Finally, the name Benedict reflects the last Pope Benedict -- a moderate who came after a fairly hard-line predecessor. I believe that this older man sees himself in that light. Deciding to move away from the temptation to become Pope John Paul III was a wonderful move to end the "cult" of the late pope, who will finally be allowed to rest in peace.
Edward Vacek, S.J. is professor of moral theology at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts:
In his homily before the conclave, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger insisted that the unchanging truth of the Catholic Church must kick against the contemporary world. The Church, he demanded, must reject "aggressive secularism" and the "dictatorship of relativism." Those are fighting words.
While I have often found Cardinal Ratzinger's writings in his role as secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to be somewhat insensitive or harsh, I have long joined him in my writing and in my classrooms in the fight against a mindless relativism and against what I see as a sort of secularism in the Church.
Recently, someone reminded Cardinal Ratzinger that an earlier Pope Benedict, this one Benedict IX who lived in the eleventh century, was the 145th, 147th and 149th pope. The father of Benedict IX bribed people to make his son pope, but Benedict was then deposed. After the next pope, he again was elected, and this time he voluntarily resigned in exchange for the promise of a large sum of money and a wife. That did not work out, and once again he was elected pope. He was deposed one last time by the Council of Sutri. After that, he repented and lived a life of asceticism and virtue. Cardinal Ratzinger reflected for a minute on this triple papacy of Benedict IX. With reason guided by hope, he pointed out that this case shows the Church does not depend on the competence of its pope. Rather, it depends on God, who is bigger than the papacy.
Similarly, the cardinal once told the story of Napoleon who declared that he would destroy the Church. On hearing that, one of the cardinals at that time replied: "Not even we have managed that." Our Benedict retold such a story in a spirit of hope, the hope that God works with imperfect instruments. This spirit of hope enabled the young theologian Ratzinger to describe the Holy Office as thoroughly corrupt in the way it treated people, yet then as Cardinal Ratzinger to accept the pope's request that he become the head of that same office. His hope was and is that God will prevail. In his first remarks as Benedict XVI he repeated that sentiment, saying God knows how to work with inadequate instruments.
All of us need that kind of hope. Pope Benedict XVI has that hope, and so should we. Is he conservative or progressive? An avuncular gentleman or a dogmatic "enforcer"? A complicated aristocrat or a "simple, humble worker"? There is some truth in each of these descriptions. One of Cardinal Ratzinger's more striking maxims is: If you don't have dualism, you have totalitarianism. I think that means we need "both/and." Thus, for him, if you don't have the Church's prophetic opposition, you get what he calls the dictatorship of relativism. His chosen role is to oppose various elements of the contemporary world in roughly the same way he and his family opposed Nazism.
The word "dualism" is infelicitous, but we can use it to say there was a sort of dualism or emphasis on "both/and" at the Second Vatican Council. On the one hand, there is the strand that Cardinal Ratzinger most emphasizes: "ressourcement" -- that we must go back to the Church's origins, to the early teachings, to the foundations. Hence this movement is not ashamed to think of itself, in contrast to contemporary sensibilities, as "foundationalist" or even "fundamentalist." Those like Cardinal Ratzinger who emphasize this strand do not mean going back to the traditions of our grandparents, but rather to the traditions of the early Church of the first few centuries. They find life there.
On the other hand, in the Second Vatican Council there was also an emphasis on John XXIII's "aggiornamento," openness to all that is good in the present world. Everyone who emphasizes this strand gets a thrill when hearing the opening lines of Pope Paul VI's 1965 pastoral constitution "The Church in the Modern World" (Gaudium et Spes), namely that "the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of this age" are "the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the followers of Christ." Open wide the windows, and let the contemporary fresh air in.
It remains to be seen which of these two emphases Benedict XVI will embrace. In the view of Cardinal Ratzinger, however, not all the air that Vatican II let in was fresh. Rather, a lot of it was polluted. In his Good Friday prayer this year, he went so far as to say that there was "filth" in the Church. Cardinal Ratzinger has emphasized the return to origins, even to the point of saying that a reduction in numbers would be fine if the Church would go back to the basics.
What are we to make of all this? First, it is important to recognize that no single description will define this papacy, just as no single description described the tornado that was John Paul II. Second, we cannot predict the future, but hope is not about predictions. After all, who would have guessed that the young Joseph Ratzinger, who seemed to emphasize a readiness to go forward and whose dissertation was rejected for being too subjective and relativistic, would turn out to be Cardinal Ratzinger, a fierce opponent of subjectivism and relativism? Third, this Church is our home, and we are already where we belong. And fourth, we can join Benedict XVI in saying that ultimately we place our trust in God and not in princes, no matter how perfect or imperfect the prince is. Because that is so, we can gladly gather around the earthly table and sing songs of gratitude to our God.
