Although Pope Benedict XVI’s highly unusual resignation is said to be for reasons of health, it fits the character of his papacy: all his initiatives remain incomplete. He was elected to rescue the church from itself, but he failed to finish what he started.
The assessments of his papacy have so far focused on Benedict’s statements on homosexuality, contraception and other controversial church teachings.
This helps us locate him (and the church) on a familiar political spectrum but tells us little beyond the fact that the Pope is a faithful Catholic. After all, these are not ”policies” that a future pope can change with a pen stroke.
If we really want to understand Benedict’s papacy, we have to understand the wrecked church he inherited and his limited powers within it.
Although The New York Times describes him as a ”profoundly conservative” figure, Joseph Ratzinger made his first impression as a member of good standing in the liberal wing of ”periti” (experts) at the Second Vatican Council during the early 1960s.
He wore a suit and tie rather than a clerical collar to the proceedings. He was given to the bold – and often unsubstantiated – pronouncements of his generation of theologians.
The world celebrated the changes Ratzinger’s cohort helped to effect at Vatican II. And the Vatican II reforms and the charged post-conciliar spirit were seen as the answer to a problem that was conspicuously on the mind of theologians and apologists since the late 19th century: How should the church engage with ”modern man”?
Apparently, ”modern man” was unimpressed by Vatican II.
He left the church.
After Catholic, ”Ex-Catholic” has become the second largest ”religious affiliation” in the US. In Europe, the decline is even more dramatic.
The meaning of the council itself became subjected to enormous debate within the church.
Was it the first opening of a new age in the church, where previously solid dogma about the Mass, the sacraments and the male priesthood would dissolve?
Or was it the disastrous rupture with the past that should be repudiated?
In 1972, Ratzinger founded the theological journal Communio with theologians who charted a course between those two poles.
Their position was that the Thomistic theology of the late 19th century was inadequate for the times but that the more radical theologians writing in the rival journal Concilium were throwing out the baby with the baptismal font.
By the time Benedict was elected pope in 2005, the church had gone aground. Pope John Paul II’s papacy was the partial cause.
After a period of activity in the 1980s, the former actor’s papacy consisted of enormously dramatic but unexplained gestures such as praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem or giving the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury a pectoral cross.
John Paul II either did not understand or denied the gravity of the child-abuse crisis. But his charismatic presence and the enormous goodwill towards the Parkinson’s-afflicted pontiff overshadowed his failures of governance.
Of his papacy, one would say, he travelled while Rome burned.
That Ratzinger emerged to succeed him was a shock at the time but makes sense in retrospect. Continue reading