When reading Last Testament, the autobiography (written with Peter Seewald) of Pope Benedict XVI, I was intrigued by the discrepancy between my image of Joseph Ratzinger as prefect of the Congregation for the Defence of the Faith (CDF) and the person revealed in these interviews.
I had imagined him as a tall, severe man, served by a richly resourced bureaucracy, and on top of all deviations from true faith and practice throughout the world. A man who played a persistent and methodical political hand in all aspects of church policy.
My image of the man changed considerably after he was elected Pope — he was manifestly short and frail, and seemed poorly served by his Curia. It has been further challenged by these interviews given to the German journalist Seewald.
In them he speaks of his life, his motivations, his limitations, and the circumstances of some controversial events and decisions. The man and his actions appear as more ordinary and less adamantine than I had once imagined.
Benedict would have been well served by a more searching interviewer. Seewald's adulation reminded me of a football fan talking with a club legend: 'Tell us about that game against the Tigers when you took them apart after half time and showed what drongoes they are.' In his responses Benedict constantly has to minimise his own exaggerated influence and acknowledge the disparaged virtues of his opponents.
The man who emerges is a modest person of deep faith, fed by a scholarly reading of the Catholic tradition. He wanted its resources to enliven the faith and practice of the church. This was the program of enrichment rather than change that he understood the Second Vatican Council to have undertaken.
But in much of the theological thinking and practice that followed the Council he saw embodied a program of change that was unfaithful to Catholic tradition.
In his writing and his office he commended a deep understanding of faith and combatted the deviations he saw in many political theologies, in reductive understandings of Jesus Christ and of the Catholic priesthood, and in other accommodations of faith to the ethos of the secularist world.
"His approach was constantly that of the scholar who read texts closely himself and respected critics of his own texts only if they gave them an equally close reading."
He emphasises the continuity in his outlook, claiming persuasively that his views and actions were not influenced by such historical events as the student revolts of the 1960s or by political conflicts in the Vatican. He worked harmoniously with John Paul II whom he greatly admired, and as Prefect of the Congregation he operated within the responsibilities and regulations that bound it.
The need to revise regulations in the light of experience limited the capacity of the Church to respond appropriately and expeditiously to the sexual abuse scandal, but he points to what was achieved. His approach was constantly that of the scholar who read texts closely himself and respected critics of his own texts only if they gave them an equally close reading.
The only traces of anger he displays in the book occur when he discusses his difficulties with elements in the German church. He clearly believed them motivated by the desire to discredit him.
Although not the last word about Joseph Ratzinger's life, Last Testament offers a persuasive account of its continuities. It shows poignantly the sacrifice he made in leaving a scholar's life when asked to serve first as Archbishop of Munich and later as Prefect of the CDF.
In the latter role he commended the richness of the Catholic tradition, criticised what he saw as narrow or distorted views of it, and called various movements and people to account. But he showed no empathy for the people whose lives were affected by its investigations. And in many cases his officials failed to read the texts they criticised with the close and objective attention he would have demanded of his students.
His desire to commend the full Catholic faith in the face of its counterfeits has always been central in the Catholic tradition. But the opposition he claims between the intention of Vatican II to draw on the Catholic tradition to enrich the faith and life of the contemporary church and the later interpretation of the Council seems overstated. He downplays the desire of the Council to read the contemporary world in a way that would illuminate faith. That implies a messy process in which ambiguities would be expected and the weeds perhaps better left till harvest time.
He saw the central drama of our day as the struggle between living Christian faith and secularism. If so, the battle has been conceded by the Catholic leaders whose lives have discredited the living faith. But Benedict's successor has also shown persuasively that a more crucial opposition lies between living faith and the greed that dominates economic settings to the misery and the consequent closure to God of so many people.
The inflated image I once had of Cardinal Ratzinger, and that many Catholics have of cardinals and other authority figures, was shaped by fear. Fear hands over to the human beings behind the image a power they do not possess. Conversations always turn to them and inhibit the free and constructive living of faith. In helping to demystify such images Last Testament serves us well.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.