Books
A Realist's Vision
A book-length interview with Cardinal Ratzinger reinforces the image of a Vatican official who understands the critical problems that face the Church, and has no illusions that those problems will disappear.
By Tom Bethell
Salt of the Earth: Christianity and the Catholic Church at the end of the Millennium,Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, An Interview with Peter Seewald, Ignatius Press, 1997
The Bishop of Rome and the prefect for the Congregation of the Faith were both attracted to the thickest fog-banks of Germanic theology, and yet somehow both managed to emerge with their theological compasses intact.
"So what went wrong?" Seewald asks. It is interesting that Ratzinger accepts the premise of this question.
"Perhaps the time has come to say farewell to the idea of traditionally Catholic cultures."
Cardinal Ratzinger, who has been the prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Faith for almost 16 years, is 70 years old now and we may consider it providential that a man of his stature and intellect has held so important a position in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at a time of brewing rebellion and disorder. We may also be grateful to the author of this book, a German journalist named Peter Seewald, for taking the trouble to interview Ratzinger at such length, and for preparing so thoroughly for the task. The book was originally published in Germany last year. It gives us a more complete understanding of Ratzinger than anything we have yet seen.
Seewald's questions and the cardinal's answers, extending over xxx pages, are separated in question-and-answer form, and for that reason alone this is a better book than The Ratzinger Report, published some 12 years ago. In that work, the Italian writer Vittorio Messori also interviewed Ratzinger, but sometimes contrived to blend Ratzinger's comments and his own thoughts into a confusing narrative. His intention was no doubt literary, but there were places where the reader was left unsure of who was saying what.
It is impressive to read that when the cardinal met with Seewald, he "didn't want to look at any of the questions beforehand." Nor did he inquire about Seewald's "past or current status." Nor, incidentally, does Ignatius Press provide any such information. This strikes me as a defect. Seewald must have sat down with Ratzinger for days on end. His hundreds of questions and sometimes lengthy comments play a major role in eliciting this (sympathetic) portrait of Ratzinger. A brief biography of the interviewer would certainly have helped. I am told, however, that in Germany Seewald is "well known." He does say in a cryptic foreword: "I had left the Church a long time before; there were plenty of reasons. Once upon a time, all you had to do was sit in a church, and you got bombarded by particles of faith that had been charging for centuries. But now every certainty had become questionable, and all tradition seemed impossibly old and stale."
Ratzinger was born on Holy Saturday in Upper Bavaria in 1927. His father was a constable --a "simple commissioner," modestly paid. "We did have to live very frugally and simply, for which I am very grateful," Ratzinger recalls. "For this very situation was the occasion of joys that one cannot have in the midst of wealth." He often thinks "how wonderful it was that we could be joyful over the smallest things." His joyful memories of his rather austere childhood are infused with the Christian spirit of the appreciation of life. It is a joy in itself to read his recollections here, which contrast favorably with the invidious socialist spirit of so many of the social encyclicals from the past hundred years. (Now that we have reached the Centesimus mark, and Communism has providentially ended, let us gladly give the Pope full credit for that and hope in turn for an end to Vatican reminders on labor unions, income distribution, development planning, foreign aid, justice between nations, and other such distractingly non-religious matters.)
Ratzinger recalls his father as a strict, just man with excellent judgment about politics. A "reflective believer," he went to 6 a.m. Mass on Sundays, then again to the main service at 9, and then again in the afternoon. As a child Ratzinger loved the old liturgy of the Church. Now that this liturgy has been destroyed, it is poignant to read: "It was actually terribly exciting to penetrate into the mysterious world of the Latin liturgy and to find out what was actually happening, what it meant, what was being said. We progressed by degrees from a children's missal, to a more complete missal, to the complete version. That was a kind of voyage of discovery."
He became a theology professor and taught at Tubingen and Regensburg. Heideger and Jaspers, and notions of "personalism," interested him greatly. For all I know, this may bear some relationship to the mysterious thing called phenomenology that so attracts the Pope. Is it not one more sign of the providential guidance of the Church, that the Bishop of Rome and the prefect for the Congregation of the Faith were both for a while college professors, were both attracted to the thickest fog-banks of Germanic theology, and yet somehow both managed to emerge from these intellectual hazards with their theological compasses intact?
"A process of decline"
Ratzinger participated in the Second Vatican Council as an advisor to Cardinal Frings of Cologne. There he made a reputation as a progressive theologian. Seewald reminds Ratzinger that he had at one point complained that the Church had "too tight reins, too many laws, of which many have contributed to leave the century of unbelief in the lurch, instead of helping it to redemption." Ratzinger says he did indeed think that scholastic theology "was no longer an instrument for bringing faith into the contemporary discussion." A greater freedom was needed in the Church, he believed. In fact, all across the Church in those post-war years there was this hope that, "at last, a new hour of Christianity was possible."
Not too many years after the Council, however, Ratzinger was beginning to speak of an "anti-spirit" of the Council, a "process of decline."
"So what went wrong?" Seewald asks.
It is interesting that Ratzinger accepts the premise of this question. "This is the great question we all ask ourselves," he replies. "That the expectations weren't met, that can be documented purely empirically, statistically. And today it is above all progressive folk who speak of a 'winter of the Church.' That we haven't experienced a new hour of the Church, but that there have been a lot of crashes--alongside of new beginnings, which also exist--no one can contest."
Everyone expected too much. "The Church is something that we can't make ourselves." Also, there was a big difference between what the Church Fathers wanted and what ultimately lodged in the public consciousness. The idea was merely to "update the faith." Despite this good intention, the impression was created that the reforms of Vatican II "consisted in simply jettisoning ballast, in making it easier for ourselves." Reform, then, became a "thinning of the faith."
Ratzinger taught at Tubingen during the time of the student revolt in Europe. The celebrated professor of theology who was considered a good progressive began to reconsider, and suddenly became the object of hostility. Ratzinger saw a new spirit creeping in, "a spirit in which fanatical ideologies made use of the spirit of Christianity, and it was there that the lie really became visible for me."
His appointment by Paul VI as Archbishop of Munich, at the age of 50, came as a surprise, "in fact a shock." He regretfully accepted that his own additions to the heavily-laden shelves of theology would probably remain unwritten. He met the Pope Paul VI for the first time in the same year, 1977, and briefly also Cardinal Wojtila of Krakow. But it wasn't until the two conclaves of the following year that he became well acquainted with the future John Paul II. His appointment to the Congregation came not long after the assassination attempt on the Pope, in 1981.
The mildness of the Inquisition
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith grew out of the Holy Inquisition and its task is to promote sound doctrine. Ratzinger works collegially, he tells us, with his staff of about 40 collaborators. It took five years to produce the 800-page reference book called The Catechism of the Catholic Church. A thousand bishops contributed; eight more were its "actual authors." Was there any "input" from the people? he is asked. "We can't take a survey of a billion Catholics," the cardinal replies. One wishes he had said that truth does not emerge from surveys, of whatever size. One authoritative bishop would have been better than a contributing thousand.
Ratzinger is good on the treatment of such vain individualists as Hans Küng. Having conjured up his own theological recipes, Küng expected the Church's imprimatur. He must have known, as Ratzinger certainly does, that that would have been the end of the Church.
There's an interesting passage on the "cellars of the Inquisition"--the archives of the Congregation. Ratzinger says:
I must confess that I make little use of the archives, simply because I don't have time to do so. For that reason I haven't been in a position to stumble upon any special secrets. The fact is that Napoleon confiscated the archive. A part of the contents was subsequently returned, but that's just the point, only a part, so it is by no means still complete. In general, it is not half so interesting as people expect. A thoroughly liberal Italian professor recently spent some time working on various proceedings and remarked that he was very disappointed. Instead of the battle between conscience and power that he hoped to run across, he discovered quite ordinary cases of criminal activity. That was due to the fact that the Roman Inquisition was a relatively mild court. So people who faced a civil tribunal falsely accused themselves of some religious offense, such as witchcraft or fortune telling, so that they could appear before the Inquisition, from which they could generally expect a relatively clement judgment.
Probably no more than three or four people have seen the third secret of Fatima, kept in the archive. Seewald's book offers the following exchange:
You once went so far as to say that the prophecy speaks of what Jesus himself often reminded us of, in that he isn't afraid to say, "If you don't convert, you will all perish." Did the prophecy shake you?"
No.
Why not?
Because nowhere does it say anything more than the Christian message already says.
But doesn't it speak of the destruction of the world?
I can't say anything about that now. In any case, I wasn't particularly shaken.
And exact dates and times?
No. But I don't want to enter into any further details here.
A shrunken sense of mission
On Tuesdays, members of the Congregation meet with Pope for an hour and a half, usually continuing with lunch. Ratzinger also meets alone with the Pope every Friday evening. They discuss the deliberations of the Congregation and "then the Pope decides." Here is another revealing passage:
Do you pray first?
I must confess that we don't; we sit down at the table together.
So you come in and shake hands?
Yes. First I wait, then the Pope comes in. We shake hands, sit down together at the table and have a little personal chat that doesn't have anything to do with theology per se. Normally I then present what I want to say, the Pope asks whatever questions he has, and this starts another conversation going.
Does he make very concrete remarks?
It depends on the topic. There are numerous subjects where he basically waits to see what we have to say. An example is the question about how to admit converted Anglicans into the Catholic Church. It's necessary to find juridical forms for this. In this case he intervenes very little, but says only "be generous." But the details of the procedure don't interest him so much. Then there are other topics in which he has a very lively interest, such as everything having to do with morality, whether bioethics or social ethics, the whole sphere of philosophy, everything that somehow touches on philosophy. Or else the whole sphere of catechesis and doctrine. That interests him very personally, and there are really intense discussions on those points.
Of particular interest are Ratzinger's comments about the Church, the times we live in, and prospects for the future. Seewald suggests at one point that the Church is like a collapsing star, shrinking to dwarf-like proportions. Ratzinger finds the image interesting. "It can certainly look that way empirically," he replies. "The historical hour isn't turning around," the star is not "returning to its accustomed size and luminosity." And it would be false to expect that "a sort of historical shift could take place, that the faith will again become a large-scale mass phenomenon that dominates history."
According to conventional opinion, Seewald says, "the Roman Catholic Church is not only considered to be a relic of a bygone time that is almost despicable to the world at the end of the second millennium after Christ. There actually seems to be no greater provocation than the mere existence of the official Church."
Ratzinger replies that it says something for the Church that she still has this power to provoke. (His comment in itself reveals the shrunken sense of the Church's mission.) "The primary scandal consists precisely in the fact that the Church stands athwart the drift into the banal and the bourgeois and into false promises," he says. He recalls the silent revolutions. In late antiquity St. Benedict, who had so great an influence by creating "the 'ark' in which the West survived," probably wasn't noticed at all. He was the dropout from Roman society, perceived as doing "something bizarre."
Today's Christians are often weary of their faith and regard it as heavy baggage to be dragged along without joy, he says. But when Jesus said "I have not found such faith in Israel," he was crediting the heathen world with stirrings of faith--stirrings that do not have the same vitality among today's Christians. We should not forget the mustard seed. But whether the Church "will again shape history as it did the whole Middle Ages is something no one can predict."
Ratzinger notes the rebellion against nature ("man is to have the liberty to remodel himself at will") and the sudden collapse "even of simple religious information." Religion is migrating into the realm of subjectivity. He notes the rise of relativism (claims to possess the truth are considered intolerant); and of ecology (a "kind of embarrassment at humanity," at man who "sucks creation dry"). In fact, Christianity is experiencing "a massive loss of significance;" the Christian society that we have known "is very obviously crumbling."
The high costs of dissent
In the United States, Seewald asks, is it not the case that a large number of bishops "are going to answer the Roman Church blow for blow, with polemical writings of their own?"
"The number is not large," Ratzinger replies, "thirty bishops at most."
Thirty! And these bishops receive no rebuke--or at least they certainly behave as though they don't. Rebellious bishops know that their subversion will be construed as well intentioned; every heresy is taken as a misunderstanding, to be met with: quietly whispered demurrals, tact, prudence, solidarity, collegiality--diplomacy above all.
The number of churchgoers has dropped in "all the European countries," Ratzinger continues. France, Spain, Italy, Britain as well as Germany "have their anti-Christian movements." In Germany as elsewhere "cleavage within the Church and reluctance to believe are increasing on all sides." For the progressives every reform is insufficient; and the "good Catholics" no longer feel at home. They "suffer and grieve over the fact that the Church is no longer a place of peace where they can find refuge, but a place of constant conflicts." This "inner cleavage" is something that should worry us, he says, especially because "we are also beginning to see an alarming disproportion of elderly people in the Church."
It's remarkable that Ratzinger refers casually to "the crash of the Church and of Christianity that we have lived through in the last 30 or 40 years," and adds: "Perhaps the time has come to say farewell to the idea of traditionally Catholic cultures." He speculates that we may be moving into a time when Christianity "will exist in small, seemingly insignificant groups that nonetheless live an intensive struggle against evil and bring the good into the world." What the Church is now facing is "certainly one of the major challenges" since the time of the Apostles, he says--perhaps not its greatest challenge, "but it is one that goes to the roots."
Tempering papal optimism
Seewald detects the significant discrepancy between the prefect's views and those of Pope John Paul II. He asks about the Pope's 1995 comment before the United Nations: "We will see that the tears of this century have prepared the ground for a new spring of the human spirit."
"That is a story of its own," Ratzinger replies. "The Pope does indeed cherish a great expectation that the millennium of divisions will be followed by a millennium of unifications....He is convinced that the Second Vatican Council, with its yes to ecumenism and its call to ecumenism, is part of this historical-philosophical movement."
Ratzinger admires the Pope's optimism, and stresses that we should not abandon ourselves to "a purely negative calculus." But he adds cautiously of the Pope's vision: "At the moment I do not yet see it approaching." And a couple of pages later he says: "One should be wary of utopian hopes."
To me, Ratzinger's candid remarks--of which I have given only a small sample here--are encouraging. Like others, I have worried about the potentially misleading view of the world from the Popemobile: the cheering throngs, the smiling, respectful faces, the endless expressions of affection, the stadium-sized crowds. It would be easy for a man in that position to believe that the whole world is going his way, when it is very far from doing that. Furthermore, in any world-wide organization as large as the Catholic Church, it is not possible to get more than a small proportion of the available information from the periphery to the center. For the most part, what the Vatican knows is what the bishops report. Clearly, however, as he tells us in this valuable book, Cardinal Ratzinger well knows what is going on, and he is free of illusions. So the Pope surely knows as well. No doubt John Paul II believes that the virtue of hope imposes an obligatory optimism upon him, as it does upon us. Let us pray, then, that his vision is correct.
Tom Bethell is Washington correspondent for The American Spectator.