Benedict XVI, Defender of the Faith
A new biography, which portrays Pope Emeritus Benedict as a reluctant pope set on rescuing the Church from a hostile modern age, fails to capture the complex, original quality of his thinking.
There have been many biographies of popes while still popes but, until Peter Seewald’s two-volume Benedict XVI: A Life, never before one of a still-living retired pope. If he is still with us, in mid March, Joseph Ratzinger will have spent nine years as Emeritus Bishop of Rome, as Francis correctly referred to him on the night of his election.
I was fascinated to know how Seewald would handle this remarkable, final chapter in the second volume of his Benedict biography. How has it worked out? How have the two Popes connected, related? What is it like for Benedict, looking back at his pontificate in the light of what came next?
Only that final chapter never comes. In Part One, Seewald follows Fr Ratzinger from celebrity professor in Tübingen in 1966 through to his 1977 appointment as Archbishop of Munich; Part Two covers his long tenure as cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 until his election as Pope in 2005. Part Three is the pontificate, ending with the famous resignation in February 2013, at which point – but for some answers to a few “final questions” that dispose of charges that he is interfering in Francis’ pontificate –Seewald slams on the brakes.
It is easy to see why. Seewald would have needed to deal with the undignified bids by the opposition to Francis to suborn the emeritus papacy, the various fateful co-publishing ventures that Benedict was forced to disown, as well as writings and speeches that stirred misunderstandings. You can see why neither the emeritus nor his secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, wanted Seewald going there. And Seewald’s deference to these wishes is a reminder that Benedict’s long-standing interviewer is an insider, part of the circle of trust, which brings both strengths and weaknesses.
A German journalist reconverted to Catholicism by Benedict who has often sat down with him over the decades to create best-selling books, Seewald enjoys unrivalled access, above all to Archbishop Gänswein, Benedict’s personal secretary since 2003 and for many years now his carer and gatekeeper. Seewald understands, as perhaps few do, how Benedict thinks, and his life’s mission, with which the biographer identifies.
To appreciate how a great teacher thinks – and Ratzinger is perhaps the greatest contemporary teacher of the Catholic faith – a disciple beats a critic anxious to prove their impartiality. If, like me, you admire Benedict and his teaching, Benedict XVI: A Life will remind you of just how dazzling a thinker he is, and give you fresh insights into his character: anxious, slightly controlling, in need of order (“Sister Christine, have you been dusting the books? The Kafka is upside down”), but kindly, self-effacing, modest and obedient.
Yet it has the deficiencies you might expect in a reporter who has never been a specialist follower of Church affairs. To describe the “reforming forces” after Vatican II as “battling for an all-purpose Church, in which autonomous church members would be the measure of all things, led by the high priests of the zeitgeist”, is a straw man that Ratzinger himself would never have created. To characterise the St Gallen group around Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini as “aiming to make the Church much more modern by things that were thought of as reforms” is lazy and contemptuous; and any journalist who writes of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s attack on Francis in 2018 that “Benedict XVI had proceeded against McCarrick, but then Pope Francis de facto lifted the sanctions”, just hasn’t followed the story.
These examples, and there are many more, are wince-inducing, yet mostly they are due to Seewald simply not grasping the big issues at stake. So he explains the reasons for Benedict’s 2007 edict, loosening the restrictions on celebrations of the Old Rite Mass, in terms of concern for the Church’s “unbroken identity”, but then makes three outrageous claims: one, that fears that Summorum Pontificum would lead to an anti-Vatican II traditionalist Mass movement proved baseless (long before Pope Francis restored the restrictions last summer, those fears had been proved right); two, that Summorum Pontificum “created a new awareness of the beauty and holiness of the classic Catholic liturgy”, a claim for which he asserts no evidence; and three, that a preference for the preconciliar Mass followed the fashionable trend to return to slow food and unadulterated wine. Seewald is an unreliable narrator in other ways, not least in his clumsy attempts to disguise Gänswein as his source.
True, Gänswein is often quoted and footnoted, but often the tracks are poorly covered over: in the put-downs of Gänswein’s predecessor as Cardinal Ratzinger’s secretary, Josef Clemens, and of his former housekeeper, Ingrid Stampa, for example; or in the withering (and unjust) critiques of Benedict’s communications chief, Fr Federico Lombardi. Seewald even attributes to “Curia personnel” the story of a stand-up row between Gänswein and secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone. Yet his account of the row is wholly one-sided, and includes a direct block quote of the earful that Gänswein gave Bertone about his mismanagement of the Curia, for which Gänswein himself must have been the source.
Being a German journalist at home on his own turf served Seewald well in Volume I, and does so again in the first 150 pages of Volume II. In Tübingen, Ratzinger and Hans Küng are the two celebrity theologians of their day, and Seewald nicely milks the contrasts between the austere ascetic German and the media-pandering Swiss: in how they moved around (Ratzinger on a bicycle, Küng in an open-topped sports car), lived (modest house with balcony versus ostentatious villa with indoor swimming pool) and, of course, in their theological divergences, with Ratzinger quietly triumphant as Küng slides – in Seewald’s telling – into heterodoxy and egomania.
Citing Benedict, Seewald disposes of the myth, promoted by Küng after they fell out, that Ratzinger was turned into a conservative by the traumatic impact of the student protests of 1968. It was not the students but the theologians that turned him: Ratzinger’s mission – which became clear especially after the spectacular success of his Introduction to Christianity – was to rescue the faith of the people from the distortions of the intellectuals. Ratzinger had a passion for the truth and a reformer’s zeal to rehabilitate it by communicating it. The future of the Church depended on a correct interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, through a hermeneutics of reform in continuity rather than through the hermeneutics of rupture. This was key to realising the council’s purpose. Ratzinger planned to spend the rest of his life carrying out his mission as an astonishingly brilliant academic theologian and writer with no desire – or natural ability, as Seewald often reminds us – to embrace a governance role in the Church. Yet in 1977 he was given the Archdiocese of Munich, and four years later, despite his best efforts to resist John Paul II’s bid to make him the theological architect of his pontificate, he was recruited as his doctrine chief.
For Seewald, Benedict’s mission is to rescue the Church from “ruthlessly advancing modernity”. In the remaining 400 pages he shows little interest in exploring the ecclesiological and theological tensions caused by the Wojtyla-Ratzinger understanding of the council being imposed via the papacy. “Benedict saw his main task as renewal through proclaiming the Church’s message,” Seewald declares at one point, and one senses that his biographer’s job is simply to tell that story: Ratzinger boldly and articulately proclaims the truth; modern people, including progressive liberals, hate him for it. What is there to discuss? Even when Benedict makes a bad mistake – not understanding how his Regensburg address would go down in the Muslim world, for example – Seewald tells it straight, shedding no new light, but frames it as a regrettable gift to Benedict’s critics.
The problem with the Ratzinger-versus-the-zeitgeist hermeneutic is that it misses vital stories that fill out a more complex, nuanced figure, verging at times on a caricature of Ratzinger-Benedict that fails to capture the original quality of his thinking and leadership. Here are three examples that leapt out at me. The first is Latin America, where Seewald gets that the first 1984 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Instruction on liberation theology was critical of Marxist sociology and political utopianism, but misses that in the second one, of 1987, Ratzinger praises the great gifts of Latin America’s vibrant postconciliar theology, including liberation from unjust structures, the option for the poor, base communities and popular religiosity. Having missed the story of how Ratzinger grew more convinced that Latin America held the future for the Church, he later overlooks how, as Pope, he was the great enabler of the meeting of the continent’s bishops at Aparecida, Brazil, in May 2007. Aparecida turned out to be the most significant synodal gathering of the past decades, and coincidentally the nursery of the Francis pontificate. Yet Seewald says nothing about how Benedict allowed Aparecida to go ahead – John Paul II had denied permission – nor about his long, warmly applauded speech opening the meeting, which healed decades of hurt (Benedict famously said the preferential option for the poor was implicit in Christology); nor how, in his recognition of the Aparecida document as a legitimate expression of the local Church’s Magisterium, Benedict broke with John Paul’s centralism.
Then there is Seewald’s description of Caritas in Veritate, Benedict’s impressive social encyclical of 2009, in which he not only passes over the one really big idea in it – the economist Stefano Zamagni’s gift economy – but fails to mention how much the libertarian Catholic right in the United States hated it. He claims there was “worldwide praise” for the encyclical, yet who can forget the attacks on it led by John Paul II’s biographer, George Weigel, who famously told Catholics they should read the encyclical’s prologue and ignore the rest? Or consider the impact of Benedict’s nuanced remarks on the use of condoms in the struggle against Aids. Seewald explains the thinking behind Benedict’s famous critique of the condom strategy on the flight to Cameroon in 2009, and reminds us that the Pope later clarified that condoms could be justified in particular cases, and even be a sign of a moral awakening by, for example, prostitutes. But he makes no mention of the rigorists and traditionalists who excoriated the Pope for his errors. (We have become familiar with this kind of ferocious, contemptuous language from these groups under Francis, but at the time it was breathtaking.) These reactions do not fit Seewald’s frame in which, as he puts it, loyalty to the Pope was “synonymous with small, conservative groups”. That wasn’t true then, and it most certainly isn’t now.
Seewald’s other constant theme is that of the reluctant prefect and Pope who wants only to be released back to his books. Thwarted by John Paul II’s merciless insistence that he remain in post, and again by the cardinals voting for him in 2005 – he saw his election as God’s will, but also as a guillotine dropping from on high – Benedict regarded himself as unable, for reasons of health and age, to carry through long-term projects and major reorganisations. Seewald uses his weaknesses in governance – not a good manager of people, indecisive, unwilling to face problems – to reinforce this narrative of sacrificial service, and the bathos of a deeply introverted thinker forced, as Benedict himself put it to his biographer, to [NB4] “descend into the nitty gritty of actual conflicts and events”. Combined, these two frames (the reluctant Pope, defending the Church from modernity) portray Benedict’s pontificate as a kind of holding operation, devoid of deeper purpose, overseen by a noble servant of God’s will.
But is there not another side to Ratzinger the Reluctant: the powerful ego of the intellectual with a divine destiny to shed clarity in the midst of confusion? If Benedict’s often seemed a papacy exercised by remote – he found heads of state tiresome, insisted on Mass and meals alone, reduced private audiences to a minimum and escaped each week to Castelgandolfo to write – it was arguably to ring-fence his mandate, even from the papacy.
Yet he was also ambitious to use his office to engage Europe’s secular intellectuals in dialogue, with an endearing confidence in the evangelising power of reason, long after the world had abandoned books for the shopping mall. Notwithstanding the lack of results, it is where the ambition and greatness, surely, of the Benedict papacy is to be located. Meanwhile, the conviction of a divine mission to explain and clarify explains so much about Ratzinger: both his glories and his failures, his faith and his temptation, his humility and his ego. Is it not why Benedict has been so keen, as emeritus, to clarify the record, to explain himself? Is it not why he has agreed to collaborate yet again with Seewald? And is it not why he has proved so vulnerable to people preying on him these nine years, persuading him to write for ill-fated projects?
The resignation was Benedict at his boldest and most prophetic. Seewald dedicates the final part of his book to it, and rightly, for it is a complex story, one that plays to the journalist’s strengths as an insider-reporter rather than a chronicler. A decision born of age and frailty, prayed over and discerned, that followed on from the butler’s betrayal but was not a response to it, Seewald adds to the record in significant ways by listening to both Benedict and Gänswein. But then it all just stops. For all that Seewald hams up the historical drama of it all, there is a sense of something missing, that this consequential act can only be understood in the light of what follows: Benedict’s final chapter. Perhaps, when another comes to tell that story – if Seewald is not already writing Volume III – the bigger, more complex, more daring Benedict will find his Boswell.
Austen Ivereigh is a fellow in Contemporary Church History at Campion Hall, at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and his Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (Henry Holt, £21.25; Tablet price £19.12). Benedict XVI: A Life Volume II: Professor and Prefect to Pope and Pope Emeritus 1966 – The Present by Peter Seewald is published by Bloomsbury Continuum at £30 (Tablet price £27).