The Quiet Genius of Pope Benedict XVI

By Senior Fellow Francis X. Maier

Wall Street Journal     |     December 31, 2022

In the 1980s I had two long conversations with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would be elected pope in 2005 and was known as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI when he died Saturday at age 95. Our meetings were private affairs and off the record. This allowed us to have unhurried and unfiltered discussions about issues and personalities in the church.

The press already had branded him Panzerkardinal, the humorless German commandant of the Vatican’s doctrine police. I had read his bracing work, and the label seemed implausible. I still wasn’t prepared for his personal simplicity and humility. He gave no hint of impatience in his manner, no divided attention, no self-important ego. That can be said of few public figures, including churchmen.

Remembering Benedict XVI

By Fellow Carl R. Trueman

WORLD Opinions     |     December 31, 2022

As with the death of Queen Elizabeth II, today’s death of Benedict XVI indicates that the last embers of the generation of leaders whose rite of passage to public status was marked by World War II are now all but extinguished. And as with others of that generation—Raymond Aron, George Orwell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Czesław Milosz, etc.—Benedict was for a time a key voice, offering commentary, critique, and proposals for preserving the best of the West in the face of mounting domestic secularism and the rise of a confident and aggressive Islam in Asia and Africa.  

Before he was Pope Benedict XVI, he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. As John Paul II’s Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he had the reputation of being the pope’s enforcer, doubling down on traditional church teaching on sexuality and contraception while also moving against the liberation theology being promoted particularly by South American priests such as Leonardo Boff.

But more important to the wider Christian world than his internal leadership was his thinking with regard to culture and secularism. A deeply learned theologian rather than a philosopher, Benedict made signal contributions to thinking about the nature of the secular world. Indeed, though many of his most significant intellectual contributions predate his papacy (2005-2013), the accuracy of so many of his observations and analyses has given his work a mantic quality.