Much of the media commentary about Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s recent passing has focused on the real and important differences between his ecclesial vision and that of Pope Francis. There are reports that the memoir of Pope Benedict’s former chief personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, will continue to highlight some of these distinctions. And there is no doubt that more than a tonal shift exists between “Summorum Pontificum” and “Traditionis Custodes.” But it’s important to complement some of these conversations within a wider hermeneutic of continuity, emphasizing that as leaders of the global Church, as defenders of the Second Vatican Council and ultimately as Christian disciples, there is much more that unites these two universal pastors than separates them.
From the earliest moments of Francis’ pontificate, he undoubtedly saw a golden thread uniting he and his predecessor as successors to Pope John Paul II, and a fortiori to the Apostle Peter. Francis’ first, and most rarely cited encyclical, “Lumen Fidei,” was by and large written by Pope Benedict before his resignation to complete the cycle he had imagined on the theological virtues, as “Spes Salvi” centered its attention on hope and “Deus Caritas Est” on charity/love. Francis added his own interpretation on certain passages to this testimony to the “light of faith,” and then published the document as the work “of four hands,” as he himself described it, only months after his election.
Both Francis and Benedict sought to address the staggering reports of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, which of course they had inherited rather than created, to varying degrees of success. Neither would claim to have solved the problem entirely, but both made strides in creating systems that would protect minors and vulnerable people. Yet, as we continue to learn with anguish across our global Church, victims feel there is still a long way to go to reach full transparency, justice, healing and space to have their stories of horror acknowledged.
Francis receives due accolades from the international community for his work prioritizing ecological concerns and sustainability, primarily in the legacy of “Laudato Si,” which has been called “the most important encyclical in the history of the Church,” in some quarters, due to its impact on not only the whole human race, but on the entire natural world. But it is imperative to remember that Benedict was called the “first green pope” as early as 2008 for his work combating planetary climate change and manmade food shortages as moral issues and for famously ordering solar panels to be installed in the Vatican.
Arguably no conversation has defined Catholic life from 1965 to today more than the interpretation and implementation of the Second Vatican Council, in whose wake we all continue to live and move and have our ecclesial being. Because he was so young at the time, Benedict was among the last living periti, or official theological advisers, to have been present at Vatican II. Francis is the first pope to be ordained to the priesthood after the council, meaning his priestly formation unfolded in its immediate context. (For an even wilder bit of trivia, I remember reading once that Archbishop Alfonso Carinci had been a 7-year old altar boy at Vatican I and was present as the most senior bishop at Vatican II at 101 years old).
Both Benedict and Francis have spent their entire ecclesiastical careers articulating and defending the importance of the council in the modern Church. As recently as this past October, Benedict called the council “not only meaningful, but necessary.” While of course the two had radically different experiences as leading Church figures in Bavaria and Rome on the one hand and Latin America on the other, both were united in their belief that something irrevocable and of paramount significance had unfolded when the bishops gathered together from 1962 to 1965 to assess the state of the Church as it moved into the technological age, with all of the progress, pluralism and potential problems that would come to include.
Leading Vatican watchers perhaps rightly saw the conclave of 2005 as defined by a thirst for cohesion and attempted prolongation of the successes of the long Wojtyla pontificate, while they saw the conclave of 2013 as defined by disruption and the thirst for change between the Ratzinger and Bergoglio ones. Without discounting such analysis, as with nearly all things Catholic, the full story is deeper and richer and more complex than one might first think. Perhaps, in the end, nothing unites them more than their tireless cry to set our eyes firmly on Christ, the fulfillment of every human longing and culmination of every distinct personal history.
Requiescat in Pace, PP. Benedictus. Ad Multos Annos, PP Franciscus.
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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