WHEN Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stepped on to the balcony as Pope Benedict XVI, dismay filled my heart. Here was the man who, as right-hand man to Pope John Paul II, had closed down the debate within the Roman Catholic Church which the Second Vatican Council had thrown open.
As Rome’s doctrinal watchdog, he had defended the Church from heresy so strictly that all life was squeezed out of the creative rethinking of Vatican II. Discussion was deemed dissent. Latin American liberation theologians were silenced. So were explorers of interreligious dialogue in Asia. So were those in the West who tried rethinking the Church’s teaching on pre-marital sex, birth control, celibacy, women priests, or same-sex ministry. Scores of theologians were suppressed; many more fell victim to self-censorship.
As Pope, would he be any different? In some ways, not. He restored the Latin mass, promoted reactionary bishops, established the Ordinariate for former Anglicans, censored nuns in the United States, excommunicated a Sri Lankan theologian, and saw Islam as a threat to Christian Europe.
But he also turned his uncompromising eye on the Vatican’s finances, opening them for the first time to review by an outside body: the anti-money-laundering agency Moneyval. And he was the first pope to take clerical sex abuse seriously, immediately disciplining the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel, a serial sexual predator who had been protected by Pope John Paul II.
Behind the scenes, Pope Benedict summarily expelled hundreds of paedophiles from the priesthood. He was the first pope to meet clerical-abuse victims, although he failed to deal with bishops who had covered up their crimes, in a misguided attempt to protect the Church from further scandal.
But, as pope, the man dubbed God’s Rottweiler proved himself to be a more pastoral German shepherd. His first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, avoided finger-wagging entirely and praised erotic love as a paradigm of the divine. He insisted that the economic system must work for the common good, not individual greed. He even began to address climate change.
But perhaps his greatest contribution, as we saw when he visited Britain in 2010 and he addressed the nations’ politicians in Westminster Hall, was his lucid demonstrandum of the need that religion and politics, faith and reason, have of one another. Speaking on the spot where St Thomas More was tried for refusing to put political expedience before his ethical convictions, Benedict asked: “By appeal to what authority can moral dilemmas be resolved?”
His answer was that, “if moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus”, then democracy risks sawing through the bough on which it sits. “This is the real challenge for democracy.” The post-modern insistence that “my truth is necessarily as valid as yours” leads us into the blind alleys that produced the slave trade, fascism, the Holocaust, the international financial crisis, “fake news”, and the self-serving politics that refuses to act for the global good on climate change.
An ethical politics can be discerned only through the interaction of faith and reason when they enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue for the good of civilisation. Benedict XVI was a pope of paradox. But, if he taught us that, then we should give thanks for his ministry.
Read an obituary of Pope Benedict XVI here