Benedict’s legacy is complicated | Opinion
Pope Francis, sitting at left, presides over the first Vespers and the 'Te Deum' in St. Peter's Basilica Saturday, Dec. 31, 2022. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the German theologian who will be remembered as the first pope in 600 years to resign, has died, the Vatican announced Saturday.
He was 95. I wrote to him a few years back. I wanted to thank him, ask his prayers. Months later, through his secretary, I received a brief reply: “His Holiness gives the assurance of his prayers.” Which was enough, all I needed to hear: that he prayed for me. Such is my infinitesimally small link to Benedict XVI. His death marks the passage of an age. I wrote to him because I needed to make a connection. Without him I wouldn’t be where I was, so I needed to say thanks. He approved my priesthood; we married priests need permission from Rome to be ordained, you see, and I received mine under Benedict XVI. And that’s always meant something to me, mostly because it was he who changed my life by changing my mind. It was during his papacy that I gave the Catholic Church a fighting chance, seeing in this papal theologian a Catholicism intellectually impressive, biblical, profound and cultured, unafraid of the world. I read him, many of his voluminous works. I also read what he read; he introduced me to the real wisdom of the faith. And ultimately I couldn’t resist; I was converted. I became a Catholic, for better or worse, for the truth of it, thanks to him. Benedict XVI’s legacy, of course, is complicated. All legacies are complicated, though, mine as well as yours, ours together. Undoubtedly, he belongs both to the shadows and the brightness of the contemporary church. Ours is the epoch of sexual abuse and complicity, still agonizingly awaiting full reform. No high cleric is faultless, few lowly clerics are either, nor was Benedict XVI. His sins, failures, and faults are easy to find, easy to name. And there will be many that won’t let you forget his sins; and, to a measure, they’re right in doing so. His sins were real, but he’s answered for them; he’ll answer for them; they will be burned away. That’s just the faith, the truth of it, so we Catholics believe. Such is the moral realism of Catholicism, that we accept a broken yet perfect church, that seeing sin so clearly, however reluctantly we finally do, still we hope in the sinner, always. Because that’s grace, it’s how love really wins. Which is why I will pray for his soul, as I pray for all those I love. So, penance accepted and beyond the profitable tabloid puritanisms that are just instances of intractable hatred, what can we say is the legacy of Benedict XVI? Really, it’s his theological work that will last; which, by the way, is why his press will be so lopsided because so few have taken the time actually to read him. Perhaps the greatest theologian in recent centuries to occupy the chair of Peter, he will, I think, be remembered as much for what he accomplished before his papacy as during it. When he became a bishop, he took as his motto “Co-worker of Truth.” Before anything, he was a teacher; and he considered the mission of a bishop and a teacher to be the same thing: “to follow the truth, to be at its service.” It’s something, he said, he learned as a boy in Hitler’s Germany. He saw in Nazism “a certain anti-Christian vision of the world, that, in the final analysis, showed itself to be anti-human and absurd.” That’s what caused him, he wrote, the rest of his life always to have “a certain reserve with regard to reigning ideologies.” But he also saw the mistake in a church thinking its mission was merely to “guarantee institutions,” the mistake in a church compromising with clear evil. There always was in his thought a deep distrust of institutions, a fear that institutions too easily sacrifice truth for earthly survival. He learned this early on. Which is why he put so much store in the more organic foundations of Catholicism, which he first saw in his parents’ humble, familial faith. That, for him, was the real “bulwark of truth and righteousness,” ordinarily faithful families, Catholicism’s real guard against the “kingdom of atheism and lies.” It became his entire life’s theme: the responsibility to know truth. And it’s why his work remains important. Like many thinkers of his age and ours, for a time, he wondered whether truth meant anything. Was Pilate right after all? Many now think he was. “I also asked myself to what extent it might not be better to suppress this category,” Benedict once wrote. Why talk about truth at all? Isn’t it dangerous to do so? These are legitimate questions. Yet Benedict came to believe that “relinquishing truth doesn’t solve anything but, on the contrary, leads to the tyranny of caprice.” Without truth, without the genuine search for the truth, we simply become the victims of impersonal forces—corporate, collective, political, online forces. Benedict predicted this long ago; this is our world today. Hence Benedict’s foundational claim, that “Man is degraded if he can’t know truth, if everything, in the final analysis, is just the product of an individual or collective decision.” That, if you’re wondering, is what he’ll be remembered for centuries after us, and what, love him or hate him, he seems to have got right about our chaotic post-truth world. Which is why, perhaps, we should still keep reading him, maybe even if you’re not Catholic. Because truth remains, for everyone. Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor at St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and a frequent contributor to The Dallas Morning News.
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