The Vatican's Enforcer

http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives/041699/041699a.htm

The Vatican�s enforcer
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
NCR Staff

Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born in rural Bavaria on April 16, exactly 72 years ago. Perhaps it is fate that the day was Holy Saturday and his parents were Joseph and Mary -- eerie foreshadowing for a child who would grow up to become a stark sign of contradiction in the world�s largest Christian church.

Like so much else about Ratzinger, how far to press that biblical parallel is contested. Some say his 18 years as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church�s guardian of orthodoxy, have been the intellectual salvation of Roman Catholicism in a time of confusion and compromise.

Others believe Ratzinger will be remembered as the architect of John Paul�s internal Kulturkampf, intimidating and punishing thinkers in order to restore a model of church -- clerical, dogmatic and rule-bound -- many hoped had been swept away by the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 assembly of bishops that sought to renew Catholicism and open it to the world. Ratzinger�s campaign bears comparison to the anti-modernist drive in the early part of the century or Pius XII�s crackdown in the 1950s, critics say, but is even more disheartening because it followed a moment of such optimism and new life.

At the most basic level, many Catholics cannot escape the sense that Ratzinger�s exercise of ecclesial power is not what Jesus had in mind.

Beneath the competing analyses and divergent views, this much is certain: Ratzinger has drawn lines in the sand and wielded the tools of his office on many who cross those lines. Whether necessary prophylaxis or a naked power play, his efforts to curb dissent have left the church more bruised, more divided, than at any point since the close of Vatican II.

Those divisions have made Ratzinger a lightning rod. An anecdote from the mid-1980s underscores the point.

In May 1985, Ratzinger notified Franciscan Fr. Leonardo Boff that he was to be silenced. Boff, a Brazilian, was a leading figure in liberation theology, a Third World theological movement that seeks to place the church on the side of the poor. Boff accepted Ratzinger�s verdict and withdrew to a Franciscan monastery in Petr�polis, outside Rio de Janeiro.

Some days later, a sympathetic Brazilian bishop visited Boff to make an unusual proposal: Boff should study all of Ratzinger�s writings, including the just-published Ratzinger Report (a book-length interview with an Italian journalist in which Ratzinger voiced gloomy views of church and world), and then draw up an indictment accusing the cardinal of heresy. It would be a theological form of fighting fire with fire.

The conversation was reported by Harvard theologian Harvey Cox in his 1988 book on the Boff case. According to Cox, Boff said he wouldn�t subject anyone else to the kind of inquiry he had faced.

Nevertheless, the fact that a Catholic bishop could seriously envision pressing charges of heresy against the church�s top doctrinal officer -- even if it was more a political gambit than a sober theological judgment -- illustrates Ratzinger�s remarkable power to polarize.

His record includes:

Theologians disciplined, such as Fr. Charles Curran, an American moral theologian who advocates a right to public dissent from official church teaching; Fr. Matthew Fox, an American known for his work on creation spirituality; Sr. Ivone Gebara, a Brazilian whose thinking blends liberation theology with environmental concerns; and Fr. Tissa Balasuriya, a Sri Lankan interested in how Christianity can be expressed through Eastern concepts;
Movements blocked, such as liberation theology and, more recently, religious pluralism (the drive to affirm other religions on their own terms);
Progressive bishops hobbled, including Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, reproached by Rome for his tolerance of ministry to homosexuals and his involvement in progressive political causes, and Bishop Dom Pedro Casald�liga of Sao F�lix, Brazil, criticized for his political engagement beyond the borders of his own diocese;
Episcopal conferences brought to heel on issues such as inclusive language and their own teaching authority;
The borders of infallibility expanded, to include such disparate points as the ban on women�s ordination and the invalidity of ordinations in the Anglican church.
Indeed, it would be difficult to find a Catholic controversy in the past 20 years that did not somehow involve Joseph Ratzinger. Part of that is the nature of the job, but no other 20th-century prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- perhaps none ever -- has enjoyed Ratzinger�s high profile or his centrality to the life of the church. He and John Paul are men who believe that ideas count, and Ratzinger has prosecuted what he considers dangerous ideas with vigor. Whether his tactics and ironclad sense of certainty are more dangerous than the ideas he has attempted to suppress is a question that cuts to the core of some of the deepest divisions in the church.

After extensive interviews with leading Catholics, both friends and foes of Ratzinger from the United States and abroad, and after digesting thousands of pages of his writings and writings about him, three key insights about Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -- Ratzinger the Vatican official, if not the man -- seemed to surface repeatedly:

He sees his work as a defense of human freedom;
He is convinced that he and John Paul are the rightful heirs of Vatican II;
He believes time is on his side.
It�s important to try to understand Ratzinger on his own terms, not merely as a historical exercise, but because believers who see the church as he does -- �Ratzinger Catholics� -- are likely to be a force long after the cardinal himself is gone.

* * *
The year was 1987, and Jesuit Fr. Joseph Fessio was not in the best frame of mind for a reunion in Rome with his mentor and old friend, Joseph Ratzinger.

Fessio had sought out Ratzinger when the latter was a professor of dogmatic theology in Regensburg, Germany, in the 1970s, and under his direction wrote a dissertation on Hans Urs von Balthasar (a Swiss Catholic philosopher/theologian, and a hero to those who believe that liberals hijacked the church on a false reading of Vatican II).

The two men stayed in touch after Fessio returned to the United States and began working at the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco. Fessio�s pugnacious style did not always endear him to his colleagues, and by 1987 he had been canned as the director of the university�s St. Ignatius Institute.

Fessio was still director of the Ignatius Press, a publishing house. Its signature title was The Ratzinger Report, which sold 50,000 copies for the press.

The university had previously decided it didn�t want to be affiliated with Ignatius Press, which likewise had no ties to the San Francisco archdiocese. That left Fessio to explain to Ratzinger that his publishing house -- the one to whom the cardinal had signed over all his American rights -- had no structural ties to the Catholic church at all.

Ratzinger, according to Fessio, listened sympathetically to the story, including Fessio�s decision to incorporate separately from both the university and the archdiocese. At the end, Ratzinger�s eyes twinkled as he said: �Ah, because of this double independence, you can remain orthodox.�

As a joke, the remark works better in German, but it speaks volumes about Ratzinger the man: his graciousness, his quick wit and, clearly, his concern with orthodoxy.

Joseph Ratzinger is, by most accounts, a charmer in person. The silver hair and dark eyes that look so piercing in photographs have a different effect up close; he seems more avuncular, almost frumpy, with a coy smile. Yet he is also reserved, often preferring to use the formal German term Sie rather than the familiar du in conversation, even with people he�s known for decades. Friends say Ratzinger has a wry sense of humor.

He is, above all, an intellectual. He completed his doctoral work in Germany on Augustine in 1953, then published his postdoctoral dissertation on Bonaventure in 1957.

He made the circuit of famous German theological faculties, receiving appointments in Bonn in 1959, M�nster in 1963, T�bingen in 1966 and Regensburg in 1969. He was a peritus, or theological adviser at Vatican II. Ratzinger�s area was systematic theology, and he�s said to believe his best writing was on the subject of eschatology (the doctrine of the last things).

Paul VI made him archbishop of Munich in 1977, and on Nov. 25, 1981, John Paul II brought him to Rome as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- formerly known as the Holy Office and before that as the Holy Inquisition.

Virtually everyone concedes that Ratzinger is a trenchant thinker. �I think most theologians would find him a delightful dialogue partner -- if he didn�t have the bureaucratic power to silence them or get them fired,� said Jesuit Fr. Thomas J. Reese, who interviewed Ratzinger for his 1996 book Inside the Vatican.

Former students and colleagues are full of praise. �He is an extraordinarily refined, calm and open-minded person,� said Archbishop William J. Levada of San Francisco, who worked on Ratzinger�s staff in the early 1980s. �He can listen and synthesize a group of people�s thought and find much of value in almost anything that is said. He has the uncanny ability to articulate those things we meant but forgot to say,� Levada told NCR in February.

Ratzinger is also, by most accounts, genuinely pious. Those who have traveled with him tell stories of watching him steal away to pray the breviary. The liturgy is an abiding concern for him. Ratzinger raised eyebrows when he said in 1997 that the way Paul VI imposed the new Mass after Vatican II created a �tragic breach� in the tradition.

�I am convinced that the crisis in the church that we are experiencing today is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy ...� he wrote, arguing that too much about the new rite had been dreamed up at the desks of experts and forced on the church. In a 1998 interview, he said he hoped for a new generation of bishops who would restore Latin to the liturgy and curb the �wild excesses� of the post-conciliar era.

Such plain-spoken comments outrage some, but Vaticanologists give Ratzinger credit for having the courage of his convictions. It is a refreshing contrast, they say, from the ambiguous diplomatic language in which curialists normally couch their pronouncements.

His bluntness is more than a matter of personal style. It reflects Ratzinger�s deep commitment to -- some might say, obsession with -- truth.

To stand for absolute truths

Ratzinger�s views on truth and freedom were forged in the crucible of World War II. As a seminarian, he was briefly enrolled in the Hitler Youth in the early 1940s, though he was never a member of the Nazi party. In 1943 he was conscripted into an antiaircraft unit guarding a BMW plant outside Munich. Later Ratzinger was sent to Austria�s border with Hungary to erect tank traps. After being shipped back to Bavaria, he deserted. When the war ended, he was an American prisoner of war.

Under Hitler, Ratzinger says he watched the Nazis twist and distort the truth. Their lies about Jews, about genetics, were more than academic exercises. People died by the millions because of them. The church�s service to society, Ratzinger concluded, is to stand for absolute truths that function as boundary markers: Move about within these limits, but outside them lies disaster.

Later reflection on the Nazi experience also left Ratzinger with a conviction that theology must either bind itself to the church, with its creed and teaching authority, or it becomes the plaything of outside forces -- the state in a totalitarian system or secular culture in Western liberal democracies. In a widely noted 1986 lecture in Toronto, Ratzinger put it this way: �A church without theology impoverishes and blinds, while a churchless theology melts away into caprice.�

The war years likewise gave Ratzinger a strong sense of the �otherness� of the church, a contrarian impulse that to be Christian is to resist the prevailing social current. Ratzinger once expressed the point in typically pithy fashion: �Where there is no dualism, there is totalitarianism.� He meant that where the church does not offer an alternative value system, where it sells out to the state or the culture, it gives up its ability to protect freedom. It�s an outlook that reflects the experience of oppression, both under the Nazis and later under the communists who harassed Ratzinger�s Catholic colleagues and friends in East Germany.

His analysis is, of course, open to criticism on many levels. For one thing, the alleged possession of eternal truth hardly immunized German-speaking Catholics against fascism; it was the Catholic bishops of Austria, for example, who instructed their flocks to vote in favor of Anschluss with Hitler.

For another, it�s a far cry from recognizing the immutability of basic truths -- that genocide is evil, for instance -- to insisting upon very specific claims such as the impossibility of ordaining women. The way Ratzinger seems to slip so easily from one to the other has led to charges that he obscures a �hierarchy� of truths, lumping foundational principles together with highly debatable hypotheses derived from those principles, and then striking a �take it or leave it� stance with respect to the whole set.

The approach has been derided as �papal fundamentalism� by Jesuit Fr. John Coleman, a sociologist and theologian at Loyola Marymount University, and as �magisterial maximalism� by Fr. Richard McCormick, a moral theologian at Notre Dame. This approach is embodied in such documents as the 1990 �Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian,� where Ratzinger demands assent to the magisterium even when its statements aren�t proclaimed as infallible, such as the ban on women priests; asserts that the magisterium can authoritatively interpret the natural law, in contrast to Curran and others who believe it should be open to reasoned debate; and says that the documents of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are covered by the pope�s magisterium.

Ratzinger has suggested that those who seek to alter church teaching on what he regards as matters of revelation are attempting to substitute raw political power for God�s will. It�s a step he believes reaches its logical end in tyranny.

Fessio puts the point succinctly: �The Nazis helped him understand the liberal mind. Liberals are as closed to genuine dialogue as fascists.�

Only by grasping this core conviction, that slavery begins when power dislodges truth, is it possible to understand how Ratzinger�s supporters can insist he has not been a repressive force. Far from it, they say -- he has simply marked off the intellectual boundaries beyond which the church loses itself and imperils freedom.

�I do not believe any credible case could be made for him as an authoritarian,� said Dominican Fr. Augustine Di Noia, theological adviser for the U.S. bishops conference. �Faith is not the suppression of intelligence, but its exaltation. The fundamental divide between dissenting or revisionist theologians and the mode of John Paul II and Ratzinger lies along this fault. Ratzinger is stating points which would have been totally noncontroversial even 50 years ago,� Di Noia said.

Di Noia and others note that Ratzinger has never attempted to impose his own theological system on the church. He is certainly not trying to force Thomism down anyone�s throat, Di Noia observes, since Ratzinger himself is an Augustinian. On the rare occasions when he has had to rein someone in, Di Noia says, it is because �a clear line in the sand� was crossed.

For those who have found themselves on the wrong side of one of those lines, however, Ratzinger�s logic doesn�t always seem so clear.

* * *
Fr. Charles Curran says he remembers how he first got wind that the Congregation for the Doctrine o