Ever since news of his death was announced on 31 December 2022, Catholic commentators around the globe have rightly called attention to the fact that Joseph Ratzinger/ Benedict XVI was one of the most brilliant theological minds of the 20^th century. Others have gone even further, ranking him among the very best theologians in the entire history of Christianity and calling for him to be declared a Doctor of the Church.

None of this is surprising. Ratzinger was the last of the theological experts of the Council, and probably the most famous – if not the most erudite – of that group of theologians comprising Lubac, Congar, Danielou, Balthasar, and Rahner that because of their influence on the Council changed the course of Catholic history forever. In the 60-odd years of his theological production, he wrote more than 100 books and 1300 articles and essays, in addition to the 3 encyclicals, 4 apostolic exhortations, and countless homilies, addresses, and audiences he delivered as Pope. And the themes he covered in these writings was equally vast: everything from the traditional dogmatic fields of fundamental theology, Christology, Ecclesiology, and Christian anthropology, to spiritual, moral, and pastoral theology, theology of religions, political theology, catechesis, and the historical and cultural importance of the faith in an increasingly secular world.

Unlike the notoriously obscure vocabulary of Rahner, or the dense and technical academic style of Lubac or Balthasar, however, Ratzinger’s writings were characterized by a disarming clarity that could even be mistaken for simplicity. He possessed the extraordinary gift of being able to both grasp and then articulate with astounding precision what the core problems or difficulties involved in an issue were, and there are countless stories of how he would listen silently – and without taking any notes – to the reports of multiple theologians in his meetings at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or of several bishops in their ad limina visits to the Vatican, and then give a brilliant summary of the entire argument and the core issues upon which it hinged. As Archbishop Charles Chaput wrote recently, “Benedict was simply the most intelligent person I’ve ever met – not only in his understanding but also in his articulation” (First Things, 4 January 2023).

In all of this, what also stood out was Ratzinger’s eminently pastoral style. He was a priest, a bishop, and a Pope before being a professional theologian, and his theology thus had a distinct ‘teaching, explanatory’ flavour to it. What he wanted to do above all with his writings was to explain the faith anew for the modern man, and to respond to the upheavals that the implementation of the Council, liberation theology, and then relativism and post-modernism had occasioned in the faith of the ordinary Christian. As one commentator put it, he was no disconnected theological writer living in the ivory tower of abstract speculation, but one who wrote with the Bible in the one hand and the newspaper in the other, and who set himself the task of trying to truly understand, empathize with, and engage the questioning faith of today’s believer.

Reading Ratzinger should thus at the top of every Catholic’s list in the new year. And this is also why I am beginning this weekly post. My own love affair with Ratzinger began more than 15 years ago, when as a newly arrived seminarian in Rome who neither understood nor spoke Italian I stumbled upon his Introduction to Christianity in our university library. I was soon hooked… and the rest was history. In the years that followed I eagerly devoured everything of his that I could find and eventually ended up writing my doctoral thesis on his theology. Ratzinger became my intellectual mentor, my spiritual guide, and the closest and dearest friend of my soul.

What I propose to do now is simply to let you repeat that initial experience of discovering Ratzinger that changed my life. My goal is to methodically go through some of his most important works, choose those texts that stand out for their beauty and depth of content, and thus allow you to hear Ratzinger explain the faith in his own words every week.

My hope and prayer is that your encounter with this brilliant and yet humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord will bring you as much joy, light, and food for prayer and reflection as it has for me.

Fr Sameer Advani, LC

Question for reflection:

What did I learn today about Pope Benedict that I will take with me throughout this week?

Based on a series of lectures he delivered to students in 1967, Introduction to Christianity was the work that instantly shot Ratzinger to fame. It remains one of his most read and commented upon books, and scores of scholarly articles, conferences, and even doctoral theses have been based upon it. Intended as a commentary on the principal affirmations of the Creed, it contains Ratzinger’s answer to what the essence of the faith is and why its proposal to man is still valid and meaningful in the 20^th century. While it is thus far from a simple read, Introduction to Christianity lays the platform for the rest of Ratzinger’s writings and is the best place to begin our journey of discovery into his world.

Chapter 1 of the work is entitled ‘Belief in the World Today’ and begins with a reflection on ‘Doubt and Belief’. In fact, the opening paragraphs of the work, in which Ratzinger uses the famous story of a clown and a traveling circus to describe the situation of the ‘theologian’ – and indeed of every Christian and every believer – before the question of God today, have become legendary…

“Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought (whether by vocation or by convention) soon comes to sense the alien— and alienating—nature of such an enterprise. He will probably soon have the feeling that his position is only too well summed up in Kierkegaard’s famous story of the clown and the burning village, an allegory taken up again recently by Harvey Cox in his book The Secular City. According to this story, a traveling circus in Denmark caught fire. The manager thereupon sent the clown, who was already dressed and made up for the performance, into the neighboring village to fetch help, especially as there was a danger that the fire would spread across the fields of dry stubble and engulf the village itself. The clown hurried into the village and requested the inhabitants to come as quickly as possible to the blazing circus and help to put the fire out. But the villagers took the clown’s shouts simply for an excellent piece of advertising, meant to attract as many people as possible to the performance; they applauded the clown and laughed till they cried. The clown felt more like weeping than laughing; he tried in vain to get people to be serious, to make it clear to them that this was no stunt, that he was not pretending but was in bitter earnest, that there really was a fire. His supplications only increased the laughter; people thought he was playing his part splendidly – until finally, the fire did engulf the village; it was too late for help, and both circus and village were burned to the ground.

Cox cites this story as an analogy of the theologian’s position today and sees the theologian as the clown who cannot make people really listen to his message. In his medieval, or at any rate old-fashioned, clown’s costume, he is simply not taken seriously. Whatever he says, he is ticketed and classified, so to speak, by his role. Whatever he does in his attempts to demonstrate the seriousness of the position, people always know in advance that he is, in fact, just a clown. They are already familiar with what he is talking about and know that he is just giving a performance that has little or nothing to do with reality. So they can listen to him quite happily without having to be seriously concerned about what he is saying. This picture indubitably contains an element of truth in it; it reflects the oppressive reality in which theology and theological discussion are imprisoned today and their frustrating inability to break through accepted patterns of thought and speech and make people recognize the subject matter of theology as a serious aspect of human life.

But perhaps our examination of conscience should go still deeper. Perhaps we should admit that this disturbing analogy, for all the thought-provoking truth contained in it, is still a simplification. For, after all, it makes it seem as if the clown, or in other words, the theologian, is a man possessed of full knowledge who arrives with a perfectly clear message. The villagers to whom he hastens, in other words, those outside the faith, are conversely the completely ignorant, who only have to be told something of which they are completely unaware; the clown then need only take off his costume and his makeup, and everything will be all right. But is it really quite such a simple matter as that? Need we only call on the aggiornamento, take off our makeup, and don the mufti of a secular vocabulary or a demythologized Christianity in order to make everything all right? Is a change of intellectual costume sufficient to make people run cheerfully up and help to put out the fire that, according to theology, exists and is a danger to all of us? I may say that, in fact, the plain and unadorned theology in modern dress appearing in many places today makes this hope look rather naive. It is certainly true that anyone who tries to preach the faith amid people involved in modern life and thought can really feel like a clown, or rather perhaps like someone who, rising from an ancient sarcophagus, walks into the midst of the world of today dressed and thinking in the ancient fashion and can neither understand nor be understood by this world of ours. Nevertheless, if he who seeks to preach the faith is sufficiently self-critical, he will soon notice that it is not only a question of form, of the kind of dress in which theology enters upon the scene. In the strangeness of theology’s aims to the men of our time, he who takes his calling seriously will clearly recognize not only the difficulty of the task of interpretation but also the insecurity of his own faith, the oppressive power of unbelief in the midst of his own will to believe. Thus anyone today who makes an honest effort to give an account of the Christian faith to himself and to others must learn to see that he is not just someone in fancy dress who need only change his clothes in order to be able to impart his teaching successfully. Rather he will have to understand that his own situation is by no means so different from that of others as he may have thought at the start”.

Questions for reflection:

Just like the clown warning the town of the approaching fire, how often does the culture ignore the wisdom of the Church simply because it comes from the Church?

As a Christian, do I feel people take me seriously?

Am I also aware of the insecurity of my own faith, of the fact that perhaps at times, I too can look at some aspects of the faith with eyes of incredulity and skepticism?

Last week, Ratzinger began his reflection on the situation of the Christian in the contemporary world by pointing out that if he was sufficiently critical and honest, he would realize that the problem of faith today was not simply one of communication, not simply a question of finding the right strategy or outward form in which to ‘dress up’ and present these truths to those who do not believe. Today, we read how he continues that argument, pointing out that the problem with faith is in the first place internal; it has to do with the precarious nature of belief itself, with the fact that both doubt and belief necessarily cohabit the world of the believer and that he often feels himself to be alone, cast adrift on the ocean of uncertainty…

“First of all, the believer is always threatened with an uncertainty that in moments of temptation can suddenly and unexpectedly cast a piercing light on the fragility of the whole that usually seems so self-evident to him. A few examples will help to make this clear. That lovable Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who looks so naive and unproblematical, grew up in an atmosphere of complete religious security; her whole existence from beginning to end, and down to the smallest detail, was so completely molded by the faith of the Church that the invisible world became, not just a part of her everyday life, but that life itself. It seemed to be an almost tangible reality that could not be removed by any amount of thinking. To her, “religion” really was a self-evident presupposition of her daily existence; she dealt with it as we deal with the concrete details of our lives. Yet this very saint, a person apparently cocooned in complete security, left behind her, from the last weeks of her passion, shattering admissions that her horrified sisters toned down in her literary remains and that have only now come to light in the new verbatim editions. She says, for example, “I am assailed by the worst temptations of atheism”. Her mind is beset by every possible argument against the faith; the sense of believing seems to have vanished; she feels that she is now “in sinners’ shoes.” In other words, in what is apparently a flawlessly interlocking world someone here suddenly catches a glimpse of the abyss lurking – even for her – under the firm structure of the supporting conventions. In a situation like this, what is in question is not the sort of thing that one perhaps quarrels about otherwise – the dogma of the Assumption, the proper use confession – all this becomes absolutely secondary. What is at stake is the whole structure; it is a question of all or nothing. That is the only remaining alternative; nowhere does there seem anything to cling to in this sudden fall. Wherever one looks, only the bottomless abyss of nothingness can be seen.

Paul Claudel has depicted this situation in a most convincing way in the great opening scene of the Soulier de Satin. A Jesuit missionary, brother of Rodrigue, the hero of the play (a worldling and adventurer veering uncertainly between God and the world), is shown as the survivor of a shipwreck. His ship has been sunk by pirates; he himself has been lashed to a mast from the sunken ship, and he is now drifting on this piece of wood through the raging waters of the ocean. The play opens with his last monologue:

Lord, I thank thee for bending me down like this. It sometimes happened that I found thy commands laborious and my will at a loss and jibbing at thy dispensation. But now I could not be bound to thee more closely than I am, and however violently my limbs move they cannot get one inch away from thee. So I really am fastened to the cross, but the cross on which I hang is not fastened to anything else. It drifts on the sea.

Fastened to the cross – with the cross fastened to nothing, drifting over the abyss. The situation of the contemporary believer could hardly be more accurately and impressively described. Only a loose plank bobbing over the void seems to hold him up, and it looks as if he must eventually sink. Only a loose plank connects him to God, though certainly it connects him inescapably, and in the last analysis he knows that this wood is stronger than the void that seethes beneath him…”

Questions for reflection:

How often does my faith seem to be drifting in a sea of confusion?

Throughout this next week, reflect on those moments and situations in my life in which I am or have been tempted to doubt that God really is who He says He is and that I am His beloved child.

Part 1 Faith – Week 5

Introduction to Christianity:
A provisional definition of belief and the difficulty of faith today (I)

Part 1 Faith – Week 7

Introduction to Christianity:
Faith as standing and understanding

Part 1 Faith – Week 8

Introduction to Christianity:
The rationality of faith

Last week we saw that Ratzinger defined belief as man’s humble acceptance of the gift of faith from God and his trusting choice to build his life on that gift. This decision, Ratzinger said, was capable of giving man far more safety and security, far more meaning, than the decision to trust only in himself, in his abilities to gain scientific knowledge and to construct a better world.  Today, he continues that reflection to explain why this Christian decision to trust in another is actually the better one, the one that is actually more ‘reasonable’ and worthy of man. Fundamentally, he says, it is because the Christian believes that the gift he is receiving in faith is not just meaning for his life, but actually for all of reality, that it is the meaning or logos woven into reality itself and that upholds all of reality that is revealing itself to him. Christianity is the certainty in faith that the logos of the world is giving itself to man as a gift, in other words, and that only by taking a stand on this logos, by building on this solid ground, which is far wider and more profound than the limits of man’s reason, can he truly find happiness and meaning.

Thus, starting from a quite general analysis of the basic attitude of “belief”, we have arrived directly at the Christian mode of belief. For to believe as a Christian means in fact entrusting oneself to the meaning that upholds me and the world; taking it as the firm ground on which I can stand fearlessly. Using rather more traditional language, we could say that to believe as a Christian means understanding our existence as a response to the word, the logos, that upholds and maintains all things. It means affirming that the meaning we do not make but can only receive is already granted to us, so that we have only to take it and entrust ourselves to it. Correspondingly, Christian belief is the option for the view that the receiving precedes the making—though this does not mean that making is reduced in value or proclaimed to be superfluous. It is only because we have received that we can also “make”. And further: Christian belief—as we have already said—means opting for the view that what cannot be seen is more real than what can be seen. It is an avowal of the primacy of the invisible as the truly real, which upholds us and hence enables us to face the visible with calm composure—knowing that we are responsible before the invisible as the true ground of all things.

If one ponders all this, one will note how closely the first and last words of the Creed—“I believe” and “Amen”—chime in with one another, encircling the totality of individual assertions and thus providing the inner space for all that lie between. In the harmony of “Credo” and “Amen” the meaning of the whole becomes visible, the intellectual movement that it is about. We noted earlier that the word “Amen” belongs in Hebrew to the root from which the word “belief” is also derived. Thus “Amen” simply says once again in its own way what belief means: the trustful placing of myself on a ground that upholds me, not because I have made it and checked it by my own calculations but, rather, precisely because I have not made it and cannot check it. It expresses the abandonment of oneself to what we can neither make nor need to make, to the ground of the world as meaning…

Yet what happens here is not a blind surrender to the irrational. On the contrary, it is a movement toward the logos, the ratio, toward meaning and so toward truth itself, for in the final analysis the ground on which man takes his stand cannot possibly be anything else but the truth revealing itself.

The Christian attitude of belief is expressed in the little word “Amen”, in which the meanings trust, entrust, fidelity, firmness, firm ground, stand, truth all interpenetrate each other; this means that the thing on which man can finally take his stand and that can give him meaning can only be truth itself. Truth is the only ground suitable for man to stand upon. Thus the Christian act of faith intrinsically includes the conviction that the meaningful ground, the logos, on which we take our stand, precisely because it is meaning, is also truth. Meaning or sense that was not truth would be nonsense. The indivisibility of meaning, ground, and truth that is expressed both in the Hebrew word “Amen” and in the Greek logos at the same time intimates a whole view of the world. The way—-for us inimitable—in which words such as these embrace the indivisibility of meaning, ground, and truth throws into relief the whole network of coordinates by which Christian faith surveys the world and takes up its position in relation to it.

Questions for reflection:

Today we have seen how Ratzinger claims that the little word “Amen” communicates once again in its own way what belief means: the trustful placing of myself on a ground that upholds me, the abandonment of myself to what I can neither make nor need to make but can only receive, to the ground of the world as meaning that is giving itself to me… As Catholics, we say “Amen” after every prayer and when we receive Jesus in the Eucharist. Do we realize the importance of pronouncing that word? Do we see it as taking a stand, as grounding our faith and our lives in the hands of Divine Providence?

Having defined faith as the taking of a stand, as the building of one’s life on the revelation of the meaning or the logos of reality that alone gives meaning to that life, Ratzinger concludes the first chapter of his Introduction to Christianity on faith by reflecting on its personal character. For the true heart of Christian revelation, he says, is not just that there is a logos or meaning woven into and supporting all reality, but that this logos is a person: a person who has a name and who loves me in my uniqueness and concreteness. In one of the most beautiful lines in the entire book, he thus defines faith as the finding of a ‘You’ that upholds me in all the struggles and empty hopes of this world, of the discovery that the meaning and ground of the world has a face: Jesus of Nazareth.

In all that has been said so far the most fundamental feature of Christian faith or belief has still not been specified; namely, its personal character. Christian faith is more than the option in favor of a spiritual ground to the world; its central formula is not “I believe in something”, but “I believe in you.” It is the encounter with the man Jesus, and in this encounter it experiences the meaning of the world as a person. In Jesus’ life from the Father, in the immediacy and intensity of his converse with him in prayer and, indeed, face to face, he is God’s witness, through whom the intangible has become tangible, the distant has drawn near. And further: he is not simply the witness whose evidence we trust when he tells us what he has seen; he is the presence of the eternal itself in this world. In his life, in the unconditional devotion of himself to men, the meaning of the world is present before us; it vouchsafes itself to us as love that loves even me and makes life worth living by this incomprehensible gift of a love free from any threat of fading away or any tinge of egoism. The meaning of the world is the “you”, though only the one that is not itself an open question but rather the ground of all, which needs no other ground.

Thus faith is the finding of a “you” that upholds me and amid all the unfulfilled—and in the last resort unfulfillable—hopes of human encounters gives me the promise of an indestructible love that not only longs for eternity but also guarantees it. Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me, that I can entrust myself to it like the child who knows that everything he may be wondering about is safe in the “you” of his mother. Thus in the last analysis believing, trusting, and loving are one, and all the theses around which belief revolves are only concrete expressions of the all-embracing about-turn, of the assertion “I believe in you”—of the discovery of God in the countenance of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

Of course, this does not do away with the need for reflection, as we have already seen earlier. “Are you really he?” This question was asked anxiously in a dark hour even by John the Baptist, the prophet who had directed his own disciples to the rabbi from Nazareth and recognized him as the greater, for whom he could only prepare the way. Are you really he? The believer will repeatedly experience the darkness in which the contradiction of unbelief surrounds him like a gloomy prison from which there is no escape, and the indifference of the world, which goes its way unchanged as if nothing had happened, seems only to mock his hope.

We have to pose the question, “Are you really he?”, not only out of intellectual honesty and because of reason’s responsibility, but also in accordance with the interior law of love, which wants to know more and more him to whom it has given its Yes, so as to be able to love him more. Are you really he? Ultimately, all the reflections contained in this book are subordinate to this question and thus revolve around the basic form of the confession: “I believe in you, Jesus of Nazareth, as the meaning (logos) of the world and of my life.”

Questions for reflection:

Reflect for a moment on what grounds and gives meaning to your own faith. Is it truly the person of Jesus Christ? In what ways?