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The obdurate Ratzinger may be just what the Catholic Church is looking at a particular historical crossroads facing the Vatican and Europe, although it could mean a ruinous outcome for the human nexus forged by John Paul II. MATTHEW VELLA looks inside the choice of the man they called ‘God’s rottweiler’
At first glance, the choice of 78-year old, softly spoken Cardinal Ratzinger as the Catholic Church’s pontiff reeks of stopgap tactics designed to ensure continuity with John Paul II – an ecclesiastical coup of border-control cardinals.
But at such an old age, just two years older than Angelo Roncalli when he became John XXIII, there is nothing stopping the German Benedict XVI from bringing upon a face-changing revolution at the Vatican as Roncalli did with the Vatican Council II.
Much of this is, expectedly, very doubtful. Ratzinger’s past and pronouncements speak little of revolution or radicalism. As the former prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, John Paul II’s doctrinal watchdog has carved his name into the conservative boulder that rolled down on the Vatican since 1978 when Karol Wojtyla was elected pope.
A staunch defender of the Church, accordingly an opponent of homosexuality, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, abortion and rock music (he likes Mozart and Beethoven), Ratzinger has also called all other Christian churches and ecclesiastical communities “deficient”, and as cardinal, he wrote Truth and Tolerance, a book in which he denounces the use of tolerance as an excuse to distort the truth.
But the cardinals in the conclave chose who they were looking for – a man who can tie up the loose ends of John Paul II’s papacy, with no unnecessary pomp and hobnobbing.
They decided to forgo charisma, innovation, or any form of modernist bent other Catholics might have hoped for in a Third World, or African pope. The fact that they must have not found anyone capable of eclipsing the greatness of the previous papacy, must have meant that they were consciously deciding to take John Paul’s legacy down a further ten years with his second-in-command, a man not unlike Woytjla but certainly not his clone.
So here is Ratzinger – older than Wojtyla at his election by more than 20 years, certainly not a pope who will travel much nor pander to the media by giving audiences to rock stars, and certainly devoid of his predecessor’s charisma or life story. Indeed, whilst Wojtyla as a seminarian was escaping Gestapo soldiers, Ratzinger was serving in the Hitler Youth, according to the John Allen biography, ‘unenthusiastically’.
So where is the church pulling with the choice of Benedict XVI? First, some mystic numerology on the choice of the name of Benedict.
The number sixteen corresponds to Ratzinger’s birthday on the 16 April, on which is also celebrated the feast of Saint Benedict Joseph Labrè, also known as the Holy Pilgrim. The choice of Benedict, with his first name Joseph, completes his Christian namesake.
But most interestingly, Saint Benedict of Nursia is also the patron saint of Europe. Indeed, the choice of Ratzinger as a German pope, hailing from a country which is not only the cradle of Protestantism, but also where just 15 per cent of German Catholics go to mass according to Der Spiegel, calls for an inward look inside the soul of Europe at a particular time in history: the European Constitution uniting 25 Member States, if however without the mention of God or Christianity in its text; the dwindling number of vocations in Europe making it critical mission land for the Vatican; the debate about whether to allow a secular-Muslim country like Turkey into the European Union; and Ratzinger’s own battle against the postmodernism and moral relativism which Europe spawned.
He made his message clear to cardinals at the pre-conclave mass to stand up for an “adult faith”, withstand ideologies and anything-goes philosophies. In short, Ratzinger’s own candidacy to the papacy was a blurb that shot arrows at anything that was not Catholic in vest.
“We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognise anything as definitive and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one’s own desires… from Marxism to free-market liberalism to even libertarianism, from collectivism to radical individualism, from atheism to a vague religion, from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth.”
And like the choice of Wojtyla in 1978 to serve as a staunch bastion of anti-communism, forged by the maudlin Mary-worshipping Polish church that battled against Stalinism, Ratzinger is the conservative reactionary concerned about the European faith in the age of postmodernism. His choice can be termed to have historical and cultural importance for the cardinals who feel the Catholic Church is losing ground against secularism. With this European background in mind, Ratzinger fits the bill perfectly.
Surprisingly, Benedict XVI has already embarked on taking upon certain aspects of his predecessor’s mission, particularly by addressing the young and stating that he looks forward to meeting them. Sceptics would have bet that Benedict XVI was about to bring an end to the party of fluffy, ‘new global’ congregationalism of John Paul’s tireless, globetrotting mission to bring Rome to the people and infuse everyone, Catholic or non-Catholic, with his charisma.
Surely, Ratzinger is here to defend the church in an extension of his role as Grand Inquisitor, the name by which the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was previously known before it was changed by Pope Pius X in 1908. Ratzinger is here to get down to business and rein in the faithful before the Church undergoes another liberal transmutation of sorts.
Certainly, there are doubts whether his controversial, conservative and uncompromisingly staunch outlook on the Catholic faith will manage to reach out to secular, pluralist societies. If anything, Ratzinger is expected to curtail the Vatican’s bureaucracy and its institutions, rooting it into its doctrinal foundations rather extending its pastoral mission the way John Paul II did – indeed, Ratzinger’s late pastoral work is little when compared with his huge corpus of doctrinal work.
Critics know him to be a polarising figure, especially due to his dressing-down of liberal theologians and his strongly-worded statements on homosexuality, which he called a “tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil” and an “objective disorder”, and contraception.
His spirit has been described as ‘combative’ rather than ‘compassionate’. Bernd Goehring, of the German ecumenical organisation Kirche von Unten, was unequivocal in his condemnation: “We consider the election of Ratzinger a catastrophe. It is very disappointing, even if it was predictable. We can expect no reform from him in the coming years. I think that even more people will turn their back on the church.”
And although he has already proven himself in Christian-Jewish relations, his past in the Hitler Youth is hardly a recommendation for pope, especially since he had stated that Jewish history and scripture reach fulfilment only in Christ. He was denounced by critics for “theological anti-Semitism”. Other religions took offence to a 2000 document in which he argued that “only in the Catholic Church is there eternal salvation.”
Even the fact that he is not a Third World pope, as many Catholics hoped for, means that Catholics are hoping that Ratzinger will not bring a lack of understanding of the problems in the developing world, especially considering the challenges in Africa with HIV, and the use of condoms.
However, by defending the tenets of Catholicism against the current of modernist and liberal tendencies in the Church and the world, especially Europe, Ratzinger is also believed to be what the Church is looking for: a grounding, moral force that will pull the stops where other progressive bishops have dared to thread or instead tried to hide their heads in the sand where the winds of change were blowing. Even if this might mean alienating more of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics.
Controversially, Ratzinger may not believe that the search for truth is a dialectical process that caves in to external social trends, meaning that the ‘panzer-pope’ is bringing his kulturkampf to the fore. However, there is still room for surprises.
But indeed, for Benedict morality is a black-and-white dichotomy, and he has little time to spare for grey shades, what he terms the anything-goes philosophies, and the relativism of our secular societies. Whether he will triumph with such a crude polarised notion, will signal the strength of the Catholic religion in the postmodern age.
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