Who could possibly follow in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II?
In 2005 the College of Cardinals in Rome faced the daunting task of selecting John Paul’s successor. The Polish pope had reigned for nearly 27 years and played a pivotal role in ending communism’s tyranny in Eastern Europe.
He had the charisma of a rock star and the mind of a philosopher. Conservatives loved him, but JPII was a great modernizer of the Church as well. His successor would step into his shadow — and have to deal with the greatest failure of his pontificate, the horrific sexual abuse scandals plaguing the faith.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger prayed he wouldn’t be chosen. He was in many ways John Paul’s right-hand man, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for nearly a quarter century and the logical choice to solidify John Paul’s legacy. Yet Ratzinger was 78 and feared he was too old to complete his friend’s unfinished work.
The college chose him anyway, and Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI.
Conservatives — and not just Catholic ones — were thrilled. Liberals were dismayed, and they resented it when Benedict moved to allow the Traditional Latin Mass to be offered more widely.
Benedict worked to heal old wounds from the ecclesiastical upheavals of Vatican II. And he minced no words about the “filth” that perpetrated sexual abuse within the Church.
He also charged into the religious controversies of the post-9/11 era.
Did faith lead to fanaticism and violence? Was Christianity just a form of Western imperialism, as Islamists and liberal postmodernists insisted?
In a short speech at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12, 2006, Benedict gave a brilliant defense of Christianity as a religion of reason as well as revelation — a religion of persuasion, not conquest, and a teacher of objective morality in an age when science had become merely empirical.
The Regensburg lecture stirred controversy and was mistaken for an attack on Islam. In fact it was an affirmation of Socratic philosophy along with the Catholic faith, and its message was universal. This was the heart of Benedict’s pontificate and of Ratzinger’s life’s work.
At his death on New Year’s Eve, Benedict was best known by many outside the Church, and all too many within it, for having resigned the papacy in 2013 — the first pope to do so in nearly 600 years. His admirers were dismayed, but Benedict knew what he was doing. He felt his age, and he understood that future pontiffs would likewise risk becoming too old for the office. He set a precedent to guide them.
But Benedict XVI should not be remembered as the pope who resigned or as an epilogue to the great John Paul II. Benedict was a champion of faith — against fanaticism and cold materialism alike.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.