Benedict XVI, Pope

▪ 2006

 Joseph Ratzinger, a German cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church and longtime prefect (director) of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was elected by his fellow cardinals on April 19, 2005, as the 264th successor to St. Peter, the apostle of Jesus Christ, first bishop of Rome, and first pope. The new pope took the name Benedict XVI and embarked on a pontificate dedicated to opposing what he called “a dictatorship of relativism” infecting modern society and to reconciling the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christian churches with one another.

      Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, in the Bavarian village of Marktl am Inn. German law compelled Ratzinger to join the Hitler Youth when he turned 14; he refused to attend the meetings, however, and set his sights on entering the seminary. After being drafted into the Nazi antiaircraft artillery corps, he was drafted into the German army, but his unit was never sent to the front. Briefly interned in a prisoner-of-war camp near Ulm, Ratzinger was repatriated on June 19, 1945.

      Shortly after the war, Joseph and his brother Georg entered Saint Michael Seminary in Traunstein, and they then studied at the Ducal Georgianum of the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. On June 29, 1951, they were ordained into the priesthood. In 1958 Ratzinger became a professor at Freising College, but the following year he joined the faculty at the University of Bonn.

      By 1963, when he accepted a faculty post at the University of Münster, Ratzinger had already established a reputation as a leading theologian in the German church, so it came as no surprise when Joseph Cardinal Frings of Cologne invited him to participate at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) as a peritus, or theological consultant. Ratzinger became known as a reformer at the council; he took particular interest in the debates that led to the promulgation of two key documents: Nostra aetate, the conciliar statement on Roman Catholicism's relationship to Judaism and to other religions, and Dignitatis humanae, Vatican II's startling affirmation of every person's inalienable right to religious freedom.

      Following Vatican II, Ratzinger became (1966) a professor of dogmatic theology at the University of Tübingen, where a turning point occurred in his evolution as a Catholic theologian. Ratzinger had been an advocate of a type of Catholic federalism by which apostolic authority would be shared equally among bishops worldwide. He shared with his Tübingen colleague Hans Küng a concern about the centralization of church authority in the papacy. After a group of radical young Marxists studying at Tübingen sparked a series of riots in April and May 1968, Ratzinger, unsettled by the radicals' apparent disregard for order and law, became convinced that anarchy, including the moral “confusion” that led to the rise of the German gay rights movement, was related to a watering down of Catholic doctrine. In 1969, shaken, he left Tübingen and returned to Bavaria to teach at the University of Regensburg. Subsequently, he came to oppose certain “liberal” or “progressive” interpretations of Vatican II. One vehicle for disseminating his ideas was the international theological journal Communio, which Ratzinger helped to establish in 1972.

      From this point Ratzinger's ecclesial fortunes ascended rapidly. In 1977 he was consecrated as the archbishop of Munich and Freising; later that year Pope Paul VI named him a cardinal. On Nov. 25, 1981, Pope John Paul II essentially made Ratzinger his second in command by appointing him prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and granting him wide authority for enforcing the church's doctrine against radical and liberal Catholic theologians. These “dissident” theologians included his friend Küng, who had taken to questioning the doctrine of papal infallibility, among other traditional teachings. In assuming his new post, Cardinal Ratzinger resigned the Munich archdiocese in early 1982 and became cardinal bishop of Velletri-Segni in 1993. In 1998 he became vice-dean of the College of Cardinals and in 2002 dean, the position he commanded when that body convened in April 2005 to elect a new pope.

      During the 26 years of John Paul II's pontificate, Ratzinger earned a reputation as a strict and uncompromising enforcer of the hard theological line adopted by the pope. By silencing controversial theologians or taking away their right to teach as Catholic theologians, Ratzinger attempted to eliminate dissent against received Catholic teaching on birth control, homosexuality, and the exclusion of women from the priesthood. Ratzinger applied his talents to squelching a number of innovative movements within the church, most notably the theology of liberation that emerged in Latin America in the 1980s.

      In 2000 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a document titled Dominus Iesus, which asserted the exclusive orthodoxy and superiority of Roman Catholic doctrine and denounced “relativistic theories which seek to justify religious pluralism.” Dominus Iesus claimed that other religions “objectively speaking…are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.” The document deeply offended other Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists and proved a setback to the ecumenical and interreligious relationships achieved by Vatican II—advances that had been promoted by Ratzinger himself.

      Nonetheless, Ratzinger's elevation to the papacy marked a new beginning for him. In his more capacious role as pope, he took great pains to position himself as a pope of reconciliation, following the example of his namesake Benedict XV. During the first six months of his pontificate, Benedict reached out to opposite theological extremes within the church by meeting with both Küng and the leader of the traditionalist followers of the late renegade archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. During his first major papal trip, to World Youth Day in Cologne, Benedict visited a historic synagogue and prayed with Jewish leaders in remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust. Despite his wariness of Islam as a global power, he addressed a small group of Muslim leaders in Cologne, offering them friendship and encouragement in the battle against radical Islamism.

R. Scott Appleby

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