In my home library of several thousand volumes, only a few authors enjoy the privileged status of occupying several shelves exclusively their own. No one will be surprised to hear that Aristotle and Aquinas are among them; in the music section, Arvo Pärt and G.F. Handel; and for pleasure, P.G. Wodehouse. Joseph Ratzinger belongs to this limited circle of authors whom I regard so highly that I have acquired nearly everything they wrote.
It would be difficult for me to reconstruct at this point the sequence in which I read his works, but for sure it started with The Ratzinger Report. I remember eagerly awaiting each subsequent sparkling interview—Salt of the Earth, God and the World, Light of the World—much as fiction fans might look forward to the latest release by a favorite novelist. As a professor, I sometimes assigned Called to Communion as a text in ecclesiology, Behold the Pierced One as a text in Christology, and Truth and Tolerance as a text in missiology.
At the International Theological Institute in Austria where I taught from 1998 to 2006, I enjoyed the privilege of teaching alongside Fr (then Dr) John Saward at the time he was putting finishing touches on his translation of The Spirit of the Liturgy. Although I had already fallen in love with the classical Roman rite by experiencing it in its recited and sung forms, it was Ratzinger who first opened my eyes to why I loved it—the theological and spiritual rationale. He made my own mind and heart intelligible to me, gave me the language with which to express what had been, prior to that, little more than an intuition and an attraction.
In discussing The Spirit of the Liturgy with fellow appreciators over the past two decades, especially members of the clergy, I learned that it had had the same powerful effect on many of its readers. At last, we had found a highly literate, sophisticated, rather audacious modern theologian who nonetheless knew and loved the Catholic tradition, explained its meaning, rebuked its assailants, and advanced its recovery. That he was the right-hand man of John Paul II and followed him to the Chair of Peter only added to the momentary elation of recovering territory after a series of brutal annexations.
Rejoicing there was, and plenty of it, in the small town of Gaming on that day in April of 2005, when the faculty and students of the ITI learned that Ratzinger had been elected pope. We heard the bells of the town church start ringing like nobody’s business and we knew something was up. (When bells ring like that in Europe, it means one of three things: someone has died; a war has begun; or a pope has been elected!) My wife and I took a short walk downtown to the apartment of some friends who had a TV, and they shouted to us from their upper-storey window: “It’s Ratzinger! Raaaatziiiingerrrrrr!” The rest of the day and week was passed in a sort of stupor, as the magnitude of the event sank in.
It’s actually very difficult to convey to younger people the utter improbability of Ratzinger being elected pope at all. It would be something like Card. Sarah or Card. Müller having been elected pope in the last conclave. As we now know, Bergoglio was the other candidate in the running at the 2005 conclave, and when he lost, most of the progressives figured his chances were over. Little did we know, in that “honeymoon” phase, the horrors yet to come—horrors triggered by the abdication of the pope we admired so much.
Upon Ratzinger’s death, a steady stream of commentators struggled to pinpoint his “greatest work” or “lasting legacy.” When it comes to such a versatile and influential figure, it would not be easy to do that; rarely has anyone in the last hundred years spoken with as commanding a breadth and depth of knowledge as Ratzinger possessed, or with comparable rhetorical finesse. Indeed, it is easy to make the case that no pope since Prospero Lambertini (Benedict XIV, r. 1740-1758) has been his equal in learning or theological acumen. Besides, we are not as well-positioned to make judgments about legacies as men will be twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred years hence.
That being said, for me two moments stand out as permanent points of reference.