Joseph Ratzinger (1927-2022)
Many people my age have been formed in faith through the influence of John Paul II, who was Pope for most my childhood and young adult life. One might assume that since I am Polish his papacy would have had a significant impact on my spiritual development. For many people I know, this is indeed true. For me, however, while I am sure JPII has profoundly shaped my Christian life in ways of which I am not yet aware, it is Joseph Ratzinger who has been my spiritual guide these past many years.
My journey in seeking the true meaning of my Catholic faith began when my daughter was born, the same year Joseph Ratzinger became Pope. During this time I began meeting with my parish priest. I believed in God and had a sincere spiritual life but was doing little more than personal prayer and attending Mass on Sundays. I wanted to teach my daughter about God but really had no understanding of how to do this and so I met with this priest who one day suggested that I read the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I remember sitting on the floor in the bathroom next to the tub while my daughter played in the bath and being swept up in the knowledge that I actually believed what the Church teaches.
God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength (CCC 1).
I did not know then that this project of producing a renewed Catechism, ordered by John Paul II, was carried out under the direction of then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.
It wasn’t until 2009 that I really came to know his spiritual thinking. My first formal introduction to his theology was in the seminary. We were assigned parts of the book Introduction to Christianity. The beginning of the book was interesting to read and touched me deeply and it speaks to me even more now than it did then.
Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought (whether by vocation or by convention) soon come to sense the alien—and alienating—nature of such an enterprise. He will probably soon have the feeling that his position is only too well summed up in Kirkegaard’s famous story of the clown and the burning village, an allegory taken up again recently by Harvey Cox in his book The Secular City. According to this story, a traveling circus in Denmark caught fire. The manager thereupon sent the clown, who was already dressed and made up for the performance, into the neighboring village to fetch help, especially as there was a danger that the fire would spread across the fields of dry stubble and engulf the village itself. The clown hurried into the village and requested the inhabitants to come as quickly as possible to the blazing circus and help put the fire out. But the villagers took the clowns shouts simply for an excellent piece of advertising, meant to attract as many people as possible to the performance; they applauded the clown and laughed till they cried. The clown felt more like weeping than laughing; he tried in vain to get people to be serious, to make it clear to them that this was no stunt, that he was not pretending but was in bitter earnest, that there really was a fire. His supplications only increased the laughter; people thought he was playing his part splendidly—until finally the fire did engulf the village; it was too late for help, and both circus and village were burned to the ground. Cox cites this story as an analogy of the theologian’s position today and sees the theologian as the clown who cannot make people really listen to his message. In his medieval, or at any rate old-fashioned, clown’s costume, he is simply not taken seriously. Whatever he says, he is ticketed and classified, so to speak, by his role. Whatever he does in his attempts to demonstrate the seriousness of the position, people always know in advance that he is in fact just—a clown. They are already familiar with what he is talking about and know that he is just giving a performance that has little or nothing to do with reality. So they can listen to him quite happily without having to be seriously concerned about what he is saying. This picture indubitably contains an element of truth in it, it reflects the oppressive reality in which theology and theological discussion are imprisoned today and their frustrating inability to break through accepted patterns of thought and speech and make people recognize the subject matter of theology as a serious aspect of human life (pp. 39-40.)
Joseph Ratzinger put words to my experience. Just as he guided me through his work with the Catechism so he has guided my theological formation. I’ve journeyed with him as Pope Benedict XVI tracing the life of Jesus. I have delved into his eschatology which shifted my perspective on life and death.
Schleiermacher once spoke of birth and death as ‘hewed out perspectives’ through which man peers into the infinite. But the infinite calls his ordinary life-style into question. And therefore, understandably, humankind puts it to the ban. The repression of death is so much easier when death has been naturalized. Death must become object-like, so ordinary, so public that no remnant of the metaphysical question is left within it (Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 70).
This idea has brought me to a place where I can face a long and drawn-out death, as so many must do now given medical and technological advancement which has led to prolonged life. How do I deal with the topic of death? Can I look it in the face or in the face of my mother or brother or friend who is now slowly fading from the world with an illness that reaches ever so slowly draining the person who once was so alive? Raztinger has taught me that my attitude about dying determines my attitude about living. (Eschatology, p. 72).
Above all, however, this man brought me to understand this inexplicable longing I have for God. He wrote about the emptiness I experience which “can be comforted by a human ‘You’. But then there is the paradox that, as Claudel says,
every ‘You’ found by man finally turns out to be an unfulfilled promise; that every ‘You’ is at bottom another disappointment and that there comes a point when no encounter can surmount the final loneliness: the very process of finding and of having found thus becomes a pointer back to the loneliness, a call to the absolute ‘You’ that really descends into the depth of one’s own ‘I.’” (Introduction to Christianity, p. 106).
And because of this human loneliness Ratzinger, in his artful writing explains why God became man. Why God took on our nature in his exceedingly glorious self-communication. And this, simply put, is because we cannot see God in any other way. But Joseph Ratzinger did not leave out human love as this is, in fact, the paradox. As he says, our longing is really a longing for the absolute ‘You’ but it seemingly cannot be found without the human ‘You.’
The very fulfillment of love, of finding one another, can cause man to experience the gift of what he could neither call up nor create and make him recognize that in it he receives more than either of the two could contribute. The brightness and joy of finding one another can point to the proximity of absolute joy and the simple fact of being found that stands behind every human encounter” (Introduction to Christianity, p. 106-107).
And this is the beauty of our faith. The divine miracle of our humanity.
Man comes to deal with God in coming to deal with his fellow men. Faith is fundamentally centered on ‘You’ and ‘We’; only via this double clamp does it link man with God. The corollary of this is that by the inner structure of faith our relationship to God and our fellowship with man cannot be separated from each other; the relationship to God, to the ‘You,’ and to the ‘We’ are intertwined: they do not stand alongside each other. The same thing could be formulated from a different point of view by saying that God wishes to approach man only through man; he seeks out man in no other way but his fellow humanity (Introduction to Christianity, p. 93-94).
And so the mystery of the Incarnation. The mystery of the spirit that intertwines us in our relationships and existence. I have been led to God by many different paths and formed by the theology of a man whose skill in expressing that which I have found inexpressible. There is to much in his writing to include in a short article, however, I feel I must include just one more example of his ability to express so beautifully the reality of our nature.
Pain is a part of being human. Anyone who really wanted to get rid of suffering would have to get rid of love before anything else, because there can be no love without suffering, because it always demands an element of self-sacrifice, because, given temperamental differences and the drama of situations, it will always bring with it renunciation and pain. When we know that the way of love, this exodus, this going out of oneself—is the true way by which man becomes human, then we also understand that suffering is the process through which we mature. Anyone who has inwardly accepted suffering becomes more mature and more understanding of others, becomes more human. Anyone who has consistently avoided suffering does not understand other people; he becomes hard and selfish… If we say that suffering is the inner side of love, we then also understand why it is so important to learn how to suffer – and why, conversely, the avoidance of suffering renders someone unfit to cope with life. He would be left with an existential emptiness, which could then only be combined with bitterness, with rejection and no longer with any inner acceptance or progress toward maturity (God in the World. A Conversation with Peter Seewald, p. 322-323).
I was sad when I heard of his serious illness and even sadder when I heard of his passing. However, I believe that he will be blest and live on in the communion of saints before God.
There is so much more I could say but instead I will end with a prayer for the repose of the soul of Joseph Ratzinger, Priest, Bishop, Cardinal, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Emeritus.
Hail Mary, full of Grace…
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