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From John Allen Jr.
The year was 1987, and Jesuit Fr. Joseph Fessio was not in the best frame of mind for a reunion in Rome with his mentor and old friend, Joseph Ratzinger.
Fessio had sought out Ratzinger when the latter was a professor of dogmatic theology in Regensburg, Germany, in the 1970s, and under his direction wrote a dissertation on Hans Urs von Balthasar (a Swiss Catholic philosopher/theologian, and a hero to those who believe that liberals hijacked the church on a false reading of Vatican II).
The two men stayed in touch after Fessio returned to the United States and began working at the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco. Fessio's pugnacious style did not always endear him to his colleagues, and by 1987 he had been canned as the director of the university's St. Ignatius Institute.
Fessio was still director of the Ignatius Press, a publishing house. Its signature title was The Ratzinger Report, which sold 50,000 copies for the press.
The university had previously decided it didn't want to be affiliated with Ignatius Press, which likewise had no ties to the San Francisco archdiocese. That left Fessio to explain to Ratzinger that his publishing house -- the one to whom the cardinal had signed over all his American rights -- had no structural ties to the Catholic church at all.
Ratzinger, according to Fessio, listened sympathetically to the story, including Fessio's decision to incorporate separately from both the university and the archdiocese. At the end, Ratzinger's eyes twinkled as he said: "Ah, because of this double independence, you can remain orthodox." As a joke, the remark works better in German, but it speaks volumes about Ratzinger the man: his graciousness, his quick wit and, clearly, his concern with orthodoxy.
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