Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith

Christian Century, May 9, 2001 by John P. Burgess

Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith. By John L. Allen Jr. Continuum, 340 pp., $24.95.

JOHN ALLEN wants a Catholic Church that is radically committed to the liberating impulses of the gospel. Joseph Ratzinger, he argues, is dedicated to expanding and consolidating the power of the Roman hierarchy. Cardinal Ratzinger represents the conservative, even repressive, aspects of John Paul II's papacy. But Allen's book, perhaps unwittingly, demonstrates that Ratzinger is seriously struggling to shape a faithful, enduring church that can withstand the assaults of contemporary culture. Allen's Ratzinger may help Catholics and Protestants alike ask better questions about their churches and their lives of faith even if they agree with Allen's critique.

Allen, Vatican reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, reviews Ratzinger's humble beginnings in small-town Bavaria, his academic appointments at the universities of Tubingen (facilitated in part by Hans Kung) and Regensburg and his rapid rise to power in Rome as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Along the way, he documents Ratzinger's attacks on Kung and other Catholic theologians such as Leonardo Boff and Charles Curran. As a young, progressive Catholic, Allen wants to account for Ratzinger's defection from liberalism and Vatican II; he also wants to understand what makes Ratzinger such a formidable figure today.

While Allen's style is journalistic, he is sensitive to theological questions. He ultimately finds the key to Ratzinger's writings and policies in his ecclesiology. Ratzinger believes that the church is a transcendent, divine reality that constitutes itself on earth, especially as believers participate in the sacraments. Christians do not create the church; the church creates them. It invites them to be taken up into the life of God, and it guides them into true relationship with each other (communio).

For this reason believers must submit to the church and to its authoritative teachings. The church embodies a wisdom greater than that of any particular time or place. As Allen explains, in Ratzinger's view "it is the function of the magisterium to uphold the testimony of every generation of believers over against the tyranny of the present."

Ratzinger has resisted the tendency of some Western church circles to define theology primarily as a university discipline. Theology belongs to the church. Theologians do not simply investigate intellectual questions that they happen to find interesting; they explicate the church's faith. His critics accuse Ratzinger of repressive censorship. But Ratzinger thinks that the magisterium helps theologians to be more disciplined. It keeps them focused on their true vocation of supporting the faith of simple believers and of making a credible witness to a nonbelieving world.

Doctrine must also discipline practice. Ratzinger is concerned that much contemporary Christian ethics derives from a Kantian skepticism about our ability to know objective truths. Such a system of ethics judges ideas not by their correspondence to God's will but by whether they contribute to advancing particular human notions of justice or peace. To Ratzinger, such a stance denies God's place in the world and leaves us with nothing more than multiple human interests, all vying for hegemony. We will inevitably succumb to one or another form of human totalitarianism, he believes, unless we regain the conviction that there is an objective, divinely established order of reality to which we must conform our lives.

Ratzinger's ecclesiology is closely related to his eschatology. He fears that liberal theologies ultimately reduce the kingdom of God to a this-worldly social and political program. They equate the freedom of the gospel with human notions of self-determination. Sin becomes a social, structural problem rather than a condition of the soul. Ratzinger argues for an individual salvation beyond this world. Though this vision of eschatological salvation has implications for Christian social thought here and now, the latter cannot replace it.

Ratzinger's opposition to liberation theology, feminism, the sexual revolution and theologies of religious pluralism springs from his conviction that they disregard certain "givens" established by God. If God has created us, we are not free to create ourselves. If God has called us to know Christ, other religions, while deserving of respect, do not relieve us of the responsibility to preach the gospel. The church need not fear pluralism, since a genuine pluralism illuminates the church's core principles; it does not overthrow them.

The church's power rests not in its ability to make common cause with the world but to offer the world an alternative way of life. Allen contrasts Ratzinger's Augustinianism with the French neo-Thomism of Vatican II's Gaudium et spes (Constitution on the Church in the Modern World). Whereas the latter looks for the activity of God's grace and salvation in the signs of the time, Ratzinger insists that the church must guard against a fallen world's corrosive influences.