Is the Pope a Catholic?

9:10pm Friday, 24th September 2010

Michael Jensen

He’s an unspectacular figure in some ways: elderly, bookish and somewhat swamped by his ecclesiastical robes. He has none of the radiant, rock-star charisma of his Polish predecessor. At crucial moments of crisis, such as the recent spate of child-abuse scandals, he has seemed to fumble the ball. He naively lit the touchpaper of controversy with Muslims in the midst of reading an academic paper which was over everybody’s head.
Yet Pope Benedict XVI is the man of redoubtable intellect who sits at the helm of a Roman Catholicism which is proving increasingly appealing to intelligent young westerners, especially in the US. While I was studying in Oxford, one of my best friends became a Roman Catholic. An American Methodist, he found the liberalism of his own denomination increasingly at odds with his orthodox convictions. The evangelicalism of the US scene did not appeal to him either. It was far too individualistic, divided and chaotic—not to mention that it was signed up to a set of political convictions he found repugnant. Neither liberal nor conservative Protestantism offered an intellectually satisfying alternative for an orthodox Christian.
I was determined to find out what had made the Catholic Church so appealing to him. What better place to start than by asking “What makes Benedict XVI tick?”
What I discovered was that Benedict is a courageous and perceptive critic of contemporary modern and postmodern culture. He has moved away from the reliance on the thought of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas that has been the solid philosophical basis for much Catholic thinking down the years. He insists that God’s revelation is not just a matter of a person’s own feelings. He argues powerfully that faith and reason complement each other. However, in the role he has for the sacraments and in his view of the Church, he remains steadfastly an advocate of the traditional Catholic faith—against which this Protestant still has to—respectfully —protest.
Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927 in Bavaria, the son of a policeman. At the age of 14, he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth as required by law, but refused to attend its meetings. After some military service, he entered seminary with his brother Georg and was ordained in 1951.
An emerging scholar, he wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine of Hippo, who remains a huge influence on his theology. Ratzinger said once: “I have developed my theology in a dialogue with Augustine, though naturally I have tried to conduct this dialogue as a man of today”. This influence is evident in the emphasis he places on the depth and seriousness of human sin, and God’s gracious action in responding to that sin.
But to understand Benedict it is necessary to see him as a European thinker. That is to say: while over in Britain philosophers and theologians are obsessed with the finer points of logic and with other minutiae, in Europe they think big thoughts about the nature of history, and society and with the whole of human existence. Benedict thinks BIG.
Serving as a theology professor at several major German universities, Ratzinger’s intellectual development took place against the philosophical backdrop of Marxism and Existentialism. Ratzinger’s intellectual development took place against the philosophical backdrop of Marxism and Existentialism. He was also able to observe a growing materialism and secularism in Western Europe, and an increasing disillusionment with the established churches.
Ratzinger moved to Rome when Pope John Paul II appointed him to his famous position as “Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”—the successor to the “Inquisition”—in 1981. It was here that he gained his reputation as a concrete bollard against the sweeping tide of theological liberalism, and earned the somewhat unflattering sobriquet “God’s Rottweiler”.
The bulk of Ratzinger’s theological career has been focused on the reception and interpretation of the documents that emerged from Vatican II (1962-66). Ratzinger was present as a peritus, or theological expert. It is hard as an outsider to really grasp what a revolution Vatican II was. Two possibly conflicting themes dominated the council: ressourcement (“going back to the sources”) and aggiornamento (“bringing up to date”). We shouldn’t think that this was a simple case of either-or, though. The ressourcement, or nouvelle théologie, movement to which Ratzinger was loosely affiliated had an agenda of reform on the basis of a return to Scripture and the Fathers. They hoped to reorient the teachings and the liturgy of the Church to its most ancient expressions. At the same time, it was a call to openness to the contemporary world. They stood against the “neo-Thomist” movement which clung so hard to Thomas Aquinas that they were choking him. Rather, for the ressourcement group, Aquinas answered questions for a world that no longer existed. His insights remained valid, but his theological methodology had become less helpful.
After the council, this movement split into two groups with the founding in 1966 of the progressive journal Concilium and the more conservative Communio in 1972. Ratzinger’s detractors, such as his former ally Hans Küng, have accused him of betraying the spirit of the Council, especially after he distanced himself from the student upheaval of 1968. However, he has always maintained that he has been consistent to his convictions and a faithful inheritor of Vatican II.
You can see this in the commentaries he has offered on two of the most important Vatican II documents. First: the statement called Dei verbum (‘The word of God’) represents the defeat of the old idea that revelation is chiefly a matter of raw theological propositions. As Ratzinger explains, God does not reveal himself in statements. God’s revelation is Christ himself, who is the logos. In his later approving commentary, Ratzinger emphasized the close relationship of actions and words in revelation. He liked the way in which the Bible’s account of salvation-history is right at the forefront of the piece; and that the idea that we can have a “natural” knowledge of God comes at the end.
However, the role of Church tradition is of course very significant for Benedict in his account of God’s communication to human
beings. Tradition and Holy Scripture together form one sacred deposit of the word of God—and this has been committed to the Church. Though revelation is complete in Christ, it remains for the Church to make it completely explicit down the centuries. For Ratzinger, the Church still has an exclusive teaching authority over Scripture—rather than the Church being answerable to what it finds in Scripture.
Second: one of the most controversial documents from Vatican II was a discussion of the human condition called Gaudium et Spes (‘Joy and Hope’). Many felt that this rather sunny document licensed almost any accommodation of the gospel to human culture. That’s not how Ratzinger sees it. He insists it reads as saying that the person of Jesus Christ must be the heartbeat of a truly Christian anthropology. Without Christ, humanism is always inadequate. The purpose of the document was not to accommodate Catholicism to modern thinking but rather to note that only an anthropology based on Jesus Christ has any hope of meeting the needs of modern human beings.
In 2006 Benedict wrote the encyclical Spe Salvi almost as an antidote to the liberal misreading of Gaudium et Spes. It is an astute piece of social commentary, and points to the ambiguity inherent in human progress which was somewhat lacking in the optimistic Gaudium et Spes. Hope, he says, cannot be found in human effort alone. If we ignore the reality of the judgment of God on human beings, we will be blind to our own true situation.
In this piece, as in the now infamous “Regensburg Address” of 12 Sept 2006, Benedict XVI argues strongly that faith and reason should not at all be opposed to each other. Secularists and fundamentalists share the conviction that faith and reason are strangers—and the terrorism of 9/11 has been the result. The theology which exalts God’s will and transcendence such that our reason—our sense of the true and the good—is no longer an authentic mirror of God’s nature is frankly dangerous to the world. But so is the view that says that faith has nothing reasonable to say. On the other hand, Benedict is perhaps too confident that human reason is able to escape the taint of sin and make clear moral and spiritual judgments.
As a conservative and orthodox Protestant, I have reason to be grateful for Benedict’s stand against a rampant secularism. Benedict XVI is a remarkable champion against secularism, just as John Paul II was a champion against Communism. Yet he also offers a challenge to Protestants, too: Are we not just spiritual individualists? Certainly, some forms of evangelicalism are guilty as charged. There is a great deal of evangelicalism that is rootless, faddish and representative of a kind of spiritual selfishness. I can see why my friend found Rome appealing at that level.
But the great Reformers of the sixteenth century were certainly not individualists. If we return to their teachings we will find a robust and biblical account of the role of the church, reason and tradition. And this account, in turn, offers a challenge to the Pope’s Christianity. For Benedict, it is still very much the case that, even if he claims that salvation is by grace alone, it is by grace as it is encountered within the Roman Catholic Church in its sacraments—and not through faith alone. Even if Scripture has a new prominence in Benedict, it is Scripture as it is interpreted by the Roman Catholic Church and thus subject to a form of reason. In Benedict’s thinking, the institution of the Catholic Church has a priority over everything else.
Dr Michael Jensen teaches at Moore College.

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Is the Pope a Catholic?