Justified True Belief

(●) A Bavarian professor who spent his life arguing that faith and reason need each other, and then spent eight years as pope. + For most of his life Joseph Ratzinger was a university teacher, and the things he wanted were a piano, a cat, and an afternoon with a stack of manuscripts. He held chairs at four German universities and wrote a short book on the Apostles’ Creed that theology students are still assigned half a century later. Only afterwards came twenty-three years running the Vatican office that decides what Catholic teaching is, and then, at seventy-eight, the papacy. He is the rare figure who did his best thinking long before the fame arrived, and that is worth knowing at the start, because it means the books can be read on their own terms rather than as the pronouncements of an office. One argument runs through the whole of it, and he made it in a Bavarian lecture hall and in an encyclical, the formal letter a pope writes to the whole church, signed at his desk in Rome. Christianity, he held, is not a leap taken in the dark. And a reason that has ruled God out before it starts has not become more rigorous by doing so; it has quietly made itself smaller. He put that case across a table in Munich to the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, no believer himself. He put it again to a room of scientists and scholars at Regensburg. And he built three volumes on Jesus around the claim that the Gospels can carry historical weight. Two things about him tend to stay with people. In February 2013 he stood up in front of the cardinals, read out a short paragraph in Latin, and resigned, the first pope to do so in nearly six centuries. And in the foreword to his book on Jesus, written while he was pope, he told his readers that it carried no official authority whatever and that everyone was free to contradict him.

(●) 16 April 1927 AD: Born on Holy Saturday in a Bavarian village, and baptized the same day. + Marktl am Inn is a small town in Upper Bavaria, on the river that gives it its name, close enough to Austria that you could walk there before lunch. Joseph Ratzinger was born there on 16 April 1927, and before the day was out he had been carried to the parish church and baptized. He never stopped finding the date significant. It was Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter, and the water used on him was the water blessed that morning for the coming Easter; in his memoirs he notes that he was the first person baptized with it. To be born on the threshold of Easter rather than inside it struck him as an accurate description of a Christian life: hope, not possession. His father, also Joseph, was a country policeman with a low opinion of the National Socialists, and the opinion cost the family moves: Tittmoning, then Aschau am Inn, then Traunstein in 1937. His mother Maria, a cook before her marriage, ran the household on a policeman’s pay. There were two older children, Maria and Georg. Georg, three years the elder, would be ordained on the same morning as his brother and would spend three decades directing the boys’ choir of Regensburg cathedral, and the two of them remained close for more than ninety years.

(●) 1941 AD: Conscripted at fourteen into the Hitler Youth, and four years later he walked home from the army. + Membership of the Hitler Youth had been made compulsory for German boys, and in 1941, not long after his fourteenth birthday, Ratzinger was enrolled in it. He went as little as he could get away with, which took some doing, because absence had a price attached. He remembered a sympathetic mathematics teacher who simply marked him present, so that the family would not lose the reduction on his seminary fees. He was at that point a pupil at the minor seminary, the boarding school where boys who might one day become priests do their ordinary schooling alongside their Latin and their prayers. Two years later the boys of his year were pulled out of it altogether and sent to work anti-aircraft batteries around Munich as Luftwaffenhelfer, schoolboy auxiliaries in uniform. That is how a sixteen-year-old came to spend his nights watching the sky over a city he loved for the bombers coming to burn it. Labour service on the Austrian border with Hungary followed, digging tank traps, and then infantry training back at Traunstein. In the last days of April 1945, with the war visibly finished, he left his unit and walked home. That was not a small thing to do: desertion was a hanging offence, and he was lucky in the men he met. He later wrote that the two soldiers who stopped him on the road had had enough of the war, and that when they saw his arm in a sling they told him he was wounded and to move along. American troops found him at the family house soon afterwards, and he spent several weeks in their prisoner-of-war camps at Neu-Ulm and at the airfield at Bad Aibling, sleeping on the ground in the open with tens of thousands of other men. He was released on 19 June 1945. He never told any of this as a story about courage, and he was careful to say that his family had not been heroes either. What he took away from it was a permanent suspicion of political enthusiasm, of movements that promise to remake human beings, and of any state that recognizes nothing above itself. A power that answers to no truth, he came to think, will eventually recognize no limit.

(●) 29 June 1951 AD: Ordained beside his brother, and then a second thesis that nearly ended the career it was meant to begin. + The two brothers were ordained together in the cathedral at Freising on 29 June 1951 by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the old archbishop of Munich who had preached against Nazi racial doctrine from his own pulpit while it was dangerous to do so. Ratzinger remembered a small bird lifting off and singing as the cardinal’s hands came down on his head, and remembered too that he told himself not to make too much of it. A doctorate followed in 1953, on Augustine’s understanding of the church as the people and house of God. Then came the part that nearly went wrong. In the German system a young scholar cannot simply take up a chair once he has a doctorate; he has to write a second and much larger book first, the Habilitation, which is the door into an academic career and has no way around it. Ratzinger wrote his on Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century Franciscan theologian, and specifically on how Bonaventure understood revelation and the shape of history. His second reader was Michael Schmaus, the formidable dogmatic theologian of Munich, and at Easter 1956 Schmaus rejected it as tending to a dangerous subjectivizing of revelation. A rejection at that stage did not mean revise and resubmit. It meant find another line of work. He salvaged it by amputation. The portion on Bonaventure’s theology of history had drawn no objection, so he cut the book back to that section, reworked it fast, resubmitted, and was habilitated at Munich in February 1957. He called the episode a drama when he came to write his memoirs forty years later, and the material he had cut waited another half century to be printed. How much of a drama it was is now argued over. The German magazine Publik-Forum printed Schmaus’ two assessments in January 2024, and they read less like the begrudging opponent of the memoir than like a hard examiner listing citation errors and conclusions reached before the sources had been heard; other readers of the same file answer that Schmaus also worked to block the young man’s appointment to Bonn. What nobody disputes is that the establishment came within an inch of finishing him at twenty-nine.

(●) 1962 AD: He went to the Second Vatican Council as a young adviser, and the cardinal he advised shook the Holy Office. + He had been teaching four years, at Freising and then at Bonn, when Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne took him to Rome as his peritus, a theological expert attached to a bishop for the length of the Council. The Second Vatican Council sat from 1962 to 1965, and it reset how the Catholic Church spoke about Scripture, worship, other Christians, other religions, and the modern world. Ratzinger, still in his thirties, was in the drafting rooms where the texts were fought over. On 8 November 1963 Frings stood up in St Peter’s and told the assembled bishops that the methods of the Holy Office, the Vatican’s doctrinal court, were unsuited to the age and a scandal to the world. Cardinal Ottaviani, who ran the Holy Office, answered from the floor in open anger and said the charge came from ignorance. Frings was nearly blind by then and leaned on Ratzinger to summarize each day’s papers and to draft his interventions, and Ratzinger’s biographers hold that the young adviser had a hand in this one. Eighteen years later he would be given Ottaviani’s job. For a man who had come within an inch of losing his career at twenty-nine, the years that followed went remarkably well. Münster offered him a chair in 1963, and Tübingen in 1966, where Hans Küng was dean of the faculty and wanted him badly enough to put his name forward alone rather than on the usual list of three, telephoning him first to be sure he would come. Then in 1968 he published Einführung in das Christentum, a set of lectures on the Apostles’ Creed that he had given to students from every faculty in the university rather than to theologians only, and it is still the book he is best known for. That same year the student revolt reached Tübingen, and it changed the direction of his thinking for good. He watched Marxist slogans go up on the doors of the theology faculty and a colleague shouted down off the platform, and what he concluded from it was not that the students were wrong about every grievance but that a movement announcing itself as liberation was busy manufacturing a new coercion. He had heard that promise before, from the other end of the political spectrum, when he was fourteen. He left in 1969 for the quieter new university at Regensburg. Three years after that, in 1972, he helped found a theological journal called Communio with the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac and the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.

(●) 1977 AD: Made archbishop of Munich and then a cardinal, and four years later the pope put him in charge of Catholic doctrine. + He did not want Munich. He was about to turn fifty, had never run a parish, and had books he meant to finish. Paul VI appointed him archbishop of Munich and Freising on 24 March 1977; he was ordained bishop in the cathedral on 28 May by Josef Stangl, the bishop of Würzburg, and made a cardinal on 27 June. For his motto he took two words from the third letter of John, cooperatores veritatis, fellow workers for the truth (3 John 8), which joined the work he had done as a teacher to the work he was being handed as a bishop. In 1978 he voted in two conclaves inside seven weeks, a conclave being the meeting at which the cardinals are locked in together until they have elected a pope, and the second of the two elected a Pole. Three years after that, on 25 November 1981, John Paul II called him to Rome as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is the same office, under a later name, that Frings had attacked from the floor of St Peter’s in 1963. He asked to be released and sent back to his books more than once, and he was refused every time. He stayed twenty-three years, and the work he did there is what fixed his public reputation. Some of it was combative. In 1984 and again in 1986 his congregation issued two instructions on liberation theology, the Latin American movement that read the gospel as a summons to political liberation. The first warned that borrowing Marxist analysis wholesale would end by shrinking salvation into politics; the second said plainly that the church’s concern for the poor is not an optional extra. Then in 2000 he signed Dominus Iesus, which restated that salvation comes through Christ alone and through his church, and which angered other Christians more than anything else he ever put his name to. Other parts of the work were constructive and got far less attention. He chaired the commission that spent six years producing the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992, the first complete one the Roman church had issued since the sixteenth century. Still, it was the combative half that made the headlines, and German newspapers took to calling him der Panzerkardinal, the armoured cardinal, the one who arrives like a tank. The people who actually worked for him described somebody rather different: a courteous man who listened, restated your argument back to you better than you had put it yourself, and then disagreed with it.

(●) 19 April 2005 AD: Elected pope at seventy-eight, he took the name Benedict and wrote his first encyclical about love. + John Paul II died on 2 April 2005. Ratzinger, as dean of the College of Cardinals, preached at the funeral in front of a crowd that filled the square and the streets behind it, and then preached again on the morning the conclave opened. Four ballots later, on the evening of 19 April, he was pope. He took the name Benedict, after Benedict of Nursia, whose rule shaped European monasticism, and after Benedict XV, who had spent the First World War pleading with the powers to stop. Almost nobody predicted the first encyclical. The world was braced for a crackdown and got Deus Caritas Est, signed on Christmas Day 2005, a letter about love: about eros and agape, the Greek words for desire and for self-giving, and about why a church that believes God is love ends up running soup kitchens. Spe Salvi followed in 2007 on hope, and Caritas in Veritate in 2009 on charity, truth and economic life. The professor never quite went away either. In the hours he could steal from the office he wrote three volumes on Jesus, published between 2007 and 2012. Two acts of his that people still argue about belong to the same stretch of years. In July 2007 he issued Summorum Pontificum, giving priests wide freedom to celebrate the older Latin Mass, on the argument that what an earlier generation had held sacred could not simply be forbidden to this one. And in September 2010 he travelled to Britain, where he spoke in Westminster Hall to an audience of parliamentarians, judges, diplomats and academics, and then beatified John Henry Newman at Cofton Park in Birmingham, beatification being the step at which the church formally declares a dead Christian blessed and permits public devotion, one stage short of naming him a saint.

(●) 11 February 2013 AD: He told the cardinals in Latin that his strength was gone, became the first pope in nearly six centuries to resign, and lived nearly another ten years inside the Vatican walls until his death on 31 December 2022. + Nothing about the morning suggested anything was coming. The occasion was a consistory, one of the routine working meetings a pope holds with the cardinals who are in Rome, and this one had been called to approve some canonizations, the formal declarations that a dead Christian is a saint. He read out a short paragraph in Latin, and most of the men in the room did not immediately take in what they had heard. To steer the boat of Peter, he said, both strength of mind and body are needed, and his had deteriorated in recent months; he was therefore renouncing the ministry, and the see of Rome would be vacant from eight o’clock on the evening of 28 February. No pope had resigned since Gregory XII in 1415, and even that one had a reason nobody could mistake for weakness: he stepped down to end a split in which rival claimants each said they were the real pope. This was something else. This was simply a man saying he was too old for the work. He flew to Castel Gandolfo, came back a few months later to a converted monastery inside the Vatican walls, and lived there for nearly ten years, reading, playing the piano, and answering letters, insisting throughout that there was only one pope. The last decade was not quiet. In January 2022 a Munich law firm published a report on the handling of abuse in his old archdiocese and named him in four cases, and he answered with a letter of his own on 8 February. He died at the monastery on the morning of 31 December 2022, aged ninety-five. His secretary reported that a few hours earlier, alone in the room with a night nurse who spoke no German, he had said in Italian, "Signore, ti amo," Lord, I love you. On 5 January 2023 Pope Francis celebrated his funeral in St Peter’s Square, and it was a thing no living person had seen before: a pope burying his predecessor.

What He Taught

(T1) Christianity begins with meeting someone, not with adopting an idea. + A child comes home from a school lesson on world religions with a worksheet, and the worksheet has two columns: what these people believe, and what these people do. Ask most adults the same question and you will get the same two columns. It is a fair enough description of how a religion looks from the outside, and Ratzinger thought that in the Christian case it had the thing backwards. He opened his first encyclical as pope by saying so, in a single sentence, which is a startling place to begin for a man the world was expecting to begin with a warning. He is not saying that doctrine and conduct do not matter. He spent twenty-three years guarding doctrine, and nobody on any side of him ever accused him of going soft on it. He is saying that they are second things. What comes first is an event that happened and a person who is alive, and everything else in a Christian life is what someone does after being met. He liked to put it in a form that sounds almost commercial until you sit with it for a moment: the church does not grow by recruiting, but by attracting, the way one person draws another. The encyclical then does something few readers expected. It picks up eros, the Greek word for desire, the love that wants and reaches and is not ashamed of the body, and it refuses to line that up against agape, the self-giving love the New Testament prefers, as though a Christian had to choose. Each goes bad alone. Desire with no self-gift in it curdles into appetite, and self-gift with no desire in it hardens into duty. Real love is one movement with both in it. And God, on this account, is not the cold first principle of the philosophers who merely thinks about himself, but one who both gives and wants: which is what the New Testament says in three words when it says that God is love (1 John 4:16).

(Q) "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." + Source: Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est 1, 25 December 2005 (Vatican English translation). From the opening paragraph of his first encyclical, written eight months into the papacy. He had been Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for twenty-three years, and the letter the world was braced for was a letter about error.

(T2) Faith and reason need each other, and each goes wrong when it is left alone. + On 12 September 2006 he went back to the University of Regensburg, where he had held a chair from 1969 until Munich called him away, and gave a lecture to the university’s scholars called "Faith, Reason and the University." He opened with a memory of Bonn, where he had begun teaching in 1959: two theology faculties, Catholic and Protestant, arguing with each other inside one secular university, and everyone in the building taking for granted that reason could get at questions about God at all, so that the arguments were worth having. The argument that follows cuts in two directions, and both halves have teeth. Against a religion that appeals to a God so far beyond reason that he could command anything whatever, he answers that acting against reason is acting against God’s own nature. He happened to be quoting a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor at that point, in a passage about conversion by the sword, and one sentence of the quotation set off protests across the Muslim world within a week. He said afterwards that he had been reporting the emperor’s words rather than adopting them, and that he was sorry for the effect; the published text carries an added note saying so. On 30 November 2006 he stood in silent prayer beside the Mufti of Istanbul in the Blue Mosque. Turned the other way, the argument is just as blunt, and this is the half that matters most to anyone weighing the Christian claim today. A reason that has decided in advance to count only what can be weighed and measured has not grown more rigorous by narrowing itself. It has shrunk, and in shrinking it has quietly ruled out of court exactly the questions people most need answered. Whether there is a God. What a human being is for. Why anything at all is wrong. None of these can be settled in a laboratory, and a definition of reason that puts them outside its scope has not answered them; it has changed the subject and hoped nobody would notice. He did not have to go looking for someone to test that on. Two years before Regensburg he had sat across a table in Munich from Jürgen Habermas, the most respected secular philosopher in Germany and no believer, and the two of them worked their way toward a version of the same point from opposite sides. Faith needs reason to keep it from turning violent. Reason needs faith, or something like it, to keep it from concluding that whatever can be done should be.

(Q) "The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature." + Source: Benedict XVI, "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections," lecture at the University of Regensburg, 12 September 2006 (Vatican English translation). He is drawing out what he takes to be the real point of the Byzantine dialogue he has been quoting: that spreading a faith by force is wrong not merely because it is cruel but because it contradicts what God is. The lecture ends by inviting others into what he calls the breadth of reason.

(T3) A culture that will not call anything true ends up taking orders from its own appetites. + Everyone has met the argument in its friendly form. Who am I to say? What is true for you may not be true for me. Around a dinner table that sounds like modesty, and Ratzinger took it seriously as a moral instinct, because underneath it is a decent impulse: nobody wants to be the person who forces a conviction on a neighbour. Relativism, the word for the position, is simply the claim that truth is relative to the person or the culture holding it, so that there is nothing further to appeal to. He thought the instinct went wrong the moment it hardened from good manners into a rule. If nothing can be called true, then a disagreement cannot be settled by argument, because argument only works when the parties are both answerable to something outside themselves. Something else has to settle it instead: numbers, money, fashion, or simply which side wants it more. That is why he reached for the word dictatorship, which sounds overheated until you notice what he means by it. A dictatorship is a regime you cannot argue with. Relativism turned into a public creed is exactly that, because it has removed the ground an argument would have to stand on, and what is left when the arguments go is the will of whoever wants something badly enough. He said it in the most exposed sentence of his life, on the morning of 18 April 2005, preaching at the Mass before the conclave in front of the men who were about to elect a pope. Many of them read it afterwards as the reason they elected him. He had made the same case at book length two years earlier in Truth and Tolerance, and there the other half of it is spelled out carefully: tolerance is a Christian duty, the church has no business coercing anybody into belief, and the reason is not that truth does not matter but that a faith produced by force is not faith at all.

(Q) "We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires." + Source: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, homily at the Mass Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice, St Peter’s Basilica, 18 April 2005 (Vatican English translation). Preached to the College of Cardinals on the morning the conclave opened, on the reading from Ephesians about being tossed about by every wind of doctrine. The sentence just before it observes that a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is now often labelled fundamentalism, while being carried about by every wind of doctrine looks like the only attitude that can cope with modern times. He was elected the following evening.

(T4) The Jesus of the Gospels is the real Jesus of history. + Stand in front of the religion shelf of a good bookshop and count the lives of Jesus. There will be a dozen of them, and no two describe the same man. That shelf is the visible end of something that has been going on for roughly two centuries: scholars taking the Gospels apart to look for the man behind them, on the working assumption that the figure the church preached and the figure who actually walked around Galilee had come apart somewhere along the way. The method has a name. Historical criticism means reading the texts as ancient documents with sources, editors, audiences and purposes, the way a historian reads any other ancient document, asking who wrote this, for whom, out of what earlier material. Ratzinger did not reject it. He was trained in it, he uses it on every page he wrote about Jesus, and he insisted it was necessary, because Christianity stakes itself on things that either happened or did not. What he denied is that it can do the whole job on its own. Line up the reconstructed Jesuses of the last hundred years, he said, and something awkward becomes obvious: each one bears a strong family resemblance to the scholar who found him. The nineteenth century produced an ethical teacher who looked like a liberal German professor. Later came a failed apocalyptic prophet, a wandering Mediterranean sage, a peasant revolutionary. Meanwhile the figure actually in the Gospels, whose whole life is turned toward the Father and who speaks and acts out of that relationship, hangs together; and no reconstruction has ever managed a convincing account of where such a figure could have come from if nobody like him ever lived. So the three volumes he wrote between 2007 and 2012 do an unusual thing. They use the historians’ tools throughout, and they treat the Gospels as testimony to be listened to rather than as a screen to be seen past. The foreword to the first volume then does something no pope had done before. It states that the book is in no way an exercise of the teaching office, that it is one man’s search for the face of the Lord, and that everyone is free to contradict him; he asks his readers only for the goodwill without which nothing can be understood.

(Q) "I wanted to try to portray the Jesus of the Gospels as the real, 'historical' Jesus in the strict sense of the word." + Source: Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, volume 1, foreword (Doubleday, 2007; translated from the German by Adrian J. Walker). The word "historical" carries the quotation marks in his own text, because he is taking the term back from a use he thinks has gone wrong: the reconstructed figure is routinely called the historical Jesus, and he is claiming that title for the one in the sources.

(T5) Hope is not optimism, and a small hope will not carry a life. + People say hopeful things to each other at hospital bedsides, and most of us have heard how thin they can sound. Spe Salvi starts in that neighbourhood. It opens with four Latin words from Paul, spe salvi facti sumus, in hope we were saved (Romans 8:24), and then asks the obvious question: what sort of hope could possibly be worth a sentence as large as that one? Optimism will not do, and it is worth seeing why. Optimism is the expectation that things will probably turn out well; it is a temperament more than a conviction, and it is fragile, because the evening news can refute it before you have finished your coffee. Hope in the Christian sense is different in kind, not merely in degree. It is not a forecast at all but a relationship with someone who has promised, and it works the way a fixed anchor works for a climber. Nobody admires an anchor for its outlook. The whole point of it is that it holds weight. The encyclical makes the case with a life rather than an argument. Josephine Bakhita was born in Darfur around 1869, kidnapped by slave traders at the age of nine, beaten until she bled, and sold five times in the slave markets of Sudan; in the house of a general she was flogged every day until she carried a hundred and forty-four scars. Bought in 1882 by a merchant for the Italian consul and brought to Italy, she learned there the Venetian word paron, master, and learned that above all the masters who had owned her there was a Paron who was good, who knew her and had made her, and who had himself accepted a flogging. She entered the Canossian sisters, a religious order that runs schools and cares for the poor, took her vows at Verona in 1896, and spent the rest of her life in their houses in northern Italy; she was declared a saint in 2000. The point of telling her story is not that her circumstances improved. It is that she had been given a future her owners could not reach. He is equally hard on the substitutes, and this is where the encyclical stops being comfortable. The modern age, he argues, moved hope off God and onto progress, and expected that the right political arrangement plus enough technology would deliver what religion had promised. Much of that was good and a great deal of it worked. But no arrangement restores the dead, and none of it can go back and make an old wrong right. A hope that cannot look steadily at a graveyard is not large enough for a human being.

(Q) "Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present: the present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey." + Source: Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi 1, 30 November 2007 (Vatican English translation). The opening paragraph of his second encyclical, setting out the working definition the rest of the letter tests: a hope worth the name has to be trustworthy, and it has to be big enough to be worth the walk.

(Q) "Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide away from themselves and from the truth of their being." + Source: Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, part one, chapter one (Ignatius Press edition, translated from the German by J. R. Foster). Written in 1967 and 1968 out of lectures given at Tübingen to students from every faculty, twenty years before anyone thought of him as an enforcer. He goes on to say that the doubt each of them carries is what saves both from being shut up alone, and that it can become the road on which the believer and the doubter reach each other.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His own church read him first as a reformer and later as a brake, and he insisted he had not moved. + The young adviser at the cardinal’s elbow when the Holy Office was attacked from the floor of St Peter’s in 1963 and the cardinal who ran that office from 1981 are the same man, and the reversal of his reputation is one of the more interesting facts about the last century of Christian thought. His own account of it never changed. The Council he had defended in Rome was the Council of the documents the bishops actually debated and voted for. What he opposed afterwards was a different thing: an appeal to the "spirit" of the Council used to get past the texts the Council produced. He set it out formally in an address to the Roman curia on 22 December 2005, eight months into his papacy, and people have been arguing about the phrasing ever since. Two ways of reading Vatican II were on offer, he said. One is a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture; a hermeneutic is simply a way of interpreting, and this one treats the Council as a break, with the documents as awkward compromises to be got past on the way to what was really meant. The other he called the hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church. The Church before the Council and the Church after it, he said, are the same Church. The division had shown itself in print decades earlier, in two journals that both claimed the Council. Concilium was founded in 1965 by Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner and others, with Ratzinger on its board at the start; he broke with it and joined de Lubac and von Balthasar in founding Communio in 1972. Küng, who had helped bring him to Tübingen, lost his licence to teach as a Catholic theologian in 1979 in a case over papal infallibility. The two men had dinner together at Castel Gandolfo in 2005 all the same, which is worth recording alongside the rest.

(†) Readers well outside his own communion took up his case for the Gospels and his case for reason. + Evangelical Protestants are not in the habit of reading papal authors, and the Jesus of Nazareth volumes are a genuine exception. What surprised readers who came to them expecting an exercise of authority is how much of the argument turns on close reading of the biblical text, which is precisely what the foreword promises when it disclaims any official standing. N. T. Wright, the Anglican New Testament scholar, reviewed the second volume in the Times Literary Supplement and treated it as a piece of biblical scholarship to be argued with, which is the compliment such a book most wants. The Regensburg lecture had a second life nobody planned. A month after it, on 13 October 2006, thirty-eight Muslim scholars published an open letter answering its argument point by point. A year later to the day a hundred and thirty-eight of them signed a longer document, A Common Word Between Us and You, which proposed love of God and love of neighbour as the ground on which Muslims and Christians could talk. A Catholic-Muslim Forum met in Rome in November 2008 as a direct result. A lecture that began as an argument about Greek philosophy and the Bible, and that set off a week of protest and violence, ended by producing one of the broadest formal exchanges between the two faiths in modern times. His case with Habermas has travelled furthest of all, and it is now made by people who share none of his theology. The German jurist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde had put it in a sentence in 1967: the liberal secular state lives by presuppositions it cannot itself guarantee. It needs citizens who tell the truth, keep contracts, and restrain themselves when no one is looking, and it has no way of manufacturing them. Ratzinger did not invent the point, and he never claimed that only Christians can be good. What he did was press it in public, from a chair opposite an atheist philosopher, at a moment when the question had gone quiet.

(†) Where his own record draws the criticism: the abuse cases, and the line he drew around the word church. + Two criticisms attach to his own record, and they are of very different kinds. One is about what he did in an office; the other is about a line he drew in a document. - The abuse cases. In January 2022 a Munich law firm commissioned by his old archdiocese published a report on the handling of abuse there between 1945 and 2019, and it concluded that in four cases Ratzinger had been at fault as archbishop. Two of the four involved priests who went on in pastoral work after being sentenced in the criminal courts. • His own submission to the inquiry ran to eighty-two pages, and it stated that he had not attended the chancery meeting of 15 January 1980 at which a priest already accused of abuse in another diocese was taken into Munich. The minutes showed that he had. He corrected the statement within days, said the oversight had not been intended and asked to be excused for it, and on 8 February 2022 he wrote a letter in which he expressed to all the victims of sexual abuse his profound shame, his deep sorrow and his heartfelt request for forgiveness, and said that quite soon he would find himself before the final judge of his life. • The rest of the record is genuinely mixed rather than simply bad. In the Good Friday meditations he wrote for the Colosseum on 25 March 2005, weeks before his election, he asked how much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who ought to belong entirely to Christ. In 2004 he reopened the shelved case against Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, and as pope had him taken out of public ministry in 2006 and sent to a life of prayer and penance. He was the first pope to sit down with survivors, in Washington in April 2008, and he did the same on later journeys to Australia, Malta, Britain and Germany. • Set against all of that is a plain fact that belongs in any honest account of him. He ran the office responsible for these cases through the 1990s, when the church as a whole moved far too slowly. - Where other Christians part company. Dominus Iesus, the declaration he signed on 6 August 2000, restated the Council’s teaching that the church Christ founded subsists in the Catholic Church. The verb is doing careful work: subsists says that the church named in the creed is concretely and fully found there, while stopping short of saying that the two are simply the same thing without remainder. The declaration then added that communities of the Reformation, because they lack bishops in apostolic succession (the unbroken line of ordination handed down from the apostles, each generation laying hands on the next) and therefore lack a Eucharist the Roman church can count as valid, "are not Churches in the proper sense." He always maintained that this was a technical statement about visible structure and not a verdict on anybody’s standing before God, and he never doubted that Protestants are Christians. Protestants and Anglicans answered that the New Testament locates the church where the gospel is preached and believed and where Christ is confessed, that the one foundation named there is the apostles and prophets with Christ himself as the cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20), and that a definition which makes an office the test has put a structure where Scripture puts a person. The disagreement is real, it runs between Christians who confess the same creeds, and it did not soften in his hands. He would not have wanted either item softened, and there is a reason to think so. The first chapter of the book that made his name refuses the flattering picture of a theologian who has the message perfectly clear and needs only to take off the clown’s costume to be believed. What it says instead is that the believer carries doubt of his own.