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Books Son of Bavaria
John L. Allen Jr., NCRs Rome correspondent, is
the author of a new book, Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vaticans Enforcer
of the Faith (Continuum, 340 pages, $24.95). The following are excerpts from
the books first chapter, Growing up in Hitlers
Shadow.
Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, the youngest
of three children in a lower-middle-class Bavarian household. Just a month
later, Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the
Atlantic in the Spirit of Saint Louis. Lindberghs path would
intersect, in a remote way, with Ratzingers again. During the 1930s,
Lindbergh emerged as one of the leading American sympathizers with National
Socialism. In 1941, he gave a famous speech identifying the three forces
leading America into war as the British, Roosevelt, and the Jews.
Radio broadcasts of this remark played widely across Germany, no doubt
including Ratzingers hometown of Traunstein. The Nazis had ensured that
radios were cheap and plentiful so their propaganda could reach every corner of
the Reich.
In Rome, Pius XI was five years into his pontificate in 1927, and
more concerned with increasing devotion to his new Feast of Christ the King
than with the gathering war clouds in Europe. Germany was in the late stages of
the Weimar Republic, menaced by the threat of a Bolshevik workers
uprising as well as by various conservative and nationalistic factions. Hitler
was the leader of one of those factions, the National Socialists, despite the
fact that he was not a German citizen. He renounced his Austrian citizenship in
1925 and was not granted German citizenship until 1932, on the eve of his run
for president. At about the time Ratzinger was born, Hitler recruited a new
publicist to his team named Joseph Göbbels.
In rural southern Bavaria, April 16, 1927, was one of those snowy,
bitterly cold days the region sometimes gets in the spring. Bavarians are a
tough lot, in part because by butting up against the Alps, they get some of the
worst weather in middle Europe. It did not help that Ratzinger entered the
world at 4:15 A.M., in the icy chill of the early morning. His older brother
and sister were not allowed to come to his baptism for fear of getting
sick.
Perhaps it was fate that Ratzinger was born on Holy Saturday, and
his parents were named Joseph and Mary. Like another child of another Joseph
and Mary, Ratzinger grew up to become a sign of contradiction, a scandal to
some and a sort of savior to others. Ratzinger reports in his 1998
autobiography that because he was born on Holy Saturday, he was baptized with
the newly blessed Easter water in the small parish church in the village of
Marktl am Inn. It is difficult not to read some kind of sacred meaning into the
scene, and Ratzinger has not resisted, seeing it as a symbol of the human
condition in its not quite relation to Easter and the
resurrection.
Now seventy-three, Ratzingers childhood memories are the
ones most closely tied to his understanding of who he is and what he believes.
Listening to him and reading him today, it is striking that Ratzinger rarely
makes reference to his mid-twenties through mid-forties, the years as a
professional theologian during which he achieved wide fame. When Ratzinger
wants to strike an autobiographical chord, he always looks back to his early
days in one of four small Bavarian towns. Those memories are of intimate
moments shared with his family; of the rock-solid Catholic ethos of Bavaria,
expressed in the liturgy and the simple faith of the people; of his own
intellectual awakening, fueled by classical languages and literature; and,
finally, of the political and social upheavals of the day, most dramatically,
the rise and fall of Hitlers Third Reich.
Memory, however, is selective. When people reach back across their
lifetimes, memory becomes a redactor, editing images so they cohere with the
persons current understanding of self. People reshape, reinterpret, and
distort their pasts in light of their present interests and priorities. To
fully understand Ratzinger, therefore, it is necessary to round out his
picture, to recover some of the elements of his early days that his own
published recollections and remarks have omitted.
Of special interest is the most famous member of the Ratzinger
family prior to Joseph, his great-uncle Georg Ratzinger (not to be confused
with Josephs brother of the same name). This elder Ratzinger was a rebel
inside the church and out, and those who know Joseph Ratzinger today sometimes
wish he had a bit more of his famous relative in him. As we will see, Georg
Ratzinger had a dark side as well.
The question of Ratzinger and the Third Reich also merits special
attention. Neither Ratzinger nor any member of his family was a National
Socialist. Ratzinger has said several times that his fathers criticism of
the Nazis was responsible for the four moves the family made during
Ratzingers first ten years. Such opposition by itself is unremarkable;
many German Catholics complained about the partys encroachment on the
church. Neither the elder Ratzinger nor either of the two sons took part in any
kind of resistance. Although Ratzinger today calls such resistance
impossible, there were in fact several models in his immediate
orbit, including members of the Communist Party, Jehovahs Witnesses, and
fellow Catholics.
More important is the question of what conclusions Ratzinger draws
from the war. Having seen fascism in action, Ratzinger today believes that the
best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism. In
other words, he believes the Catholic church serves the cause of human freedom
by restricting freedom in its internal life, thereby remaining clear about what
it teaches and believes. It is a position he defends ably, but it is strikingly
different from the conclusions of many of Ratzingers German theological
peers who also lived through the Nazi era.
If his childhood under the Nazis was one stream of influence on
the young Ratzinger, the other was his intellectual awakening in the seminary
and graduate school. Ratzingers mental reservoir was filled with images
and arguments from the various thinkers he encountered. Four such men have had
great intellectual impact on Ratzinger: Augustine, Bonaventure, Guardini, and
Balthasar.
A school of philosophical thought fashionable today says human
identity is formed by a mental bundle, referring to a unique set of
memories arranged and recalled in idiosyncratic fashion. To understand Joseph
Ratzinger, therefore, we need to understand what was in his bundle.
Almost as much as John Paul II is Polish, Joseph Ratzinger is
Bavarian. In 1998, when he presented his new autobiography to the
German-speaking world in a press conference, he did so in the Kloster
Andech monastery in Upper Bavaria. Introducing Ratzinger, Abbot Odilo Lechner
said in praise of the cardinal, You have always made it clear that heaven
and earth are bound together in a special way in Bavaria.
When the Roman Empire fell, Bavaria was divided into three
sections: the north occupied by the Franks, the west by the Alemanni, and the
south and east by the Baiuvarii, the tribe that eventually gave the territory
its name. This division still exists today, as Bavaria is an amalgam of three
distinct regions: Franconia in the north, Swabia in the west, and the
real Bavaria in the south and east. Ratzingers family comes
from this real Bavarian stock.
The Wittelsbach kings of Bavaria were opponents of the Protestant
Reformation, and during the sixteenth century Bavaria became an officially, and
strictly, Catholic state. Even today one could parachute into Bavaria at
random, landing at however remote or isolated a spot, and be within eyesight of
a Catholic church or shrine. Jesuit Michael Fahey, a student of
Ratzingers during his days in Tilbingen, says this is a critical point in
understanding Ratzinger. He is spiritually and culturally Bavarian, which means
he is most comfortable in an all-Catholic setting. An appreciation for
diversity was not something he imbibed growing up, and a preference for
homogeneity remains part of his character.
Today Bavaria is known as one of the most culturally traditional
and politically conservative pockets of the country. Despite its economic
success, Bavaria has resisted urbanization to a remarkable degree. In
the early 1990s, almost half of the population still lived in locales of less
than 5,000 population. Ratzinger grew up in a series of those Bavarian hamlets,
and his family has deep roots in the Bavarian soil.
Great-Uncle Georg
Before the cardinal, the most famous Ratzinger was Josephs
great uncle on his fathers side, Georg, one of the towering Bavarian
figures of the nineteenth century. In a 1985 special anthology of Bavarian
biography published in Regensburg, Georg Ratzinger made the list of the 1,000
most important Bavarian personalities of the past 1,500 years. His fame came as
a journalist, an author, and a politician. Over the years, he edited a number
of newspapers, including the Wochenblattes für katholische Volk and
the Volksfreundes. His best-known book was Die Volkswirthschaft in
ihren sittlichen Grundlagen (The economy in its ethical foundations),
published in 1881 and brought out in a second edition in 1885. Ratzinger was
twice elected to the Bavarian and the federal legislatures.
In light of who Joseph Ratzinger has become, there are three
aspects of his great-uncles life that hold most interest: his connection
to Johann Ignaz von Döllinger; his option for the poor in his
own political career; and his anti-Semitism.
Georg Ratzinger was born in Rickering, Bavaria, in 1844, the son
of a farmer. He went to gymnasium in Passau and studied Catholic
theology at the University of Munich. There he won a prize for his dissertation
on the history of the churchs care for the poor. During his four years at
the university, 1863 to 1867, Ratzinger studied under and became the assistant
of the most controversial Catholic figure of his day, Johann Ignaz von
Döllinger.
Döllinger was then coming into his own as a fierce critic of
Roman centralism and the movement towards papal absolutism called
ultra-montanism (meaning beyond the mountains, in
reference to the fact that the biggest supporters of an authoritarian papacy
were in France, England, and Germany, not in Italy). Italians at the time were
engaged in a war against the papacy in order to unify the country. (It is one
of the great ironies of modern Roman life that every day at noon a cannon goes
off, celebrating the Italian victory over the pope!) Döllingers key
idea was the organic development of church tradition, a notion he
shared with Englands John Henry Newman. Early in his career,
Döllinger employed the idea to refute Protestantism, which he saw as an
unacceptable break in historical continuity. Later, Döllinger came to
believe that the greatest enemy of historical continuity in the church was the
papacy itself, that its claims to absolute authority were foreign to the true
Catholic understanding.
In 1863, Döllinger organized (probably with Ratzingers
help) a congress of a hundred Catholic theologians in Munich. In his opening
address, Döllinger blasted scholasticism, a narrow school of theology
based on a particular reading of Thomas Aquinas and regarded by Rome as the
official theology of the church. He called for an assertion of scholarly
independence from Vatican authority.
Around the same time Döllinger suggested the creation of a
German national church headed by a metropolitan, with only a symbolic
connection to the papacy. In the same vein, he called for education of German
priests in universities rather than seminaries. This latter suggestion became
more or less standard practice. Ironically, it was Döllinger who convinced
the German bishops they should meet on a regular basis. The meetings
anticipated the creation of bishops conferences, against whose power
Joseph Ratzinger would later struggle so mightily.
By 1867, in his inaugural address as the rector of the University
of Munich, Döllinger went further: The papacy is based on an
audacious falsification of history, he declared. A forgery in its
very outset, it has, during the long years of its existence, had a pernicious
influence on church and state alike. To no ones surprise, when
Vatican I declared the pope infallible in 1870, Döllinger led the dissent.
He was excommunicated in March 1871 and fired from the university. Ludwig II of
Bavaria befriended Döllinger, however, and Döllinger went on to have
a successful political career. Though Döllinger said that he belonged to
the Old Catholics who split from Rome over the infallibility issue by
conviction, he never attended their services and refused to become their
first bishop. After his excommunication, he continued attending Catholic Mass,
but did not receive communion.
Georg Ratzinger, who was ordained to the priesthood in 1867,
resigned as Döllingers assistant in order to take up his first
pastoral appointment in Berchtesgaden. There is no evidence that he ever
publicly associated himself with the ecclesial positions of his mentor, yet
there are two intriguing hints in this direction. First, Ratzinger voluntarily
resigned his priesthood in 1888, in a day when laicized priests were rare.
Second, politically Ratzinger gravitated away from the Center Party, which was
the established Catholic party, and toward the farmers and workers parties,
both of which had a definite anticlerical tone. In any event, Ratzinger
assisted Döllinger during the four years, 1863 to 1867, in which his
antipapal views took their sharpest form.
Politically, Georg Ratzinger was an apostle of the new Catholic
social teaching, officially expressed for the first time in Leo XIIIs
Rerum novarum in 1891. The idea was to carve out a Christian alternative
to both Marxism and capitalism, to develop a blueprint for a state based on
Catholic social principles. Ratzinger served in the Bavarian Landtag from 1875
to 1878 and again from 1893 to 1899, and in the national Reichstag from 1877 to
1878 and 1898 to 1899. His first term in each chamber was as a member of the
Patriots Party, a Catholic party launched in 1869 to combat the effects
of the Kulturkampf in Bavaria. Ratzingers second term in each was
served as a deputy of the new Bauernbund, or Farmers Party,
he helped launch in 1893. In between, Ratzinger was a member of the Center
Party.
Aside from the irony of a Ratzinger holding elected office as a
priest (which todays Ratzinger, along with the pope, sees as a betrayal
of the priests office), there is a special measure of poetic justice in
Georg Ratzingers politics. They were to some degree in the nineteenth
century what Latin American liberation theology attempted to be in the
twentieth: a means of empowering the poor and translating Catholic social
teaching into public policy.
National Catholic Reporter, November 17,
2000
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