Benedict XVI’s gift of wonder to the Church

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 05, 2024

One may question the wisdom of Pope Benedict’s decision to resign, but the worst any good Catholic can say is that the fidelity of this decision is hidden in God’s Providence. On the one hand, it is hard for us to see that the decision has produced good results for the Church, given the election of Francis; but on the other hand, God’s ways are not our ways, for He draws straight with exceedingly crooked lines. Given both Benedict’s obvious holiness and his selfless dedication to the largely thankless task of heading the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope John Paul II, I think the smart money is on the crooked lines theory. (See Is there a Providential trajectory in the last seven popes?)

In the aftermath of Benedict’s death fourteen months ago (December 31, 2022), a number of writers have attempted to express their thanks for Joseph Ratzinger’s remarkable life of service to the Church. The latest effort, by Robert Cardinal Sarah, may well be the best. Sarah’s book is simply titled He Gave Us So Much, and even this title is an understatement when considering the late Pope’s theological and spiritual legacy. That legacy is marked by a depth which matches its enormous breadth, and is undimmed by the passage of time: His writings are still being translated into new languages today.

Cardinal Sarah offers a readable and inspiring book divided into three parts. In Part One, “Mystical Portrait of Benedict XVI”, Sarah highlights Benedict’s deep sense of the fatherhood of God, the source of a rich trajectory of Divine filiation which marked Joseph Ratzinger’s life from a very early date, and which inescapably bore the richest possible spiritual fruit. In Part II, “Faces of the Pontificate”, Sarah considers the late Pope from seven different perspectives: a friend, a liturgist, a confessor of the Faith, a Saint Augustine for modern times, a light in the darkness of his own time, a champion of the African church, and “Benedict the Great”.

Cardinal Sarah is a fine spiritual writer in his own right; his summation of this pontificate is as insightful as it is rich. But there is a special revelatory beauty in Part Three, “A Spiritual Itinerary with Benedict XVI”, which gathers together twelve meditations, homilies, speeches, and question-and-answer sessions from Benedict himself which highlight his wonderful ability to address the problems of our age with a unique spiritual, theological and even psychological depth. Of these I wish to single out Cardinal Ratzinger’s speech at the Rimini Meeting for Friendship among Peoples, on September 1, 1990, when he was Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. [This address is available in our ibrary.]

The Church: An Ever-Reforming Society

In this brilliant address, Ratzinger explored the pervasive discontent with the Church, during an era of massive cultural secularization, and our constant effort to tinker with its structures and doctrines so that the Church can be more humanly effective in this world. But Benedict insists that we renew the Church not by adding our own ever-changing structures but by scraping away various human encrustations which conceal her Divine glory and purpose:

Reformation, which is necessary in every age, does not consist in the fact that we can remodel “our Church” anew all the time as it would please us, or that we can invent her, but rather that we constantly clear away our own personal constructs, in favor of the most pure light that comes from above, which is also the irruption of pure freedom.

Ratzinger goes on to describe personal reform and renewal in the same way great sculptors like Michelangelo have viewed their role in relationship to the stone in which they worked—namely, they saw themselves as chipping and cutting away the encrustations until the pure image was “revealed”. Benedict describes this as an ablatio, that is, a process of “eliminating, of trimming away what is not authentic. Thus, through ablatio, the forma nobilis emerges, the precious figure”. It is only through this purification that the sculptor (God) frees man from “all the debris that obscures the authentic aspect of his being, that makes him appear as nothing more than a gross block of stone, when really the divine image dwells in him”.

The same applies to authentic renewal of the Church, a point also made by St. Bonaventure. Authentic renewal is always an ablatio, and this is the only correct model for ecclesial reform. Or as he put it later in the same address:

The fundamental liberation that the Church can give herself is to stay in the horizon of the Eternal, to leave the limits of our knowledge and power. Faith itself, in all its greatness and amplitude, is therefore the constant essential reform that we need. Starting with the faith, we must always put to the test those institutions that we ourselves have made in the Church.

He goes on to notice the contemporary urge to always conceive of what is needed as some sort of “ecclesiastical therapy by activity to make work—to try to assign everyone to some committee, or at any rate, some task within the Church”. Thus we act as if we can substitute Church committees for the Church’s sacramental life—whereas, of course, “we need not a more human Church but a more divine one, because only then can she be truly human.”

There are a hundred other quotations one could extract from this remarkable address, which is full of a richness rooted not in human activity but in Divine forgiveness. As Ratzinger puts it, “The Church does not exist for the purpose of keeping us all occupied like any other worldly association, nor of keeping herself alive as such. She exists to be for all of us the access to eternal life.”

Activism vs. Admiration

Another distinction Benedict makes in this address is between the “activist” and the “admirer”. This is more fully developed in his other writings, most notably in more extensive works on the nature of the liturgy, a deep treatment arising out of the sterile liturgical turmoil of the past seventy-five years. Benedict insists that the “activist” sees only what he can change, in the sense that nothing he sees is bigger than he is, and all is subject to his manipulation. Thus everything he sees and produces is considered smaller than himself. But the one who “admires” is filled with a wonder that triggers a very different response. This “wonder” is the sole preparation for the openness to the Divine that constitutes our own act of faith.

The riches of Cardinal Sarah’s book He Gave Us So Much consists not only in his reminiscences of Ratzinger and the pope he became. It amply displays Sarah’s own ability to highlight the realities on which we so clearly need to refocus our attention today, as we somehow learn to let go of cheap and tinselly secularist illusions and open ourselves to the very mystery of Being. The book is made all the more luminous by its organization and its use of subtitles within chapters to encapsulate each primary insight in just a few pages. In other words, there is no need for scholarship here. There is need only for that grateful and even prayerful astonishment that best captures what Cardinal Sarah owes to Pope Benedict—and what each reader will learn that he or she owes to him as well.

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Robert Cardinal Sarah: He Gave Us So Much: A Tribute to Benedict XVI: Ignatius Press, 2023. 231pp. Hardback $24.95