The Rise of Pope Benedict XVI: The Inside Story of How the Pope was Elected and Where He Will Take the Catholic Church
By John L. Allen, Jr.
Doubleday, 249 pages, $27.95
Pope Benedict XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger
By John L. Allen, Jr.
Continuum, 340 pages, $24.95
Benedict XVI is the first pope ever to have been an American prisoner of war. His critics see him as the sort of cleric who would condemn Galileo all over again. But his wartime experiences taught him that "ideologies of power" can never erase truth.
Pulled from seminary class, conscripted to military service, he was assigned to barracks and forced to march through Traunstein singing war songs, as if the Germans still had things under control. He deserted in April, 1945.
Two soldiers with orders to shoot deserters saw him, but let him go. When the Americans came, they selected the Ratzinger home as their headquarters. Joseph, identified as a soldier, had to spend a few weeks in a U.S. PoW camp. Released in June, he hitchhiked home on a dairy truck to resume study for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1951.
Pope Benedict XVI prays with Cardinal Camillo Ruini at a conference of the Diocese of Rome, at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, in Rome, Monday June 6, 2005. (Pier Paolo Cito/AP)
Thirty years later, Pope John Paul II made him the church's top doctrinal authority at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (or CDF, as the Inquisition is known in acronym makeover). As John Allen writes in The Rise of Pope Benedict XVI, this appointment of Cardinal Ratzinger placed "the first truly first-rate theologian" in that post since Cardinal Bellarmine in the 16th century. Like Bellarmine, Ratzinger has been a misunderstood and unappreciated figure at the centre of controversy.
Bellarmine, a man of moderation and learning, attempted to smooth difficulties with the inspired but imprudent Galileo. The mythology of scientism forgets that Galileo had insufficient proof for heliocentrism. The proof only came 200 years later, with measurement of stellar parallax and the pendulum precession, not with Galileo's erroneous theory of tides.
Allen writes of Ratzinger who, like Bellarmine, is no brooding, dictatorial figure but rather an intellectual giant, one of the most cultivated men of our times, a lover of Mozart and Bach whose generous and open nature makes him an excellent listener. He has written more than 50 books. His English publisher, Ignatius Press, has just published in Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith a Ratzinger bibliography 80 pages long. The best introductions to the man Joseph Ratzinger are the book-length interviews with him. The most recent is God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald (2002), but the one that made him an ecclesiastical lightning rod was The Ratzinger Report (1985). His autobiography Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977 is also engaging. Perhaps the best introduction to his theological mind is Introduction to Christianity, reissued last year with a long preface written for the new edition.
While CDF head, Ratzinger applied his theological talents as Bellarmine did, to defend those who "can't fight back intellectually" but who need to be protected from "intellectual assault on what sustains their life." He defended revealed truth, saying, "We need people whose intellect is illuminated by the light of God and in whom God opens their heart" to live "true humanism." In his homily at John Paul II's funeral, he called this humanism "the art of true love."
Allen now admits his earlier biography, Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith, treated Ratzinger unfairly. Unfortunately, his publisher has rushed it into reissue as Pope Benedict XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger, without this disclaimer. But ever since his mea culpa, Allen has been one of the best Vatican journalists around. His weekly column is mandatory reading for those who want the latest dish on ecclesiastical affairs sine ira et studio (without anger or bias): Allen is now reporting facts, not grinding ax.
The Rise of Pope Benedict XVI exhibits his gumshoe virtues. With well-placed sources and insider detail, Allen chronicles the last days of John Paul II, the funeral, the interregnum and the conclave. He shows that Ratzinger didn't become pope by political machinations. He didn't want the job, so he spoke his mind and behaved like himself. Whoops!
Like the reborn Allen, Benedict has long been devoted to "the defence of objective truth." The believer's love of truth is now widely derided, but its careful medieval chrysalis gave us modern science. Ratzinger has likened the West today to "the Roman Empire at twilight," in which civilization "lived off forces that were destined to dissolve it, because in itself it no longer possessed vital energy." Alluding to that twilight, he chose the name Benedict because that monastic saint "kept the true humanism alive in a dark time."
In his conclave homily, Pope Benedict spoke of "the dictatorship of relativism" which is currently squandering Europe's cultural inheritance. Even if, Allen writes, Benedict today sees that "a social order built on truth is crumbling," his very name testifies to the past example of Christian Europe, which became the "new Roman Empire" with a mission of preserving "the best of antique culture, and carrying it forward into history."
Allen forecasts that Benedict's hope is to "stir anew in Europe and beyond a love affair with Truth, leading to a cultural Renaissance on a grand scale." But it's that capital T that has many moderns sneering at Benedict's seemingly outdated program. For hasn't science advanced beyond religion? According to cultural prejudice, modern scientism's relativist view of truth (an ever-tentative approach of revisable hypotheses) is preferable to religion's certitude.
Well, I have an inspired friend who believes in warp drive. But hyperspace travel is not a scientifically demonstrated truth. Similarly, the inspired but impetuous Galileo, although mistreated in many ways, was a sincere Catholic who knew Bellarmine and the Inquisition were correct: He had not demonstrated the truth of his position, and had wasted his middle career (1610-1633) picking dialectical fights that his flawed tide theory could not win, alienating sympathetic clerics (most notably Pope Urban VIII).
Galileo was most productive in his early and late periods when he focused on demonstrable truths: what advances science. Benedict XVI reminds us that Galileo's love of truth is salutary. That's why the church embraces science. Besides, if science stops believing in truth, we'll never discover warp drive.
C. S. Morrissey, a member of the Institute for Advanced Physics, teaches ancient Greek at Simon Fraser University.
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