Ratzinger’s Faith by Tracey Rowland

Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI,

by Tracey Rowland;

Oxford University Press, 2008, $39.95.

When my wife and I married eleven years ago, the priest who celebrated our nuptial mass caused scandal by requesting (it being a Mass celebrated according to the 1962 Missal) that communicants knelt and received the host on the tongue. Benedict XVI’s insistence on the same at the recent World Youth Day Mass is, therefore, a subtle but significant shift.

For Tracey Rowland in her book Ratzinger’s Faith such a return to past practice is not a retro indulgence but goes to the heart of Benedict’s diagnosis of the problems that beset the Church and the West—centrally, the loss of a sense of the sacred.

In their rush to defend the faith by the standards of the rationalist philosophers of the eighteenth century, many Thomists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century muted the patristic heritage of their tradition and focused on its more classical side. This led to a sharp and unnatural division between the theological and more philosophical dimensions of Thomist thought and between dogmatic theology and spirituality. The result was an arid intellectualism that proved inadequate in meeting the challenges of modernity.

As a seminarian, Joseph Ratzinger found Neo-Scholasticism dry and unattractive. He famously quipped that “An abstraction doesn’t need a mother.” He sought out the writings of Augustine, Bonaventure, Newman, de Lubac and von Balthasar as correctives. The key to Benedict’s thought is von Balthasar’s argument that what has gone wrong with modernity is the sundering of the true, the good and the beautiful from one another. His Pontificate will be one of patiently attempting to stitch them back together.

Cardinal Pell in his foreword to this book plays down the differences between Benedict and his predecessor. Rowland agrees that on all the major theological battlegrounds, John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger (as he was) stood shoulder to shoulder. Nonetheless one cannot help, when reading her book, noting important differences between the two men. In some things John Paul II perhaps saw as unimportant, or at best secondary, Benedict sees as crucial to the re-enchantment of the West. For example, Rowland cites the example of John Paul II using the catchcries of modernity—rights, feminism, liberty—by repackaging them so as to give them new meanings compatible with his teaching. She does not say as much but the implication of what she writes is that this strategy left Ratzinger uncomfortable because of its potential to confuse. It is of a piece with Benedict’s ending the papal sponsorship of pop concerts as a way to engage the young.

None of this has dented Benedict’s popularity among the young. The attendance at his Angelus addresses is at least as large as John Paul’s. It is a commonplace that the crowds gathered to see John Paul II, but they come to listen to Benedict XVI.

While it would be a mistake to imagine a major tension between the two, it would be equally wrong to imagine the differences to be only matters of style and taste.

For the average Catholic the liturgy will be where this theme of Benedict’s pontificate will be manifested. Benedict understands that he can issue all the encyclicals he wants, but if the regular interaction of the laity with the church—at Mass—does not reflect those truths, in their hearts they will not believe. The way we pray has a large part in determining what we believe.

In her chapter on Ratzinger’s views on the post-conciliar liturgy, Rowland explains that the liturgical confusion in the church has its origins in the Neo-Scholastic reduction of liturgical questions to form and matter; a belief that as long as the essentials are left intact (wine, bread and words of consecration) everything else is optional. One of the results of this mindset has been an inherently reductive view of the sacred both before and after the Council. She writes that “Paul VI imbibed the Kantian attitude that aesthetics is a mere matter of taste.” I think it would be fair to say the same of much of the church’s hierarchy, with some honourable exceptions, today.

Ratzinger has made clear that beauty in the liturgy has an intrinsic value. It is important that truth be grounded in beauty in the minds of the faithful. For John Paul II, accommodating traditionalists was mainly a pastoral consideration and this is reflected in his letter Ecclesia Dei. Judging by his practice as Pope, Benedict XVI sees the restoration of the ancient liturgy of the church as invaluable in achieving a Balthasarian balance.

Benedict is an immensely cultured and knowledgeable man. His writings will be of interest to anyone grappling with the project of modernity and the West’s tendency towards socio-demographic self-destruction.

In his Subiaco address, Ratzinger calls for Enlightenment principles to be re-grounded in the Christian soil that they grew out of. Without metaphysical roots, reason itself is irrational.

The Hon. Jack Snelling is Speaker in the South Australian House of Assembly. He has represented the seat of Playford for the Labor Party since 1997.