NEWS FEATURE/PROFILE: Pope Benedict XVI: Humility and the Man

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Seen through the gauzy lens of history, Joseph Ratzinger’s arrival in the world borders on the mystical. He was born the day before Easter, the second son of deeply religious parents named Joseph and Mary. Within four hours of his first breath, he had been baptized. Seventy-eight years later, […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Seen through the gauzy lens of history, Joseph Ratzinger’s arrival in the world borders on the mystical. He was born the day before Easter, the second son of deeply religious parents named Joseph and Mary. Within four hours of his first breath, he had been baptized.

Seventy-eight years later, Ratzinger has been reintroduced as Pope Benedict XVI, spiritual leader to 1.1 billion Roman Catholics.


If his selection by the church’s cardinals carries the hint of providence, it was surely less of a certainty to Ratzinger himself.

Friends, colleagues and the new pontiff’s own writings suggest he has been a reluctant participant in his journey to prominence, from respected professor to ranking prelate with immense power.

As far back as 1977, when Pope Paul VI appointed him archbishop of Munich in Ratzinger’s native Germany, the bookish priest from Bavaria nearly balked, writing later that he had “grave doubts” about his pastoral ability and health.

Four years later, when Pope John Paul II summoned him to Rome to serve as guardian of Catholic doctrine, Ratzinger, then a cardinal, again questioned his qualifications. John Paul, Ratzinger wrote, convinced him he was up to the task.

The cardinal would remain in that role for 24 tumultuous years, becoming John Paul’s closest adviser and alter ego in matters of church law and faith. While the position made Ratzinger a lightning rod for criticism from those who found John Paul’s policies too conservative, it gave him enormous sway in the lives of priests, theologians and ordinary Catholics across the world.

Three times during his tenure, according to friends, Ratzinger asked John Paul for his release from Rome.

Widely acknowledged as a philosopher and theologian of great heft, well versed in both classic texts and modern thought, the cardinal wanted to return to teaching and writing.


“His great love is scholarship,” said the Rev. Joseph Fessio, a former student of the new pope and now provost at Ave Maria University in Naples, Fla. “His desire has always been to study, to read, to teach, but he sacrificed a brilliant scholarly career to serve the church.”

Fessio, who has maintained a close friendship with his teacher, said that while Ratzinger never complained about John Paul’s refusals to let him retire, his eagerness to resume a quiet existence away from the Vatican demonstrated a humility that permeates every part of his life.

“In his first words when he greeted the crowds in St. Peter’s Square after his election April 19, he called himself a humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord,” Fessio said. “That’s not just talk. He means it.”

Benedict learned that humility early in a life molded by fervent Catholicism, the financial struggles of his family and the tyranny of wartime Germany, friends and acquaintances said.

Bavaria is a picturesque region of mountains and valleys on Germany’s southern edge. Geographically and culturally removed from the country’s more reserved big cities in the north, it is home to a robust and earthy form of Catholicism.

“This is a land of a popular Catholicism lived in small country villages and parishes, of processions for Mary, festivals of saints, prayers in the family home,” said John-Peter Pham, a former Vatican diplomat who knows Benedict and who interviewed him for the book “Heirs of the Fishermen: Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession.”


“There’s a Catholicism of the heart, as opposed to the cold, cerebral Catholicism practiced elsewhere in Germany,” Pham said.

Against that backdrop, the birth of Joseph Alois Ratzinger in the Bavarian village of Marktl am Inn was a doubly special event for his family. Not only had Joseph and Mary Ratzinger added a second son _ they also had one daughter _ but the child was born on Holy Saturday, April 16, 1927. The parents had him baptized that day.

“That my life from the beginning was in this way immersed in the Easter mystery has always filled me with gratitude,” the future pope wrote in his autobiography. Its English translation was published as “Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977.”

The village didn’t remain home for long. His father’s work as a constable _ and later, tension with the Nazis _ kept the family moving frequently, Benedict has said.

The Ratzingers ultimately settled outside the small city of Traunstein, within 20 miles of Salzburg, Austria, the birthplace of Mozart. Music became an integral part of their lives and remains so today.

Benedict reportedly plays the piano every night before he goes to bed. The pope’s older brother, the Rev. Georg Ratzinger, is the former music director of a cathedral in Regensburg, Germany.


But religion remained the family’s foundation, Benedict said in “Salt of the Earth,” a book-length interview published in 1997.

The future pope’s father attended Mass three times each Sunday, and the Ratzingers went to church daily when they could. The dinner table was a time for prayer. Evenings they prayed the rosary.

Young Joseph Ratzinger initially wanted to become a housepainter, but a visit to Traunstein by Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich, planted another seed.

“With his imposing purple, he impressed me all the more,” Ratzinger said later. “I said, `I would like to become something like that.”

Ratzinger enrolled in a seminary at age 12, and while he said he experienced no “lightning-like moment of illumination” directing him to the priesthood, he understood God had a plan for him.

The rise of Adolf Hitler and World War II nearly derailed it.

To his children, the elder Joseph Ratzinger railed against the Nazi Party, which came to power in 1933, the future pope said in “Salt of the Earth.” But public opposition to National Socialism was not something many Germans, including the Ratzingers, were willing to risk.


In 1941, 14-year-old Joseph, like all German teens, was ordered into the Hitler Youth. In his writings, he said he was an unwilling participant and did not attend meetings for long. Two years later, as the tide of war turned against Germany, he was drafted into the army and sent to Munich to man an anti-aircraft battery.

He remained there until September 1944, when he was transferred to the Austria-Hungary border. There he built embankments and dug tank traps. A kindly officer arranged his transfer back to the area of Traunstein after only two months, he has said. Once home, he promptly deserted, risking summary execution.

In the spring of 1945, American soldiers took him prisoner, and he remained in a crowded POW camp for six weeks. On June 19, 1945, he was released, having escaped the war without firing a shot.

But the war, and particularly his country’s murder of 6 million Jews, remained with him. Those who have studied Benedict said the horrors of the Holocaust led to his partnership with John Paul in working toward closer relations with Jews, and he is said to have been an architect of a December 2000 document expressing remorse on behalf of Catholics for anti-Jewish attitudes that led to “deplorable acts of violence.”

“His victimhood under Hitler made him all the more compassionate for other victims of dictatorial abuse,” said Mark Miravalle, who has met the pope and who teaches theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio.

Free of the war, Ratzinger was also free to study. In November of 1945 he re-entered the seminary, devouring not only theology texts but books on philosophy, history and the arts. Languages became a second course of study, and in addition to his native German, he ultimately gained fluency in Italian, English, French, Spanish and Latin. He is said to be eloquent in all of those tongues.


Newark, N.J., Archbishop John J. Myers called the pope an attentive listener and flawless speaker.

“He speaks almost in perfectly outlined paragraphs,” Myers said.

Ordained a priest in 1951 with his brother, Ratzinger received a doctorate in theology from the University of Munich two years later. Already considered a brilliant student, he went on to become a widely respected professor at colleges in Bonn, Munster, Tubingen and Regensburg.

Like many peers at the time, Ratzinger believed the church was in crisis. Society was becoming more secular. Catholicism was losing ground. The Vatican was too steeped in secrecy.

He wrote that the church yoked its members with “reins that are too tight.”

The groundbreaking Second Vatican Council opened in 1962 with the aim of modernizing Catholicism. At only 35, Ratzinger played an important supporting role at the council, serving as chief theological adviser to the cardinal of Cologne, Joseph Frings.

Vatican II closed in 1965, bringing considerable change to an institution in which transformation is measured in centuries. The council permitted services to be conducted in local languages instead of the traditional Latin and allowed women and lay ministers a bigger role.

But for some Catholics, the changes wrought by Vatican II were not enough. Like the turbulent protest movement in the United States in the 1960s, student protests roiled campuses across Germany. Ratzinger, then a professor at Tubingen, was appalled.


“I saw a new spirit creeping in, a spirit in which fanatical ideologies made use of the spirit of Christianity, and it was there that the lie really became evident to me,” he said in “Salt of the Earth.” “I knew what was at stake: Anyone who wanted to remain a progressive in this context had to give up his integrity.”

Benedict’s critics argue his disdain for the protesters, many of whom promoted Marxist ideas, transformed him into an arch-conservative, hardening his positions on the role of women in the church, marriage of priests and divorce.

Fessio, the Ave Maria University provost, counters that Benedict remained the same while the world changed around him.

“He was against too great a rigidity before the council and too great a laxity after the council, but he didn’t change his opinion,” Fessio said. “The church changed and society changed.”

Benedict himself suggests his position did evolve, calling his fervor for reform at Vatican II “the pathos of a young man.”

However it emerged, the pope’s philosophy is simple, Fessio said. Some lines cannot be crossed.


“If we really believe that God has entrusted us with a message that only he could have written, then our duty is not to try to improve it or reform it. Our duty is to deliver it,” Fessio said.

If Ratzinger’s positions were becoming unpopular with moderates, they were endearing him to the Vatican. Four years after Ratzinger’s 1977 appointment to the Diocese of Munich and elevation to cardinal, John Paul named him prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor office to the Holy Inquisition.

The congregation, charged with maintaining the purity of Catholic belief, vets all Vatican statements and punishes offenders against the faith. It is a political minefield, and Benedict knew it.

“From the very beginning,” the future pope said, “it was clear to me that during my time in Rome I would have to carry out a lot of unpleasant tasks.”

No other period of the former cardinal’s life has generated more criticism than his tenure as prefect.

Under his leadership, the congregation cracked down on liberation theology, a movement in which the church takes on a more political role as a champion of the poor. In a widely publicized case, one of the movement’s leading figures, Brazilian priest Leonardo Boff, was silenced for a year.


Those silenced by the church are prohibited _ at the risk of excommunication _ from expressing opinions the Vatican deems heretical.

Dozens of other priests and theologians were censured, silenced or otherwise disciplined for diverging from church doctrine in their writing or teaching.

In particular, a document that emerged from Cardinal Ratzinger’s office in 2000 was poorly received. In it, he branded other Christian denominations “gravely deficient,” shocking religious leaders across the world.

Though Ratzinger’s beliefs were in lockstep with those of John Paul, many reform-minded Catholics laid the blame squarely on the cardinal. In recent years, he was dubbed “Cardinal No,” “God’s Rottweiler” and “the Panzer Cardinal.”

Leonard Swidler calls Benedict the personification of John Paul’s “dark side” _ a “hatchet man” who suppresses progressive thought.

“It’s possible his new office may call forth a new response on his part, but I have a deep fear in the pit of my stomach,” said Swidler, a Temple University theology professor who first met the future pope in the 1960s. “He has a reputation for being a very hard-line, authoritarian kind of person.”


Benedict’s supporters call that characterization flat-out wrong.

“I would challenge anyone who uses those terms to continue using them with any kind of integrity after having spoken with him,” said the Rev. Michael Jackels, the newly installed bishop of Wichita, Kan. Jackels worked under Cardinal Ratzinger for eight years at the Vatican.

“From what I’ve seen, his discussions are always presented in a gentle and inoffensive way,” Jackels said. “There’s nothing in-your-face about it. Even when he has encountered dissenters, I have never heard him raise his voice, speak in anger or lose his temper.”

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Benedict, for his part, has remained mute on the criticism. That, too, friends say, is part of his character.

“He is, of course, aware of the criticism, but he has an attitude of verbal nonviolence,” said the Rev. Hermann Schaluck, the former general superior of the Franciscan order and now national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Germany. “He never would retaliate. He handles it with simple silence. He is much less polarizing than some of his critics.”

Since the April 2 death of John Paul, the former cardinal’s gentle side has been on full display. Presiding at his predecessor’s funeral, Benedict became emotional as he recalled John Paul’s final blessing.

In his first days as pope, he has called for a continuation of the work that made John Paul so popular. He said he would seek more dialogue with other faiths and Christian denominations. He pledged to reach out to youth.


And while he is not expected to be the energetic traveler John Paul was, those who know him say he has much to offer.

“He is not a media star like his predecessor,” Schaluck said, “but he has a deep spirituality. He is intelligent. And he has messages that are hopeful. I would say that pleasant surprises are ahead.”

(Mark Mueller is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. Star-Ledger staff writer Steve Chambers contributed to this report.)

MO RB END MUELLER

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