When Benedict XVI resigned as head of the Catholic Church and became the first pope emeritus in history, some analysts highlighted the risk this could pose for his successor.
Francis did not take long to show that his papacy would follow a very different direction from that taken by the German pontiff, and the fear was that the “retired” pope would become a focus of attraction for disaffected conservatives, lending them his prestige, albeit unwittingly.
To a large extent, these fears proved to be unfounded. In the years after his resignation, Joseph Ratzinger not only made a point of pointing out that he had decided to step down completely freely, but also avoided public appearances and statements that could be interpreted as criticism. He and Francisco began to meet relatively frequently, in an atmosphere of cordiality.
None of this means, however, that the very different approaches of the two pontiffs do not remain a symptom of divisions within Catholicism. If it is simplistic to portray these differences only as a dispute between a “Benedict XVI church” and a “Francis church”, it is also undeniable that those who repudiate the current pope view the pope emeritus with nostalgia. From that point of view, the influence of Ratzinger’s pontificate has the potential to be far longer than its less than eight-year duration.
Long before he became pope, Ratzinger exemplified the complicated relationship between change and tradition in modern Catholicism. When he was still just a theologian in his 30s, he had participated in the debates of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), a meeting to adapt the church’s activities and language to the 20th century – “aggiornamento”, or updating, was a one of the most commonly used terms at the time.
The council opened the door for the languages ​​of each country to replace Latin in the mass, for Catholics to engage in a friendly dialogue with other Christian denominations and with other religions, and for concern for social injustice to gain more prominence in the doctrine of Church.
At first, Ratzinger viewed this flurry of change with optimism, but more radical theologians tended to paint the council as just the beginning of a broader wave of transformations. Some defended the end of celibacy for priests, the possibility of including women in the priesthood and the liberation of the use of artificial methods of contraception. Ratzinger, faced with these more radical positions and the wave of student rebellion that affected the German university where he taught in the late 1960s, began to argue that a “strategic retreat” was essential to guarantee the integrity of Catholic doctrine.
It was to put this program into practice that Ratzinger, then Archbishop of Munich, was chosen by Pope John Paul II as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981. The Polish Pope had also attended the council and believed it necessary to return to a more traditional Catholicism. The close partnership between the two lasted more than three decades and only ended with the death of John Paul II, in 2005. Faced with the loss of such a titanic figure, the cardinals opted to elect Ratzinger as a figure who represented the continuity of the pope who had died.
As a public figure, however, Benedict XVI has always been very different from John Paul II. It was unfair to paint him as especially bigoted or bellicose, as in the unfortunate memes that turned him, by physical resemblance, to the Emperor Palpatine of “Star Wars.” But a certain academic rigidity led him to make statements that seemed to belittle Islam, for example, causing an international malaise that he did his best to quell by praying in a Turkish mosque.
Concerned about the growing de-Christianization of Europe, a continent he saw as essential to the historic legacy of the Catholic faith, he could come across as someone who was still clinging to the shreds of ancient privileges, which caused him to begin to gain a certain status as a icon for political movements that wanted a return to the political and cultural hegemony of Christianity in the West – although he himself declared himself an admirer of European social democracy. That legacy lives on a bit.
But the great “wildcard” that perhaps defines what will become of this legacy, the card whose effects are still difficult to predict, is Catholic expansion far from the West, in Africa and Asia. Catholicism in these regions, rather than seeming cornered, is booming in terms of demographics and cultural influence.
It is quite conservative from the point of view of customs, but its concerns are unlikely to coincide for long with those of the “culture wars”. With that in mind, the papacy of Benedict XVI was perhaps one of the last to place the ancient Christian West at the center of the Church’s destiny.
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