Really?

Commonweal's review of God's Choice - Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church by George Weigel

In tracing Joseph Ratzinger’s theological development, Weigel rightly emphasizes the consistency and integrity of his journey from firebrand peritus at Vatican II and companion-in-arms of Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, and Hans Küng to prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Weigel is anxious to distance even the young Ratzinger from other conciliar reformers who, in his judgment, sought to modernize the church without sufficient respect for its deep traditions, men trapped by a shallow liberalism and “enthralled with modern culture.” This liberalism he identifies with the theologians-Küng, Rahner, and others-associated with the journal Concilium. Authentically Catholic reform, faithful to the church’s traditions, Weigel identifies with those like Karl Lehmann, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Ratzinger himself, who joined to found the journal Communio. Concilium was run, he considers, “within rather narrow ideological boundaries, according to a...party line,” whereas Communio was “genuinely pluralistic, open to all sorts of theological methods and viewpoints.”

This account of the (real and significant) Concilium/Communio split is, however, highly tendentious, on several counts. No one, for example, would guess from Weigel’s account that the young Ratzinger was in fact a member of the editorial board of Concilium, or that in the 1960s, Ratzinger made common cause with the other leading conciliar theologians, including Congar, Rahner, and Küng, in attacking the ossified scholasticism dominant among the “Roman theologians.” Ratzinger argued then that the church had “reins that are far too tight, too many laws, many of which have helped to leave the century of unbelief in the lurch, instead of helping it to redemption.” In his commentaries on the work of the council, Ratzinger was vocal in support of notions such as collegiality, what he called an “ordered pluralism” in the church, and he attached special importance to the work of the local episcopal conferences as expressions of the shared responsibilities of the whole episcopate. Yet as prefect of the CDF he would minimize the significance and competence of these conferences, and they are accordingly one of Weigel’s targets in this book. In 1968 Ratzinger was one of more than thirteen hundred signatories of an outspoken declaration, organized by Concilium, on the right of theologians “to seek and speak the truth, without being hampered by administrative measures and sanctions.” The declaration offered a trenchant critique of the secretive methods of the Holy Office in censuring theologians, calling for greater openness and the right of accused theologians to a proper hearing...