Pope Benedict XVI: The First Five Years

By George Weigel

Pope Benedict offers Easter blessings.
Photo: Ginger Mortensen, International Theological Institute, Austria

When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected the 265th Bishop of Rome on April 19, 2005, he brought to the papacy decades of work as one of Christianity's foremost theologians, and more than twenty years experience in the Church's central administration where he had served as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF] since his 1981 appointment by John Paul II.

Ratzinger and the man he would succeed as pope formed a unique intellectual partnership for twenty-three years: Ratzinger the theologian and John Paul the philosopher, both men of the Second Vatican Council, had worked in close harness to forge an authoritative interpretation of the Council's work in preparation for the third millennium of Christian history. Ratzinger's election, after one of the shortest conclaves in history, was an expression of the "consensus of esteem" that had quickly formed around him as the "elder brother who stood head and shoulders above the rest," as one cardinal-elector put it. His election also emphasized the cardinals' intention to underscore that John Paul's historic pontificate had not been idiosyncratic, but had set the Church's course for the 21st century and beyond.

Joseph Ratzinger's choice of papal name, "Benedict", reflected the Church's commitment to sanctity – which, Ratzinger and John Paul II believed, was every baptized person's Christian and human destiny. By also evoking the memory of the great founder whose monks saved the civilization of the West, Benedict XVI was also signaling his commitment to the reconversion of Europe, Christianity's historic heartland, which he believed to be suffering from a deep spiritual malaise with grave social consequences.

Elected pope three days after his 78th birthday, Benedict XVI, a shy and retiring personality who had nonetheless displayed an ability to lead millions in prayer during John Paul II's funeral, could not anticipate a pontificate extending over decades. Thus his personal circumstances, his intellectual and pastoral inclinations, and his readings of the signs of the times, especially in Europe, produced a papacy whose first five years called the Church back to the fundamentals of its common life: the universal call to sanctity, the path which the Church discovers in the scriptural word of God, its rich patristic theological heritage, and above all a personal friendship with Jesus Christ, a frequent theme of Benedict's homilies and audience addresses.

Magestrium
While Benedict XVI's papal teaching reflected his remarkably broad and deep learning, it also displayed Joseph Ratzinger's striking ability to explain the densest and most challenging of Christian doctrines in language the theologically untutored could understand. This gift, which Ratzinger had honed in his career as a university professor, was powerfully displayed in his Wednesday general audiences, whose themes reflected his commitment to bringing the world Church into a closer encounter with its roots. In 2005, Benedict picked up the thematic thread of John Paul II's last audiences and continued the late pope's explanation of the psalms and canticles of Vespers, the Church's evening prayer and, in a sense, the primary "hymnbook" of the Catholic Church. Then, in 2006, Benedict turned his attention to the cornerstones on which historic Christianity rests: the apostles, whose personal friendship with Jesus Christ had so transformed their lives that they were compelled to bring the Gospel to the ends of the world they knew. In 2007, Benedict gave a series of audience addresses on figures from the Acts of the Apostles, proceeding directly from there to a multi-year reflection on the eastern and western Fathers of the Church: the men who had turned Christian confession and proclamation into creeds and dogma. The Pope's explication of the thoughts of these early theologians was interrupted in 2008-2009 for a year of reflections on St. Paul, during the Pauline Year the Pope had proclaimed. Benedict returned to the Fathers and then began an explanation of the medieval theological reformers in his late 2009 and early 2010 audiences. These luminously clear catechetical talks often drew large crowds of pilgrims to St. Peter's Square or the Paul VI Audience Hall, and several sets of the addresses were published as books.

Benedict XVI issued three encyclicals in the first five years of his pontificate. Deus Caritas Est [God Is Love], was signed on Christmas 2005 and released publicly the following month. In addition to offering a theological exploration of the various meanings of love, the Pope taught that the service of charity is part of the "fundamental structure of the Church," along with the sacraments and the proclamation of God's word. The encyclical also reminded the world that no political system would ever embody justice so fully that there would no longer be a need for love. "There is no ordering of the state so just that it will eliminate the need for love," Benedict wrote; "the state which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing…every person needs: namely, loving personal concern."

Spe Salvi [Saved in Hope], signed on November 30, 2007, took its title from the letter to the Romans and taught that hope is faith oriented toward the future, thus radically changing the present. Spe Salvi urged the post-modern world to consider the possibility – indeed the likelihood – that its great achievements could not endure without a firm grounding in biblical faith and Christian humanism: both of which, Joseph Ratzinger had long been convinced, were crucial building blocks of a genuinely humane civilization.

Caritas in Veritate [Charity in Truth] was signed on June 29, 2009 and evoked the memory of Paul VI's social encyclical, Populorum Progressio [The Progress of Peoples], while urging political leaders, economists, and the peoples of the Church to explore what some analysts called an "economy of communion," marked by enlarged philanthropy and new methods of measuring value.

Liturgy
Another significant document of Benedict XVI's magisterium was the 2007 post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis [The Sacrament of Charity], written to complete the work of the 2005 Synod of Bishops, which marked the end of the "Year of the Eucharist" initiated by John Paul II. Throughout his decades as a priest, Joseph Ratzinger, who had been deeply influenced by the mid-century liturgical reform movement in Germany, had emphasized that the liturgy, and especially the Eucharistic liturgy, was the vital center of the Church's life. At his election it was no secret that Ratzinger believed that the implementation of Vatican II's liturgical reforms had not produced the results anticipated, and that a "reform of the reform" was required. Sacramentum Caritatis set the theological foundation for such a further reform of the Church's public worship, which the Pope also tried to accelerate by the 2007 apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, which allowed for the universal use of the Roman Missal as reformed by Blessed John XXIII in 1962. Although interpreted by some as an effort to roll back the liturgical reforms of the Council, Summorum Pontificum was in fact meant to draw the "reform of the reform" in the direction of a resacralization of the liturgy while providing for the pastoral needs of those who had found it difficult to adjust to the 1970 Missal of Paul VI.

Summorum Pontificum was also a papal gesture toward those Catholics who, because of their devotion to the older liturgy, had separated themselves from full communion with the Church by following the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre into schism in 1988. In early 2009 the Pope announced a new initiative aimed at reconciling the late French prelate's remaining followers but this effort quickly encountered difficulties when it was revealed that Richard Williamson, one of the bishops Lefebvre had illicitly ordained and whose automatic excommunication Benedict XVI had lifted, was a Holocaust-denier. In the wake of the ensuing international controversy, the Pope moved the Ecclesia Dei Commission, established by John Paul II as a vehicle for reconciling Lefebvrists who wished to return to full communion with Rome, under the authority of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Apostolic Journeys
In the first half-decade of the pontificate, Benedict XVI's pilgrimages to the world Church were focused primarily on Europe. Shortly after his election he returned to his native land to preside over World Youth Day 2005 in Cologne. His May 2006 visit to Poland was an expression of gratitude to the Polish people for having given the Church, John Paul II (whose beatification cause Benedict had started before the normal five-year waiting period was over). The Pope's travels to Spain in July 2006 for the fifth World Meeting of Families, to Austria in September 2007, to France in September 2008, and to the Czech Republic in September 2009 were all intended to call Europe back to its Christian roots as aggressive secularism continued to dominate both European high culture and the institutions of the European Union.

The Pope's second visit to Germany in September 2006 created the first media firestorm of the pontificate when, in a lecture at his old university in Regensburg, Benedict XVI challenged Islam to face its difficulties in accommodating itself to the idea of religious freedom as a universal human right that can be known by reason, and to the separation of religious and political authority in the modern state. Global controversy followed, but the net result of the Regensburg Lecture was that Islamic scholars and religious authorities requested a new dialogue with the Holy See – a dialogue which, in his Christmas 2006 address to the Roman Curia, the Pope insisted must focus on the two crucial issues he had identified at Regensburg.

Papal audience January 2010
Photo: Ginger Mortensen, International Theological Institute, Austria

Pope Benedict XVI blesses a family
Photo: Ginger Mortensen, International Theological Institute, Austria