Book Review

03 February 2001, Review by Adrian Hastings

The Grand Inquisitor of the modern Church

Cardinal Ratzinger: the Vatican's enforcer of the faith

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Cardinal Ratzinger is a prodigy. A man of outstanding and subtle intelligence, a scholar trained in the highest standards of a German university, and one of the younger members of the progressive group of theologians who so greatly influenced the Second Vatican Council, he has become the most powerful figure within the Roman Curia, at a most reactionary moment, taking up a whole series of positions seemingly in contradiction to the opinions of his youth. He has diminished the authority of bishops and episcopal conferences, so as to centralise control of the Church’s theological mind, alienating great numbers of Catholic theologians in the process. Yet he has his strong supporters, including, of course, Pope John Paul II.

We needed a book about him which was well researched, informative and analytic, adequately critical, yet thoroughly and determinedly fair. John Allen has given us just such a book. A young American Catholic journalist, now Rome correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter of Kansas City, he has mastered the theology pretty well and the account he gives of Ratzinger is generally convincing. He accords credit to the cardinal on several scores and recognises the the difficulty of Ratzinger’s job in today’s pluralist Church.

Ratzinger has endeavoured to surround his work with a wall of silence. Nevertheless, the facts of his ministry both as Archbishop of Munich and as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are well known. His more famous targets include Hans Küng, Leonardo Boff, Charles Curran, Matthew Fox and Tissa Balasuriya, all of whose lives and work he has damaged. He has felt compelled to discipline them (often in ways that have subsequently proved counterproduct-ive) in the name of the 'simple Christian', claiming repeatedly that his duty is to 'protect the faith of these little people against the power of intellectuals'.

Allen’s account is focused on Ratzinger himself and at some points is somewhat one-dimensional. It throws little light on the cardinal’s relationship with Pope John Paul II, who brought him to Rome in 1981 (Pope Paul VI had made him Archbishop of Munich and a cardinal in 1977) or with the rest of the Curia. In particular, Cardinal Casaroli, while Secret-ary of State, remained the more powerful curial figure. Ratzinger’s dominance seems to date from Casaroli’s retirement in 1990, but Allen hardly mentions Casaroli.

How to explain the mind of a Cardinal Ratzinger so deeply at odds with the opinions of a Professor Ratzinger of 20 or 30 years earl-ier? The gist of Allen’s argument is that he is in a state of denial about three separate things. First, the sudden shift of position, 1968-70, when he abandoned not only his prestigious Chair at Tübingen for a post in the new Bavarian university of Regensburg but separated himself intellectually from hitherto close colleagues like Küng and even his old ally Rahner. The second is Vatican II itself and his own part in it, on which his comments as cardinal are much at variance with what he wrote at the time.

The third is his attitude to the Nazi Germany in which he was brought up. His conversion after 1968 Allen links with revulsion from the student demonstrations and Marxist twaddle of that year. 'There was an instrumentalisation by ideologies that were tyrannical, brutal and cruel. That experience made it clear to me that the abuse of the faith had to be resisted', Ratzinger later said in an interview contained in Salt of the Earth (English translation, 1997). It may seem extraordinary that someone who grew up in a Nazi world, one truly 'tyrannical, brutal and cruel', could remain apparently so little affected by that and yet so overturned by the glib Marxist students of 20 years later.

Ratzinger has insisted that he and his father were opposed to National Socialism and there is no evidence on which to disagree. Yet his father, a devout Catholic, was after all a nephew of the distinguished but notoriously anti-Semitic priest Georg Ratzinger and had continued in office as a police superintendent for several years after Hitler came to power. And what is more, he had experienced the brief trauma when Bavaria became a 'Soviet Republic' in 1919. The impression Ratzinger gives of his own childhood is of an almost Arcadian Bavaria. Any resistance to Nazism, he has stressed, was impossible. Yet Allen shows how much resistance there actually was in Bavaria. The Jews in his home town of Traunstein were attacked on Kristallnacht; there were concentration camps just around the corner. It is impossible that Ratzinger was not made aware of much that was 'tyrannical, brutal and cruel'.

Young Fr Ratzinger could for a time put all that behind him, become a disciple of Rahner and join the ranks of the moderately pro- gressive. In many ways the most significant things in Allen’s book are the long quotations from the Ratzinger of the council years, the account of his relationship with Cardinal Frings, and the contrasts drawn with more recent teaching. It was 1968 which awoke his earlier self and a terror of Marxism. Of course, there is no reason to question that he and his father felt opposed to Nazism, nevertheless his very claim that the Catholic Church had been 'a citadel of truth and righteousness' in the Third Reich is specious. Very many Catholics were indeed profoundly opposed. Hundreds of priests were in concentration camps. Yet the role of the hierarchy was far weaker and more ambiguous, while Joseph Ratzinger himself became a reluctant member of Hitler Youth. It is extraordinary that Ratzinger uses the example of the Third Reich to argue that political freedom is to be defended not by individuals but by an authoritarian Church. It is just what failed to happen in Nazi Germany.

Ratzinger’s policy as cardinal prefect of the doctrinal congregation has been dismissed by some as a matter of ambition and power politics. They are mistaken, because his theological shift was manifest long before he went to Rome. It was shared by other, older theologians distressed by an apparent disintegration of theology after the council, notably Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and actually made possible by a dimension of his thought which had been there all along, Augustinianism. Allen makes far too little of this. It is certainly strange that the 'enforcer' of Catholic orthodoxy should be a self-confessed anti-Thomist. His dislike of the views of Aquinas has never been disguised and it underlies both the criticisms he did make of the Second Vatican Council even at the time and his subsequent development. For him Thomists are altogether too optimistic about human nature. His pessimism about the corruption of the human condition – and here at least his temperament is very different from the profound optimism which shines through Pope John Paul, as it shone through Vatican II – at times looks so Lutheran that he has to assert his differences with Luther a trifle self-consciously.

It was this pessimism which made him dislike so much in Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. Again and again, in his 1967 com-mentary on the council’s work, Ratzinger declares that sections of the constitution are 'quite unsatisfactory'. The attitude which shaped Gaudium et Spes, he lamented, 'is not at all prepared to make sin the centre of the theological edifice'. Even Lumen Gentium, in its teaching on salvation outside the Church, he found 'extremely unsatisfactory', its formulation bordering on Pelagianism. The truth is that Aquinas, the Second Vatican Council, and liberation theology alike represent shifts away from Augustine in a semi-Pelagian direction – shifts which Ratzinger deplores as Utopian.

There is a tense subtlety in Ratzinger’s 1960s conciliar commentaries which reveals the mind of a major theological scholar, interpreting the Second Vatican Council loyally yet with an Augustinian edge. Sadly, one seldom finds anything comparable in what he has written more recently, filled with too easy denunciations of 'relativism', 'historicism', 'Marxist influences' and 'liberal' academic attitudes of every sort. The danger in all this is that, despite his protestation, it proves impossible to separate his views as a theologian from his policies as cardinal prefect. As Allen notes, it hardly seems surprising that the most revered major Vatican II figure still surviving, Cardinal König, emeritus Archbishop of Vienna, should have felt compelled in 1998 to cry out, 'I cannot keep silent, for my heart bleeds when I see such obvious harm being done to the common good of God’s Church' (Tablet article, 16 January 1999, quoted by Allen). The doctrinal congregation, König believed, must be able to 'find better ways of doing its job'.

In 1964, during the council’s third session, 334 bishops asked that Gaudium et Spes should include in its section on atheism specific reference to the 1949 decree of the Holy Office excommunicating Communists. The relevant commission declined to do so and Ratzinger commented: 'The weapon of condemnation had been tried to the limit . . . it is no longer possible to deal with the problem in that way now.' One wishes that he had remembered those words 30 years later when excommunicating Balasuriya, a devout, elderly and highly committed priest, in 1997. In 1963, when the council’s first session was over, Ratzinger summed up the central issue succinctly enough: 'Was . . . the old policy of exclusiveness, condemnation and defence . . . to be continued? Or would the Church . . . turn over a new leaf and move on into a new and positive encounter with its own origins, with its brothers and with the world of today?' When one reads the latest letter of the Pope, Novo Millennio Ineunte, with its final insistence that the Second Vatican Council remains 'a sure compass by which to take our bearings in the century now beginning', one realises that the question is still an open one in Rome. But is it so for Cardinal Ratzinger?

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