Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith

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

Allen notes that this theme has pervaded Ratzinger's life and work from the beginning. Ratzinger may have grown more conservative over time, but he has always sensed a deep tension between the church and the world. Growing up during the Hitler years, Ratzinger remembers how Catholics survived only by hunkering down and defending the faith. His interest in Luther has played an important role in his thought, as has his horror at the excesses of the student revolts, which he experienced in Tubingen in 1968. Ratzinger wants a church that can stand fast, that does not depend on the world's approval. The church must know and act in accordance with the truth that God has given it. If the church is to make a faithful witness to the world, it must first attend to its own life.

Allen may not be aware of just how much mainline Protestants, who have no magisterium, need to grapple with these questions. We fight about church doctrine and practice but are not always sure that anyone's eternal salvation is at stake. We have a conception of the church as the body of Christ, but mostly we act as though the future of the church is ours to contend for. We pick and choose where we will be in tension with the world. Whether conservative or liberal, we cannot really imagine submitting ourselves to the church. We can only imagine trying to control it.

Yet we also sense that our life together is not fully faithful. Ratzinger forces us to ask whether we can really live disciplined Christian lives unless the church has meaningful ways to exercise discipline; whether we have the right to modify the traditional language and practice of Christian faith if we have not delved into the depths of wisdom that may lie behind them; whether we have any business doing theology unless we believe that God has revealed a truth to us from beyond ourselves, to which we must conform our lives.

While acknowledging a grain of truth in Ratzinger's concerns, Allen concludes that those concerns have "contributed to making the world a more fractured, and therefore a more dangerous, place." But it seems equally possible that the world is a more dangerous place if we do not take Ratzinger's questions seriously. Ratzinger teaches us that we should be much more troubled than we are about the idolatries of contemporary consumer culture, which assure us that we really are self-made men and women, and that self-assertion and grasping after power are finally what life is all about.

Perhaps the trouble with Ratzinger's thinking lies not in its strong conviction that the world is fallen but in its failure to acknowledge just how fallen the church is. The way to God and God's truth becomes less clear to us when we are aware of just how easily we can pervert the church's theology and authority for our own sinful purposes. It is not enough to appeal to an invisible church behind the visible, a divine reality behind the earthly. We must ask how we can avoid confusing the ways of God with our own.

Allen argues that the election of a new pope will serve as a referendum on the theology and policies of Ratzinger. The Catholic Church must decide whether to embrace the openness to reform and to the world that characterized Vatican II or to remain on the defensive. Mainline Protestants will not be involved in that decision. But they have reason to hope that Ratzinger's legacy will not be wholly lost.