A Chat with Ratzinger
Sept 15, 2004
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has given another extensive interview to a journalist. It will disarm and surprise its readers just as the cardinal did his interviewer, according to a London-based correspondent for German newspapers.
(The Tablet, 19/04/1997) There are as many ways to God as there are men and women", declares Cardinal Ratzinger early on in an interview he gave to Peter Seewald, a German journalist. And a post-Christian reference is conveyed through the title of the 300-page book that resulted, Salz der Erde ("Salt of the Earth"), implying that much of the world is not made of that salt.
The book, which bears Cardinal Ratzinger’s name as its author, takes the form of a dialogue between the cardinal and Seewald, who is highly critical of the Catholic Church. A non-Catholic German publishing house, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, was chosen for this remarkable attempt at illuminating the personality both of the interviewee and the Church to which he belongs.
Cardinal Ratzinger describes the basic aim of his life as "laying bare the real heart of the faith under its coating of various opinions". And the publishers’ venture into unfamiliar Christian territory has proved quite a success: almost 100,000 copies of the German edition have been sold in four months, there is already a French edition, with translations into 12 more languages due, including an English-language one to be published this autumn by St Ignatius Press, San Francisco. The cardinal shares in none of the proceeds.
As prefect of the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he is the twentieth century’s equivalent of Dostoevsky’s "Grand Inquisitor", successor to all those zealous heads of the Holy Office from Conrad of Marburg and the Albigensian crusaders to Torquemada. Pope John Paul II read the book in his hospital bed, we learn, and when visiting him one day, the cardinal naturally wanted to have his own first look at the final text. "Buy your own copy", his boss told him, not willing to part with his, and a more elegant expression of self-praise is hardly possible for a humble author.
Seewald was clearly impressed by the cardinal’s honeyed answers to his sharp questions. A lapsed Catholic, he set out to get the better of his victim. He had, however, the good sense at least to inform himself first by reading Cardinal Ratzinger’s books. He was surprised to find that the man he presumed to be the arch-conservative Panzerkardinal, an authoritarian and intolerant German dogmatist, emerged as a Catholic thinker with an extraordinary capacity for dialogue. That was evident in the subsequent exchanges. For example, referring to the 2,000-year-old dispute between Jews and Christians as to whether the Old Testament is to be understood as a Jewish book or, rather, as a prologue to the Christian New Testament, the cardinal says: "We have to relearn how to read the Bible correctly." This apparently Judaising heresy would have sufficed, a few centuries ago, to send him to the stake.
Has any highly-placed member of the Roman Curia ever appeared so disarmingly open and eager to satisfy his questioner? Ratzinger has held his Roman office since 1981 and consented to the Pope’s request to hold on to it a little longer despite his age – he will be 70 on 16 April – and tiredness from his work-load. But he has also acquired something of that famous Roman cunning, furbizia Romana, which non-Italians, too, absorb through long Vatican residence, coupled with a very detached and down-to-earth appreciation of the universal Church.
There is no Germanic utopian enthusiasm in him, no desire "to construct some beautiful triumphant Church". He is, in fact, trenchantly critical of German Catholicism: "The richest Church in the world, yet with less influence on society than many poorer Churches have in poorer countries." He despises the "German arrogance that looks down on all others as mere slovenly sloggers".
France, to him, is "the most secularised country in the Western world". And what of Anglican Britain, "the apostate darling of the Roman Church", as Cardinal Ratzinger’s questioner calls it? The Church of England, he replies, seems to want to have its cake and eat it, clinging to the Catholic tradition but then creating a new situation on the issue of women priests, by extending the principle of majority voting to matters of the Church’s teaching which it then presumes to settle by the decision of one national Church. In this Vatican perspective, British Catholicism seems not unusually cast in the role of the good but boring elder and non-prodigal son.
But he is no less concerned than his master over the crisis of the faith and of the Church. And we are reminded of how basic to his powerful position is Cardinal Ratzinger’s affinity and rapport with John Paul II. In their frequent meetings they speak German together. The cardinal has come to appreciate the Pope’s "uncomplicated human directness, humour, piety; I felt that here was a man of God with a totally original mind". The Pope-philosopher and his chief ideologue, the cardinal-theologian, have become mutually complementary minds. The Pope is not "interested how things are done in detail", but leaves that to the man he trusts. Cardinal Ratzinger sees himself as the sober, sceptical intellectual looking with respect upon "the visionary force" with which the Pope’s gaze is fixed on a new millennium.
But the cardinal is certainly not without a vision of his own. He is provokingly relaxed in regard to the burning problems of the Church: sexual ethics, the question of celibacy – "not a dogma of the faith, but something that has grown in a human way and clearly contains the dangers for those who undertake it of a headlong fall". By abolishing celibacy, the Roman Church would face no less of a problem in divorced clergy, as the Protestant Churches have discovered. Christian marriage is no easy alternative, the cardinal points out. As he sees it, it seems almost as though the Catholic Church ought to prescribe marriage to its priests as a kind of purgative discipline.
But in the foreseeable future, there is not likely to be a married clergy in the Catholic Church apart from the exceptional cases of the Anglican converts. Vatican thinking seems much preoccupied by them. As for the seemingly related question of the priest shortage, the cardinal explains that "today’s parents have other plans for their sons and daughters" than a vocation in the Church; and that as the numbers of active Christians decline, so does the potential priesthood. "The primary consideration, therefore, is: are there any believers, and only after that – will they produce priests?"
The association of believers on a mass scale characteristic of the period of Christendom is clearly a thing of the past. What will survive are "oases in the desert". "Christianity must rise again like the mustard seed, in insignificantly small groups whose members intensively live in combat with what is evil in the world while demonstrating what is good. They are the salt of the earth, the vessels of the faith." Every cultural turning-point, such as the Gothic age, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, has also produced new forms of the faith.
What has happened since the Second Vatican Council can, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, be described as a cultural revolution, considering the false zeal with which the churches were emptied of their traditional furnishings, and the way that clergy and religious orders put on a new face. That "rashness" is already regretted by many, the cardinal contends. There was, he believes, a "widening gulf" between the Council Fathers, who wanted aggiornamento, updating, and "those who saw reform in terms of discarding ballast, a more diluted faith rather than a more radical one, ‘an instrument of power’ to be used for quite different ends, and other thoughts and ideas".
In a living Church the faith will certainly need to be expressed in new forms, and these can already be discerned. Among significant new religious movements he mentions, with reservations, the Neo-Catechumenate and the Focularini and notes, sadly, that "Greenpeace and Amnesty International seem to have taken over mankind’s concerns, which formerly would have radiated from the impulses of Raphael, Michelangelo or Bach".
Religion in modern society is tolerated, but merely as a subjective experience. But he reminds his interlocutor how St Benedict, too, was an outsider in Roman society, yet what he created "proved to be an ark of survival for Western civilisation". As ever, the chaff will have to be separated from the wheat. And he quotes St Paul (1 Th. 5:19-20): "Do not quench the Spirit, and do not despise prophesying, but test everything; hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil."
The personality of this scholarly and Romanised Bavarian comes alive in this book. He sees himself as an "Augustinian", subscribing to the great African saint’s "credo, ut intelligam" (I believe, in order to understand) rather than Tertullian’s "credo quia absurdum" (I believe because it is absurd). "I am a bit of a Platonist in the sense that the remembrance of God is implanted in man." Thomas More, John Henry Newman, Dietrich Bonhoeffer are his great models. He finds it difficult to love mankind in general, wondering sometimes whether the Creator has not allowed his creature too much freedom "to become dangerous rather than loveable".
What makes for his own happiness in the Church is "the remarkable fact that an institution with so many human weaknesses and failures has maintained its continuity and that I am part of this community and part of the living and the dead, and find in it the essence of my life".
One question troubling him intellectually is that evil is so powerful in the world, however more powerful we believe God to be. Evidently God did want the Redeemer to be crucified as one who has failed. But why? It is touching that even the prefect of the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation is confounded by this question.
There is nothing in what he has done in his 26 years at the Vatican that Cardinal Ratzinger would like to see undone, although he admits that, with hindsight, he would have done some things differently – he doesn’t say which. The teaching ban imposed on Hans Küng, perhaps? "I appreciate that he does his own thing, according to his conscience, but he ought not to claim the Church’s seal of approval for that as well, but stand by the fact that in some essential questions he has reached other, wholly personal decisions." Anyway, "the imposition of a period of silence ought to do no harm to any of us".
He is satisfied with having put a stop to liberation theology in Latin America. "Religion must not be turned into the handmaiden of political ideologies. The autonomy of Christianity must be defended against the armed enthusiasts of world revolution, however nobly intentioned they may be."
The Catechism of the Catholic Church has given the right kind of impulses, he believes, on bioethical questions; and he is confident of having taken the right path in strengthening the links between the centre and the bishops’ conferences.
Cardinal Ratzinger is by no means conscious of being the all-powerful Inquisitor. His powers, he says, are very limited, allowing him only "to appeal" to the bishops; and they "in turn must plead with the theologians and superiors of religious orders". He is critical of the ideology that reduces everything to matters of power. "If belonging to the Church has any meaning, it is only because she gives us eternal life, and thus real life."
He regards power as a relic of Marxism and is clearly incapable of seeing it as an ever-present and corrupting factor in history, to which the Church in its human aspect is not immune. In someone with a great mind and humble faith in God’s ways with the world, this seems an odd blind spot.
A Chat with Ratzinger