Like many great public figures, Benedict developed a public persona or image that is wildly at odds with his true humanity and historical significance.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died yesterday; and, after reading the numerous obituaries, tributes, and denunciations of the man, one thing stands out: There is a stark difference between Benedict’s public persona or image and the real human being known to his students, readers, parishioners, and ecclesiastical colleagues.
The public persona is false and untrue; the human being is authentic and true.
Unfortunately, this discrepancy is not at all unusual. We see it all the time. Leaders in all walks of life often develop a public persona or image that is wildly at odds with who they really are, their essential humanity, and their historical significance.
This discrepancy usually results from political agendas and media biases (typically in a left-wing direction) that badly distort our understanding and misinform the public.
That’s why true historical understanding requires the passage of time. You need perspective, which only time and distance can provide; and you need detachment from the public furies and passions that surround a leader and his historical era.
Journalistic Lies. For this reason, so much of what has been written and said about Pope Benedict is false and misleading.
For example, Benedict has been depicted as a hard-edged reactionary who opposed the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. But in truth, Benedict attended the Council as a theological advisor to Cardinal Frings of Cologne, and contributed to its official documents, especially Dei Verbum, writes Tracey Rowland, Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Australia).
“One of the greatest misrepresentations of Ratzinger is that he was essentially a reactionary. An hour or so spent perusing his writings is enough to disabuse anyone of that myth,” writes Samuel Gregg, a scholar at the Acton Institute.
“On the contrary,” he explains,
Benedict had no hesitation in acknowledging the achievements of different Enlightenment thinkers. His writings reflect profound appreciation of the nuances of the various Enlightenments.”
Benedict, likewise, has been depicted as “God’s Rottweiler,” a man who reflexively and unthinkingly accepted church dogma, but who was ill at ease with normal, frail and fallible human beings.
But in truth, Benedict was a kind, humble, and pious cleric known for his grace, goodwill, generosity, and humanity.
And far from being dogmatic and unthinking, Benedict instead was one of the most thoughtful and liberal-minded thinkers in church history, an intellectual giant whose work will reverberate decades and centuries from now.
As the author of more than 60 books and magisterial documents, Benedict will be remembered as “one of the six most significant Catholic theologians of the 20th century, along with Karl Rahner, S.J., Yves Congar, O.P., the Rev. Romano Guardini, Henri de Lubac, S.J., and the Rev. Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Rowland writes.
Of course, in recent years, the Catholic Church has been badly sullied by child sexual abuse scandals that have been decades in the making. Critics charge that Benedict was complicit in these scandals by turning a blind eye to them. But as Michael Brendan Dougherty points out:
He was perhaps the sole figure of his era at the top of the church that took on the treacherous responsibility of reform—centralizing the handling of clerical abuse cases in his office and drastically speeding up the process of defrocking criminal priests (a project that has been thrown into reverse by his successor).
Unpopular Truths. Why, then, has Benedict received such a bad press and been depicted in such a negative light?
Simple: because throughout his life, he opposed fashionable changes to longstanding Catholic teachings on faith and morals and, in so doing, incurred the wrath of foes both within and outside the church.
Benedict also, of course, incurred the wrath of the popular and dominant secular media, which was and is hostile to anyone who opposes “progressive,” left-wing “reforms.”
As historian George Weigel observes, Benedict, like Pope John Paul XXIII, saw the Second Vatican Council as a vehicle to renew church teachings in a vastly different and more secular world profoundly shaped by the epic disasters of the 20th Century, World War II and the Nazi Holocaust, most notably.
To the consternation of his foes, however, he did not view the Council as a vehicle to remake the church as it has existed for nearly two millennia.
As Rowland puts it: “There is a hermeneutic of rupture and a hermeneutic of reform, and both St. John Paul II and [Cardinal] Ratzinger/[Pope] Benedict read the [Second Vatican Council] documents with the latter.”
These competing hermeneutics are still at war within the church, and the outcome of this conflict is far from certain. A “state of open theological division” now exists, notes Ross Douthat.
The vision of continuity and stability that Benedict championed is being pulled apart from both sides—from the left by the idea of Vatican II as a continuing revolution, a council whose work will never end—and from the right by a mixture of pessimism and paranoia, a very un-conservative alienation from papal authority whose endpoint is difficult to foresee.
Benedict’s Legacy. Maybe so, but what is not difficult to foresee is that Benedict’s influence on the church and broader culture will be felt for many generations to come, and the true man will be known to posterity even as he is hidden from us, his contemporaries.
“I predict confidently that he will be one of the only figures of his era to be remembered, celebrated, studied, and beloved in the future,” Dougherty writes.
“His full legacy will be felt across decades or even centuries,” adds Douthat. “Joseph Ratzinger the scholar and theologian and writer, Joseph Ratzinger the champion of a certain idea of Catholic Christianity—well, he has only just begun to fight.”
“If in the future Benedict XVI is canonised and declared a Doctor of the Church,” writes Rowland, “he may be remembered as one of the greatest scholars ever to occupy the Chair of Peter, a master of fundamental theology—but, nonetheless, a man who never lost the piety of his Bavarian childhood and a man for whom the responsibilities that went with holding the keys of St. Peter were truly martyriological.”
Feature photo credit: Pope Benedict XVI with President Bush during his historic visit to the White House, Apr. 16, 2008, courtesy of kdminer.com.
