Who could follow within the footsteps of John Paul II?
In 2005, the College of Cardinals in Rome faced the difficult task of selecting a successor to John Paul II. The Polish pope reigned for nearly 27 years and played a key role in ending the tyranny of communism in Eastern Europe.
He had the charisma of a rock star and the mind of a philosopher. Conservatives loved him, but JPII was also an amazing modernizer of the Church. His successor will step into his shadow – and he could have to face the best failure of his pontificate, the horrific sex abuse scandals that plague the religion.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger prayed that he wouldn’t be elected. He was in some ways John Paul II’s right-hand man, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for nearly 1 / 4 of a century, and a logical selection that solidified John Paul II’s legacy. Nonetheless, Ratzinger was 78 years old and feared he was too old to complete his friend’s unfinished work.
The school elected him anyway, and Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI.
Conservatives—and never just Catholics—were delighted. The liberals were horrified and didn’t like that Benedict allowed the standard Latin Mass to be celebrated more widely.
Benedict worked to heal old wounds from the ecclesiastical upheaval of Vatican II. And he didn’t mince words in regards to the “dirt” of sexual abuse within the Church.
He also became involved within the religious controversies of the post-9/11 era.
Did faith result in fanaticism and violence? Was Christianity only a form of Western imperialism as Islamists and liberal postmodernists claimed?
In a brief speech delivered on the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006, Benedict made a superb defense of Christianity as a faith of reason and revelation – a faith of persuasion, not of conquest, a teacher of objective morality in an age when science had change into merely experiential.
The Regensburg lecture sparked controversy and was taken for an attack on Islam. In actual fact, it was an affirmation of Socratic philosophy together with the Catholic faith, and its message was universal. This was at the guts of Benedict’s pontificate and Ratzinger’s life’s work.
After his death on Latest 12 months’s Eve, Benedict was best known by many outside the church, and too many inside it, for resigning from the papacy in 2013 – the primary pope to achieve this in nearly 600 years. His admirers were horrified, but Benedict knew what he was doing. He felt his age and understood that future popes may also run the danger of becoming too old for the office. He set a precedent to guide them.
But Benedict XVI shouldn’t be remembered because the pope who resigned, nor as an epilogue to the nice John Paul II. Benedict was a champion of faith – against each fanaticism and cold materialism.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.