Is the Pope catholic?

When just 31 years of age, Ratzinger was made Professor of Fundamental Theology at Freising seminary (after he verbally defended his thesis in Latin). As Prefect of the CDF, Ratzinger provided much of the intellectual leadership for Pope John Paul II’s papacy, the tenor of which, Collins argues, was to steer the church towards a closed certainty and away from the openness promulgated by the Second Vatican Council.

When made a cardinal, in 1972, Ratzinger chose as his motto, “Fellow worker in the truth” because, as he explained at the time, “… in today’s world the theme of truth has all but disappeared … and yet everything falls apart if there is no truth”. The emphasis on the need for certainty shines through, and it was this that he defended as the Prefect of the CDF.

What of the second criterion of Catholicity, “inclusive and open to various cultures”?

Ratzinger has born in rural Bavaria, which Collins reports is “completely Catholic. So in his childhood and youth, Ratzinger had no experience of living with other faiths or religious pluralism.” He followed his older brother Georg (also a priest) into the high school seminary at just 11-years-old.

The seminary was closed down in late 1942 and Ratzinger, like all his peers, was forced to join the Hitler Youth. After spending time on the Hungarian border preparing tank traps for the advancing Russians, he was back at the seminary by the autumn of 1945. And in a real sense, Collins shows, he has never really left.

As an aside, Collins is contemptuous of any tabloidesque opprobrium attached to Ratzinger by his having been yet another child victim of Hitler. Collins points out that Ratzinger’s parents’ attitude was strongly anti-Nazi, “specifically because the regime attacked the church and tried to replace Catholicism with an ideology of race”.

Bring Ratzinger’s intellectual bent and narrow upbringing together and we are not surprised to learn that he is “essentially a theologian” who is conservative, even veering towards fundamentalist. Ratzinger, with Balthasar and others, founded the scholarly review Communio, in 1972, to counter the progressive views of Concilium.

Both Ratzinger and Balthasar are essentially intellectuals who view the world from a cultured, scholarly and abstract non-experiential perspective. Both are influenced by fathers of the church and they look back to them as a resource to be recovered today. Both identify openness to the world, the kind of approach espoused by the [Second Vatican] Council … as dangerous because it … runs the risk of losing a specific Christian identity (emphasis added).

Collins mounts a case (or, perhaps simply observes) that Ratzinger and his fellow travellers within the church hierarchy have been steering the once universal Catholic Church towards a narrow, elitist, sectarianism. Collins view is that Ratzinger et al “… never engage with or attempt to understand, as does the historian, the ‘stuff’ of history, the people and processes, the unpredictability and serendipity. Their tendency is to ‘absolutise’, to turn history into ideology.”

This frame of mind, Collins suggests, “was why Ratzinger reacted so badly to the student radicalism and riots of 1967-68. … Ratzinger says he was horrified, and no doubt he was. He says that he increasingly came to see this lack of respect for authority and the constant demand for more rights, for example gay rights, as symptomatic of the abandonment of Catholic teaching and moral standards.” So much for Ratzinger’s “(3) ability to bridge generations and historical periods”.

The conclusion seems inescapable: Benedict XVI is Catholic, with a capital “C” rather than catholic, in the sense of seeking to a truly universal, ecumenical, inclusive approach to the world. Of course, whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on your own point of view.

It would be wrong to deduce from this that Collins is pessimistic about "God’s New Man", far less the prospects of the Catholic Church in the new millennium. Collins is no Latham, who seems to have thrown out the Labor party bathwater, baby and all.