A New Pope

Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

We Roman Catholics have a new pope today, and wouldn't you know it, the man who was selected was the one man I most hoped would not be made pope. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, erstwhile chief enforcer of theological purity as head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is now Pope Benedict XVI.

This is quite a blow for me, a "liberal" in my faith. Only three days ago I filed Mugged by Uncertainty, in which I pointed out TIME magazine's nominating Ratzinger as one the top 100 movers and shakers in the world. In this article, TIME said:

Ratzinger has been a tough theological enforcer in the church for more than two decades. Once an enthusiast for the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, he later wondered if they had gone too far. Call him one of the first theo-conservatives—a former liberal mugged by what he saw as the reality of religious laxity.

His response was, said TIME:

... to reassess the importance of the papacy as a means of asserting control over the church, to insist on the otherworldliness of religious faith and its imperviousness to changes in society.

The "theo-conservatism" of Ratzinger is admittedly anathema to me. So I consider it my duty to at least try to figure it out.

Some help comes from two paragraphs in a front-page profile of the new pope in today's The Baltimore Sun:

Ratzinger's experience in Nazi Germany is thought to have been a seminal moment in the formation of his theological convictions, convincing him that church teachings must be clear and absolute lest they be easily manipulated by outside forces.

"Having seen fascism in action, Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism," wrote John L. Allen Jr., in his book Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith. "In other words, he believes the Catholic church serves the cause of human freedom by restricting freedom in its internal life, thereby remaining clear about what it teaches and believes."

The best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism? That idea of serving freedom by restricting it is truly paradoxical to me, even oxymoronic. Moreover, I am a great believer not in absolutism but in relativism: I think most moral decisions must be taken in view of a larger context. What is wrong in one context may be right in another.

My gut tells me that John L. Allen's assessment of what lies at the core of Pope Benedict XVI's thinking is spot on — ecclesial totalitarianism as the supposed guarantor of human freedom, that is — even though it is usually a mistake to summarize complex thought with simple mantras.

It furthermore looks to me as if the late pope, John Paul II, bought more and more into this notion as he got older and older. Somewhere in the newspaper coverage of the papal election was mentioned the fact that Cardinal Ratzinger was one of the few men to have had regular private audiences with John Paul. Could there be a connection?

We must keep in mind that, just as Benedict XVI was traumatized by Nazism in the Germany of his youth, the former Karol Woytila was scarred by both Nazi and Soviet occupation of his native Poland. Both were, lest we forget, forms of totaliarianism.

I can't think of many things that I hate more than totalitarianism and tyranny.

So I'm going to have to cogitate on how it could possibly be true that ecclesial totalitariansim helps the cause of human freedom!