Joseph Ratzinger, better known to most people as Pope Benedict XVI, died in Rome on the last day of 2022 at the age of 95. He will be buried there tomorrow. His status as a major figure on the world scene has guaranteed that his death receive wide notice and comment, and you have probably already read at least one of the journalistic death notices, which range from short squibs to long-prepared obituaries of thousands of words. In adding my widow’s mite, I am keenly aware that I am no theologian nor an expert on ecclesiastical politics or even a member of the former pope’s church. But I owe a great debt to this man for one of his fields of accomplishment that I find mentioned only in passing if at all in what I have read so far: his role as an intellectual and a scholar. I’ll come to that in a minute.
Holding the principal leadership role in a large and complicated international organization with vast financial operations, political dealings, complex diplomacy and endless monitoring of personnel is hardly conducive to either an unremitting focus on personal sanctification—the traditional role of the Church’s commanding ascetic institutions through history—or a deep and unworldly immersion in academic scholarship, which is in many respects the secular heir to medieval asceticism in the post-Christian world. It would be unreasonable to expect that the historical papacy could reveal many saints or scholars. Of course if your definition of a saint is a “canonized person”, the odds get better. But it must be hard to concentrate on holiness if you have to be concentrating on fixing leaky church roofs most of the time. Early Church history is full of people like Augustine who actually tried to hide out from ecclesiastical search committees, having to be metaphorically dragged kicking and screaming into episcopal orders.
Just about a decade ago word leaked out that Pope Benedict was planning to resign. The very thought of a papal resignation was unthinkable, but the fact of it was not unprecedented. It was then that much of the world heard for the first time of an obscure Pope Celestin V, who resigned after a tenure of less than a year in 1294. If you had already heard of Celestin, it is probably because you had read Dante’s Inferno, in which he is one of the first actual historical personages to be introduced. Virgil and Dante have barely set out on their infernal pilgrimage. There in Limbo, Hell’s waiting room so to speak, are the Trimmers, the morally inert, the lukewarms, the neither fish nor fowls. Their mingled blood and tears drip down to attract stinking worms around their feet. Not nice. Dante gives us only one representative human member of these tormented sadsacks. He recognizes “the shade of him who, through cowardice, made the great refusal [gran rifiuto].” In reality, Celestin V was anything but a coward. He was an octogenarian holy hermit, and it didn’t take him long to conclude that the chair of Peter was, in that age, no place for a seriously religious person. The cardinals agreed; they didn’t elect another one for quite a while. Dante didn’t really seem to know squat about Celestin V. He was simply furious that Boniface VIII, who he thought was a really bad guy, was able to leap into the breach. Much of the displeasure of the many critics of Benedict’s resignation came from a similar source—fear of what would come next. The evaluation of papal elections, like those of Supreme Court appointments, are mainly political.
I am aware that Benedict was criticized by many as a hide-bound traditionalist trapped in yesterday’s moral theology. But in resigning he struck a powerful blow for modernity. The idea that the pope is a spiritual hostage-monarch who must hold up his orb in his palsied hand until dementia or prostate cancer finally carries him off lacks theological warrant, common sense, or simple Christian charity.
For centuries the clerical orders of the Roman Church provided a seedbed of erudition and scholarship indispensable for our cultural construction; but the chariness with which the cardinals have elevated men of outstanding intellect and scholarly achievement to the papacy is a puzzle to outsiders. When Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury resigned in 2010, it caused considerable hand-wringing among Anglicans. But he was a brilliant academic and scholar, and as he went on to become the head of a Cambridge college it was possible to regard the move, at least by me, as an episode in an upward trajectory. But of course I am a college professor, which is what Benedict also was so many years ago. That’s why I may have “known” him before many of you did. I knew him as Professor Joseph Ratzinger, the author of a brilliant book* about St. Bonaventure’s theology of history. This is one of those books that—granting a preliminary interest in its admittedly arcane subject matter—simply knocks you off your feet. There are only a few books the reading of which actually changes the direction of a scholar’s work. To give an intelligible account of this one would take up far more space than I have, and test my readers’ patience to the breaking point. But for me Ratzinger’s account of Bonaventure’s thought was such a book. Without it I hardly would have dipped my toe into the subject of Franciscan studies, which has been one of my major fields of study and sources of intellectual satisfaction.
I had no idea who Ratzinger was, of course. I didn’t particularly want to know. One of the joys of academic study is the encounter with the minds and erudition of other people a thousand miles or a thousand years away, completely independent of personal or biographical speculation. He had been pope for two or three years before I tumbled to the amazing fact he was the same person as my earlier scholarly mentor. It seems unfortunate to me that practically everything I have so far read about his life in the notices of his death concentrates on ecclesiastical politics, usually casting him in the implicitly dubious role of a “conservative” or a “traditionalist” succeeded and countered by a more with-it Francis I. It is not necessary to enter into questions of ecclesiastical politics to recognize the merit of his scholarship, or the value of the life he had to abandon in response to the higher call of duty.
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*Geschichtstheologie des heiligen Bonaventura (1959); English translation The Theology of History in Saint Bonaventure (1971). This was his Habilitationsschrift (roughly doctoral thesis), and it is enough to make me blush as the thought of my own.
