My Life and Times

German Catholic News Agency

Joseph Ratzinger, right rear, and his brother, Georg, in July 1951 after their ordinations, with their mother and father, Maria and Josef, and their sister, also named Maria, in Freising, in Bavaria

A Theological Visionary With Roots in Wartime Germany
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

ROME, April 19 - The man who has become Pope Benedict XVI was a product of wartime Germany, but also of a deeply Roman Catholic region, Bavaria.

As the Nazis strengthened their stranglehold on Germany in the 1930's, the strongly Catholic family of Joseph Ratzinger moved frequently among villages in rural Bavaria.

"Unemployment was rife," he wrote in his memoir, "Milestones." "War reparations weighed heavily on the German economy. Battles among the political parties set people against one another." His father, he wrote, was a determined anti-Nazi.

The Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Ratzinger recalled, was his bulwark against the Nazi regime, "a citadel of truth and righteousness against the realm of atheism and deceit."

But he could not avoid the realities of the day. In an episode certain to be scrutinized anew, Joseph Ratzinger was briefly and unenthusiastically a member of the Hitler Youth in his early teens, after membership became mandatory in 1941, according to a biography by John L. Allen Jr., who covers the Vatican for The National Catholic Reporter.

In 1943, he and fellow seminarians were drafted. He deserted in 1945 and returned home, but was captured by American soldiers and held as a prisoner of war for several months, Mr. Allen wrote.

Along his way to the papacy, he built a distinguished academic career as a theologian, and then spent nearly a quarter century as Pope John Paul II's theological visionary - and enforcer of strict positions on doctrine, morality and the primacy of the faith.

In addition to his subtle and powerful intellect lies a spiritual, almost mystical side rooted in the traditional Bavarian landscape of processions, devotions to Mary and small country parishes, said John-Peter Pham, a former Vatican diplomat who has written about Cardinal Ratzinger.

"It's a Christianity of the heart, not unlike that of the late pope's Poland," he said. "It's much different than the cerebral theology traditionally associated with German theology."

His experience under the Nazis - he was 18 when the war ended - was formative in his view of the function of the church, Mr. Allen said.

"Having seen fascism in action, Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesiastical totalitarianism," he wrote. "In other words, he believes the Catholic Church serves the cause of human freedom by restricting freedom in its internal life, thereby remaining clear about what it teaches and believes."

Totalitarianism, indeed, critics might say.

They cite a long list of theologians Cardinal Ratzinger has chastised for straying from official doctrine; his condemnation of "relativism," or the belief that other denominations and faiths lead equally to salvation; his denunciation of liberation theology, homosexuality and feminism; his attempt to rein in national bishops conferences; his belief that the Second Vatican Council of the 1960's, which led to a near-revolutionary modernization of the church, has brought corrosive excesses.

In effect, he has argued for a purer church at the expense of size.

Hans Küng, one of the theologians who ran afoul of him, has called his ideology a "medieval, anti-Reformation, anti-modern paradigm of the church and the papacy."

"To have him as pope will be considered by many Catholics to mean that the church is absolutely unable to reform itself," he said, "and that you are not to have any hope for the great process of the Second Vatican Council."

Along with Bavaria and Nazism, a third influence helped shape the new pope: the leftist-inspired student unrest of the 1960's at the dawn of domestic German terrorism. He said it made him realize that, sometimes, there is no room for discussion.

Even before becoming the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Ratzinger wielded immense power. John Paul appointed him prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the former Holy Office. It was a deeply personal choice, made without his usual wide consultation.

Their regular Friday discussions were said to be often freewheeling.

The cardinal expanded the power of the role, ruling on a wide range of subjects. He was the first professional theologian in the job in more than a century, one equipped with a strong intellect and decisiveness.

"This is a man who can deal with a lot of difficult material without becoming upset," said the Rev. Augustine Di Noia, who was the under secretary of the congregation.

John Paul was said to have given Cardinal Ratzinger wide latitude; some called him the "vice pope." Other Vatican officials have suggested he served as a lightning rod, diverting criticism from the pope.

As dean of the College of Cardinals, he was also the most powerful of them - their leader in the period after John Paul's death, the celebrant of his funeral Mass and their guide during the conclave.

Behind his fearsome reputation lies a "a simple person," Father Di Noia said. "He chuckles. There's a simple childlike quality to him." Others speak of his dry sense of humor and modest demeanor.

He is a diminutive man with deep-set eyes and white hair, and speaks Italian - the language of the Vatican - with a strong German accent. Unlike John Paul, he had little time for sports or strenuous activity, other than walks in the mountains.

Until now, he lived in a small apartment near the Vatican and walked to work. He was perhaps the best-known cardinal, appearing at Vatican news conferences and known to many through his books and profiles of him in newspapers.

Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born April 16, 1927, in Marktl am Inn in Bavaria, the youngest of three children. It was a part of a region long within the orbit of Salzburg, in Austria, Mozart's birthplace. A pianist, Cardinal Ratzinger expressed a great love for the composer.

Partly because of his father's opposition to the Nazis, he wrote, the family moved four times before Joseph was 10. His mother was a hotel cook.

He entered the seminary in 1939. After conscription, he served in an antiaircraft unit. He has said the unit was attacked by Allied forces in 1943, but he did not take part in that battle because a finger infection had prevented him from learning to shoot. After about a year in the antiaircraft unit he was drafted into the regular military, sent home and then called up again before deserting in late April 1945, according to Mr. Allen. He told Time magazine in 1993 that while stationed near Hungary, he saw Hungarian Jews being sent to death camps.

In discussing his war experience, Mr. Allen wrote that he publicly expressed little of the explicit horrors that were around him; of the resistance to the Nazis by groups other than Catholics; or of the anti-Semitism of a prominent great-uncle.

In the fall after the war ended in 1945, he returned to the seminary, where his brother, Georg - who was soon to be a prominent church music director - was also enrolled. The brothers were was ordained in 1951; two years later Joseph Ratzinger earned his doctorate at the University of Munich. His dissertation was titled "The People and House of God in St. Augustine's Doctrine of the Church." He earned his teaching licentiate in 1957.

One of his most influential books was an early work from his university lectures, "Introduction to Christianity." He also wrote "Dogma and Revelation" and "Eschatology."

In his view, the church does not exist so that it can be incorporated into the world, but so as to offer a way to live. It is not a human edifice but a divinely created one. And theology is not a dry academic exercise. Theologians should support church teaching to serve the faithful, not depart from it.

His career as an academic began immediately after he was licensed. He spent two years teaching dogma and fundamental theology at the University of Freising and 10 years at the University of Bonn. He also had stints at the universities Münster and Tübingen. Alienated by the student protests at Tübingen, he moved to Regensburg in 1969.

In a 1985 interview with The New York Times, he called the protests "a radical attack on human freedom and dignity, a deep threat to all that is human." Such actions taught him, he said, that to discuss terror was to collaborate with it. "I learned where discussion must stop because it is turning into a lie and resistance must begin in order to maintain freedom."

Already in 1962, at 35, he achieved prominence at the highest levels of the church. A mutual acquaintance introduced him to Cardinal Joseph Frings, archbishop of Cologne. Cardinal Frings asked him to serve as his expert assistant at the Second Vatican Council. Father Ratzinger was credited with pushing Cardinal Frings to join French and other German bishops in standing firm against the Vatican Curia members who wanted to hold back council reforms. He also helped write a speech criticizing the Holy Office, the predecessor to his future home, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The speech called it outmoded and a "source of scandal to the world."

Yet within a decade he came to express deep worry that the church was drifting to the left and losing its ecclesiastical rigor.

In 1977, Pope Paul VI appointed him archbishop of Munich, and made him a cardinal in just three months. That same year, he met the future John Paul II, although some have said that they might have met at the Second Vatican Council. They both spent their youths under totalitarianism, but they also had a feeling that the church was adrift in a permissive sea, and that there was a need to return to the fundamentals.

John Paul appointed him to the doctrinal congregation in 1981. Soon, he was taking action against liberation theology, the Marxist-inspired movement of priests in Latin America to help the poor by radical restructuring of society. The congregation denounced the movement in 1984; Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian liberation theologian, was summoned and silenced for a year.

Other theologians were chastised. Charles E. Curran, a theologian at Catholic University of America, was barred in 1986 from teaching at a Catholic institution for refusing to recant his challenge to church teaching on sexuality. The Rev. Tissa Balasuriya, a Sri Lanka theologian, was excommunicated in 1997 after being accused of challenging fundamental Catholic tenets like original sin and the Immaculate Conception. More than a dozen others have been disciplined by the congregation.

With the end of the cold war, Cardinal Ratzinger turned his attention to fighting "relativism." His congregation's 2000 declaration "Dominus Jesus" - "Lord Jesus" - said other religions could not offer salvation, and were "gravely deficient." An uproar from other religious leaders followed, but John Paul publicly defended the document.

Even as he celebrated the Mass leading into the conclave on Monday morning, Cardinal Ratzinger called relativism a "dictatorship" under which the ego and personal desires are paramount.

One of his major efforts, which many say has been successful, was to sap national bishops' conferences of power - and even here he harkened back to the war. The German conference issued "wan and weak" condemnations of Nazism; the truly powerful documents, he said, "came from individual courageous bishops."



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