Benedikt XVI: Ein Leben by Peter Seewald (Muenchen: Droemer Verlag, 2020)

Reviewed by Dr. E. Michael Jones

Also reviewed: Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life, Volume I Youth in Nazi Germany to the Second Vatican Council 1927-1965, Trans. Dinah Livingstone (New York: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020).

In an article which appeared recently in the National Catholic Register, Father Raymond J. de Souza announced that the Church had a “German problem.”1 The indisputable evidence for this problem could be found in the results of the German synod, which announced that the main problem facing the Church lay in lack of tolerance for sexual deviance. Whether that was construed as a celibate clergy, prohibitions against the divorced and remarried receiving communion, or disapproval of homosexuality, the German “Synodal Weg,” made it clear that it was the Church which had to change, not the Germans who had acquired a lot of bad habits over the past half century. The flagrant use of Church structures to undermine Church teaching provoked outrage among a group of “more than 70 bishops—led by four cardinals from three continents”—who “issued an open ‘fraternal letter’ to the bishops of Germany stating that ‘the potential for schism … will inevitably result’ if they do not repent of their ‘Synodal Path.’”2

Father de Souza gained insight into “the German problem” by reading the ponderous, thousand-page biography of Joseph Ratzinger by the German journalist Peter Seewald. Father de Souza claimed that “the German problem” could be traced back to Luther, but it began for all modern intents and purposes at the Second Vatican Council, when The Rhein flowed into the Tiber. Like Father de Souza, Seewald cites how the by now famous book of the same name, written by Divine Word priest Ralph Wiltgen, explained in detail how a dedicated group of Germans, led by Joseph Ratzinger and his mouthpiece Josef Cardinal Frings of Cologne, hijacked the council and replaced Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani’s “rigid” preliminary documents with a new spirit which was determined to end the negativity of the past, as epitomized by things like Pope Pius IX’s syllabus of errors and Pope Pius X’s anti-modernist oath.

Seewald gives ample support to Wiltgen’s claim that Ratzinger and his band of German followers hijacked the Second Vatican Council:

The US Council observer Ralph Wiltgen, who belonged to the Divine Word Missionaries in Chicago, described the impact from the German headquarters in a saying that became famous: ‘The Rhine flows into the Tiber.’ It expressed an infiltration, a kind of power takeover, remembered from the wild Germanic tribes who had brought about the fall of the Roman Empire.3

Seewald then pulls his punch by accepting Ratzinger’s view of what happened after the fact:

In retrospect, Ratzinger himself disputed the revolutionary potential of the Santa Maria dell’ Anima camp. It was ‘completely mistaken to suggest it was as if a solid progressive bloc had come to Rome with a fixed idea and caught the whole world episcopacy napping’. As he said in self-defence in 1976, behind the new approach there had merely been “elementary insight [...] without any mutinous intentions.”4

Whether his intentions were “mutinous” or not is best left to others to decide, but Seewald has no difficulty in convincing the sympathetic reader of his biography that, as Father Hubert Luthe put it: “The Germans strongly influenced the Council,” and that the “one towering figure in particular” who made that change possible was Joseph Ratzinger.5

Contention surrounded the new era which Ratzinger inaugurated in the Church:

the surmises about the rebel momentum of the so-called Rhine Alliance were not completely unintelligible. In fact, Santa Maria dell’Anima was at the heart of a development that led to bitter quarrels, up to an ‘October crisis’, a ‘November crisis’ and the famous ‘Black Thursday’, when the whole Council stood on the brink. There was even talk of a ‘blitz’. Soon it was rumoured that the Germans would secretly aim for a revision of the First Vatican Council.6

Ratzinger characterized the mood of the German delegation upon its arrival in Rome as “a certain euphoria,” or better, all of the German participants in the council had “that mysterious feeling of a beginning, which stimulates and inspires people like almost nothing else. It was increased by the sense of being a witness to an event of great historical importance.”7

Rev. Joseph Ratzinger as Theological Adviser to German Cardinal Joseph Frings at the Second Vatican Council, 1962

Seewald portrays Ratzinger as the main actor in that historical drama. Ratzinger had the sense that he was co-writing the book of history: “The expectation was unbelievable. We hoped that everything would be renewed, that there would really be a new Pentecost, a new era.” Ratzinger, however, could not have assumed that position without the support of Joseph Frings, the cardinal archbishop of Cologne. Frings, unlike Ratzinger at this time, was famous as the shepherd who led the German flock through World War II and the Carthaginian peace which followed the war. Together Frings and Ratzinger orchestrated what council observers were calling an “attempted putsch,”8 which succeeded in deposing Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani as the spiritus movens of the Council.

The attack began on November 14, 1962, during the 19th General Congregation. Looking back, Ratzinger reported that “the unavoidable storm” broke, “which had already been prepared for with a private counter-draft.”22 He did not say that the “private counter-draft” stemmed partly from his own pen. Cardinal Ottaviani grabbed the floor without notice. It was his first appearance in the Council chamber since he had been silenced by Cardinal Alfrink two weeks, earlier – during a debate on the liturgy when the head of the Holy Office overran his speaking time, the Dutch cardinal had simply had the microphone turned off and received thunderous applause for it.9

Cardinal Frings was the speaker, but the text of his intervention, “which he had memorized the night before,” came verbatim from the pen of Joseph Ratzinger. After Frings’ intervention, “The bishops,” according to Ratzinger, “were no longer the same as they had been before the Council opened,” prompting Seewald to add: “The wheel had turned.” 10

Out of the ashes of Ottaviani’s “negative” preliminary documents, a new positive hope emerged to abandon the defensive and to think and act in a positively Christian way. The spark had been lit.”11 Ratzinger viewed the rejection of Ottavian’s schema De fontibus revelationis as:

the moment when a decisive change took place for the future of the Council and therefore for the Catholic Church itself: from the Pacelli church, which was essentially hostile to modernity [...] to the church which is a friend to all humanity, even when they are children of modern society, its culture and history.12

Frings was the man in the limelight, but at this point Der Spiegel entered the story. Mystified by the sudden transformation in Frings from the archconservative cleric from the Lower Rhine (Niederrheiner) into the conciliar revolutionary, Der Spiegel identified Ratzinger as the man responsible for the change. Der Spiegel, according to Seewald:

had discovered the inspiration behind ‘the astonishing change in the Rhineland bishop’ to be none other than his ‘most important adviser’, one of ‘the most gifted German pro-reform theologians’. His name: ‘Professor Joseph Ratzinger, 36’. The article summed up: ‘From many conversations’ with Ratzinger, ‘the scholar half his age’, the cardinal had arrived at ‘the theological conviction which he stood for in the Council today’.13

There is nothing new here. New, however, is de Souza’s claim that Ratzinger not only caused “the German problem” as Cardinal Frings’s 35-year-old protégé, peritus, and all around theological Wunderkind, but that Ratzinger was the solution to the problem he himself had created. Ratzinger was not only the arsonist who set the Church on fire; he was also the fireman who got called in to put out the conflagration he himself had started. According to de Souza’s reading of the situation in the Church apres le deluge:

The premature death of the archbishop of Munich in 1976 presented Paul VI with an opportunity. His solution to the German problem was to pluck the brightest star of the Communio school and transfer him directly from the theological world of Regensburg to the ancient see of Munich and Freising. He created him a cardinal just a few months later. Even given the tradition of scholar bishops in Germany, it was a bolder move than the future John Paul II selecting Jean-Marie Lustiger for Paris or John O’Connor for New York.14

Like his predecessor, Pope John Paul II also recognized a German problem:

Karol Wojtyła had watched the German problem from next door in Poland. Conversant in German theology — he spoke German in his decades of private meetings with Cardinal Ratzinger — he knew that there had to be a German solution in Rome, not just Germany. And so, immediately upon election as pope, he wanted Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome. When Ratzinger declined the position of prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education in 1979 on the grounds that he had only been two years in Munich, John Paul agreed to wait. . . . Two years later, in 1981, he prevailed on his friend to become prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). This time, Ratzinger agreed. Despite several attempts to retire and return to his theological work, John Paul insisted that Cardinal Ratzinger remain to the end. He was at John Paul’s side for the battles over liberation theology — influenced by prominent German voices in Latin America — the Catechism, abortion counseling, ecumenism and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.15

Father de Souza, however, leaves historical terra firma when he claims that: “The Ratzinger solution for the German problem was effective.”16 In making this claim, de Souza departs from the central thesis of Seewald’s biography, which is that the pontificate of Benedict XVI ran aground in 2009, took on water for the next four years, and eventually sank with all hands on deck when a broken Benedict abdicated in 2013.

According to de Souza’s account, “Benedict did not need to find a personnel solution to the German problem,” because “The solution was now sitting on the throne of Peter.”17 By departing from Seewald’s narrative, de Souza painted himself into a corner. If Ratzinger had solved the German problem, why did he abdicate? Father de Souza makes it sound as if Ratzinger was a far-sighted chess player who had anticipated the Zeitgeist several moves in advance because:

when he took the decision to abdicate, he knew that the 35-year service he had rendered as chief German shepherd was coming to an end. So, he provided for the succession by naming Cardinal Gerhard Müller as the new prefect of the CDF in July 2012, by which time he had already decided to abdicate. The bishop-theologian was already in charge of publishing Ratzinger’s lifetime works. No one could replace Ratzinger, but in Cardinal Müller the Germans were being watched over by one of their own, who knew them — and followed Ratzinger.18

Unfortunately, Pope Francis removed “the personnel answer to the German problem,” when he sacked Müller in a moment of pique, when that cardinal had the audacity to question Bergoglio’s high-handed handling of the dubia crisis which followed the promulgation of Amoris Laetitia. As a result, de Souza feels that: “The integrity of faith is being ruptured anew. The flock is being divided and scattered. And the German Shepherd is in retirement with no one to replace him.” So much for Ratzinger the theological chess master.19 The fault lies not so much with de Souza’s determination to put a Panglossian spin on Ratzinger and the Council he controlled. The fault lies with Seewald’s defective narrative, and his narrative is defective not so much because of what he said in his thousand page book but because of what he didn’t say about what was happening in Germany when the world’s attention was focused on Rome.

The real turning point, not just in the Council, but in the course of human history at that moment in time occurred in 1964, when the German bishops entered the debate about Nostra Aetate, the Council document which became famous for revising the Church’s teaching on the Jews. During the course of his long career, no one would do more to placate Jewish sensibilities than Joseph Ratzinger. As pope, he would visit three synagogues—“more,” Seewald informs us—than “any other pope before him.”20 Taking Woytyla’s claim that the Jews were our “elder brothers” one step forward, Ratzinger referred to them as “our fathers in the faith.”21 It was Benedict even more than John Paul II, who ensured that

The new orientation of the Church which the council set in motion was irrevocable. He decisively condemned all forms of anti-Semitism and apologized for the misbehavior of Catholics against their Jewish fellow citizens. 22

In doing this Ratzinger ensured that Nostra Aetate would be seen, not so much as an expression of good will on the part of the Church, which was how it was intended, but rather an admission of German guilt which was now being imposed tout court on the world’s Catholics. This moment occurred on September 28, 1964, when “the German bishops published their own statement ‘because we know the terrible injustice done to the Jews in the name of our people.’”

SELF-PUNISHMENT

In a piece of theological alchemy which would go on to have catastrophic consequences for the Church in general and Ratzinger personally, the German bishops took the guilt which the Jews bore for killing Christ and placed it on their own shoulders as expiation for the Holocaust:

In his draft speech for Frings1 for the 89th General Congregation on 28 September 1964, Ratzinger stated: ‘Something else is still left out in the new text: it is merely said that the Jews of our day cannot be held responsible for the guilt of Christ’s sufferings. Even without the Council that is as clear as daylight. However, it is also necessary to say that the Jewish people as a whole living at the time did not perpetrate the execution of Christ.’23

Seewald then tells us:

Ratzinger’s text for the speech on the Jewish question is important because it shows the line that the theologian also followed later, as office holder and pope, in relation to the Jewish world and reconciliation between Christians and Jews. It was linked with his belief that the New Testament cannot be read without the Old. While the Council was still in session, Zechariah Shuster, the European leader of the American Jewish Committee, described the draft on Catholic-Jewish relations as “certainly one of the greatest moments in Jewish history.” 24

Full of the suicidal impulse that characterized both the Jews at Masada and the Nazis in Hitler’s bunker during the last days of World War II, Seewald tells us that “The church’s historic step” contained “a total rejection of the myth of Jewish guilt for the crucifixion.” Missing from Seewald’s account is any mention of the fact that the German bishops in making this suicidal auto da fe imposed the guilt for the Holocaust on the world’s Catholics. From this point on the Holocaust narrative determined the course of the Council, and the Council’s adoption of the same narrative determined the course of the post-concilar Church. In an act which would have astounded the Greek tragedians, Ratzinger imposed the poison pill on the council which would eventually lead to the death of his pontificate when he claimed that “The church’s historic step’ contained ‘a total rejection of the myth of Jewish guilt for the crucifixion,”25 a statement which meant that St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John were liars when they claimed that the Jews killed Christ.

Seewald ignores the fact that the German triumph at Vatican II disguised a significant defeat in the culture wars which were raging in Germany during the same period. Seewald celebrates the “historic step” of absolving Jews of their guilt for the death of Christ without understanding the Germans’ virtue signaling on the Jewish question corresponded in time—the year was 1964, to be precise—with the premier in Germany of Das Schweigen, the film that would bring about the demise of that country’s obscenity laws and open floodgates to pornography, which Frings knew when he wasn’t being distracted by his assistant, would bring about the total collapse of sexual morality in Germany and pave the way for the Synodal Way’s promotion of sexual deviance in the name of the Church. “Over and over again,” Seewald tells us, describing the German synodal way:

this group lobbied for the lifting of celibacy, allowing the ordination of women, recognition of same sex partnerships, and veto power over the appointment of bishops and priests. All of this was justified by both the lack of priestly vocations but also and more importantly by the sex abuse crisis. Scholarly papers swarmed with terms like “synodal structures.”26

During the post-conciliar period, the Synodal Way took on a life of its own, which “completely excluded any input from Pope Benedict” even though he had brought it into being.27

Intoxicated with the rhetoric of new beginnings which Ratzinger propagated through Cardinal Frings at the Council, the German Church abandoned the Volkswartbund, its Legion of Decency, and ran up the white flag of surrender in the war against obscenity. Michael Calmes, the head of the Volkswartbund and a close ally of Cardinal Frings in the battle against Schmutz und Schund (filth and smut) is nowhere mentioned in Seewald’s biography. Helmut Schelsky is mentioned once, but Seewald fails to tell us that Schelsky was Calmes’s successor as head of the Volkswartbund, nor does he mention the fact that the Holocaust narrative was used to drive him from his office and silence one of the last voices willing to protest the Sexwelle that was inundating Germany when Ratzinger and Frings were busy fighting anti-Semitism at the Council.

By imposing the Holocaust narrative on the Catholic Church, Ratzinger set into motion the forces that would eventually destroy his pontificate and turn him into a tragic figure who had more in common with Oedipus than St. Peter, whose chair he would occupy in Rome. The denouement to this tragedy loomed invisible over the horizon of the future, and if someone from the future had returned with a warning about what was inevitably going to happen to the future pope and the Church he was ordained to lead, it would have been drowned out in the hosannas that accompanied the end of the Council and the inauguration of a new age, freed from the negativity of the past. Defending the Council, especially its statement on the Jews became one of the main priorities of the papacy of John Paul II, who took the Church to new heights of popularity by riding the crest of the anti-Communist crusade as it liberated his native Poland and brought about the fall of the Soviet Union.

Ratzinger was chosen to be Woytyla’s successor because the conclave wanted him to do for Germany what his predecessor had done for Poland. Liberation of the German captives required both imagination and courage because the situations were dissimilar in important ways. In both instances, the pope had to stand up for his own people against two of the main victors who had created the post-World War II world. In this regard, Pope John Paul II had a much easier job because the Soviet occupation of Poland was always seen as an alien invasion, one which unified the Polish people against it. The Allied occupation of Germany was much more devastating because it was accompanied by the most ruthless and sophisticated campaign of social engineering in human history, one which succeeded in persuading the German people to internalize the commands of their oppressors and portray themselves to each other and the rest of the world as a “Tätervolk” (nation of perpetrators). To understand the situation in Germany, we have to imagine the conclave of 1978 electing a Polish pope who was a devout communist and then telling him to return to Poland and bring about the fall of the Soviet Union. That was precisely Ratzinger’s situation in 2005. Shortly before being elected pope, Ratzinger gave a speech to the curia on what it was like to attend the Second Vatican Council. For Ratzinger this meant understanding that the American Revolution was as good as the French Revolution was bad, a notion he picked up at the Council by reading TIME magazine and the American Proposition of its founder Henry Luce. It was most probably this speech which led TIME to proclaim Ratzinger the first American pope. That misunderstanding of America turned Ratzinger into an intellectual cripple and as such incapable of recognizing much less opposing the forces that would eventually bring him down.

As Pope John Paul II’s right hand man and chosen successor, Joseph Ratzinger sprinted out of the peloton which his predecessor had created for him into a papacy that commanded a world wide audience of such magnitude and enthusiasm that all he had to do in 2005 was raise his arms in triumph as he sailed across the finish line.

Seewald describes the “magic and elan” which marked the beginning of Ratzinger’s papacy.28 Three hundred thousand faithful and visitors had attended his installation and they hung on his every word. Books by the pope topped the bests seller lists. The world press analyzed his papal locutions. In the first year of his papacy alone, four million people packed the Piazza San Pietro to cheer him on and get their picture taken with him: Benedict with a cell phone, Benedict wearing a fireman’s helmet, Benedict holding a lion cub.

Nothing epitomized the halcyon early days of Benedict’s pontificate better than his triumphal return to Munich as the first German pope in 700 years. The public Mass which Ratzinger celebrated in Munich was exactly analogous to the Mass which the returning Polish pope celebrated in Warsaw in 1979, when, in a collaboration which only the Zeitgeist could arrange, he announced the end to dialectical materialism four months after the Ayatollah Khomeini announced the end of western materialism in Tehran. Backed by the enthusiastic spiritual support of over one billion Catholics, Benedict stepped up to the podium in Regensburg and, with the rapt attention of the entire world hanging on his every word, gave the wrong speech. Instead of addressing “the German problem,” Benedict launched into a tone-deaf attack on Islam, which made many good points about the relationship between religion and Logos, but at the same time ignored the main problem plaguing Germany at that moment, which was guilt over the Holocaust.

It was as if Pope John II had gone to Warsaw in 1979 and denounced Mormonism or the threat which Scientology posed to the continued existence of the Polish nation. Like St. Paul at the Areopagus, Benedict gave the wrong speech. Instead of discussing the Logos with the philosophers in Athens, Paul condemned the idol worshippers of Ephesus. Unlike Paul, whose mistake got rectified when St. John wrote the metaphysical prologue to his gospel announcing that Logos was God, Benedict had no one to rescue him from the phantasms he had picked up from the social engineers who were determined to turn Germans into their own willing executioners at the hands of Henry Morgenthau, Louis Nizer, author of Germany must Perish, David Mordechi Levy, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. The Jews took particular delight in having a German pope collaborate with them in this project, because Ratzinger’s adoption of the Holocaust narrative meant a much more effective prosecution of the Germania delenda est strategy which American patriots like Herbert Hoover and George Patton had rejected as semitic vengeance. Like the Jews who were blind at the moment of their visitation, Ratzinger pissed away one of the greatest mandates of the modern era when he wasted the legacy of Pope John Paul II on an issue, namely Islam, which was at best peripheral to the main concern of the German people at that moment in time. Ratzinger became a tragic figure at this moment because like the Jews he defended so ardently, he missed a historic opportunity which had been handed to him on a platter, but only once, and once he refused it, it would never be offered again.

Ratzinger, in other words, should have used the moment of his triumphal homecoming to contest the Holocaust narrative. The Jewish admission that that narrative had become intellectually indefensible had occurred in 1993, when Deborah Lipstadt confected the fiction known as “Holocaust denial” as its continuation and replacement. True to the internalization of the commands of their oppressors which had become a sign of virtue in Germany, the German government had made “Holocaust denial” illegal in the wake of Lipstadt’s book. Ratzinger’s speech contesting the Holocaust narrative would, therefore, have broken the law in Germany, which would have put the enemies of the Church in a bind. Do we arrest the pope, Germany’s solons would have asked each other, tugging at their beards? Didn’t Napoleon say that he who ate the pope would die? Or do we abolish the notorious paragraph 130, one of the main chains which held the German Geist in bondage? Well, we’ll never know. Because the German pope failed to take the war to the enemies of the Catholic Church and the German people, those enemies took the war to him, wielding as their weapon the same Holocaust narrative which he imposed on the Church after he and his German accomplices hijacked the Second Vatican Council.

The turning point in Benedict’s papacy occurred in January 2009 when Ratzinger got lured into the media ambush that later became known as the Williamson Affair. Seewald describes the Williamson affair as “the inflection point” (die Sollbruchstelle) which tipped the pontificate toward the pope’s historical decision to step down.29 The Williamson affair didn’t just happen. “The most important scandal of Benedict’s pontificate… involved a disinformation campaign which resembled the Dreyfus affair of the 19th century in France.”30 After this dramatic prelude, Seewald trivializes his own story by attributing what was clearly an orchestrated attack by as yet unnamed perpetrators to the Vatican’s failure to understand the rudiments of public relations, as when he writes: “The Williamson affair also sheds light on the catastrophic state of crisis management at the Vatican and the lack of support from bishops and cardinals who threw the successor of Peter under the bus.”31 In framing the issue this way, Seewald disguises the fact that the main weapon used to bring Ratzinger down from the pinnacle of power and acclaim he had enjoyed in Germany a few years before was Holocaust denial…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the July/August 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)