Benedict XVI's lifelong friendship with God
National Post, 05 January 2023
He dedicated his life to telling anyone who would listen that friendship with God was the answer to the deepest longings of the human heart
VATICAN CITY — “Lord, I love you.” Those were the final words of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, overheard by a nurse attending his deathbed in the final hours of his life.
Joseph Ratzinger, who later become Benedict XVI, was a colossus of Christian theology and preaching, one of the relatively small proportion of popes whose works and influence will endure long after his death. The breadth of his scholarship and study was astounding.
He was a master theologian of the first rank (ranging from Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish and Islamic theology), but he also knew philosophy (ancient, medieval and modern) and political theory (classical and post-Enlightenment), to say nothing of his avocational interests in music, physics and history. He played Mozart on the piano to relax.
He was plausibly the most learned man in the world. And yet this man — who, in the estimation of a fellow German cardinal, had the “mind of 12 professors” — could express the essence of Christian discipleship with the simplicity of a child: “Lord, I love you.”
Here in Rome, commentators of all kinds are being asked about the most important things Benedict preached, taught and wrote. I have answered with two passages that capture his brilliance and simplicity.
In his first encyclical, titled “God is Love” — what could more simple and fundamental than that? — Benedict began by stating that the prodigious intellectual work at which he excelled was not the beginning or the end of the Christian life.
“Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction,” he wrote. “In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant. For this reason, I wish to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others.”
Religion is about many things, ranging from metaphysics to cosmology to morality to questions of justice and freedom, but what makes the Christian faith distinctive is that a personal encounter with God is possible in Jesus Christ, God who entered history as a man — the truth recently celebrated by Christians at Christmas. God is not distant, a philosophical abstraction or an prehistoric myth. For more than 90 years — yes, even as young boy — Joseph Ratzinger dedicated himself to living that reality and sharing it with others.
Even before that first encyclical, published on his first Christmas as pope, Benedict began to sound variations on that great theme. He concluded his first papal homily in St. Peter’s Square with words that I have quoted hundreds of times working with young people over the last 17 years. But they are not words only for the young.
He noted that St. John Paul II began his pontificate with what became his signature message, the biblical exhortation, “Be not afraid!”
Pope John Paul “was speaking to everyone, especially the young,” Benedict began on that morning in April 2005. “Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to Him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom?”
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