Joseph Ratzinger’s relationship with his homeland remained difficult to the end. In the motherland of the Reformation, the Bavarian pope was an outsider – but he announced his spiritual legacy in Freiburg, Baden.
Joseph Ratzinger’s first trip abroad as Pope took him to Cologne in 2005 for the Catholic World Youth Day.
In retrospect, the sound and statement were a flash in the pan, but it actually existed: a disco song called “We are Pope”, performed by “Urbi & Orbi featuring Buddy”. People sang, jammed and rejoiced for a few weeks in April 2005: “We are pope and are all going to heaven, brothers and sisters, let the bells ring.” The headline of the “Bild” newspaper set to music actually hit the spirit of the moment. The Germans could hardly believe it: one of their number had just become pontifex maximus, and so they were amazed and a little proud and happy – at first.
Psychoterror in Tübingen
Throughout his life, the relationship between Joseph Ratzinger and his home country remained complicated. The man from Marktl am Inn saw himself more as a Catholic, Bavarian, Westerner than as a German. He largely shared the ultramontane judgment of the uncertain Cantonists, the rebels against Rome, the eternal Lutherans on the Rhine, Ruhr and Elbe. Wasn’t the student revolt of 1968, which the then Tübingen professor of dogmatics noted with irritation, also a typically German uprising against tradition and faith? According to Ratzinger, he experienced a “very violent explosion of Marxist theology”. Students of Protestant theology should “Cursed be Jesus!” have called.
The then only 41-year-old intellectual high-flyer avoided, withdrew, fled from the “psycho-terror” in the Tübingen lecture halls to tranquil Regensburg, from Protestant Swabia to the Catholic Upper Palatinate. There he became an internationally respected researcher and university teacher – and it would probably have stayed that way until the end of his life if Pope Paul VI. not appointed him bishop of Munich and Freising in 1978.
John Paul II (left) visited the Archbishop of Munich and Freising at the end of 1980 in the Bavarian state capital.
With the appointment as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Paul’s successor, John Paul II, only four years later, it finally became a complicated story. As the guardian of theological orthodoxy, Ratzinger made fewer and fewer friends in Germany year by year. At the same time, his homeland shrank from his place of residence to one point of reference among many. The job description had to keep an eye on the church worldwide.
Against relativism
Ratzinger had been a guardian of the faith for much longer than Pope, a full 23 instead of just under 8 years. As a pontiff, he remained an episode of his own accord, as a prefect he allowed John Paul II to take on his duties for almost two and a half decades. In the spirit of the trained philosopher and social ethicist from Poland, Ratzinger also combined curiosity about modernity with traditional theology. The Church Fathers remained the decisive guide for him. When he presented a new catechism of the Catholic faith based on their spirit in 1993, there was great outrage in Germany.
The work, it was said, had fallen out of time, taking into account neither the theory of evolution nor the findings of biblical scholarship. The Scriptures are interpreted literally. In the motherland of Protestantism, people were particularly offended that this catechism made ecumenism more difficult.
Emotions flared up even more when Ratzinger presented the declaration “Dominus Jesus – on the uniqueness and salvific universality of Jesus Christ and the Church” in 2000. Ratzinger’s constant Swiss antipode, the theologian Hans Küng, saw only a “combination of medieval backwardness and Vatican megalomania”. The German section of the “European Society for Catholic Theology” located “tendencies towards ideologization and fundamentalist infiltration of the faith”.
Ratzinger himself, more modest in his dealings than anyone with such creative power, gently explained that the letter was primarily directed “towards India, Asia and America”. The theological relativism that is spreading there in the guise of religious pluralism is uncatholic. The question of truth should not be left out in religious dialogue.
Only in Cologne did Ratzinger become a pope
The actual becoming of Joseph Ratzinger then took place on German soil, as did the proclamation of his spiritual testament. First Cologne, then Freiburg, was the scene of the events, which were surprising in so many different ways. Due to the death of John Paul II, the long-planned World Youth Day in August 2005 became the first trip abroad for the newly elected successor.
Step by step Ratzinger gained security on Cologne soil alongside the host Cardinal Meisner, the young people cheered him on. He announced a message to them that drew a link from the Tübingen days to the new office: “Only from the saints,” said Benedict XVI. “The real revolution, the fundamental change in the world, only comes from God.” No ideology can save the world, only personal turning to God.
During Benedikt’s second home visit, six years later in Baden, the clouds had darkened. The German Pope was viewed by large sections of the German public as an embarrassing incident. Ratzinger himself behaved anything but confidently in his annus horribilis 2010. More and more cases of sexual abuse in the area of the church had become known. Benedict wrote a bitter letter to Irish Catholics, met with abuse victims in England. And explained in another letter: “Even in our days, the ecclesial community is not lacking in trials and suffering, and it shows itself in need of purification and reform.”
The trip to Great Britain in September 2010 was for the beatification of John Henry Newman and was also overshadowed by the abuse crisis. Benedict spoke of “indescribable crimes” that filled him with shame.
Booth in the concert hall
Then, in Freiburg, on September 25, 2011, on the last day of his visit, “committed Catholics from church and society” made up the audience. Your ears must have ringed after the speech in the Konzerthaus. Benedict was as direct as a returnee who is only a guest should be. Of course he knew that German committee Catholicism, which is proliferating thanks to church taxes, spells out commitment under left-wing Catholic, if not secular, signs. That is why he spoke to the committed people just as energetically as he did to the members of the Berlin Bundestag.
“The missionary testimony of the unworldly church,” declared Benedict in Freiburg, is becoming clearer. A church freed from its material and political burden could “turn better and in a truly Christian way to the whole world, really open to the world”. The “cancellation of privileges or the like” could even benefit the church.
In doing so, he put the ax to the self-image of a highly institutionalized and record-breakingly wealthy regional church like the German one. As expected, Benedict’s spiritual legacy, his Freiburg appeal to the Germans “to discard the worldliness of the church courageously” and to give priority to the spirit over the structure, fizzled out without any consequences. The Central Committee of German Catholics has traditionally shown little interest in papal affairs.
In addition to personal and theological reasons, there were also historical reasons why many German citizens were strangers to the first German pope in almost 500 years. Since the 18th century at the latest, nation and Protestantism have entered into an intimate connection that symbolically intensified in the simultaneity of Bismarck’s welfare state and Bismarck’s hatred of Catholics. Germany would sooner produce another Luther than another Pontifex.
No man can escape the thoughts that shaped him. Benedict XVI Before his last visit in 2011, he referred a sentence by Friedrich Hölderlin to himself: “Birth can do the most.” He doesn’t want to and can’t cut his roots. Joseph Ratzinger was a German professor on the throne of the Roman Pope.