Seán O’Conaill: Joseph Ratzinger’s Throwaway Theology – and the Truth of It

Sometime in 1997, browsing the Tablet, I came upon a review of recent book-length interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. When I read that the cardinal had expressed some puzzlement over the crucifixion of Jesus I was immediately riveted. I ordered the book in question and eventually found the passage – among exchanges on the apparently greater power of evil in the world of that decade. The interviewer, Peter Seewald, asks:

‘Does this mean that God has too little power over this world?’

Speaking of Jesus, Cardinal Ratzinger replies:

‘In any case he didn’t want to exercise power in the way that we imagine it. This is, of course, exactly the question that I too would ask the ‘world-spirit’: Why does he remain so powerless? Why does he reign only in this curiously weak way, as a crucified man, as one who himself failed? But apparently that is the way he wants to rule; that is the divine form of power. And the nondivine form of power obviously consists in imposing oneself and getting one’s way and coercing.’ (1)

What left me almost breathless was that the cardinal simply left that train of thought at that point, as though it was no more than an idle thought. Never afterwards to my knowledge did he follow it to its logical conclusion – in raising a most obvious question: 

If ‘imposing oneself‘ and ‘getting one’s way and coercing‘ was indeed  a ‘nondivine form of power‘, then why had the church attached itself to that form of power from the early fourth century until roughly 1918, in the arrangement with state actors known as Christendom – in defiance of the solemn instruction of Jesus to the apostles never to ‘Lord it’ over anyone? 

Nothing could be clearer for me than that the church’s own chief theological monitor had opened a door that I now could go through. The result was the reflection on where the history of the church had taken us to by the late 1990s – Scattering the Proud.

There was, of course, a reason that the cardinal prefect could not follow the logic of his own speculation about ‘divine power’. No less a theological heavyweight than St Augustine of Hippo had approved the coercive linkage of church and state for religious purposes in 408, in the Letter to Vincentius. (2)  

There Augustine used the parable of the Great Feast in Luke 14:15-24 to argue that it was legitimate now to ‘compel’ Donatist dissidents (who would not accept pastors they believed to be sinful) to ‘come in’ – i.e. to submit to those official Christian pastors who were now recognised by the Roman state. 

As the parable in question had been told by Jesus explicitly to encourage hospitality to the poor, and to teach that ‘the last shall be first’, its use by Augustine in this way – to justify ongoing coercion of dissidents to submit to the church-state authority – was a flagrant distortion of its original meaning. Nevertheless it became, disgracefully, the proof text for Jesus’ approval of state coercion to impose religious uniformity in the long centuries that followed, the centuries of Christendom and Inquisitions.  

When he speculated in 1996 that ‘getting one’s way and coercing’ was a ‘non-divine form of power’ did Cardinal Ratzinger in 1996 realise that he was opening this can of worms? It seems not. St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas (who also acquiesced in state coercion of heretics) were the giants of Catholic thought who bestrode modernity as well as the middle ages – and never did the cardinal advance a criticism of them on this issue.

However, at Vatican II, a huge majority of the bishops of the Catholic Church had in 1965 approved the church’s declaration on religious freedom, stating in its first article the following principle:  

“The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.”(3)

Logically opposed as they are, St Augustine’s defence of religious coercion and Vatican II’s repudiation of it cannot sit comfortably together in any Catholic’s ‘take’ on the history of the church. To follow Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1996 line of thought – that Jesus in submitting to crucifixion was exercising a divine form of power that was the opposite of coercion – is to reject Augustine’s reasoning in 408 that coercion was divinely sanctioned. If the Gospel contained any text that did prove that Jesus was in favour of coercion, we can be sure that Augustine would have found it. His misuse of Luke 14:15-23 in fact proves the contrary, and it is time for Christians to face that. 

We need this clarity. Still today there are those in the ‘pro-life’ movement who confuse morality with politics by arguing that the wrongness of abortion compels us to support the use of state coercion to end it. That such confusion is likely instead to consolidate the support for legalised abortion, defeating the moral end of enabling every conceived child to be born, is never considered.

Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus make any reference to the role of the state in the coming of the kingdom of God. His appeal is always directly to his listeners, and in the end he died rather than wield the sword of political ambition. Only by the same forbearance, and the same compassion for everyone facing a moral dilemma, will the pro-life movement change anyone.    

1. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth: Christianity and the Catholic Church at the End of the Millennium, An Interview with Peter Seewald, Ignatius Press, 1997, P.44

2. St Augustine, Letter to Vincentius, 408 e.g.:

https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102093.htm

3. Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican II Declaration on Religious Liberty, 1