms him, and appropriates to itself his very origin. Theology, philosophy, politics, and law; faith and custom: it all comes into play. It is the challenge of the century for the Church, and the new pope knows it.
LITURGIES. The grandiose mass celebrations so dear to pope Wojtyla cannot be repeated, as such, by his successor. And this will modify the external image of the Church that the worldwide media will transmit. Another critical point, and one even more important, regards the manner of celebrating the mass in all the large and small churches throughout the world, the central act of Christian worship and the classical barometer of the adhesion to the Church on the part of the faithful. This October, a worldwide synod of the bishops will discuss precisely this issue together with the new pope. In the judgment of many, the novelties introduced in the sacred rites after Vatican Council II have taken forms that are deviant to a certain extent, and these have in turn had a negative influence upon the content and practice of the faith. The decisions that the synod and the pope will make in order to reshape the celebration of the mass will therefore be decisive in remodeling the concrete face of the Church in the next years and decades. Sacred music and art will be an integral part of this chapter of the agenda.
MEA CULPAS. The reservations among the Church’s leadership that always accompanied John Paul II’s requests for forgiveness for Christianity’s faults throughout history make it seem likely that the new pope will distance himself from his predecessor on this point. The interesting thing will be to see how he does this. One hypothesis that attracts the hopes of many is that Benedict XVI will concentrate his attention on the faults of Christianity today, and ask pardon for these. The difference is substantial. The past can be branded with infamy, but it can never be changed. The present can. A “mea culpa” relative to the present would be empty if it were not accompanied by acts of effective reform in the areas that the pope will consider most important.
PEACE. Contrary to many current opinions, John Paul II was by no means a pacifist. He approved of the spreading of nuclear missiles throughout Europe to combat the Soviet menace; he disapproved of the first Gulf War; he called for “disarming the aggressor” that was raging against Bosnia; he dissociated himself from the bombing of Belgrade; he supported military intervention in Afghanistan; he opposed the second war in Iraq; finally, he defined as “peacemakers” the soldiers who remained in that country to provide security for the emerging democracy. And again: he beatified Marco d’Aviano, the man who provided spiritual leadership for the defense of Vienna from the Ottoman assault until the “victory of God.” In short, the last pope has left as his legacy a very dynamic model of geopolitical initiative, but one perfectly in line with the Church’s classical doctrine on war. It is unthinkable that his successor would separate himself from this.
RUSSIA. The fact that the new pope does not come from Poland, the historical adversary of Moscow, has removed a great obstacle. But the prohibition that kept John Paul II from setting foot in Russia remains far from being overturned. In words that were almost brutal, the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow, Alexei II, restated the reasons for this in an interview published ten days after the death of pope Wojtyla. His chief accusation concerns the campaign for conversion with which the bishops and priests of the Church of Rome are supposed to be taking the faithful away from the Orthodox Church. And the second concerns the Eastern-rite Catholic Church of Ukraine, which Moscow sees as a rival patriarchate intended for the conquest of an historically Orthodox territory. Benedict XVI will have great difficulty in pacifying the patriarch of Moscow, especially on the question of Ukraine. Here, in fact, the pope will find himself between two equal and opposite forces: that of Moscow and that of the powerful Ukrainian Church, millions of believers strong.
SAINTS. One of the new pope’s first decisions will regard his own predecessor: whether or not to begin an accelerated process for his beatification. But more generally, he will need to decide whether, and how, to put the brakes on the frenetic pace of the proclamation of new saints and blesseds begun by John Paul II, who raised more of these to the honors of the altar than all his predecessors, put together, from the last four centuries; since, that is, the causes of saints have followed the canonical form in use today.
WOMEN. John Paul II placed a total ban on women priests, which is also valid for future popes. He formulated it with the words of infallible proclamations, “ex cathedra.” But leaving holy orders aside, the room in the Church for women is wide open, in theory. In practice, we’ll see. In Beijing, at the international conference on women held by the United Nations in 1995, the head of the Vatican delegation was an American woman, Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard University. The same has happened since then also. The new pope is awaited on this proving ground, and he will be judged by a very demanding public opinion.
YOUTH. World Youth Day is scheduled for this August, in Cologne, with the pope expected at the culminating moment. The previous meetings were a highly personal invention of John Paul II, and from them was born a collective typology of young people, the “papaboys,” closely connected with his persona. Benedict XVI will need to decide quickly whether to imitate his predecessor on this point, introduce variations, or consign these mass gatherings of youth to history. In terms of the substance of this issue, he will above all need to consider how to assure the transmission of the Christian faith from one generation to the next in a largely dechristianized cultural atmosphere.
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The homily delivered by Joseph Ratzinger at the "missa pro eligendo romano pontifice" of April 18, in an English translation released by the news agency Zenit:
> “At this hour of great responsibility...”
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