Since his election to the papacy, Ratzinger has published three encyclicals, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love), Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope) and Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), and one apostolic exhortation Sacramentum caritatis (the Sacrament of Charity).
part of his pontificate trying to bring outsiders back into the fold,
reaching out to traditional Catholics and the Orthodox Churches. Above,
Pope Benedict XVI arrives for his general audience in St. Peter’s
Square at the Vatican 20 October. Photo: CNS/Paul Haring
He has also published the first of a several volume series on the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
A recurring theme in these publications is the idea that Christianity is primarily about a person’s participation in the life and love of the Trinity, mediated through Sacraments, particularly the Eucharist.
For Benedict, the reduction of Christianity to the status of an ethical code is an impoverished representation of true Christianity.
He also emphasises the significance of the virtues of faith, hope and love, and argues that these virtues have become mutated by various secularist ideologies.
For example, he believes that faith is coming to mean trust in technology or scientific reason, hope is becoming hope in material progress, and love has become truncated to eros (sexual desire) without a telos (higher end).
He is concerned that for many people these virtues no longer have anything to do with Christ.
In Caritas in Veritate, Benedict engages with various modern philosophies, pointing out the limitations of the secularist notion of development.
Benedict argues that when cultures no longer serve the deepest human needs and actually narrow the spiritual horizons of people, the result is a loss of strong self-identity and even depression.
The remedy, the Pope believes, is to grasp the fact that truth is something which is given as a divine gift, and that it is not something self-constructed.
Benedict also observes that truth is not determined by majority opinion.
This papacy has also put a lot of energy into mending historical rifts. Foremost among these have been the rift with the traditionalist Catholics who regard Vatican II as the work of the devil, and the rift with sections of the Catholic Church in England which started in 1533 when Pope Clement VII excommunicated King Henry VIII for purporting to divorce Queen Catherine of Aragon.
In part to heal the rift with the traditionalists, but also because of his own liturgical concerns which are evident in Sacramentum Caritatis, Benedict has lifted all the barriers to priests saying the traditional Latin Mass.
Diplomatic channels are opening with leaders of the traditionalist movement and attention is now focused on the doctrinal aspects of the documents of the Second Vatican Council.
In order to prepare the diplomatic ground for these negotiations, Pope Benedict lifted the decrees of ex-communication against four Bishops who had been illicitly consecrated without the permission of John Paul II.
After the event, Benedict discovered that one of the men denied the holocaust and the Pope was forced to write a deeply apologetic letter to the Bishops of the world.
On the Anglican front, he has responded to requests from groups such as the Traditional Anglican Communion to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church by establishing an Anglican Ordinariate.
This is a canonical framework by which Anglicans can join the Catholic Church in whole parish communities, rather than on a person by person basis, and can retain their own liturgy and be served by their own clergy. Energy has also been expended improving relations with the various Eastern Orthodox communities, especially the Greek and the Russian.
These initiatives are generally regarded as successful and the Russians have established the Gregory Nazianzen Foundation to help all Christians, Eastern and Western, to defend the faith from attacks within Europe.
Nonetheless, there is a general sense that Benedict XVI’s papacy is encountering wave after wave of opposition.
In a book recently published in Italy called Attacco a Ratzinger, the authors argued that the attacks are coming from three separate sources: from social elites across the Western world who are in favour of secularism and see Benedict XVI as a significant source of intelligent opposition; from elites within the Catholic Church who support the ‘hermeneutic of rupture’ reading of Vatican II, and from the incompetence of the Vatican’s own officials, many of whom, it seems, don’t even know how to Google.
In the medium term, his papacy is likely to be judged by how well it contends with these forces of opposition and incompetence rather than by reference to the solid intellectual framework he has steadily built to support Christianity into the 21st century.
Nevertheless, Benedict’s holiness and desire to preach the gospel of the God of Love shine through in his writings as Pope and through these he is able to reach many millions of his faithful.