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    Pope Benedict XVI: His Life and Mission
    Pope Benedict XVI: His Life and Mission
    Pope Benedict XVI: His Life and Mission
    Ebook154 pages2 hours

    Pope Benedict XVI: His Life and Mission

    By Stephen Mansfield

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    About this ebook

    Includes a new foreword on the resignation and legacy of Pope Benedict XVI.

    The sudden resignation of Pope Benedict XVI comes as the capstone to a papacy that that shocked some and delighted others. Pope Benedict was both an ardent intellectual and a driven traditionalist charged with leading a divided Catholic Church into a new era.

    In Pope Benedict XVI, bestselling author Stephen Mansfield tells the story of a youth who grew up in Nazi Germany and went from being a liberal theologian associated with Vatican II to a theological conservative who became Pope John Paul’s closest ally. As a cardinal, the outgoing pope pursued a firmly traditional path in the last quarter century: he excommunicated radical priests, cracked down on Marxist liberation theology in Latin America, and shaped some of John Paul’s more socially conservative positions. He also drew a line of distinction between Catholicism and other faiths, promulgating respect for—but not equality among— the historic religions. To some, Pope Benedict was the ultimate insider whose election ensured that the revolution of John Paul was rendered permanent in our century.

    Mansfield’s portrait of Pope Benedict was validated by recent history: Benedict XVI will be remembered as the Great Custodian. He sustained the return to tradition marked by John Paul.

    Pope Benedict XVI examines its subject specifically from the perspective of a non-Catholic—a committed Christian without fealty to Rome. Mansfield’s academic depth, his poetic but widely accessible writing style, and his ability to take complex religious ideas and make them understandable to the nonreligious make his treatment of Pope Benedict XVI significance for readers of all philosophies and faiths.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateJul 21, 2005
    ISBN9781101144121
    Pope Benedict XVI: His Life and Mission
    Author

    Stephen Mansfield

    Stephen Mansfield is the New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln's Battle with God, The Faith of Barack Obama, Pope Benedict XVI, Searching for God and Guinness, and Never Give In: The Extraordinary Character of Winston Churchill. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife, Beverly.

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    • 4/5
      The election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy was for many an unexpected one. Yet, being a close friend of the late John Paul II, it was most likely that he did ascend as Pope Benedict XVI. In Stephen Mansfield's chronicle of the life of the young Joseph Ratzinger until his election to the Holy See, a glimpse of the past reality of this now pope is presented on how his theologies and perspectives are formed. Cutting out from the mainstream media providing an array of information, this book selects and differentiates media sensations that grow into fanaticism and gossip from that which is Truth. To those who would like to get a better understanding on how the new pope leads the 1.1 billion members of the Catholic Church, and for some his theology on the many books he wrote (and would write), this is one good read.

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    Pope Benedict XVI - Stephen Mansfield

    INTRODUCTION

    Please Don’t Do This to Me!

    The year was 1968, and to the middle-aged theology professor it seemed that evil was spilling out into the world. The whole earth appeared to be in upheaval. The Soviets had invaded Czechoslovakia, the war in Vietnam raged on, and a leftist student uprising in France threatened to topple the Fifth Republic of Charles de Gaulle.

    In America, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy had been gunned down, and students enraged by their government’s policies abroad took over college campuses and forced violent confrontations in the streets. The Beatles, who played Pied Piper to the young, had released an album called Yellow Submarine that seemed to summon their generation to a life of drugs and irrationality. It was a fearful, chaotic time for a man who was given to thought and order and system.

    Still, the professor held his own. Though he had grown up in the rich Catholic traditions and idyllic beauty of Bavaria in southern Germany, he had wrestled with the meaning of truth through a Nazi seizure of power in his homeland, a calling to the priesthood, the earning of a doctorate in theology from the University of Munich and professorships at Bonn and Münster. He was no stranger to the clash of ideas. His students loved him for his unusual merging of gentleness and fierce intellectual hunger, for the way he urged them to seek out truth wherever it might be lurking. In fact, hadn’t this professor been a theological expert at Vatican II some years before? Wasn’t he a progressive who had then called the Church to a greater openness and accommodation of the modern world? In truth, it was just this spirit of inquiry and willingness to embrace the new that caused eager students to flood into his courses.

    Yet things were changing—and often in an ugly, disorienting way. Just the year before, in 1967, the professor had been part of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Faculty for Catholic Theology at Tübingen, the university where he now taught. They had done it old style, with liturgy, Latin, and high ceremony befitting the occasion. It had been a glorious moment and the professor didn’t mind so much that the pageantry concealed tensions among the faculty over the ultimate nature of truth and what it meant for theology. The ideas of those like Rudolph Bultmann and Martin Heidegger—existentialist philosophers who asked whether all truth was relative—were widely discussed. Even though the professor believed that the thinking of these men drained Christian theology of its historic content, he still understood that such new ideas must be considered in the context of learned debate. So, he had enjoyed the anniversary festivities and looked forward to the sounding trumpets of theological battle.

    It was not long, though, before existentialism gave way to a darker force on the Tübingen campus: Marxism. As the professor later wrote, The Marxist revolution kindled the whole university with its fervor, shaking it to its very foundations.¹ In the Marxist worldview, faith is frequently trumped by atheism, the church is replaced by the state, community by the political party, and man as a spirit is replaced by man as an economic unit. When many students at Tübingen embraced this secular religion and rejected the old order, the school became a battle zone.² It was horrible, the dean of the Catholic theological faculty later remembered. The university was in chaos. Students kept professors from talking. They were verbally abusive, very primitive and aggressive . . .³

    It was all a shock to the professor’s soul. On one occasion, students crashed into a meeting of the faculty senate and took over. On another, a classroom discussion erupted into a furniture-throwing fight. Anger and rebellion were thick throughout the school. Many of the young whom the professor had learned to love became long-haired, unkempt radicals who were insulting, arrogant, and threatening. It was a sad and fearful time.

    Yet the professor was trained to look beyond the immediate to the long-term meaning of ideas. When he did so, he grew even more disturbed by what was happening at Tübingen. First, he had expected prudence from the theology faculty, had hoped that the men of God who taught truth would represent a bulwark against the Marxist temptation. It was not to be. Now the opposite was the case: they became its real ideological center. It was horrible for the professor to watch and made him fear for the future of the faith. He was also fearful over what was happening to theology. These new radicals retained biblical language but gave the words a new political meaning. Now, sin frequently meant oppression, redemption meant revolution, and righteousness meant social justice, as defined by Marxist ideology. The professor realized that if you alter Christian language, you lose Christian meaning and, ultimately, lose God in the process.⁴

    This, the professor felt, would mean finally, The party takes the place of God. Now he understood: Marxism was not a new ideology by which to interpret Christianity, Marxism was a replacement for Christianity—a dark, sinister, secular reworking of the very truth of God. As the professor later wrote, I have seen the frightful face of this atheistic piety unveiled, its psychological terror, the abandon with which every moral consideration could be thrown overboard as bourgeois residue when the ideological goal was at stake.⁵

    These months of Marxist upheaval at Tübingen were torturous for the professor. Faculty members ceased speaking to one another. Students whom the professor had counseled over coffee now regarded him as a relic of an old and oppressive system. Worse, the faith he so cherished was now trampled underfoot by the very students he hoped would be its ambassadors.

    In desperation, the professor joined with other like-minded Catholics to build alliances across denominational lines. There were Protestants, most of them Lutherans, who were willing to stand with their Catholic friends against the Marxist tide. Now, theological disputes between believing Christians seemed frivolous. The professor recognized that anti-Marxist followers of Jesus were in the same boat, that their differences were small indeed in the face of the challenge we now confronted, which put us in a position of having, together, to bear witness to our common faith in the living God and in Christ, the incarnate Word.⁶

    So they stood together and they gave witness to their faith and, in time, the crisis passed. But the professor never forgot. He would always remember those days at Tübingen: how quickly professed Christians conformed to worldly thinking, what a powerful force ideas could be, and how chaos ensued when the foundations of faith were undermined. He would forever be haunted by the vision of angry students, eager to overthrow the proven faith of centuries to reach for the passing ideological fancies of this age.

    No, he would never forget. Not when he left Tübingen to become a professor at Regensburg. Not when he became a cardinal or was made the archbishop of Munich. Nor did he forget when he was appointed by Pope John Paul II to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), where it would be his job to assure the purity of the Church’s teaching, to be, in effect, the earthly bodyguard of the truth of God. And he did not forget on April 19, 2005, when this professor, whose name was Joseph Ratzinger, became Benedict XVI, the 265th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.

    003

    He was supposed to be the Grand Inquisitor of a new generation, the Torquemada of our time: a man who hunted down heretics, crushed rebellion, and devastated lives all in the name of Jesus Christ. His critics called him the Enforcer, God’s Rottweiler, and even the Panzer Cardinal, an insulting allusion to his brief stint in the Hitler Youth and his allegedly tanklike tactics. His Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was referred to as God’s Gestapo and the Headquarters of the Thought Police.

    When he was elected pope, conservative Catholics rejoiced but those who had despised him as a heresy hunter sent up a great wail of anguish. An angered priest promised on network television to organize prayer for Benedict XVI to have a short reign. The leading Italian newspaper, Corriere della Serra, carried a cartoon that alluded to John Paul II’s now famous introduction as pope from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in October 1978. I do not know whether I can express myself in your—in our—Italian language. If I make mistakes, he added with a winning smile, you will correct me. The cartoon showed Benedict at the same balcony looking out at the crowds and warning, And if I make a mistake, woe to you if you correct me!

    Other newspaper headlines told the tale. The Dutch daily, Algemeen Dagblad, sported a front page headline that read From Hitler Youth to Holy See. Italy’s La Repubblica proclaimed Benedict A Warrior to Challenge Modernity. France’s left-wing Libération titled its editorial on the new pope Intransigence. And a headline placed over an Associated Press story that circulated on the Internet was shamefully titled Nazi Pope Elected.

    American news networks reminded their viewers that it had been Joseph Ratzinger who issued the statement that many took as a condemnation of the liberal Catholicism of presidential candidate John Kerry. In June of 2004, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Ratzinger’s direction, issued a letter calling abortion a grave sin and insisting that the sacrament of Holy Eucharist should be denied in the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws.⁷ A majority of Catholic voters supported Kerry’s opponent, George W. Bush, and many Ratzinger critics expressed their resentment of Vatican intrusion into American politics.⁸ That the instigator of this intrusion was now pope only increased their ire.

    Clearly, many saw Joseph Ratzinger as the archetype of the sin-sniffing, legalistic, cold-hearted religious bureaucrat. And now he was the pope.

    Yet as time passed after his election, and his supporters acquired the media spotlight, a new image of the man who became Benedict XVI began to emerge. It turned out that Joseph Ratzinger was by most accounts a man with a gentle manner, a quick mind, and a deep soul. He even had a sense of humor, like John Paul before him, who once told an Italian muscle man, If I wasn’t wearing this dress, I could whip you.

    Ratzinger’s simplicity was legend in Rome. For twenty-three years he had set off each morning on foot from his apartment along the Piazza della Città Leonina, just above the last stop of the No. 64 bus, adorned in simple cassock and blending in among the flocks of priests who poured through the streets of Vatican City. As he made his way past carts filled with Vatican souvenirs, he was often stopped by tourists needing directions who had no idea who he was. His command of language served him well as he kindly told a French visitor the way to the Sala Stampa or explained to an American family when the pope would make his next public appearance. Finally, he would reach the CDF in the Piazza Sant’Uffizio promptly at 9:00 a.m. and begin work in his well-ordered but unimpressive office. It did not seem the kind of place where a torturer of heretics might ply his trade.

    In fact, the world soon learned that he had prayed he would not have to be pope. A man of bookish ways, he had hoped

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