It is difficult to underestimate Joseph Ratzinger’s influence within the Church over the last sixty years. During the Second Vatican Council he made an important contribution as a theological expert (peritus) to the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum). He emerged from the Council as a leading Catholic theologian and, in 1972, helped found the journal Communio. In 1977, he was appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising and a cardinal. Five years later, St. John Paul II appointed him as Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. For over twenty years, Card. Ratzinger assisted the pontiff in issuing important doctrinal documents, drafting encyclicals, and overseeing the preparation of the magnificent Catechism of the Catholic Church. Finally, he was elected Bishop of Rome and exercised the Petrine ministry until his resignation in 2013.
On this first anniversary of Benedict XVI’s death, Prof. Tracey Rowland selects and discusses five of his books that we should read.
Professor Tracey Rowland holds the St John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia. In 2001 she was appointed the Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne, a position she held until 2017. She is a member of the editorial board of Communio: International Catholic Review and was appointed to the 9th International Theological Commission in 2014. In 2009 she was awarded the Archbishop Michael J Miller Award for the Promotion of Faith and Culture by the University of St. Thomas in Houston and in 2010 she was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. In 2020 she won the Ratzinger Prize for theology. In 2023 she was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences. Her books include Culture and the Thomist Tradition (London: Routledge, 2003), Ratzinger's Faith: The Theology of Benedict XI (Oxford University Press, 2008), Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2010),Catholic Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), The Culture of the Incarnation: Essays in Catholic Theology (Steubenville: Emmaus Academic, 2017), Portraits of Spiritual Nobility (New York: Angelico, 2019) Beyond Kant and Nietzsche: The Munich Defence of Christian Humanism (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). She has published over 150 articles and is the English sub-editor of the forthcoming multilingual Ratzinger Lexikon.
- Faith and Politics: Selected Writings
by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI - A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today
by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger - What is Christianity?: The Last Writings
by Benedict XVI - Fundamental Speeches from Five Decades
by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI - The Nature and Mission of Theology: Approaches to Understanding Its Role in the Light of Present Controversy
by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Why should Catholics read the writings of Joseph Ratzinger?
Ratzinger is the Card. Newman of the twentieth century. In the future, he will be regarded as a great theologian, even a Doctor of the Church. Unlike many other theologians, he is easy to read if you have a basic grasp of the faith and are a practicing Catholic. Most of his books are accessible to any Catholic who has had an undergraduate education.
Moreover, Ratzinger is valuable because he did not create his own original theological system. Instead, he looked at pastoral or intellectual crises in the contemporary Church and wrote articles and books that addressed these crises. This means that his work is very relevant to the issues we are dealing with today.
You have written extensively on Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. What drew you to study his writings?
I was like many of my generation, the one that came immediately after Vatican II. When I went to school, I still had some teachers who were in a pre-Conciliar mould and others who were typical 1960s-style teachers. I was exposed to both the pre-Vatican II ecclesial culture and that of the late sixties and the seventies. Moreover, I could see the tensions between the two.
As a schoolchild, I was academically inclined and did not like the transition from an intellectual presentation of the faith to something subjective and emotional. In the seventies, religious education often took the form of separating students into small groups, inviting them to hold hands, usually around a coffee table covered in candles, and then demanding that such students share with others in the group their deepest spiritual experiences. Apart from the dubious pedagogical value of this practice, it was a huge invasion of a child’s privacy.
As an undergraduate, I discovered The Ratzinger Report. It was an interview with Card. Ratzinger about the hot button issues in the Church. I read that book when it first came out in 1985 and thought, “I agree with this fellow! He understands the issues. He is not opposed to Vatican II but he understands that it has been followed by some problematic pastoral experiments.” I had been one of the guinea pigs in those pastoral experiments and so I could easily relate to his criticisms.
When I went to Cambridge for my doctorate, I was interested in the issue of culture and moral formation. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre had written a lot on this subject and, though a Marxist at one stage, he became a Catholic. I found that I was not allowed to write positively on a Catholic philosopher in what was then called the Faculty for Social and Political Sciences. As a consequence, I ended up in the Divinity school and my doctorate morphed into a study of the theology of culture. I drew on the work of the theology of Joseph Ratzinger and Henri de Lubac together with the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre and synthesised this material.
Ratzinger is valuable because he did not create his own original theological system. Instead, he looked at pastoral or intellectual crises in the contemporary Church and wrote articles and books that addressed these crises.
In your book, Ratzinger’s Faith, one of the issues you broach is whether there is a continuity in his thought. Sometimes, he has been criticised for breaking with his early, allegedly liberal tendencies and becoming a conservative after the Council, especially following the events of 1968. Do you share that view?
No, I do not believe that he changed his theological spots. The person who promoted that view was Hans Küng. Küng went even further and said that Ratzinger had a breakdown in 1968, when he was at the University of Tubingen, a centre of the student protests in Germany.
The theology faculty at Tubingen was picketed by students claiming that Jesus Christ was a sadomasochist. According to Küng’s narrative, Joseph Ratzinger found that so distressing he had some kind of break-down and changed from being a liberal to being an arch-conservative. I argue—and more importantly, people who were students of Joseph Ratzinger’s during the sixties have argued—that he never changed his theological spots.
He was always interested in the Church Fathers, particularly in St. Augustine. During the early sixties, that made him somewhat radical because he was not into Thomistic scholasticism. The prefect of studies at his seminary said that scholasticism was not Ratzinger’s beer. In short, he was not a typical 1950s style neo-Thomist. He preferred what he found to be the more personalist approach of St. Augustine. He was also influenced by the early 20th century personalist philosophers, people like Martin Buber. That made him look a bit radical at the Second Vatican Council. As a young peritus or theological advisor to Card. Frings, he often came up with ideas that were not part of the typical pre-conciliar, scholastic framework.
In the late sixties, there was a split among the theological advisors of the council. It became very apparent at a 1970 Congress in Brussels that the former periti were not all on the same theological page.
In 1972, Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar (who had not been at the Council but who was part of de Lubac’s circle) formed their own journal, Communio. Its interpretation of the meaning of the Second Vatican Council was very different from that of Concilium, the journal that some of the other periti supported.
Ratzinger said that he never changed his theological position but that, in the late sixties, some of the other periti changed their positions.
The major division between them was over which philosophy or discipline should be theology’s intellectual partner. As Catholics, we agree that theology is about the integration of faith and reason. But how do we understand reason? During the seventies, there was a movement among Catholic scholars in Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium to take a serious interest in social theory and, in particular, the so-called critical theory of the Frankfurt School, which was then dominant in Germany. They tried to work with new social theories as theology’s partner. This—not Ratzinger’s suddenly becoming terribly conservative or emotionally distressed at the student protests—was a major cause of the cleavage.
You have already mentioned some of the main theologians of the period and how Ratzinger, unlike them, was not a system-builder. This makes his contribution harder to pin down. Henri de Lubac is known for his retrieval of the patristic and medieval tradition regarding grace, Eucharistic ecclesiology, and the spiritual sense of Scripture. Hans Urs von Balthasar is known for his theological aesthetics; Louis Bouyer for his writings on the liturgy and the Paschal mystery. Is there a central theme in Joseph Ratzinger’s theological output?
I would argue that it is fundamental theology.
Fundamental theology is in a state of flux. There is no common agreement among theologians about its basic principles. How do we relate nature to grace? How do we relate faith to reason? How do we relate history to ontology? What is the relationship between the Petrine office and the episcopacy? All these fundamental principles of the faith are in a state of flux. The core of Ratzinger’s work is his view on what the fundamental principles should be. This includes his understanding of the basic principles of Scriptural interpretation, which are also in a state of flux.
Ratzinger’s best-known works are his Introduction to Christianity, Introduction to the Spirit of the Liturgy, and the three-volume Jesus of Nazareth. You have not included any of these in your list. Why have you selected some of his less well-known works, collections of occasional writings.
Introduction to Christianity is a magnificent book and has been translated into fourteen languages. However, it is not an introduction. It is a defence of credal Christianity to the German intelligentsia of the late sixties. It answers many of the attacks on Christianity that stem from German philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century, and which reach back to the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It is a great book, but it requires a rudimentary familiarity with the last two hundred years of German philosophy. Without that familiarity, reading it can be daunting.
The Jesus of Nazareth trilogy is brilliant and very accessible. Often, I tell people who have not read any Ratzinger to start with those books. Everyone I know who has read them has said that they have come away with a deeper understanding of Christ and the faith. I have even heard of agnostics who have converted to Christianity after reading those books. I strongly recommend them. However, I have not put them on the list because any discussion of them becomes a discussion of Benedict XVI’s interpretation of certain passages of Scripture.
"In the current geopolitical situation, we are starting to worship the state. One of Ratzinger’s main points is that Christianity de-deified the state."
1.
The first book you have chosen is Faith and Politics, a collection of addresses and writings of Joseph Ratzinger’s from the early sixties to the year of his abdication as Bishop of Rome. Why have you started with his writings on the relation between faith and politics?
In the current geopolitical situation, we are starting to worship the state. One of Ratzinger’s main points is that Christianity de-deified the state. This is one of its great achievements. Once Christianity became influential within the Roman Empire, people ceased to believe that the state, though an important institution, was the highest good. We do not worship the state.
Due to the current crisis within Christianity worldwide, people are starting to treat politics as a religion. Many are treating the state as a kind of highest good. We saw this during the pandemic. Politicians were treated like religious figures. Many looked to the state to save them from the virus.
That is not the only issue. The problem of contemporary political correctness is that many have ceased to believe in truth. Instead of truth, they are accepting ideologies of a Marxist pedigree. All the social theories that derive from Marxism begin with this problematic relationship with truth. This is one of Ratzinger’s main points. In fact, he says that the primary problem with Marxism is not that it is atheistic, but that it is hostile to truth. Its atheism is a secondary problem, a kind of by-product of the hostility to truth. Ratzinger therefore spills more ink over Marx's opposition to objective truth than over his atheism, which, of course, he doesn’t like, but he emphasises that Marx got to an atheist position from his stance against truth.
Ratzinger’s works on faith and politics are also helpful when it comes to current cultural issues. They explain why there are mobs of people who neither think nor act rationally. Many no longer think that individuals are responsible for their actions. Many think that groups, classes, or peoples of a certain colour are to be held responsible for social problems. Ratzinger discusses all these contemporary political and social issues in the Faith and Politics collection.
One example is his analysis of Pontius Pilate’s behaviour. Pilate, he says, did not think that Jesus was a threat to the Roman Empire. Rather, he thought that unless he allowed Jesus to be condemned, some of the Jewish leaders would create political trouble for him. So, he ends up agreeing to the condemnation and crucifixion of Christ. Though he washes his hands, he allows things to unfold as they did because his highest good was not truth, but public peace. He did not want public unrest.
Today, something similar is happening. Truth is sacrificed on the altar of social consensus. The philosopher John Rawls wanted to disconnect the relationship between justice and truth. There is an analogy between some of today’s leading jurisprudential ideas and what Pontius Pilate was thinking. That is just one example.
Ratzinger’s work in this field is very helpful for people who are struggling with the political claims of contemporary ideologies.
"What happens at Mass must be about the worship of God, not the celebration of the local community. The celebration of the community or the family or just individual friendships is what happens at the pub or café after Mass."
2.
With the second book you have recommended, we turn from politics to a collection of Ratzinger’s writings on the liturgy: A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today (1994). It focuses on the liturgy’s rootedness in Christ. For Ratzinger, the liturgy should come first in the life of the Church because this ensures that God is first. Hence, Joseph Ratzinger has declared that the liturgy was the centre of his “theological efforts.” The liturgy is a central theme in the writings of Joseph Ratzinger. What makes this book representative of his reflections on the liturgy?
This book is very accessible for a general Catholic audience. In many of the essays he deals with concrete issues. His general theory is that the liturgy must be theocentric, not anthropocentric. It must be focused on the worship of God and not, say, on the celebration of the parish community.
One of his great lines is that there has always been a link between the parish and the “inn” or we might say the “pub” or “café”.
What happens at Mass must be about the worship of God, not the celebration of the local community. The celebration of the community or the family or just individual friendships is what happens at the pub or café after Mass.
Ratzinger was critical of several ideas that were fashionable within the discipline of liturgical theology after the introduction of the new Missal in 1968, especially the idea that the Mass needed to be dumbed down to the level of popular culture. He explained this in a very concrete way for people who had been through traumatic liturgical experiences in their parish. These essays provide an accessible analysis of why some of the liturgical practices typical of parish life in the 1970s were problematic. Many understood intuitively that the pastoral experiments were not right but they could not articulate their judgements in theological terms. Ratzinger did this is in the essays published as A New Song for the Lord.
3.
Next is a posthumous collection of pieces written after Pope Benedict’s abdication. It is entitled, What is Christianity? What answer does Pope Benedict give to this question (Das Wesen des Christentums), so central in twentieth-century German theology?
For Benedict it is very important that Christianity is a way of life: a way of being. He says that Christianity is not “a religion of the book”, although the Bible is a very important component of our faith. Rather than being a “religion of the book”, Christianity is a way of life. It is really about our relationship with the Holy Trinity. It is about growing in grace and intimacy with the Trinity so that we become more Christ-like. It is not, as Emmanuel Kant would have it, just another moral code derived from a book.
With the Kantian movement within western culture, Christianity comes to be seen as a moral code. Ratzinger calls this moralism. Christianity, he says, is not a moralism. Of course, we do have a moral theology. It is part of the package. However, we cannot reduce Christianity to a moral code or just another way of being a good person. There is something much deeper: the sacramental life of the Christian, which links us into the life and love of the Trinity. The moral code, so to speak, is one element of the means, not the end.
"He calls the idea—that doctrine does not matter and that the only thing that matters is human motivation and one’s level of feeling—the Hinduization of the faith."
4.
Fourth is Fundamental Speeches from Five Decades, a collection of eleven lectures that Joseph Ratzinger gave over the year at sessions of the Catholic Academy of Bavaria. Why have you selected this book?
I selected it for several reasons.
First, there is an essay on the nature of the Petrine office. It tells us how Ratzinger understood this office.
Remarkably, he liked the ideas of Card. Reginald Pole (1500-1556), the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. Card. Pole emphasised that the Petrine office is of its nature martyrological. Just occupying the office is a form of martyrdom.
Ratzinger also said that the papacy is not an absolute monarchy. It is more like a constitutional monarchy. Just as constitutional monarchs cannot do whatever they like but need to work within the constitution, whoever holds the Petrine office needs to work within the bounds of Scripture and Tradition. The deposit of the faith is handed on to the apostles. Whoever holds the Petrine office has the mission to be the defender of that deposit of the faith. He cannot make up new teachings but needs to be guided by the teachings of Christ. Defending that deposit of the faith usually makes a pope so unpopular it is a kind of martyrdom.
Another essay is from 1970 and is called “Why I am still in the Church.” Anyone reading that essay can relate to it because he is talking about the mess the Church is in. Why would anyone continue to be a practicing Catholic given what a mess we are in? Ratzinger concludes that, while we can point to all kinds of decadence and dysfunctionality, there are saints at every time in the Church’s history. The only way we can explain the existence of such people is that they have been totally transformed by grace and sacramental life. They become such outstanding specimens of humanity that they help us to believe.
Ratzinger also talks about the relationship between truth and beauty, and how the Church, throughout history, constantly stands on the side of beauty.
Beauty can take many forms. There is the beauty of sanctity or the beauty of family life, not just the beauty of a good painting or great architecture. Some of the Protestant traditions regard beauty as a Greek obsession that is not essential to Christianity. Ratzinger, however, stood very much in the line of St Augustine and St Bonaventure and regarded beauty as a very important transcendental. Beauty was important to his own faith. In some places, he said that listening to beautiful music enhanced his faith and helped him to believe.
"The question is: should we examine social theory from the perspective of the Church’s deposit of the faith or should we look at Christian theology from the perspective of contemporary social theory?"
5.
Finally, there is The Nature and Mission of Theology: Essays to Orient Theology In Today’s Debates (1993). For Joseph Ratzinger, what are the main shortcomings and solutions in modern theology?
One of the major shortcomings, from Ratzinger’s point of view, is the attack on the Greek component.
He believed that the meeting of Athens and Jerusalem, of Greek philosophy with Hebrew Revelation was not just an accident of history, but something providential. The Incarnation occurred at the best possible moment in history for there to be a mutual integration and influence of Revelation with Greek philosophy. In particular, there was a strong convergence of the Hebrew idea of a Creator with the Greek idea of the logos, that is, a reason or rationality that is inherent in creation. This convergence was affirmed by Christ’s self-description as ‘the way, the truth and the life’.
In the seventies, the idea that the encounter of revelation with Greek philosophy was providential, came under sustained attack, though the attack had been building for at least a century. As I said earlier, some theologians tended to ditch the Greek component and replace it with contemporary social theory. This was a strong movement within liberation theology. Some liberation theologians argue that the Greek component is just an accident of history that might be of interest to Europeans but is not necessary for the Catholic faith. Ratzinger disagreed strongly with that view. Conversely, he strongly agreed with Romano Guardini that logos must always precede ethos. In other words, he argued that doctrine is very important, and that all our actions have an inherent logic which gives our actions their meaning and moral quality. He strongly opposed the movement within liberation theology to flip this long-standing relationship between logos and ethos and give priority to ethos or what the liberation theologians call praxis.
In The Nature and Mission of Theology, he calls the idea—that doctrine does not matter and that the only thing that matters is human motivation and one’s level of feeling—the Hinduization of the faith.
This is quite significant. Today, many claim our feelings and motives are what matters, not doctrine or dogmatic theology. There has been a disjunction and severance of the relationship between dogmatic theology and moral theology. Ratzinger was opposed to that severance and thought that the two had to be kept together.
Another aspect of the book is his criticism of Kantianism. Kant has been quite significant in German culture and especially in universities influenced by German philosophy.
Kant wanted to separate theology and philosophy. This had a major impact on university life. Once the two were separated, people had to study philosophy in one department and theology in another. They never had much of an opportunity to integrate the two.
Romano Guardini came along and insisted on integrating the two. As a consequence, in Germany they had to give Guardini a special professorial Chair titled the “Chair of the Christian Worldview”. He was allowed to work with philosophy and theology at the same time, but that was regarded as very idiosyncratic.
Moreover, Gottlieb Söhngen, Ratzinger’s doctoral father and the supervisor of his Habilitationsschrift, was interested in the border zones between philosophy and theology, in their relationship to one another and the overlapping territories.
In summary, when Ratzinger was a young seminarian and theology student, several of his professors were waging a battle against the Kantian separation of theology from philosophy and were trying to reintegrate the two. This reintegration was important for Ratzinger.
You mentioned his criticism of the tendency to saddle theology with social theory. Are we undergoing a similar trend today by trying to integrate critical race theory and other such modern trends in theology?
Absolutely. The question is: should we examine social theory from the perspective of the Church’s deposit of the faith or should we look at Christian theology from the perspective of contemporary social theory?
I would argue that the teaching of the Church, Scripture, and Tradition, should be the standard by which we judge contemporary social theory. To the extent that contemporary social theories disagree with Scripture and Tradition, they are problematic partners for theology.
One can find a similar argument in the work of the Radical Orthodoxy scholars. John Milbank has made this point very strongly. Milbank’s seminal work is called Theology and Social Theory and sub-titled Beyond Secular Reason. In it, he examines several fashionable twentieth-century social theories and shows that far from being theologically neutral they all carry within them an implicit theological stance, including a stance that is hostile to Christianity. Many people in Milbank’s circle are discussing these issues.
Bishop Robert Barron makes the same kind of argument in some of his books, such as his The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism. Barron asks the question: does Christ position culture or does culture position Christ?
Ratzinger was a German and so much contemporary social theory comes out of German universities. He well understood that many fashionable social theories begin with a flawed understanding of reason and a flawed understanding of the relationship between freedom and truth, along with a very bad anthropology.
A social theory or philosophy needs to be at least open to the idea that there is some kind of order within creation, or what Ratzinger called an “ecology of the human person”. If we are starting with an anthropology that denies that there is an ecology of the human person but supposes instead that human beings are just matter in motion without any internal logic, and that they can make up for themselves what it is that they want to be, then we end up with a social situation where some people want to be cats.
This is not a joke. Recently in the United Kingdom, a girl went to school and said that she was now identifying as a cat. It was front-page news when her school teachers defended her. This is nonsense but the logical consequence of many social theories that begin from a rejection of Jewish, Christian and Greek anthropology.
However, they give the game away with their terminology. You say you identify as something because you are not that thing.
That is right.
You have mentioned the shortcomings. What about the solutions? Does Ratzinger propose any solutions, such as a return to the Church Fathers?
Ratzinger was influenced by some of the good personalist philosophers, such as the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and by Theodor Steinbüchel, a German Catholic philosopher and theologian. Ratzinger wanted the Church to be open to the breadth of scholarship and to keep abreast of science. He was not narrow-minded. However, he believed strongly that the human person has been made in the image and likeness of God. We have been made with a certain rationality and will only truly be free if we lead a life that is consistent with that rationality. His solution is the Church’s faith. We will be free to the degree that we are genuinely Catholic.
One aspect that we have not covered, but where Joseph Ratzinger perhaps exercised the greatest impact on the Church, is catechesis. During his period as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he was charged with overseeing the preparation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He had also anticipated it with some of his talks, such as the lectures he gave in France in 1983, where he shifted catechesis away from an anthropocentric experiential approach to the traditional one. What are your thoughts on his importance for catechesis?
Yes, the Catechism was a great achievement of John Paul II’s pontificate and Ratzinger presided over its drafting.
One place where Ratzinger’s approach to catechesis is taken very seriously and developed is the Franciscan University in Steubenville. Franciscan University has a whole centre for catechesis.
We might have more students who continue to practice the faith after leaving Catholic schools if we made the structure and content of the Catechism central to what is taught in religion classes.
In my country, we have a massive Catholic school system. Almost every parish has its own primary school. There is also a large system of secondary schools. However, at the end of the day, less than 10% of graduates of the Catholic education system practice the faith. This is a massive failure.
I believe that many of our Catholic schools simply teach what St. John Henry Newman called “the religion of the world”. Newman observed that in every generation there is a temptation to teach those aspects of the faith that are socially fashionable and easy for people to accept, while we tend to baulk at teaching the difficult things.
It is easy for those who are not practising Catholics to talk about matters like saving the planet through conservation projects, and the importance of being kind and tolerant. It is not so easy to talk about grace and sacraments and how human persons relate to the Holy Trinity.
If the Catechism were the basis of religious education, the teachers themselves might be converted. This is because the Catechism explains the faith in a very persuasive way that anyone with a basic B.A. degree can follow. If it were taken seriously, it could be a very effective pedagogical tool. Unfortunately, in the mentality of many it is too intellectually dry and doctrinal.
"We should be proud of Benedict XVI."
Any closing advice on reading Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI?
I like his urbanity. He is at home in the world of music and literature. In his explanations, he will often talk about a great piece of art in some Roman basilica, refer to a famous painting and its meaning, or talk about a piece of music. I love that about him. He can be approached simply as a great intellectual, scholar, and man of letters. One is never ashamed to be associated with him.
I have friends who are university professors in other disciplines but who are not Catholics. They always say that they learn very interesting things whenever they read Ratzinger. Even if they do not end up becoming Catholics, they feel that their cultural capital has increased.
We should be proud of Benedict XVI. Anyone who reads him will come away much better educated. If they are already Catholic, they will come away with their faith deepened.
