Opinion – Ross Douthat: Joseph Ratzinger’s fight is just beginning

The first pope to resign was Celestine V, born Pietro da Morrone, who was living the life of a devout hermit when he was appointed pontiff in 1294 to break a two-year stalemate in the College of Cardinals. He was already over 80 years old. Not feeling up to the task, he resigned shortly afterwards, hoping to return to his monastic life. Instead, he was imprisoned by his successor, Boniface VIII, for fear that some rival faction would convert Celestine into an antipope.

The former pontiff died after about a year in captivity. His successor, one of the most ambitious of medieval popes, ended up plunging into a disastrous confrontation with the king of France that ended with Boniface temporarily imprisoned in the weeks before his death.

The strange ultralife of Benedict XVI’s pontificate, which ended with his death on Saturday (31st) at the age of 95, has not been as dramatic or tempestuous. But, like Celestine’s ultralife, it was not an example that would encourage future papal resignations. For nearly a decade the former Joseph Ratzinger played a peculiar and ill-defined role as “pope emeritus”, neither entirely reclusive nor formally active, while his successor Pope Francis sought to dismantle important parts of his work.

The former pope vowed to live the rest of his life “hidden from the world” and presumably hoped to see his legacy secure. Instead, he lived through a post-pontificate made up of ambiguous gestures in response to a Vatican that, thanks to the mysteries of God’s providence, had been handed over to its longtime adversaries.

Rereading what I wrote when Bento announced his retirement, in 2013, is a strange experience, because a good part of the analysis was contradicted a few years after his resignation. At the time, I argued that Benedict, as pope and before that doctrinal head of John Paul II, had worked tirelessly to prevent the disruptions that followed the Second Vatican Council—the brutal drop in mass attendance in the Western world, the wars in around liturgy and sexual ethics—divided the church.

A great theologian, a member of the brilliant generation that advised the bishops at Vatican II, Benedict put his intelligence at the service of continuity, reaffirming the church’s fundamental beliefs, defending traditional piety against academic revisionists, arguing throughout his life that the Vatican Council 2nd had not simply overwritten the church that had existed for centuries before him.

This work made him an intellectual inspiration to many Catholics, especially converts who sought a synthesis of supernatural reason and religion. The influence of his writings — from his “Introduction to Christianity” to the trilogy on the life of Jesus he wrote when he was pope — must outlive the celebrity of John Paul and Francis. It also earned him many enemies, especially among progressive Catholics who saw his insistence on orthodoxy as punitive and for whom the church needed a revolution to fulfill God’s purposes in the modern world.

Until his resignation, however, his quest for stability and continuity seemed tentatively successful. It appeared that he was handing his successor a true synthesis of the church (despite certain tensions and difficulties) pre- and post-Vatican II and that his efforts had preserved Catholicism from the schisms that divided other global Christian communities (Anglican, Methodist) after the social revolutions of the 1960s.

However, what his resignation produced was not what Benedict had hoped. In place of another conservative, the assembled cardinals chose an unpredictable outsider as his successor. And Francis’ pontificate soon became defined by a sweeping drive for liberalization, a notable change in personnel and policy, and the reopening of many of the 1970s-era debates that Benedict had sought to resolve.

That agenda has yet to produce the church that progressive Catholicism craves. Francis often seems to have pushed for change on controversial issues, from Communion for the divorced and remarried to the celibacy rule for priests, only to choose a more ambiguous course. And in certain cases, as part of his odd post-retirement role, Benedict made intellectual interventions that seemed to act as a warning to his successor not to go too far.

It is true that the Francis era has brought the church back into a state of open theological division. The progressive churches of northern Europe, led by the German bishops, are pushing for a revolution – liberal positions on sexual issues, secular leadership and intercommunion with Protestants.

The most conservative hierarchy in the US is seen by Francis allies as dangerously rebellious, accused of tolerating a spirit of right-wing rupture. And after all of Benedict’s efforts to reconcile traditionalists with Vatican II by making room for the Latin Mass in the modern church, Francis reimposed strong restrictions on its celebration, pushing traditionalists back into schism.

Under these pressures, the vision of continuity and stability that Benedict promoted is being dismantled on both sides – on the left, by the idea of ​​Vatican II as an ongoing revolution, a council whose work will never end, and on the right, by a mix of pessimism and paranoia, an unconservative distancing from papal authority, something whose end is difficult to predict.

It seems very difficult for any admirer of Bento to look at what happened after his resignation and see a justification for his retirement, a manifestation of the will of the Holy Spirit in action.

At the same time, his full legacy will be felt for decades or even centuries to come. All we can say about his odd years as pope emeritus is that the way in which Pope Benedict XVI sought to govern the church, to retain its institutional and theological cohesion, has been contested and partially reversed. But Joseph Ratzinger, the scholar, theologian and writer, Joseph Ratzinger, the defender of a certain idea of ​​Catholic Christianity – his struggle has just begun.