Prefect Turned Pope: Authority Part I

I recently completed a book-length interview with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, entitled Salt of the Earth. I've also read his Introduction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and his first Papal encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God is Love). I first started browsing his books when he was elected Pope, out of an interest in Church current events, and then continued because I can't help picking up small, well written books of theology, especially the kind you can read in a handful of sittings, which is precisely Ratzinger's medium.

Philip Jenkins, in the title of a recent book, claims that Anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice. This might seem an extravagant claim, but also, on the face of it, bears a fair amount of credibility, depending on how you nuance "acceptable". (I'm assuming that this acceptability is determined, as usual in America, in very WASPy environs.) If this is the case, then certainly there is no element of Roman Catholicism that so rankles its detractors (anti-Catholic bigots?) as the office of the Pope. The Pope, it seems, is such a scandal, not only because as the symbolic unifier of Catholicism, he stands for everything thing else about Catholicism that one could object to, from crusades to confessionals, but also because of the intrinsic objectionable nature of someone, in this day and age, presuming to wield such an absolute authority. Indeed it seems like much of the Protestant reaction to Catholicism is basically anti-authoritarian in character.

With this as background, add to the mix the personal reputation of the current pontiff, Benedict XVI. The reactions to whose election, in the popular press at least, invariably employed words such as conservative or rigid, or included the obligatory reminder that in his most recent digs as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger was heir to the tradition of the much maligned Holy Inquisition.

So it was pleasantly surprising-like a breath of fresh air really-to read the thoughts of this reputedly reactionary example of an already 'authoritarian' tradition, and finding a very human, very open voice, full of patience and charity for interlocutors, and characterized throughout by a depth of humility that would be a welcome change in your average academic theologian.

Here are just a few examples of Ratzinger's mode of discourse on the topics of faith & doubt, change, institutionalization, the Enlightenment, and world religions.

"Faith never cuts off questions. ... It could also become rigid if it no longer exposed itself to these questions." p. 88

"There needn't always be universal answers. We also have to realize our limits and forgo answers where they aren't possible ... we don't find answers by forcing everything into a system." p 101

"I agree with Cardinal Newman, who says that to live is to change and that the one who was capable of changing has lived much." p. 116

"The great Churches of the Christian countries are perhaps also suffocating on account of their own over-institutionalization, of their institutional power, of the pressure of their own history. The living simplicity of the faith has been lost to view in this situation." p. 123

"In this sense, the development of the Enlightenment, with which the model of the separation of Church and state appears, definitely has a positive side. ... Here are opportunities for a more vital, because more deeply and more freely grounded, faith, which, however, must fight against being subjectivized and which must continure to try to speak its message publicly." p. 240

"The dialogue with other religions is under way. We are, I think, all convinced that we can learn something, for example, from the mysticism of Asia and that precisely the great mystical traditions also open possibilities of encounter that are not so clearly present in positive theology." p. 263

Do these sound like the words of a doctrinally rigid church dictator to you? Pope Benedict XVI doubtless speaks with a degree of authority, even to the secular world. With the above as representative of his mode of thinking, I for one would welcome his type of authority having more of an influence.