The Mind of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: Pope Benedict XVI

His Spiritual Vision and the Worship of God

By Msgr. Michael J. Cantley

            The only way to try to enter into the spiritual vision of Cardinal Ratzinger is to note the intimate connection of his Christology and Ecclesiology.  Christ and the Church form a “single mystery.”[1]  Many in the present age, infected with the spirit of relativism, would answer the question: how can I know Jesus? with the suggestion that science, through literary and historical criticism offers the only available way.  For the modern mind, knowing about often substitutes for knowing something in itself, in the case of religious knowledge it substitutes for knowing someone as a living, breathing, communicating presence.  We can know a lot about the ‘historical Jesus’ from the arts and sciences we use to recover the past.  But that is all the arts and sciences are equipped to yield: “science ends logically by emphasizing [Jesus’] absence, the irrecoverable absence of the historical past.”[2]  Albert Schweitzer witnesses to this when he writes: “This [scientific] research had strange results.  It began by rediscovering the historical Jesus, thinking it was possible to transfer him, as he was, into our time, as teacher and savior.  This freed him from the chain which bound him to the rock of Church doctrine.  It was a [cause for] rejoicing to see life and movement return to this figure which seemed to be moving toward us.  But this Jesus did not stay: he went on past our time and back to his own.”[3]  Nor should this surprise us.  It is our own experience with every historical figure bound in his or her own place and time, and present today only in memory or through the continuing effects of actions accomplished.  But Jesus is not just any historical figure, he is the eternal Son of God become incarnate at a moment in time and in a particular place, yet one divine Person transcending time and place so that what he did two thousand years ago is present today as he is present today.  Knowledge about Jesus only “confirms and establishes distance;” knowledge of Jesus establishes a personal exchange of friendship through his presence in and to us, through his love that invites a response.  This can be aided by science, and should be, but to stop with science is to admire someone absent.  The call to spirituality is the call to communication – the call to prayer.

            After an examination of the prayerful intimacy of Jesus with the Father, the thesis Cardinal Ratzinger offers is: “[Since] prayer is central to the person of Jesus, sharing his prayer is the prerequisite for knowing and understanding him.”[4]  To know someone on a personal basis requires an ability to enter into the other, to be sensitive and responsive to the revelation the other makes of him/herself.  Jesus often refers to his intimacy with the Father: “no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (Mt. 11: 27).  There must be a “sympathy” (συν παθειν, a feeling with) a spiritual connaturality that opens the way to understanding the other.  Mere discursive knowledge will not be sufficient for this.  In entering into Jesus’ prayer our prayer becomes the vehicle by which we enter into the mind and heart of Christ, his revealing the Father to us.  Ratzinger assures us: “effective advances in Christology [in truly knowing the mystery that is Jesus Christ] cannot ever derive from purely academic theology…important as academic studies are… [they] are not enough: we also need the theology of the Saints, the theology which derives from a concrete experience of divine reality.  All the effective advances in theological knowledge have their origin in the eye of love, in the strength of its gaze …Coexistence with [Jesus’] person…derives from participation in his prayer [and] constitutes that wider coexistence which Paul terms ‘the body of Christ’.  Therefore the Church, the ‘body of Christ’, is the true subject of knowledge of Jesus.  In her memory the past is present, because Christ is in her and lives in the present.”[5]  Here, again, we encounter the twin realities of Scripture (the book of the Church) and Tradition (the living memory of the Church) through which the Father reveals himself in the Son, his Word, living and acting in us in our time and place through the eternal presence and activity of the Holy Spirit.  This is corroborated when Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father” (only he could pray “My Father”) alerting us to the fact that communion with Jesus is communion with all of his brethren, his Church.  Cardinal Ratzinger’s vision is not ‘inward’ but ‘outward’.  His spirituality is ecclesio-Christological because it is a spirituality of the ‘Communion of Saints.  He writes: “Communion with the life of Jesus and the consequent knowledge of Jesus presupposes communication with the living subject of the tradition to which all of this is ordered, communication with the Church …The tradition of the Church is that transcendental subject in which the memory of the past is present.  Therefore with the passage of time, what is already held in memory can be clearly seen and be better understood in the light of the Holy Spirit who leads to the truth (Jn. 6:13; cf. 14:26).  This advance is not a coming to birth from something totally new, but a process in which the memory ‘enters’ within itself.”[6]  Another name for this is the ‘development of doctrine,’ memory enriched and deepened through contemplation in love and adoration.

Liturgy

            The basic form of adoration is the Liturgy.[7] As is his custom, Cardinal Ratzinger describes the meaning of liturgy and the encounter with the Reality effected through liturgy in its historical context.  We can begin with his account of the movement that most proximately affects our liturgical experience that is with his description of the analogies in use in the 1920s.  Liturgists were attempting to describe the meaning and effect of liturgy with the use of analogy, one of them being the analogy of “play”.  As play had its rules, and introduced its own world, both remaining in force as long as the “game” continued, and as it took the players out of the world of struggle to offer respite, so the liturgy created a kind of “oasis” of freedom where for a moment one could let life flow freely, feel safe and enter a totally “other” world, later to return to the reality of ones own experience but strengthened.  Ratzinger comments: “Now there is some truth in this way of thinking, but it is insufficient.”[8]  Recognizing this, some went on to compare the liturgy with child’s play where the activity is more precisely “a rehearsal, a prelude for the life to come…Seen thus, liturgy would be a rediscovery within us of real childhood, of openness to the greatness still to come, which is still unfulfilled in adult life.”[9]  These analogies come close to the popular idea that in and through religion we step out of the world of trouble to be renewed to step back into it ready to endure and, perhaps, even to conquer.  Yet, the essential meaning and purpose of liturgy and of religion in general is not yet even suggested by these analogies.  While they offer a strengthening and are a preparation for the life to come, they are essentially devoid of the notion of liturgy as worship of God “according to the will of the Deity.”[10]  Liturgy invites God’s presence into all of the events of life; it is a ritualization of life, a surrender to God and an expression of confidence in his continued presence and support.  Ratzinger offers Old Testament images of the Exodus and Covenant to make his point, concluding that: “cult seen in its true breadth and depth goes beyond the action of the liturgy.  Ultimately, it embraces the ordering of the whole of human life…man becomes glory for God…when he lives by looking toward God… [and] law and ethos [which make life together possible] do not hold together when they are not anchored in the liturgical center and inspired by it.”[11]

            Cardinal Ratzinger uses the incident of the worship if the “golden calf” in Exodus 32: 1-35 to make the point that the liturgy to be real must be revelatory, celebrated as God decrees, not only in its ritual details but in the totality of its meaning and spirit.  He writes: “In the Old Testament there is a series of very important testimonies to the truth that liturgy is not a matter of ‘what you please’.  No where is this more dramatically evident than in the narrative of the golden calf…The cult conducted by the high priest Aaron is not meant to serve any false gods of the heathens.  The apostasy is more subtle.  There is no obvious turning away from God to the false gods.  Outwardly, the people remain completely attached to the same God…Presumably even the ritual is in complete conformity to the rubrics.  And yet it is a falling away from the worship of God to idolatry.  This apostasy which outwardly is scarcely perceptible has two causes.  First, there is a violation of the prohibition of images.  The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God.  They want to bring him down into their own world, into what they can see and understand.  Worship is not longer going up to God, but drawing God down to one’s own world…Man is using God…he is placing himself above God…second point: the worship of the golden calf is a self-generated cult… When…God himself becomes inaccessible, the people just fetch him back.  Worship becomes…a festival of self-affirmation…The narration of the golden calf is a warning about any kind of self-initiated and self-seeking worship.  Ultimately, it is no longer concerned with God but with giving oneself a nice little alternative world, manufactured from one’s own resources…an apostasy in sacral disguise.”[12]  

            This long quotation seems to sum up the basic warning against a tendency on the part of celebrants, ministers and congregations to insert personal preference into the liturgy in ways that draw attention to the self and away form the adoration, thanks, reparation and petition that are the purposes of authentic prayer.  The prayer of liturgy is God’s, and executed through his Mystical Body, the Church.  If it looses its ecclesial dimension it is vitiated essentially. 

Eucharist

            The center of Catholic liturgy is the Eucharist.  Its celebration sums up and energizes the whole of our spiritual life.  After a discussion of the word “communion” (κοινωνία)[13], Cardinal Ratzinger centers his attention on the Eucharist, locating it within the themes of both Christology and Ecclesiology.  He reminds us that “the heart of Christian communion…is to be sought in Christology: the incarnated Son is the ‘communion’ between God and man.  Being a Christian is in reality nothing other than partaking in the mystery of the Incarnation…Once this is grasped, then the indivisibility of the Church and Eucharist, of sacramental Communion and congregational communion, is obvious,”[14]  He continues: “Eucharistic Communion is aimed at a complete reshaping of my own life.  It breaks up man’s entire self and creates a new ‘we.’ Communion with Christ is necessarily also communication with all who belong to him: therein I myself become part of the new bread he is creating by the resubstantiation of the whole of earthly reality.  The Church is of her nature a relationship, a relationship set up by the love of Christ, which in its turn likewise founds a new relationship of men with one another.[15]

            This is powerful doctrine if one takes the time to penetrate its meaning.  “Jesus Christ opens the way to what is supposedly[16] impossible, to communion between God and man, because as the incarnate Word, he is that communion.”[17]

Again, receiving Jesus in Eucharist entails entering “into a community of existence with Christ, entering into that state in which the human existence is opened to God …the necessary condition for opening up of the inner being of men for one another.”[18]

            Since the Eucharist effects our participation in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection and since it is constitutive of the Church, the body of Christ, it follows that we must affirm: “the necessity of the Eucharist for salvation.  The Eucharist is necessary in exactly the same sense as the Church is necessary, and vice versa.”[19]  What else can be the meaning of Jesus’ words: “Unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (Jn. 6: 53).  This necessity can be interpreted in the same way that we explained regarding the necessity of Baptism and membership in the Church.  Those who, through no fault of their own, do not receive Eucharist may be said to do so ‘in spirit’.  That is, they would receive the Eucharist if they knew it was God’s will for them since as good willed people they would do whatever they were convinced was God’s will.  But, faultlessly, they do not have such knowledge and will not be held accountable for this failure.  God, somehow supplies. 

            But, two additional problems arise: those who know, believe and desire the Eucharist but cannot receive it because of persecution, shortage of priests (a reminder that the crisis of vocations is a serious ecclesial, sacramental and especially Eucharistic problem), or because they are canonically prevented – for example, those divorced and remarried outside the Church.  Cardinal Ratzinger addresses the plight of the excommunicated with sympathy[20], affirming that the censure is intended to bring about conversion and a change in life that will restore the excommunicate to the Sacraments.  One who deeply desires the Eucharist for reasons rooted in faith and love for Christ will feel the pain of separation and use appropriate means to recover canonical status for reception.  He also reminds us that one is never separated from love, quoting St. Bonaventure on this point.  Ratzinger’s conclusion:  “through the affliction of being distanced, in the pain of longing and the growth of love that results, the impossibility of sacramental Communion can lead to spiritual progress, while rebellion against it…necessarily undermines the positive and constructive point of the excommunication.  Rebellion is not healing, but destructive of love.”[21]  The reality is that Communion without this love and without removal of the obstacle that prevents its reception, to take Communion in such circumstances is itself spiritually harmful.  The Church is blamed for the sentence of excommunication, but the sentence is merely a statement about the condition one has freely chosen and in which one freely chooses to remain.  To put it another way, Communion is divine gift, totally undeserved, with only one condition that it be received in obedient love. 

            A problem that all of us are heir to is the possibility that we will allow the reception of Communion to become routine and, thus, fail to allow it to attain the transforming effect it is intended to bring about in our lives.  Following up on what he had written about the plight of those deprived of Eucharist, Cardinal Ratzinger speaks, surprisingly but wisely, about fasting from the Eucharist.[22]  He makes important cautionary points: if done, it ought to be infrequent and for a limited time; it should not be chosen without the advice and direction of a wise spiritual director who will help the one fasting to discover the motivation and clarify the purpose for such an action;  and the goal should be to deepen one’s appreciation for the Eucharist so that it is received in the future with greater concentration and deeper love.  The Cardinal points out that as fasting from physical food breaks what is normal and necessary for the sake of some spiritual gain, so sacramental fasting is not normal and therefore only to be cautiously entered into.

            Developing this theme, Cardinal Ratzinger offers the example of St. Augustine who, as his life was ebbing, “excommunicated himself and took upon himself ecclesiastical penitence…he set himself alongside, in solidarity, with the public sinner who seeks forgiveness and grace through the pain of not receiving Communion.”[23]  Contemplating this action, Ratzinger asks: “could such a spiritual fasting not sometimes be useful or even necessary, to renew and establish more deeply our relationship with the Body of Christ?”[24]  He notes that the early Church fasted from the Eucharist on Good Friday.  Today, though Mass may not be celebrated we are permitted to receive the Eucharist at the sacred liturgy.  May we not, he wonders, voluntarily fast on this most sacred day, though Communion would be available to us, to experience a deliberate privation to deepen our longing for the Eucharist? 

The Tabernacle

            The centrality of the Eucharist and a developing appreciation and understanding of this great Gift grew into a desire to have the sacred Species reserved in a tabernacle to be available for visits and encourage devotion to the Real Presence.[25]  The Church of the first millennium knew, essentially, the altar which was approached atop steps leading to it and with a baldacchino sheltering and setting it off for honor.[26]  The tabernacle to house the reserved Sacrament came in the second millennium.  This development was the fruit of a deeper appreciation of the Real Presence of Christ reserved for the sake of Communion of the faithful but also to be available at times when Communion was not available.  The desire, at the present time to recapture the earlier days of the Church’s practice and to remove the tabernacle to a more obscure place to concentrate attention on the altar has become a kind of antiquarianism, reducing, wrong-headedly, the deserved place for the reservation of the Eucharistic Presence.  Along with this, and to be expected with such a movement, was the reduction of celebrations like Benediction, exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in the monstrance, and processions with the Sacred Species as well as encouragement of visits to place of reservation.  These began to be considered “medieval errors… [it was alleged] the Eucharistic Gifts are for ‘eating, not for looking at.’”[27]  What was lost in this mind-set was a sense of the unique Presence of Christ in the Sacred Species, a belief that has existed in the Church from the very beginning as is evident in the teaching of St. Paul  and the sixth chapter of the Gospel of St. John; reconfirmed in the writings of the early Church Fathers, with Justine Martyr and Ignatius of Antioch among them.  Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us: “There is no doubt about the great mystery of the Presence bestowed upon us, about the change of the gifts during the Eucharistic prayer…The early Church was already well aware that the bread once changed remains changed.  That is why they reserved it for the sick, and that is why they showed it such reverence, as is still the case today in the Eastern Church.  But now, in the Middle Ages, the awareness deepened: the gift is changed.  The Lord has definitively drawn this piece of mater to himself…the Lord himself is present, the Indivisible One, the risen Lord, with Flesh and Blood, with Body and Soul, with Divinity and Humanity.”[28]  If and when this belief moves effectively from notional to real, from being something intellectually assented to, to something that invests every fiber of our being, it is then that we have to do something about it.  Ratzinger says: “This deepened awareness of faith is impelled by the knowledge that in the consecrated species he is there and remains there.  When a man experiences this in every fiber of his heart and mind and senses, the consequence is inescapable: ‘We must make a proper place for the Presence’”.[29]   This sense of the presence of Jesus is one of the influences in the life of St. Edith Stein.  She, not yet a convert and with a friend was visiting the Cathedral at Frankfurt where she noticed a woman with a shopping bag enter to pay a visit to the tabernacle.  Edith ruminated that synagogues and Protestant churches are visited only for official services and was deeply impressed by this woman’s faith: “here was someone coming into the empty church in the middle of a day’s work as if to talk with a friend.”[30]

            This is not merely an issue of faith seeking the consolation of the Presence, but of a faith that deepens itself, or is deepened and rendered more fruitful when the Presence is adored.  The importance of the tabernacle is underscored by the 1983 Code of Canon Law which requires every established house of Religious to have an Oratory in which the Eucharist is celebrated and reserved (C. 608); it is to be reserved, too, in every cathedral and parish church (C.934) where the place of reservation is open for some hours every day to accommodate the faithful in making visits to the Blessed Sacrament (C. 937); and it decrees that a light burn perpetually to signify the divine Presence; there is also a strong recommendation that annually there be exposition of the Blessed Sacrament “so that the local community [may] more profoundly meditate on and adore the Eucharistic Mystery” (C. 942).  The Eucharist is the “summit and source of all worship and Christian life…indeed, the other sacraments and all the ecclesiastical works of the apostolate are closely connected with the Most Holy Eucharist and ordered to it” (C. 897).

Sacred music

     The wonder of the Eucharist has inspired a rich treasury of ritual, art, architecture and music. Given the close relationship of the Cardinal to his priest-brother Georg and the latter’s prominence in the field of liturgical music, as well as the Cardinal’s own proficiency in music, he is an accomplished pianist, what he had to say about music is worth considering seriously.  He notes that some form of the verb “to sing” appears with great frequency in the Bible: 309 times in the Old Testament and 36 in the New.  The Book of Psalms is a primary source for discovering the themes appropriate for sacred music.  The Psalms reflect the human environment out of which praise of God evolves: “lament, complaint, indeed accusation, fear, hope, trust, gratitude, joy –the whole of human life is reflected here, as it is unfolded in dialogue with God.”[31]  The great value of the Psalms as a paradigm for liturgical prayer is that they embrace both the world of personal experience and the common prayer of eh whole people: “The Psalms frequently come from very personal experience of suffering and answered prayers, and yet they flow into the common prayer of Israel.”[32]  The Psalter almost spontaneously became the prayer book of the infant Church, and has remained so because of the personal and communal dynamism it contains. 

            Liturgical music underwent significant changes over time when human creativity began to advance its own ends rather than service to the Word of God.  “Music was no longer developing out of prayer, but, with the new demand for artistic autonomy, was now heading away from the liturgy; it was becoming an end in itself, opening the door to new, very different ways of feeling and of experiencing the world.  Music was alienating the liturgy from its true nature.”[33]  Modern as this may sound, this quoted comment refers to pre-Reformation ecclesial experience.  The Council of Trent (1545-1563) found it necessary to intervene by decreeing that liturgical music be at the service of the Word.  Pope St. Pius X (1903-1914) found a similar need to intervene.  A clear distinction has to be established between liturgical music that serves the worship of God; and religious music that would serve a wider purpose where, aesthetically and inspirationally, it would give stage to talent and give enjoyment to its listeners, fulfilling the ends of art.  Much cultural beauty and greatness both in Chant and polyphony has been lost to the liturgy and should be reclaimed for its power to raise the mind and heart to God in praise and adoration.

Devotion to Mary

            Devotion to Mary, Mother of God and Mother of the Church, has identified the Catholic faith through the centuries.  In the era after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), this devotion suffered loss and the Council was wrongly blamed in its decision not to offer a separate document on Mary, but to include its Mariology in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church as a final chapter.  While it is “incontrovertibly true that the teaching on Mary initially rose out of Christological necessity and developed within Christology’s framework…it must be added that everything that was said in this context did not form a distinct Mariology, nor could it, it remained an explication of Christology.”[34]  Historically, it is out of the development of the theology of the Church, of Ecclesiology that Mariology or the theology of Mary developed.  This is what Vatican II hoped to recover with its placement of Mary at the end of its document on the Church, signaling that she is both the image and fulfillment of what it means to be Church.  Ratzinger notes that “in the Ecclesiology of the period of the Fathers [there is] a preliminary adumbration of the whole of Mariology, albeit without naming the name of the Mother of the Lord: the Virgo Ecclesia, the mater Ecclesia, the Ecclesia immaculata, the Ecclesia assumpta – everything that will one day be Mariology is present [here] as Ecclesiology.”[35]  For: “The Church is virgin and mother; she has been immaculately conceived and carries the burden of history; she suffers and has already been received into heaven.  It gradually becomes clear in the course of the development that the Church was anticipated by Mary, that she is personified in Mary, and vice versa, that Mary does not stand there as an isolated individual, closed up in herself, but carries within her the whole mystery of the Church.  The person [Mary] is not being understood as closed and individualistic, nor the community [the Church] as collective and non-personal; the two merge inseparably together.”[36]  Such a vision takes nothing away from the glory of Mary or her place in our prayer life.  Rather: “the teaching on Mary’s motherhood and the teaching on her embodying the Church are related to one another as factum and mysterium facti, as fact and meaning.  Both are inseparable: the fact without meaning would be blind, and without the fact, the meaning would be empty.”[37]  Devotion to Mary leads inexorably through the Church to Jesus, the incarnate Son of the Father, conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit.  As in all authentic prayer, all stems from and leads back to the Trinity.    

Conclusion

            The purpose of these lectures has been to acquaint ourselves with some of the major themes in the vast literature authored by our present Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI.  These are his writings as a professor of theology and as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  Contemplating them at the beginning of his Papal ministry gives us some insight into the issues he has been concerned about and will presumable be the issues he will develop as Head of the Church through his encyclicals, homilies, letters and whatever other form of communication he chooses to use.  It is hoped that we have come to appreciate our new Pope as a first class theologian, knowledgeable in Scripture, history and the culture that has and is shaping our world.  He is himself a man of culture, sensitivity and deeply learned.  His thought is continuous with that of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, and his grasp of what the Second Vatican Council actually taught is that of a participant – he was a peritus, an expert advising the fathers of the Council in their deliberations and in the construction of many of the Council documents that were approved by the Council.  His spirituality is Christocentric, Ecclesially loyal, Eucharistically nourished and supported by a deep devotion to Mary.  The great mystery of the Communion of Saints, with Mary as central, inspires his writings and his call for all members of the Church to live in loving communion with one another.  We may await with anticipation the first and others of his Papal writings.