EuropeAnalysis

Pope Benedict: A complex riddle who many Germans remain ambivalent towards

For critics he was a naive and vain man and a chronically poor judge of character

A portrait of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is seen near the altar at the Cathedral of Regensburg, southern Germany. The death of the former Pope was announced by the Vatican on Saturday. Photograph: Florian Cazeres/AFP via Getty Images

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Derek Scally
Sat Dec 31 2022 - 12:29

When Joseph Ratzinger became pope in 2005, his Bavarian birth place embraced what wags dubbed the “Marktl economy”.

Benedict XVI fridge magnets and postcards popped up almost overnight around Marktl am Inn, a pretty village of 2,700 near the Austrian border. A plaque appeared on an adjacent house, quickly renovated and turned into a museum, marking where “Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger” was born on April 16th, 1927. As visitors arrived, the Leukert family bakery began a roaring trade in sweet-dough Papst Mützen or pope hats.

On a recent summer visit, though, no one seemed particularly interested in the former pope.

“We don’t sell the pope hats any more, haven’t done for some time,” said the bakery saleswoman, visibly surprised by the request for a Papst Mütze, “there’s just no demand any more.”

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In death as in life, people here in Bavaria and around Germany remain ambivalent towards Joseph Ratzinger.

For most, the man who inspired a legendary 2005 Bild tabloid cover, “We are Pope!” and led a triumphant return to his homeland a year later remained a complex riddle. The late cardinal Joachim Meisner, former archbishop of Cologne, called the German pope “the Mozart of theology, smarter than 10 professors and yet pious like a first communion child”.

To the end, Joseph Ratzinger’s faith was inspired by the lush Bavarian countryside and churches of onion-domed towers and Baroque interiors, a daily life and faith that was, emotionally and geographically, closer to Austria than Germany.

His Bavarian Catholic piety, with echoes of traditional Irish faith, was shaped by his parents. The tension between his childhood and the shadows of fascism are still palpable in nearby Altötting, a place of pilgrimage since the 15th century and resting place of several anti-Nazi Catholic martyrs.

Aged 41, a second Ratzinger emerged in Regensburg, 130km to the north where he found his theological home after leaving behind the 1968 student revolution university upheavals further west in his previous academic home of Tübingen.

The move saw him part company – professionally and theologically – from former colleague and Vatican II companion Hans Küng.

While the Swiss-born Catholic theologian embraced the Vatican II’s liberal reform spirit, so liberal it later cost him his theological licence, Ratzinger’s quieter Regensburg years saw him take a more conservative path he saw as more in line with the true spirit of Vatican II.

While Küng insisted Ratzinger fled Tübingen, traumatised, the later pope told his biographer Peter Seewald he made a planned retreat from “the destruction of theology ... taking place through its politicisation in the service of Marxist messianism”.

In 2005 a former Tübingen colleague spotted a characteristic that would shape Ratzinger’s later career heading the Catholic church.

“He was unable to deal with conflict and doesn’t handle aggression well,” said Prof Max Seckler, a fellow theologian.

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Benedict in St Peter's Square, Rome, in 2009. Photograph: Reuters/AP

Stories abound in German church circles about Ratzinger’s preferred modus operandi: in person a calm, amenable, conflict-averse figure who, behind the scenes, could act quickly and decisively against those perceived as problematic or a threat.

For his admirers this complemented his gift as a theological plain-speaker, someone they viewed as the last defender of the faith and a bulwark against an “anything goes” era of cultural relativism. For critics he was a naive and vain man and a chronically poor judge of character who, surrounded by sycophants, never took personal responsibility for his mistakes.

For both camps, his final testament is a 2019 German letter in which he framed the clerical sexual abuse scandals as the fault of the 1968 revolution, when the “complete collapse” in standards of sexuality saw the introduction of sex education in schools and the rise of homosexual cliques in priest seminaries.

The letter, applauded by German conservatives, prompted large pushback from liberals.

“For Ratzinger, clerical abuse and church scandal came from outside the church, and the church needs to hunker down and get back to basics,” said Christoph Röhl, co-author of the critical analysis of Ratzinger’s time in Rome, Only the Truth Saves. “But the real problem came from within the church,” he argued, “from the culture of secrecy he helped shape and an oath of loyalty to the system that comes before one’s conscience, where the individual does not count.”

The effects of secrecy and institutional loyalty were evident in Joseph Ratzinger’s final act in Germany: a January 2022 report on sexual abuse in the Bavarian archdiocese of Munich and Freising, which he headed for five years until 1982.

Church-appointed investigators said it was “overwhelmingly likely” the former pope was aware of at least four abusing and paedophile priests. During his time in Munich, they wrote, Joseph Ratzinger “consciously waived the sanctioning of criminal acts” and “ignored” his obligation as archbishop under 1962 rules to report to Rome priests who preyed on children.

A former Ratzinger deputy in the Munich archdiocese told investigators how, when first abuse allegations emerged in 2010, he was “pressured” to take sole responsibility for the failure to act at the time, “to protect the pope”.

In a written response the ailing pontiff expressed “pain” over the cases. Insisting he had not known of them, he argued he had done no wrong. Similarly he expressed “profound shame” at clerical sexual abuse cases that occurred during his time as a senior cleric in Rome. Again he did not ask for forgiveness as he saw no wrongdoing.

Munich investigators flagged the Ratzinger case with the local public prosecutor. On December 5th, after five previous inquiries during the year, a spokeswoman told The Irish Times the prosecutor had yet to look at the file.

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