Light On Dark Water

The Cardinal Prophet

The buzz of the week has been the report that Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger is the, or at least a, leading candidate for the
papacy. I don’t think this is very likely, for reasons
including his age and the fact that he was a member of the Hitler
Youth and was drafted into the German Army as a teenager during
World War II, but there do seem to be grounds for believing that
he will be very influential in the conclave.

Ratzinger has been demonized for more than twenty years now
because he has been responsible, in his role as Prefect of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for disciplinary
actions against certain dissenting theologians. He is hardly ever
mentioned in the media without being described negatively as
“a hard-liner,” “ultra-conservative,”
“the Vatican’s enforcer,” etc. And sometimes
his reserve has been contrasted unfavorably with John Paul
II’s personal warmth. But anyone without a progressivist ax
to grind who has ever read him knows that he is not only an
incisive and balanced thinker but very much of the same mind as
our late Pope about the major questions facing the Church.

Some twenty years ago a book-length interview with the
Cardinal, called The Ratzinger Report, attracted a fair
amount of attention. It made me an admirer, and even, it’s
fair to say, a fan of the Cardinal. Here are some samples; bear
in mind that they were published in 1985:

On Vatican II:

I am convinced that the damage that we have incurred in these
twenty years is due, not to the “true” Council, but
to the unleashing within the Church of latent polemical
and centrifugal forces; and outside the Church it is due
to the confrontation with a cultural revolution in the West: the
success of the upper middle class, the new “tertiary
bourgeoisie,” with its liberal-radical ideology of
individualistic, rationalistic, and hedonistic stamp.

On the moral crisis of the West:

In a world like the West, where money and wealth are the
measure of all things, and where the model of the free market
imposes its implacable laws on every aspect of life, authentic
Catholic teaching now appears to many like an alien body from
times long past, as a kind of meteorite which is in opposition,
not only to the concrete habits of life, but also to the way of
thinking underlying them. Economic liberalism creates its
exact counterpart, permissivisim, on the moral
plane….it becomes difficult, if not altogether impossible,
to present Catholic morality as reasonable.

On sexuality:

The issue is the rupture between sexuality and
marriage. Separated from motherhood, sex has remained without a
locus and has lost its point of reference: it is a kind of
drifting mine, a problem and at the same time an omnipresent
power.

After the separation between sexuality and motherhood was
effected, sexuality was also separated from procreation. The
movement, however, ended up going in an opposite direction:
procreation without sexuality. Out of this follow the
increasingly shocking medical-technical experiments so prevalent
in our day where, precisely, procreation is independent of
sexuality. Biological manipulation is striving to uncouple man
from nature (the very existence of which is being disputed).
There is an attempt to transform man, to manipulate him as one
does every other “thing”: he is nothing but a product
planned according to one’s pleasure.

I think it was my old friend Daniel Nichols who described
Ratzinger as a prophet—accurately, it would appear, on the
basis of the above: the description of our situation is if
anything more accurate than in 1985. I haven’t read the two
collections of interviews with him which have been published
since The Ratzinger Report, but if he still thinks, as he apparently does,
the way he did in 1985, I would certainly welcome him as pope. We
could do worse than a prophet, although we would probably all be
shaken up more than we might like.