Book Review, 20 March 2008
Reviewed by Fergus Kerr

Gardener with a thirst for beauty

Ratzinger’s Faith: the theology of Pope Benedict XVI
Tracey Rowland
Oxford University Press, £12.99
Tablet bookshop price £11.70 Tel 01420 592974

In a previous book, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: after Vatican II, Tracey Rowland, who is professor of political philosophy and continental theology at the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne, Australia, argued that the reforms instigated by the Second Vatican Council were bound to go wrong since the largely neo-Thomistically educated clergy were incapable of the critique of modern culture which would have saved them from succumbing so easily to liberalism.

From his seminary days Pope Benedict XVI felt estranged from the Aristotelian Thomism that prevailed at the time. His "antipathy to the theological establishments of his youth", so Rowland says, led him to regard Augustine as "a counterweight to Thomas Aquinas". Augustine's theory of knowledge is "much deeper" than that of Aquinas, in the sense that Augustine sees that God cannot be known by any non-historical "natural reason" ("which just does not exist"), but only by "purified reason", better still by the "purified heart". According to Rowland, Ratzinger would be in "broad sympathy" with "the Radical Orthodoxy set", headed by John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock. For Ratzinger, metaphysics must be subordinated to theology, which puts him much closer to these Anglican postmodern scholars than to old-fashioned Thomists.

Rowland has harsh words for Thomists - much harsher than Ratzinger would surely allow himself. It is one thing to celebrate the Thomist tradition for "its openness to the best of pagan thought", as Thomists often did. It is quite another to treat his "synthesis" as "a kind of all-purpose garbage-recycling unit with the capacity to pick up any rubbish and repackage it as something useful". Who - one wonders - ever thought that? And who needs the warning that Aquinas did not think he was building "a cultural sewage treatment plant"?

Rowland sets out the Pope's theological

positions under six headings. First, Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modern World, while it contains "a daring new Christocentric anthropology", often cited by John Paul II, is, as Ratzinger has argued all along, too easily read as endorsing "the false neo-Pelagian optimism of the modern age". On the other hand, Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, replaces Neo-Thomist emphasis on propositional truths with a much richer conception of tradition, memory and history. Thirdly, the practice of the faith before Vatican II was infiltrated by a certain "moralism": the problems in moral theology that arose after the Council "were not simply the result of a spreading infection of the 1960s secular liberal virus but were more fundamentally the logical outgrowth of a centuries-long process separating the true and the beautiful from the good". Fourth, Lumen Gentium, the document on the Church, steers away from "a bureaucratic and clericalist vision of the Church", towards a eucharistic ecclesiology much indebted to Henri de Lubac.

The chapter on modernity and politics breaks away from Vatican II. Like John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger was opposed to the US-led invasion of Iraq: it played into the hands of Islamic terrorists. In any case, for democracy to take root there needs to be something like a Greco-Christian cultural foundation. Indeed, given the advance of Islam and the

European Union's ambivalence about our Christian inheritance, the Pope is anxious about the democratic future of Europe.

Finally we return to Vatican II and Ratzinger's well-known disquiet about the post-conciliar liturgy. John XXIII never envisaged Mass in the vernacular. Paul VI, despite his grief at the loss of "our hereditary religious patrimony", allowed himself to be persuaded by supposedly pastoral considerations and accepted the abandonment of Latin. Ratzinger has not accused him of making "a gross pastoral error" but he has committed himself to the observation that, with respect to the liturgy, a Pope "has the task of a gardener, not that of a technician who builds new machines and throws the old ones on the junk-pile". According to Rowland, Paul VI did not understand that beauty is an essential element of liturgical action. She clearly hopes that Benedict will restore the use of Latin, though it must be with a wry smile that she recalls his affectionate boyhood memories of the village youth firing their guns during the annual Corpus Christi procession. She has not caught up on Charles Taylor's Gifford lectures but quotes one of the preliminary essays, in which he begins his exploration of the implications for our rituals and beliefs when the culture disappears that once surrounded them.

For years Ratzinger has been concerned about the practice of saying Mass versus populum, "against the people", as Rowland translates. She takes us through the usual arguments. There is no historical basis for

facing the congregation: in early times all would have been reclining on the convex side of a horseshoe-shaped table. More importantly, Mass becomes merely a fellowship meal; it is no longer the Holy Sacrifice. The assumption here seems to be that Mass celebrated versus populum inevitably tends to become one of those "parish tea party liturgies", which the Pope abhors. Anyone who watched John Paul II's funeral, or who was present when he celebrated the Eucharist in St Peter's or who for that matter goes to Mass in most churches in Britain, knows that it need not be so.

There is plenty to argue about in this book. The readership envisaged seems to be entirely British, with allusions to "New Labour Britain", "Cromwellian England", and suchlike. On the other hand, we do not hear many Catholics in the United Kingdom issuing "calls for open communion". Nor do we have much rock music ("neo-Dionysian"), or liturgical dancing during Mass. More generally, we may well doubt if 1968, "a watershed year for the whole of the Western world", was the year in Britain that "modernity as a cultural project was finally abandoned by the intellectual elite of the great universities". Moreover, we should need to discuss how far postmodern thought is likely to benefit Catholic theology.

The book opens with a lengthy appreciation by Cardinal George Pell. It concludes with Cardinal Ratzinger's Subiaco Address (2005) on the European Union's reluctance to acknowledge Europe's Christian roots, and Pope Benedict's Regensburg Address (2007), on the de-Hellenisation of Christianity. Each chapter has an extensive bibliography. Some of this is for the specialist to pursue. But on the whole, the book is an accessible survey of the theological landscape by an author completely at ease and in tune with her subject.

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