Leading Australian theologian Dr Tracey Rowland begins a trilogy of columns on Pope Benedict, delving beyond the surface to reveal what really motivates the Pontiff
Ratzinger as Peritus
Joseph Ratzinger attended the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) when he was in his mid-30s as a peritus, or expert theological advisor, to Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne.
He was one of a number of young European theologians present who were frustrated by the rigidity of the pre-Conciliar theological establishment.
Seminarians were taught with manuals containing summaries of Catholic doctrine dredged largely from 17th century commentaries on the works of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). In the 1940s, this ‘manualist Thomism’ came under fire for being dry, narrow, ossified and not in all ways consistent with the classical Thomism it claimed to champion.
Among the leading periti there was an almost universal belief that this theological diet was inadequate for dealing with the problems of the late 20th century.
There had been two world wars, an economic depression and an unusually large number of psychopaths in positions of authority.
People were emotionally wounded and in the midst of so much evil they doubted the existence of a personal God who cared about them. The works of the existentialist philosophers spoke more directly to the grief and anxiety of the post-war generations than a framework built from Aristotelian categories and Latin maxims. Accordingly, the periti set off on a course of renewing the intellectual life of the Church with reference to the perceived pastoral needs of ‘modern man’. Differences soon emerged, however, over the intellectual material to be put at the service of this renewal. After the Council many of the periti, Ratzinger included, were contributors to the journal Concilium.
However, by the fifth Concilium Congress held in Brussels in 1970, it was obvious that there were sharp divisions among members of the editorial board and that there was no common line among the former periti on how the Conciliar documents were to be interpreted.
Some were treating 1965 as a theological Year 0. Everything that went before, including the papacy, was up for review.
In 1972, Ratzinger, with a group of friends including the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss blue-blood polymath, founded an alternative journal named Communio.
Whereas Concilium authors tended to approach the documents of the Council with what Ratzinger called a ‘hermeneutic of rupture’, making every pre-Conciliar belief and practice questionable, the Communio authors offered a ‘hermeneutic of continuity’.
While they regarded the theological tradition as having undergone a corruption in the 17th century, above all in the works of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez, and thus wanted to purify the tradition of these baroque deviations, they did not want to throw the whole tradition overboard.
They preferred to enrich it with insights from personalist philosophy and phenomenology and with a retrieval of insights from the Early Church Fathers.
The significance of the personalism and phenomenology was that its focus on the uniqueness of each and every person made it possible for theologians to address the concerns of the existentialists.
They also supported the Church’s moral teachings, especially in the difficult area of sexuality, though they sought to re-present these teachings in a more explicitly theological idiom rather than simply relying on references to the natural law.
In contrast, the contributors to Concilium and others who followed the ‘hermeneutic of rupture’ tended to be more interested in currents of thought to be found in secular academies then in any Patristic retrieval or explicitly Trinitarian defences of the Church’s moral teaching or ecclesial structures.
In some places, this fostered an interest in Marxism and liberation theology. In others, it led to schemes to synthesise Christian ideas with elements from liberal, feminist and post-modern philosophy. Renewal in these contexts came to be interpreted as correlating the Catholic faith to trends in contemporary culture and in some cases incorporating the very values of this culture.
In 1985, John Paul II called a Synod to reflect on these various interpretations of the Council.
What emerged from this was a magisterial emphasis on Communio theological anthropology and ecclesiology, including elements of John Paul II’s Thomistic personalism.
The official magisterial interpretations of the Council have never embraced the hermeneutic of rupture. While Ratzinger regarded the pre-Conciliar theological framework as problematic, he had no desire to replace it with secularist mutations of Christian thought.
As a number of his former students from the early 1960s have argued (including those who would be regarded as theologically liberal and would not be placed in the same theological stable as Ratzinger), the shifts in Ratzinger’s alliances in the early 1970s were not due to the fact that he suddenly changed his theological spots, but rather to the ambiguities inherent within the movement for theological renewal itself.
One could find a narrow scholasticism problematic from more than one perspective, and there was more than one alternative to it.
Ratzinger’s alternative was based on the thought of St Augustine, St Bonaventure, Josef Pieper, Blessed John Henry Newman, Romano Guardini, Adam Möhler and, ultimately, Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar.
This is not a roll call of liberals. His arch villains from his earliest years well before Vatican II were Immanuel Kant and Francisco Suárez – both significant names in the liberal tradition. Given this pedigree, he was never likely to end up in the same camp as Hans Küng, however much as a theological teenager he shared Küng’s frustration with manualist Thomism.
Dr Tracey Rowland is Dean and Permanent Fellow of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family (Melbourne); Honorary Fellow, Campion College, Sydney; Member, Centre for Theology and Philosophy, University of Nottingham, UK and author of Ratzinger’s Faith: the theology of Pope Benedict XVI and Benedict XVI: a guide for the perplexed.
This column was previously published in The Times. Reprinted with permission.