Abstract
Our childhood experiences are always formative, but for Joseph Ratzinger they were decisive. First, the home in which he grew up was seriously devout, with religion permeating every aspect of the family’s life in a way that was probably rare even then. This was not a strained or artificial religion but one natural to the family and the culture of Bavaria at the time. Second, his father was a man of firm principle who despised the Nazis. He retired early as a policeman and moved to the countryside to escape their clutches. Ratzinger was a clever child and, deciding early to be ordained, went easily through the training to priesthood. Seewald gives a vivid picture of growing up in the Nazi era and training in the spartan post-war conditions.
That immediate post-war period was a hopeful one, with Europe being rebuilt by serious Christians such as Konrad Adenauer and a sense that the Christian faith had a growing place in the future. By the mid-1950s, however, Ratzinger was conscious that there was a growing gulf between the Church and the world, which was turning away from the faith. It was at this time that he encountered his first major crisis. In order to obtain a university post he needed not only a doctorate but a habilitation. Because of either suspected modernism or his criticism of the Church as full of heathen or personal animosities, both this essential qualification and an offered teaching post were at first blocked. Small incidents in the life of the world but deeply traumatic for him at the time. That overcome, students in their hundreds attended his lectures. Instead of parroting the teaching of the Church, he tried to engage with modern thought on issues of reason and faith.
Ratzinger’s breakthrough came in the preparation for Vatican II (1962–65), when he was an unofficial adviser to the highly respected Cardinal Josef Frings. A key preparatory paper had been based on the two founts of revelation: Scripture and tradition. Ratzinger savaged it, arguing that it is God himself, in his word, who is the source of revelation. In due course he was appointed an official peritus or adviser, and through Cardinal Frings had a huge influence, getting the council away from documents drawn up by the curia that simply repeated the old truths in a legalistic way to a new style which was pastoral, open to the world and non-judgemental. However, good theology by itself would not have been enough. Deft political footwork was necessary to change the composition of the committee that put forward the documents to the council from one controlled by the curia to one that was more representative of the wider Church. The book comes to its climax and end with this significant political achievement, whose effects are still with us.
The style of this book is somewhat journalistic but it gives a fair and balanced account both of the enigmatic Ratzinger himself and of this period of great change.