By Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge
At the end of a long life, Benedict XVI, like Elizabeth II, seemed almost the relic of a bygone age – a link with the Second World War, the embodiment of values and styles morphing or passing even in their lifetime, the end of an era, leaving us thinking that we shall never see their like again.
Joseph Ratzinger was also a link back to the Second Vatican Council, the interpretation of which was at the heart of much of his academic and episcopal life.
Called to Rome by Pope John Paul II after a brief time as Archbishop of Munich, he became, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a crucial voice in that long and remarkable pontificate. He met with the Pope each Friday, and it was in those conversations that the major themes of the Wojtyla papacy were forged. Ratzinger was a crucial shaping influence in most of the great Encyclical Letters bearing John Paul II’s signature. He was also a hugely authoritative figure in the Curia who could make even the grandest of the Curialists tremble, in part because they knew he was so trusted by the Pope. Yet at the same time, like Wojtyla himself, Ratzinger was a Curial outsider with no interest in the intrigues of the papal court. That too gave him a peculiar freedom.
His election as Pope was a decision to continue the trajectories of the Wojtyla papacy; but Ratzinger seemed less at his ease as the sun than he had been as the moon. Perhaps he was too old when elected; perhaps his temperament was never suited to a life so lived in a blaze of publicity. Yet humbly he accepted, just as humbly he would resign some years later.
Unlike John Paul II, he seemed at times too timid for the spotlight; his gestures were never quite right. But, more seriously for a Pope, he struggled at the point of governance, and the pressure of this over time must have been a major reason for his resignation. At a time of some crisis in the Vatican, he retired to his study to write the volumes on Jesus of Nazareth; and he would probably have been happy to retire permanently to his study.
It will surely be as a teaching Pope that Benedict XVI will be remembered in history. It has been said that he was the most able theologian to ascend the papal throne since Gregory the Great: perhaps. Certainly he was one of the most gifted theologians of the twentieth century, steeped in the Scriptures and the Fathers in a way that made his style clear, evocative and engaging, which was not always the case with German theologians. He understood the profound civilising power of the Gospel and was himself a most civilised, even cultured man, a thorough-going Bavarian gentleman. He was a European intellectual of a particular generation, though there is a timelessness about his work that will guarantee its durability.
For all its profusion, Ratzinger’s theology has a dazzling simplicity at its heart: a vision of Jesus Christ crucified and risen as the only answer to humanity’s deepest questions and the only saviour of the world. This is why he was, for all their differences, very much attuned to Pope John Paul II, and why it was no surprise to learn that his last words were, “Jesus, I love you”.
