The Mission of Benedict XVI: Act Two?

Benedict XVI was a “member of the Nazi Youth,” fought in the German Army, became a Catholic priest, a bishop, a cardinal, a hard-liner, a “Rotweiler” for the Vatican—these are a few of the “facts” certain media outlets have thrown out there for public consumption. This is so you will understand why it is that American Catholics are “dismayed” by the choice of Ratzinger as Pope.

Of course, this is all nonsense. Ratzinger, like all German boys was considered a member of the Hitler youth—and (did they tell you?) he resisted and skipped meetings. He was drafted into the army, which is what you would expect, and deserted, though was later kept, briefly, as a prisoner of war. His father, by the way, was a known dissident.

One report I heard also said that Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla were “on opposite sides” during the War. Technically true—they were born in countries at war with each other. But both men enlisted in the priesthood and were decidedly not involved in politics. Neither had any use for either fascism or communism.

As the Eastern Europe in which John Paul II lived fell behind the Iron Curtain, the war-ravaged Western Europe of Ratzinger’s youth was freed from fascism and experienced freedoms forbidden to the Poles. John Paul II later emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, summoned to the papacy. Having experienced the Eastern part of Europe under the tyranny of Communism, he helped to effect a revolution that shocked the world with its speed and non-violence.

Ratzinger, on the other hand, while living in the free West came to experience another sort of revolution that Poland was spared: the radical 60s revolution. Ratzinger saw the student riots that swept Europe (and parts of the United States) alongside the Sexual Revolution.

Earlier this week Cardinal Ratzinger said, “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desire.” It is a “dictatorship” when you are told that you only need to go with your feelings and passions, that there are no external rules to bind you. Ratzinger, having lived under the horrors of Nazi Germany realized that though there are no more Nazi commandants there yet remain commandments, there are no more dictators but there are still moral dictates.

Relativism kills the soul by removing the guidance that comes from the “spiritual” realm. The reality of the spiritual world was denied by the Communists and remains denied by Western materialists, and we have lost our grasp of the spiritual by allowing ourselves to become swamped by a sea of things and sensations, of which perhaps the most powerful is sex. Both East and West have lost the truly spiritual.

John Paul II spoke of the whole of Europe as having “two lungs,” the East and the West—sometimes this referred to Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Regardless of whether the metaphor works on every level, one can still stay that both lungs have had pneumonia for quite some time. In the East the state (until recently) denied the spiritual, while the West (still) denies any Truth.

The Eastern European John Paul II and the Western European Benedict XVI. Are they together bookends, a first and second act designed to preach the Word of God to the whole of Europe, not to mention the world which has increasingly come under the sway of either Western materialism or Eastern collectivism (e.g., China)?

Does Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI—named, after all, for the “patron saint of Europe”—stand poised to follow in the wake of John Paul II, who reminded the world of the spiritual and freedom? Is Benedict XVI’s mission to remind the world that there is Truth? For this Benedict will be called as before a “hard-liner” for simply warning that there are Truths that cannot be ignored.

It was by ignoring the Truths of man’s sinfulness and need of a Redeemer in Christ that the whole of Europe fell into an abyss that deepened in the 20th century, with its million-fold carnage of war, death camps, gas ovens, genocides, and gulags; with its moral and physical carnage of unbridled sexuality, abortion, infanticide, “mercy” killings, divorce, homosexuality, and the ensuing despair and loss of meaning, purpose, and joy to the miracle and gift of Life.

Benedict XVI is 20 years older than was John Paul II at the beginning of his pontificate, so he likely has much less time. But some of the work has already begun and who knows where the Spirit will blow? No one knew that 1989 would bring the freeing of Eastern Europe.

Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI together point to Christ who is the Truth, the Truth who makes us Free.