New York Times Op-Ed: Pope Benedict Wasn’t Conservative. He Was Something Much More Surprising., by Matthew Walther (Editor, The Lamp; Contributing Editor, The American Conservative):
“The words of a dead man,” W.H. Auden wrote in his elegy for a fellow poet, “are modified in the guts of the living.” In the case of Pope Benedict XVI, whose requiem Mass was celebrated on Thursday, this process of transformation began long before his death.
During the almost quarter-century in which Joseph Ratzinger served as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he carried on something of a good cop-bad cop routine with Pope John Paul II. Whereas John Paul’s sunny disposition and glad-handing stadium tours eventually won him the affection of nearly everyone not named Sinead O’Connor, Cardinal Ratzinger was seen by critics (and even some admirers) as a holdover from the period before the Second Vatican Council. His was an older, more aloof style of churchmanship that seemed ultraconservative, detached, forbidding, skeptical of emotion, indifferent to the experience of the laity and the lower clergy alike, much less to those of non-Catholics. His enemies called him “God’s Rottweiler.”
Having spent the last week reading again through the authorized biography by Peter Seewald and revisiting his own published writings, I find that Benedict the theologian bears almost no resemblance to popular caricatures. …
The real Benedict is less straightforwardly conservative than many claim him to have been, an unclassifiable thinker whose legacy has more in common with that of Soren Kierkegaard or John Henry Newman or G.K. Chesterton — those idiosyncratic but somehow essential figures in the modern history of Western Christianity who, in translating fundamental questions about the nature of the universe into the language of their own era, spoke for all time. …
When asked by irreligious friends to recommend a book about God, I do not suggest a work of philosophy or any of the famous arguments meant to prove God’s existence but a slim volume of talks given by Cardinal Ratzinger on the Book of Genesis in the 1980s ['In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall]. In these pages the cardinal assumes that his readers are familiar not only with modern scientific accounts of the origins of the universe and humanity but also with the idea that the Bible has a great deal in common with other ancient Near Eastern myths about the creation of the world.
Instead of denying the similarities, he acknowledges them, but he also draws our attention to the crucial differences. In the “foreboding picture” of the Babylonian account, the “world is a dragon’s body, and human beings have dragon’s blood in them” and the fundamental chaos at the heart of creation can be tamed only by the dictatorial representative of a cruel god. In Genesis, an omnibenevolent being recognizes the inherent goodness of the world that he has created.
For Benedict, this is the dazzling possibility that believers must share with their fellows: that all of us are the inheritors not of an ancient chaos but of something that despite the brokenness in our midst is fundamentally and recognizably good, a good we are invited to share for all eternity with a being who does not merely love but who is love itself.
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