Benedict and the tempest of history

First Things, 01 July 2021

Throughout his astonishing life, Ratzinger has never wavered from the foundational conviction that God alone can provide what man ultimately needs.

When Joseph Ratzinger was drafted into the Nazi armed forces, his commanding officer asked him what he planned to do, what profession he wanted to pursue. 

He said he wanted to be a priest. The officer dismissively told him that there would be no need for priests in the new Germany the Nazis were building.

On June 29, 2021, Ratzinger celebrated the 70th anniversary of his ordination. His priesthood has lasted nearly six times as long as the Third Reich. The future needed priests rather more than it needed Nazis.

Ratzinger’s boyhood was marked by several family moves, as his father paid a social and professional price for his outspoken anti-Nazi convictions. Consequently, the Ratzinger family was confronted early on with the question of salvation. Was it the gift of Christ crucified, or was it something that a man, a party, a regime could seize if only powerful enough? It was an ancient question that history put to Ratzinger as a teenager. 

It was also the question Jesus and Satan disputed in the desert. Benedict XVI wrote about the temptation of turning stones to bread in his first volume of Jesus of Nazareth. 

Did not, and does not, the Redeemer of the world have to prove his credentials by feeding everyone? Isn’t the problem of feeding the world—and, more generally, are not social problems—the primary, true yardstick by which redemption has to be measured? Does someone who fails to live up to this standard have any right to be called a redeemer? …

Jesus has emerged victorious from his battle with Satan. To the tempter’s lying divinization of power and prosperity, to his lying promise of a future that offers all things to all men through power and through wealth—he responds with the fact that God is God, that God is man’s true Good.

Even before his priestly ordination at 24, Ratzinger had to confront the “divinization of power and prosperity.” He followed his father in rejecting that “lying promise of a future” that was passing away even then.

He would devote the next 75 years, including these last eight of quasi-monastic retirement, to the primacy of God, the search for him, and the conviction that he could be found because he reveals himself to us:

What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world? What has he brought? He has brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him. Now we know the path that we human beings have to take in this world. Jesus has brought God, and with God the truth about our origin and destiny: faith, hope and love. It is only because of our hardness of heart that we think this is too little.

Throughout his astonishing life, Ratzinger has never wavered from the foundational conviction that God alone can provide what man ultimately needs, and that any regime, any party, any man who attempts to usurp that will be, sooner or later, left behind by history.

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