Pondering Benedict XVI, Retired Pontiff

Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, the retired Bishop of Rome, died today, December 31, at age 95. Many will write learned, well-informed commentaries on his legacy. Rightly so, since that legacy is vast, complex, and very influential. I am a scholar of some Hindu traditions, and a Catholic comparative theologian, and I cannot hope to compete with such ecclesial erudition. My reflection here is simply my own pondering of what I, a Catholic intellectual, have learned or worried about, when thinking of the example of Benedict as another Catholic intellectual.

Ratzinger and RahnerAs head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Benedict was a bracing, provocative intellectual figure. He became head of the CDF in 1981, when I was in doctoral studies (South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago). I was always interested in his reflections on the Catholic relation to other religions, most notably his 1989 letter on meditation, his 1996 speech on relativism, and his defining 2005 document, Dominus Iesus. His concerns are worthy of consideration, and I still think of his cautions. Because I study another religion, I appreciate the questions he raises more, not less. The more I learned of Hindu traditions, the more I could see that neither Catholic intellectuals nor our peers in other faith traditions would benefit from a flattening discourse on religions that diminishes truth and makes the reality of God no more than a figure of speech, cultural residue. Our traditions are too deep, intellectually, and spiritually profound, for us to make casual appeals for common ground. I am not sure that Benedict ever understood that he had many intellectual and spiritual peers in non-Christian traditions, or that here too, more knowledge would have helped clarify things.

Benedict's cautions are always well taken, but by themselves, they are never enough, if we are to learn from other faith traditions rather than simply theorize about them. The more I learned, the more I could see that he did not have the time or take the time to go deep enough to deal with the really hard questions arising interreligiously. I wish that in his writings and pronouncement and judgments passed on theologians who struggled with the meaning of Jesus in today’s world, he had shown more knowledge of other religions, faced the problems in a more multifaceted way, and had wrestled with the beautiful, mystical, and yet too highly rational truths of those traditions.

Too often, Asian religions in particular seem but a vague stereotype in his writing: what they are, we are not, and should not be. But by his own choice, he had left behind the library and the classroom. He was a busy man, with tremendous obligations and duties that limited his time for scholarship. Had he declined to take the path of administrative leadership in the Church, he surely could have written more and deeply about other religions. Henri de Lubac, the learned French Jesuit of the generation before Benedict, and a role model for Josef Ratzinger as a young scholar, had been silenced by Rome long before Benedict came to the CDF. de Lubac used his silenced years to learn impressively from the traditions of Asian Buddhism. Being a committed Catholic did not prevent him from taking the time to learn. Karl Rahner, that greatest of modern German theologians, was no scholar of religions, but his many reflections on “anonymous Christianity” were serious efforts to find a better way to be Christian in a pluralistic world. But Benedict did not have time for the trial and error of thinking out loud on matters of interreligious import.

Benedict was very good at drawing boundaries, and cautioning us on where we could not go. It was and will always be important that some leader in the Church worry as he did. But it is not enough; constructive thinking too is necessary, because every Catholic knows that pluralism is not going away. How to act at the boundaries, balancing on the edge, how to go deeply into Scripture and Tradition and the liturgical tradition of the Church while still learning from the holy scriptures and theologies and mystical treatises of other faiths? That he did not tell us, not even showing us the way by the path of good example signally traveled by John Paul II.

This is why even today, it will be of great value to read his work alongside that other monumental theologian who died on a December day in 2004: Jacques Dupuis, SJ. Fr. Dupuis was possessed of unrivaled learning on the Church’s relations with other religions and the myriad theological approaches taken up in Catholic tradition. He strove in his learned writings to make clear the Church's tradition of encounter and the possibilities for the future. This was his life's work, in his many years in India, during his time teaching at the Gregorian University in Rome, and even in the last, painful period of his life after he was silenced by the CDF for his magnificent Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. Dupuis will, I think, still be read a century from now. Indeed, that very book, plus the ones Dupuis wrote after it, and the interviews he memorably gave in response to the CDF crisis, should find a place right next to Benedict’s own important books on any Catholic intellectual’s bookshelf.

Ratzinger as scholarBenedict loved the Church greatly, and spoke and taught and decreed out of that love. But he is not unique in loving or thinking lovingly for the Church. Myriad other Catholic intellectuals do the work we do out of a deep love of the Church. I am so very aware of this, during this year when I am President of the Catholic Theological Society of America, when I see so many of my CTSA colleagues writing and teaching for the sake of the Church as it – as we – find our way in a rapidly changing religious landscape, locally and globally. To put it positively: the very concerns and questions that drove Benedict’s thinking over the decades are the very concerns and questions Catholic theologians are still facing today, even if very often with different vocabulary, amid differently configured communities of theological conversation. I myself try to be a responsible Catholic theologian all the time: when I write occasionally on the Catholic view of other religions; when I try to show how to do comparative theology by examples small and large; when I teach my classes for Harvard Divinity School's very diverse student body; when I preach in my parish; when I converse with Hindu teachers and scholars; and even when, as now, I am deep into translating medieval Hindu mystical poetry that is as beautiful and profound as the poetry of any of the great Catholic mystics. Do we all not do our best to help the people of God find our way in the times in which we live? We do!

Benedict has helped us to anticipate and avoid pitfalls, and for this we can be grateful. But I wish he had let himself be helped by the rest of us too, that he too might have ventured more boldly beyond his comfort zone, into the depths, let us say, of Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism. Had he done so, the conversation on religions, learning from people of other Faiths in light of our own Faith, would have been more fruitful and holy, for him as well as the rest of us.

But may this good and holy man, a servant of the Lord, rest in peace.