This essay was mostly written just after the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. It has been completed, keeping the original form, for the occasion of the third anniversary.
We have in recent weeks been inundated with tributes to, retrospectives on, remembrances and summations of, the man once known as Joseph Ratzinger.
And rightly so. By even the barest journalistic standard, he deserves to be remembered. His influence on the Church of the twentieth century—and unless we run from ourselves, on the Church of future ages—was immense. And much has been brought to attention in these days: his overarching themes, his greatest statements, his key ideas, his “career” highlights or low points, his views, his frustrated dreams, his prescriptions for the Church, and (as each one sees them) his failings. Wading through these many judgments and recollections, it seems that the only thing about him that we may be permitted to forget is Ratzinger, Benedict, himself.
Perhaps I exaggerate. A number of the essays, of course, have been insightful, sensitive, and excellent. But the thing that surprises me is a way in which the images presented by his admirers and his detractors often match. The descriptions they give are both quite evidently of the same man: and one would think, one would accept even in a court of law, that this indicates their accuracy. Yet, whoever he may be, the man described is unrecognizable as Cardinal Ratzinger.
One of the most commonly highlighted qualities of his life and work is his championing of truth. And he did indeed speak of truth often. He likewise spoke often of reason—and he was obviously an intellectual. How could one forget his phrase “dictatorship of relativism”? Or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which he edited? He was, after all, tasked for much of his life with safeguarding “the doctrine of the faith.”
He had something to say, however, not only about what is true but about what truth is. When asked why he selected the words cooperatores veritatis—co-workers of the truth—for his episcopal motto, he replied:
I had for a long time somewhat excluded truth, because it seemed to be too great. The claim: “We have the truth!” is something which no one had the courage to say, so even in theology we had largely eliminated the concept of truth. In these years of struggle, the 1970s, it became clear to me: if we omit the truth, what do we do anything for? So truth must be involved.
Indeed, we cannot say “I have the truth,” but the truth has us, it touches us. And we try to let ourselves be guided by this touch. Then this phrase from [3 John] crossed my mind, that we are “co-workers of the truth.” One can work with the truth, because the truth is [a] person.[1]
He said things such as this repeatedly:
The question immediately arises: but how can one have the truth? This is intolerance! Today the idea of truth and that of intolerance are almost completely fused, and so we no longer dare to believe in the truth or to speak of the truth. It seems to be far away, it seems something better not to refer to. No one can say: I have the truth—this is the objection raised—and, rightly so, no one can have the truth. It is the truth that possesses us, it is a living thing! We do not possess it but are held by it. Only if we allow ourselves to be guided and moved by the truth, do we remain in it. Only if we are, with it and in it, pilgrims of truth, then it is in us and for us. I think that we need to learn anew about “not-having-the-truth.” ... We must learn to be moved and led by it. And then it will shine again: if the truth itself leads us and penetrates us.[2]
The truth mattered to him, yes: “if we omit the truth, what do we do anything for?” Yet he takes seriously the common contemporary objection that truth is a straitjacket, intolerant. And he concedes that, on a certain notion of truth—on, indeed, the commonplace notion of truth used by people today—this is correct. So, he was concerned that we arrive at another notion of truth—one that is liberating and humble, not oppressive and arrogant. For this reason, he insisted on two essential elements of truth, elements we generally leave out.
The sort of thing that truth and love are must change for us: they must change as we change, letting ourselves—and all our ideas, our partial knowledge—be measured by Christ.
First, that the truth is transcendent. We do not have the truth, as he says, “but the truth has us.” This is not a mere turn of phrase. It is not a rhetorical shift that allows me to feel self-satisfied, now picturing the truths I possess—certainly, stably, with complete comprehension—as my link to the “big values,” as a guarantee that I’m part of what’s important. No: it requires us to change the way we live. “We cannot say: I have the truth. ... We must learn to be moved and led by it.” His exhortation is not directed to those indifferent to truth, who need to commit themselves to the cause. It is directed instead to those who do value the truth, but who need to become humble before it. We do not know, in the usual sense, even the things we are sure we know. He is appealing to the ancient category of mystery: that which we cannot encompass, which cannot be reduced to our ability to take it in. This is so of every “truth.” Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as “this truth” or “that truth”: solid, self-contained, and disparate bits of “the way things are.” Each and every thing we know flows from the one Truth that transcends the world yet infuses it, holding it in being. Nothing that we know can be understood alone, or apart from that transcendent whole—any more than one could understand my leg apart from my body, or my body apart from my person. Our knowledge is real, but we do not know the full sense of anything we know. We must be humble before all our knowledge; we must seek to more fully enter into it, through openness to what other people know. We must let it lead us. One does not get to enter the realm of rationality and remain in charge at the same time: it draws us out of ourselves.
Second, that the truth is a person. That person, of course, is Jesus Christ, the eternal Son. We too rarely think of the implications of calling Christ the Logos, the Word: for a Christian, “truth” cannot be what it is for a non-believer. Arraigned before Pilate, He explains the purpose of His becoming incarnate: “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth.” That is, He has come to make plain—within the created and fallen world, within time—the transcendent Logos itself, “in [Whom] all things were created.”
Famously, Pontius Pilate responds, “What is truth?” It is less well-known that Christ answers his question. We tend, with reason, to take Pilate’s question as a retort; but Christ took it as an invitation. He answers through His silence and submission. His love, His pouring Himself out for us, reveals Who He is: He does not hold on to power, but joins us in our weakness, goes to the limits of the abandonment we have consigned ourselves to, that He may place His Spirit in us in the very place we have reached running from His Spirit. And so, His love reveals the truth: the ultimate truth, the nature of truth. The defining act of Jesus Christ—what we’ve grown accustomed to calling the “paschal mystery”—is the inner life of God lived out in time, amid sin. That life encompasses everything, even what seems to be (and is) opposed to it. It is unthreatened, uncontrolling. It works for the good of others by becoming small and being with them. It is a trust in which one is—perhaps despite all appearance—never dropped. It never fails, amid even the worst extremity, in giving life. It calls for our assent by appealing to the heart, to our desire for communion and fullness of life. It is love.
All the truths we know come from this and are for this. All the truths we know find their genuine sense in this. This, too, cannot be just an assertion. It is not enough to say, “Ah, the truth is love.” If He who is Truth loves to the end, then truth and love are the same, yes. But in our fragmented and fallen world, things are not so simple. The two cannot just be juxtaposed or effortlessly identified. We must find how the truth is love. And this is something spiritual—a mystical experience, a fruit of prayer and charity. “Truth and love coincide in Christ. To the extent that we draw close to Christ, in our own lives too, truth and love are blended. Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like ‘a clanging cymbal’ (1 Cor 13:1).”[3] (This, one may note, is the “dictatorship of relativism” homily.) The faith, which is indeed certain and ultimate, can be so because it is not a matter of mere knowing. It is an act of trust, of love: of handing oneself over to the one who is ultimate. The sort of thing that truth and love are must change for us: they must change as we change, letting ourselves—and all our ideas, our partial knowledge—be measured by Christ. We have access to the ultimate sense of things, that is, only insofar as we know Christ; and we know Him to the extent that He lives in us, making us like Him.
Humility is demanded of us not only because the truth is transcendent but because the Truth Himself is humble—and enters us only to the extent that we are humble. Humility and certainty are not contradictory, but come, according to their true meaning, only together.
Ratzinger’s gentleness, which has been remarked upon by nearly everyone, even those who didn’t like him or agree with him, was almost certainly congenital. But his humility was not. Nor was it merely “moral,” existing alongside his thought: rather, it was born of his dearest commitments. And it gave birth to them. As Aidan Nichols writes: “The mature Ratzinger [speaks] of theology as subordinate, in the last analysis, to contemplation, charity, holiness, and—not least—the attaining of poverty of spirit.”[4]
One commentator—I cannot remember who—said that he was struck by Benedict for one reason: it was clear to him that “here was a man who believes.” That is exactly the sense one got from him. Not because he spoke about doctrine and the Church constantly; not because he maintained propositions unchanged—but because his belief genuinely shaped all his other thoughts. Christ was not irrelevant to anything he held: He was their inner definition. Benedict was a man living the life of faith, even in the life of the mind.
Which makes it strange how often we wish to treat him as a truth dispenser: coming to him not as a person but as a prooftext, not as someone who was thinking (as an action, as something organic) but as someone who simply had “views.” Many have valued him for his “positions”—as though they are so many blocks, things that can, without any cost, without any personal transformation, be simply picked up and taken with you. We do not wish to enter into his life; indeed, we suppose—implicitly—that he didn’t have one. (Once again we see the solid, self-contained, flat notion of truth, which, far from being a hallmark of traditional Christianity, letting its “yes be yes and its no be no,” is an Enlightenment notion: Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas.) This of course means that his thought must have been a bricolage, a disconnected mass of “true facts.” To pick two egregious examples, from opposite sides—Timothy Flanders, editor of OnePeterFive, wrote:
he accepted and defended various novelties and ambiguities promulgated by the Council.... He is in some sense a “hostile witness” for the Trad movement. He himself is not a Trad, yet he articulates in numerous places important talking points for Trads to raise.... Those of good will ... who will not be convinced by quotations from Archbishop Lefebvre may be convinced by quotations from Ratzinger.
A brilliant yet sadly misguided man—but at least he kept some of the good blocks in his grab bag! Throw out his books, his thinking, his magisterium: give us talking points. For his part, the progressive Andrea Grillo wrote:
There is no doubt that the theologian Ratzinger used reason with finesse in his relationship with faith. But after the startling beginnings between the 1950s and 1960s, his recourse to reason was rather anti-Enlightenment and apologetic. His argumentation very often landed in paradoxes, in the face of which tradition prevailed due to affection, not according to reason.[5]
A brilliant yet sadly misguided man—a shame he kept those bad blocks in his grab bag! We don’t need to throw out his thinking, because, really, he didn’t do any: he was just tying reason in knots, to defang it, so he could find a way to keep those blocks—which he just liked too much.
But the faith is not made up of “this thing” and “that thing,” however true they may be. The truth is one—and the faith is the essential dimension of the truth, which must be grasped if the genuine meaning of truth is to be grasped. It is the fundamental character, the “inner life” of truth.
It is this that Ratzinger stood for, not for this or that mere fact. It was not because of his encyclopedic knowledge of theology and dogma, nor because of his intellectual keenness, enabling him to slalom the ins and outs of subtle argument, that he was a great Christian thinker. It is in faith, in living contact with God, that all the doctrines find their true meaning. “No one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Cor 2:11). “Theology becomes an empty intellectual game and loses its scientific character without the realism of the saints, without their contact with the reality it is all about.”[6] One cannot become a theologian by studying books; one cannot become a Christian teacher by insisting on formulae and practices. “We impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit. The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor 2:13–14). Ratzinger could rightly interpret the doctrine of the faith above all because he lived in faith—fides formata. Propositions, “doctrines,” are only expressions of that life. He did not put them forward to have them “agreed with.” No proposition is true that remains merely a proposition. He would hate to see them merely accepted, made absolute—and thus made meaningless. The heart of everything is God in Christ.
One could be forgiven for reaching the conclusion in these weeks (and not only in these weeks) that Pope Benedict saw his chief occupation as spittin’ facts and owning the libs. There is a tendency abroad, even among many who wish to be faithful, to associate Christianity with correctness and saintliness with intransigence in making true assertions. Ratzinger, despite his reputation, always refused this. He everywhere insisted on union with God, on sharing the humility of “love that goes to the end.”
As he said once in an interview:
Since Jesus used the words “little ones” as a title of honor for his disciples—that is, for Christians—it is also absolutely clear that the cult of saints is not a cult of heroes, that holiness occurs precisely in the miracle of daily patience and goodness.... There is among the fundamental elements of my spiritual theology one thought of a medieval writer which moves me very much: the writer speaks of the wonders which Moses performed in the presence of Pharaoh. These, however, could all be imitated at the beginning by the Pharaoh’s magi, until Moses performed a wonder which went beyond the capacities of the magi, who were then forced to confess: here is the hand of God. The question which the medieval theologians posed to themselves was always: which is the sign that is reserved only for God and which excludes every deceit of the devil? The answer of the above cited writer is: all miracles can be the deception of the devil; only the miracle of an entire life united with God is not deceptive. But this is precisely the miracle that God continually works. If we can believe today, our belief depends essentially on the fact that each one of us has met one of these “little saints,” who has opened our eyes towards God.[7]
Let us give the last remark to his successor. About two and half weeks before Benedict died, an interviewer from the Spanish newspaper ABC asked Pope Francis, “What do you appreciate most in Benedict?”[8] And Francis replied: “He is a man of an exalted spiritual life.”
Well, that was half of what he said. That was his second sentence—how he explained his first to prevent it being misunderstood. His first words were:
“Es un santo.”
[1] Benedict XVI with Peter Seewald, Last Testament: In His Own Words (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 241.
[2] Benedict XVI, “Homily at Mass concluding a meeting with the “Ratzinger Schülerkreis,” September 2, 2012.
[3] Ratzinger, Homily at Mass “Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice,” April 18, 2005.
[4] Aidan Nichols, The Thought of Benedict XVI: An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger (London: Burnes & Oates, 2007), 64.
[5] Peter Kwasniewski, “Progressive Liturgist Tells Us Ratzinger Motivated by
Sentimentality and Guilt,” Rorate Caeli, January 3, 2023. This is a translation of Pierluigi Mele, “Ratzinger, tra tradizione e modernità: Intervista ad Andrea Grillo,” January 2, 2023, Rai News.it.
[6] Pope Benedict XVI, The Yes of Jesus Christ (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 32.
[7] Joseph Ratzinger interviewed by Marina Ricci, “I Never Said There Are Too Many,” 30 Days, May 1989, 18–19, at 19. Emphases added.
[8] The relevant portion of this interview is, in English: Pope Francis, interviewed by Julián Quirós and Javier Martínez-Brocal, “Papa Francisco: «Sometimes there are immature positions of faith, they cling to what was done before»,” ABC, December 18, 2022. The complete original Spanish can be found here: “La entrevista de ABC con el Papa Francisco en 2022: «A mis sucesores les diría que no hagan mis errores»,” April 21, 2025. The interview was conducted on December 12. The next words are my own translation.
