Defender Of The Faith
The Vatican's longtime enforcer promises a kinder, gentler pontificate. Can he deliver?
There is ample evidence to suggest that the new pope is a person capable of change, or at least superficial modifications, even while he remains faithful to his bedrock beliefs--and even though, as his biographer John Allen reports, he has in the past insisted that he hasn't changed his theological position "over the years."
Born and raised in small-town Bavaria, where conservative Catholicism runs deep, young Joseph grew up seeing the consequences of strong convictions. His father, a policeman, was compelled to move from town to town when his own devout Catholicism put him at odds with Nazi officials. Joseph, the youngest of three siblings, was forced to enroll in Hitler Youth while he attended seminary, but he allowed his membership to lapse even before his schooling was interrupted and he was assigned to an antiaircraft battery. Returning to the seminary after the war and ordained in 1951, he became an academic theologian and taught in several prominent German universities until he was named archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1977. He became a cardinal later that year and John Paul II's prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981.
It was during those years that he formulated his theological views in essays and books such as The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood and Introduction to Christianity. And it was also along the way to his position in the Curia that Ratzinger played a central advisory role in the four sessions of the Second Vatican Council, from which came his book of essays, Theological Highlights of Vatican II.
The new pope insists that he has remained true to the real accomplishments of that council, bringing the church more into line with its oldest traditions and freeing it from some of the rigidities of medieval scholasticism. His critics, however, say that he reversed his stand on any number of very specific reforms--from liturgical changes (including the abandonment of the Latin mass) to views about collegiality.
Endless debate circles the question of whether Ratzinger did or did not really change between the time of Vatican II and his days in the Curia, but there is no question that he was alarmed by what he saw in the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s, particularly the student uprising of 1968 that convulsed his own campus at the University of Tubingen. The blend of antireligious Marxism and hedonistic individual-ism contributed to his decision to relocate to a university in his native Bavaria. More important, he later said in an interview, "here [at Tubingen] I saw very clearly and also really experienced that there were incompatible concepts of reform." In Ratzinger's view, any reforms that challenged the authority of tradition and Scripture, the core of the teaching of the church, were simply unacceptable.
But Allen suggests, along with many other observers, that the Ratzinger of the Curia became more "concerned with arresting the development of tradition than with defending it." Specifically, Allen continues, "in 1966, Ratzinger wanted to recover the role of Scripture as a tool for assessing church teaching and practice." By 1997, however, he warned that the use of Scripture to evaluate church teaching "was one of the most dangerous currents to flow out of Vatican II." In other words, was this a man and theologian who had come to the view that the church's stand on such matters as homosexuality and celibate priests was something that could not be re-examined in light of the best critical readings of the Bible? And was his own increasingly narrow interpretation of Christian tradition as the full truth of that tradition closed to further discussion?
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