In the days since his death on December 31, several commentators have expressed the hope that Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI and then Pope Emeritus, will eventually be named as a Doctor of the Church. In light of those hopes, I thought it would be interesting to revisit a conversation I had with then-Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, when I was preparing Witness to Hope, the first volume of my two-volume biography of Pope St. John Paul II.

It was September 20, 1997, and we spoke, as we usually did, in the cardinal’s office in the Palazzo Sant’Ufficio. As always, the cardinal was dressed simply in a black house cassock with no pectoral cross. After discussing several other matters, I asked him about John Paul II’s recent decision to name St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, a Doctor of the Church, after petition to do so had been received from (if memory serves) well over two thousand bishops, in a campaign led by a retired auxiliary bishop of New York, Patrick Ahern. The decision had caused some controversy, as that rare title was typically given to distinguished theologians.