RATZINGER AS UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR: PART 2
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THE DIFFICULT YEARS AT TUEBINGEN
Former students and colleagues speak about Professor Ratzinger at the theological citadel of Tuebingen. Where his adherence without regrets to the reforms of Vatican-II was put to the test by the new clerical triumphalism and bourgeois rebelliousness.
By Gianni Valente
[
with the collaboration of Pierluca Azzaro]
In the mid-1960s, Tuebingen appeared like the Promised Land for any self-respecting German theologian. With its centuries-old history as a “papist” theological center that became Lutheran from the very start of the Reformation, and with its faculty of Catholic theology reconstituted with vigor in the mid-18th century, the Swabian theological citadel seemed to be the ideal harbor for whoever wanted to experience the new conciliar ferments and to examine the ‘signs of the times’ by attaching themselves to and confronting a great and prestigious theological tradition.
In 1966, Joseph Ratzinger had not yet reached 40, but his hair was already all-white and his fame as the
enfant prodige of German theology had already been ‘consecrated’ by his intense and determinative participation in the adventure of Vatican-II. The Council had just concluded and the atmosphere was still vibrant with confident hopes.
Ratzinger in 1966
at Tuebingen University
But the anticipation of a good time for the Church in the world was marked with other, strange manifestations. Already that year, in one of his lectures assessing the Council, Joseph the Bavarian took note of these murky conditions.
“It seems important to me,” he said, “to show the two faces of what filled us with joy and gratitude at the Council… I think
it is equally important to note the dangerous new triumphalism of those who themselves denounced the triumphalism of the past. As long as the Church is a pilgrim on earth, it has no right to glory in itself. And this new way of celebrating may be even more insidious than tiaras and sedie gestatorie [
the papal throne borne aloft by courtiers] which, in themselves, have been more cause for amusement rather than for pride.”
The man who pulled strings so that the Catholic faculty at Tubingen would send its
vocatio (call) to the Bavarian professor who by then had only been three years at Muenster, was Hans Kueng, supported by his young colleague Max Seckler, who recalls to
30 Giorni today:
“At that time, there was a generational turnover from the thinking of many old professors. To strengthen the faculty, some proposed calling to the chair of Dogmatic Theology professors who were more mature, with a more solid profile. In 1966, I was 39 years old, Kueng 38. It was we who fought to call another young man. And
Ratzinger at the time was the man of the future.”
The mild and reserved Bavarian professor and his boisterous polemical Swiss colleague had known each other since 1957. They had worked together as theological experts at the last session of Vatican-II, and already, evident differences had emerged between them on how the fresh Conciliar stream should merge into the great river of the Church’s daily life.
But then, as Ratzinger explains in his autobiography, “Both of us considered this as a legitimate difference of theological positions,” which would not affect their “fundamental consensus as Catholic theologians.”
From 1964, both were among the founding members of
Concilium, the international journal of the “united front” of Council theologians. Speckler explains: “Kueng knew that he and Ratzinger thought differently about many things, but he said,
'One can deal and work with the best people; it is the bad ones who create problems.’”
Prof. Wolfgang Beinert, an ex-student of Ratzinger at Tuebingen, adds: “Perhaps Kueng called for Ratzinger because he wanted the students to be able to confront another Council theologian other than him, someone who would be a counterweight to his unilateral theology. Nevertheless, other more close-minded professors perceived the distance between the two, (even if) they also looked on Ratzinger as a dangerous liberal reformer and they said, 'We don’t need another Kueng.’”
In his new start at Tuebingen, Ratzinger as always became deeply involved without sparing himself. From his new position, he looked forward to establishing fruitful relationships even with the evangelical theologians of the Protestant faculty.
His enthusiasm and the unmistakably characteristic texture of his lectures –
a substantial theology nourished by the Fathers and by liturgy, luminous easy language with poetic shadings, an open confrontation without censure towards all questions raised by those confusing times – kindled unforeseeen affinities in the hearts of so many students of theology, but not just them.
More than 400 students would come to each of his lectures. Even seminarians wished to participate in numbers, and so they had to be screened by testing their knowledge of Greek and Latin!
The prelate Helmut Moll, who would much later work with his ex-professor for many years at the CDF, recalls: “To take part in a seminar on Mariology, one had to pass a preliminary exam on Marian texts from the first centuries in Greek and Latin.
There just was no comparison between Ratzinger and other professors! The lectures I heard in Bonn from neo-scholastic professors sounded arid and dry by comparison – a list of doctrinal definitions, and that was it!
“When in Tuebingen, I heard how Ratzinger spoke of Jesus or the Holy Spirit, it seemed to me at times that his words approached the intensity of prayer.”
In 1967, Ratzinger realized a project that he had been cultivating for 10 years: a course of lectures open not only to theology students, structured as an exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, which, by embracing all the ferments and disquiet of the times, would answer these by repeating "the content and significance of the Christian faith," which to the new professor, "today appears enveloped in a nebulous haze of uncertainty, perhaps as never before in history."
In the early morning hours, they came to listen to him – not only students from all the university faculties, but even parish priests, religious and even simple laymen.
Peter Kuhn, whom Ratzinger had called to Tuebingen to be his assistant, would stay up till the wee hours studying his own lessons and was not always able to arrive on time for those early-morning lectures.
“When I nodded off, those next to me would give me a nudge because they knew the professor had noticed. So I thought of masking it by assuming a thinker’s pose.” To make up, Kuhn brought with him a heavy tape recorder (this was the 60s!) which he would then have transcribed at the administrative office.
Those tapes gave birth to
Introduction to Christianity, the first best-seller signed Ratzinger, published by Heinrich Wild. With ten printings in its first year alone, it would eventually be translated into more than 20 languages.
In the same year, the new professor took active part in the preparations to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Catholic faculty of theology at Tuebingen. He considered it a propitious occasion to gather new perspectives by immersing himself in studying the famous School of Tuebingen, a group of theologians who had gathered around Johann Adam Mohler, who in the first decades of the 18th century, had given the decisive impulse for the emergence of historical theology, inspiring the historic-salvific approach that Ratzinger himself favored since his own studies in Munich and Freising.
It would be nice, Ratzinger thought, to recover the lessons of Mohler and company in order to strengthen the way of witnessing the faith in the modern world as suggested by the Council. But the climate within the faculty was conditioned and diverted by a completely different dynamic.
Kuhn says it briefly:
“Ratzinger perhaps hoped to connect with the great tradition of Tuebingen. But when we got there, that great tradition was no longer there.”
Ratzinger’s relations with his colleagues in Tuebingen would remain formally correct and courteous to the end. In his lectures, Kueng proclaimed loudly his esteem for the Bavarian theologian and reaffirmed many times that they had a common viewpoint. And Ratzinger in turn said in public that he had no problems with his Swiss colleague.
Excusationes non petitae.
Between these two big names on the faculty, who occupied the two chairs in dogmatic theology, the human and behavioral differences were always obvious.
Hans Kueng in Tuebingen
The impetuous Swiss zipped around town in his white Alfa Romeo, always dressed with bourgeois elegance. Journalists sought him out whenever they needed anyone who could shoot back answers amid the burning polemics that criss-crossed the Church in the post-Conciliar years.
The mild-mannered Bavarian professor, on the other hand, walked to work or used public transport, said Mass every day at the chapel of a girls' school, and otherwise, studied and prepared his lectures, keeping faithful to his austere and reserved lifestyle.
“Once when we happened to ride with some students and we stopped for lunch,” Kuhn remembers, “he only ordered sausages for himself and for everybody, thinking perhaps everyone was as frugal as he. We did not dare tell him we were young and we were hungry! But then he must have realized it because afterwards, whenever the occasion arose, he was concerned that each one should choose carefully from the menu whatever dishes they wanted.”
But it was in the concrete details of faculty life, between lectures, seminars, lessons and exams, that under the apparent ‘conciliar’ unanimity, the growing distance between Ratzinger and some of his colleagues reached critical points.
Ratzinger believed that all the important things that he exulted about during the Council – a Biblical and Patristic renewal, the openign to the world, the sincere desire for unity with other Christians, the liberation of the Church from all that weighed it down and hindered its mission – had nothing to do with the corrosive and iconoclastic agitation that impelled most of his colleagues.
The role played by some any theologians in the work of the Council had been transmuted by many of them into a professional arrogance that presumed to subject to the tribunal of ‘experts’ even the most elementary facts of Christian doctrine and the life of the Church.
“In their lectures,” Moll recalls, “
many professors among them appear to have lost every consensus about even essential facts about the faith. As students, it made our heads spin. One always had to take positions about things which had always been beyond question. Does the devil exist or not? Are there seven sacraments or only two? Can non-ordained people celebrate the Eucharist? Is there a Primacy of the Pope in Rome, or is the Papacy simply a despotic regime to bring down?”
The Redemptorist father Real Tremblay, who came to Tuebingen in 1969 to earn his doctorate under Ratzinger, and now a lecturer at the Accademia Alfonsiana, says: “I have always thought that some of Kung’s aggressiveness may have arisen from some problems which he encountered as a student in Rome. He is one of those who has not been able to decant the anti-Roman venom accumulated from years of personal juvenile experience. Ratzinger had no such problems, if only because he never studied in Rome.”
The Bavarian theologian, who grew up in the school of St. Augustine, of Newman and of Guardini, felt the onus of new conformism that seems to have infected so many of his colleagues: the exegete Herbert Haag, the moralist Alfons Auer, the canonist Johannes Neuman.
He who during the council developed a close frinedship with Congar and De Lubac did not hide his non-alignment with the call to arms of the new ‘progressivist’ triumphalism.
Father Martin Trimpe, one of the students closest to Ratzinger during his Tuebingen and Regensburg years, recalls: “Once, in an overflowing lecture hall, there was a debate among different professors on the Primacy of the Pope. Kueng had said that the authentic type of Pope was that represented by John XXIII, because his Papacy was pastoral rather than jurisdictional.
"Ratzinger did not offer an opinion, and so the students started to chant his name, 'Rat-zin-ger! Rat-zin-ger!' They wanted to know what he thought.
"He responded calmly that the context described by Kueng was correct because
one must take into account all the aspects connected with the Petrine ministry. Otherwise, he said, by insisting only on its pastoral aspect, one risked describing not the Shepherd of the Universal Church, but only a universal puppet that could be maneuvered at our pleasure.”
Ratzinger did not take sides, he maintained his critical attitude, but it was certainly not he who sought polemics and comparisons with his colleagues. By nature he is not a fighter, he does not want to exchange blows, he shuns academic brawls. Nor does he want to take on the role of the awkward customer who would organize resistance to a prevailing trend.
It is a fact that during his years in Tuebingen, there is no record of any open conflicts between Ratzinger and the rest of the academic corps, who even chose him to be dean. Even his relations with Kueng “broke up” through a slow and silent process of internal detachment, a progressive estrangement without confrontations.
“Kueng only once attacked Ratzinger,” says Seckler, “and it was not on account of theology.”
Between the two, they had agreed that every semester, if one gave the main course in dogmatic theology, the other would give the supporting course, and therefore, would have more time available to program his own activities.
When Ratzinger announced that he would be leaving Tuebingen soon, after having been called to the new theological faculty in Regensburg, the decision threw off the plans of his colleague, who had already filled up his agenda for his ‘light’ semester.
Seckler continues: “Kueng breathed fire! He attacked Ratzinger with vehement invectives, insisting that their agreement should be observed. Ratzinger remained calm but unmoveable in his decision to leave.”
Before that outbreak of rage, Ratzinger had been convinced that it was best to have a change of climate when, as he expressed it himself in his autobiography, the year 1968 fell like a bolt of lightning on relationships that had already unravelled in the post-Conciliar turbulence.
The bourgeoisie was fighting within itself. The sons of the middle classes were rebelling agianst their fathers. In Berlin, deaths resulted from demonstrations against emergency laws enacted to safeguard the national security. The blaze began in the university centers of Berlin and Frankfurt, but soon reached even the theological faculties.
In Tuebingen itself, at the faculty of philosophy, Ernst Bloch was a professor, who in his book
The Principle of Hope, identified a secularized Jewish-Christian messianism as the ultimate source of the revolutionary winds which were shaking the West.
A perspective, Ratzinger wites in his autobiography, “that is distorted precisely because while it is based on Biblical hope, enough to preserve its religious fervor, it eliminates God and replaces Him with political actions by man.”
Faith, Ratzinger explains his introductory essay to the 2000 edition of his best-seller
Introduction to Christianity, “ceded to politics the role of being the saving force.” In this “new fusion of the Christian impulse and political action on a global level,” many Christians felt the intoxication of being made protagonists of history. [Referring to liberation theology, Ratzinger notes that] after the most advanced culture of the West had tried to relegate religion to the subjective and intimate sphere, now with ”the Bible re-read in a new way and a liturgy celebrated as a symbolic fulfillment of the revolution and a preparation for it … Christianity with this curious synthesis has stepped once more onto the world stage, proposing itself as an ‘epocjh-making’ message.”
But even the ‘democratizing’ agenda of the up-to-date theologians all of a sudden changed. It was no longer about making changes to the government of the Church in order to favor its opening to the world. Even the historic form assumed by the Church would be demolished in the collapse of the old regimes.
“
Unter den Talaren, der Muff von tausend Jahren,” the stundents at theological faculties screamed. Under the cassocks, the filth of a thousand years.
Student demonstration in Bonn, 1966.
The revolutionary convulsions reached into the insterstices of routine faculty life, distorted and tore apart centuries-old practices in the relationship between students and teachers.
The confrontation did not recognize free zones. In Tuebingen, even Kueng and his friends paid the price. Student ‘rebels’ occupied the unversity parish church of St. John and demanded the democratic election of its chaplain. They lay down on the steps to the faculty of theology, preventing the professors form coming through. The students had no time for 'useless 'lessons, they needed to 'prepare for the coming revolution.'
Ratzinger tolerated these “people’s processes” by the students a few times. Martin Trimpe recalls: “They would interrupt a lecture with screams, or they would take possession of the lectern and oblige him to answer their ‘revolutionary’ questions. Other professors tried to wink back at the protesters. The Bavarian professor chose to answer with calm and logical arguments. But his soft voice often got interrupted by streams.
Seckler continues: “He does very well when discussions are calm and reasoned. But he was lost when opposition became violent. He does not know how to scream, he is unable to make himself heard above voices raised in anger.”
Nevertheless, Ratzinger felt human sympathy, mingled with sorrow, for so many of these students who complicated his life. One of them, Karen, was a beautiful blonde, who however disturbed she was, was obviously in search of something. It was evident that her revolutionary illusions were a confused eexpression of her expectations for a different life, a good life, her desire to be happy. Ratzinger was there to listen to her, spent time on her. But then she died unexpectedly.
Trimpe recalls: ”It was I who notified him at lunchtime. He was deeply saddened but he never said anything more about it. I am sure that he offered Mass, that he brought to the altar his compassion for the life and death of that girl, entrusting the salvation of her soul to the mercy of the Lord.”
Even in his lectures, as was his habit, Ratzinger initially took seriously and valued expressions of Marxist criticism, which could also express the hope for actual historical salvation not enclosed in the ghetto of individual subjectivity.
But
his shock was tremendous when the protests became sacrilegious parody, bourgeois rebellionism, a devastating corruption of all the things that he most treasured.
Today, another of his ex-students, Werner Huelsbusch, now a retired parish priest in the suburbs of Muenster:
“He could no longer stand reading manifestos which described Jesus and St. Paul as sexually frustrated beings, or listen to rants which derided the Corsss as a symbol of sadomasochism. It made him sick.”
The increasingly poisoned atmosphere at Tuebingen hastened the time for his transfer to the new theological faculuty inaugurated in Regensburg in 1967.
At his last meeting with his doctorate class in Tuebingen, the professor arrived a little late, driven by Peter Kuhn in his little 2-horsepower Citroen. Kuhn braked hastily in front of the waiting students, and the Tuebingen carplate fell off. Everyone burst out laughing.
Ratzinger’s transfer forom Tuebingen to Regensburg is often labelled as his time of metamorphosis - i.e., when the reform-minded theologian of Vatican-II, traumatized by his experience inTuebingen, began his transformation into a lucid conservative (or insidious, depending on the mindset of whoever is proposing this cliché).
Here were born the myths of a titanic Ratzinger leading the orthodox counter-offensive against the evils of that time, and the opposite one of a crypto-conservative Ratzinger who casts aside his mask of reformer-theologian to reveal his visceral reactionary impulses.
The first one to reject this role that those from the left and right wished to impose on him iwas Ratzinger himself on a number of occasions. “I did not change, it is they who changed,” he would say in the 1984 interview-book with Vittorio Messori, when speaking of the theologians who were with him initially in
Concilium.
Victor Hahn , the Redemptorist father who became the first pupil to earn his doctorate under Ratzinger, remarks: "One already finds this refusal to see a radical change in his outlook because of the Tuebingen experience, in the interview given by our professor to the weekly diocesan newspaper in Munich in 1977, when he was named to be Archbishop of the Bavarian capital.”
What changed was not the heart nor the outlook of the theologian who participated in the Council, but the circumstances he was facing. For him, as for many enthusiastic protagonists of the Conciliar season – Congar, De Lubac, Danielo, Le Guillou – the anxious waiting for the maturation of the good fruits from the Council’s hundred flowers in bloom had changed into the desolation of a missed feast.
The falling away of all the most ordinary practices and all the essential data from Tradition that reached into the hearts of all theological faculties appeared to them as a true self-destructive process in the Church.
But the lucid recognition of the conditions towards which the Church was tending never led to abjuration nor damnatio
memoriae of the Conciliar spring.
Says Peter Kuhn: “I remember the time when we students were still euphoric about the Council, but he, citing an image from the Bible, said:
We have opened the door to drive out a devil from the house; let us hope that in doing so, we have not let seven others enter. He wrote the same thing in article for
Hochland in 1969. But I never heard him say, We should never have done what we did.”
In Rome, Paul VI saw the same things. “We thought,” he would say on June 29, 1972, “that after the Council, a new sunny day would dawn for the Church. Instead, the day has brought clouds and storms, darkness, more seeking and uncertainty; it has become an effort even to dispense the joy of communion.”
It was also in 1968 that intra-ecclesial dissent against the Magisterium reached its peak, against the encyclical
Humanae vitae, with its considered No to modern methods of contraception.
The Canadian Tremblay found an ironic caricature of Paul VI in a Catholic magazine. He thought it witty and decided to bring it with him to one of the doctorate students’ Saturday meetings with their professor. “When I showed it to him with a wink, he surprised me with a severe look.”
The message was clear: One does not make jokes about the Pope.
“But it was precisely his very catholic sense of freedom about relations with the Appostolic See that immunized him against that magisterial fundamentalism which seems be in vogue today – meaning there are those who are quick to cite phrases from Vatican documents that have just been freshly issued,” he continues.
As a Bavarian priest facing the tempests which were beating even more fiercely on the chruches of northern Europe, Ratzinger did not invoke the intervention of the ‘police’ in Rome as a panacea. He felt it was the duty of each bishop to proclaim the faith of the Apostles of whom he is a successor and to defend the simple faithful from those who would poison the wells of their faith.
Ratzinger and Rahner at the time of Vatican-II
“In 1965,“ Beinert notes, “Ratzinger wrote with Karl Rahner a key book called
Primacy and Episcopacy, where in a certain sense the most relevant word is the conjunction that unites the two terms. On the
quaestio disputata of the relation between the Pope and bishops, Ratzinger has always stayed with the line expressed by the Council.
Even with his students, he sometimes made a witty remark about conformism in Rome’s academic circles.
Beintert recalls: “I was in Rome for ten years. I studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and for a long time, I was an alumnus of the Pontifical German College. During a discussion with a group of us doctorate students, the professor asked what we each thought about the subject. Then he added smiling, ‘Useless to ask Mr. Beinert – he studied in Rome, and we already know what he would think and what he will say…'”
”A marginal episode which took place towards the end of his Tuebingen period is particularly illuminating. In the summer of 1969, some professors at Tuebingen wrote an article in which they launched this proposal – to abolish the lifetime duration of bishophood and fix a time limit for the ministry of residential bishops.
"This was published in the
Theologische Quartalschrift, the prestigious Tuebingen journal which boasts of being the oldest among all the German theological journals. Before it was published, all the professors of the Catholic faculty, including Ratzinger, signed the article.
“In twelve dense pages they presented sociological arguments to show that the 'framework and concept of the right of the Church in the light of the actual society today are seen as from a lost world, a strange world.’ According to the authors, even the actual configuration of episcopal jurisdiction does not 'come from the Gospel, nor from the structure of the first Christian communities, but only from a tradition that emerged much later,’ and which ‘under certain aspects, is no longer adequate.’
“Then they explain their proposals for adapting episcopal powers to the new times. According to them, the duration of a residential bishop’s ministry should be limited to eight years. A re-nomination or a prolongation of that period would be possible only in exceptional cases and for objective external reasons owing to the political-ecclesiastical context.’
“The authors specified that their proposal referred, for now, only to Western Europe. And that its implications on the election of a Pope were beyond the scope of the exposition and are not therefore discussed. Another
excusatio non petita, seeing that the proposal by itself allows hypothesizing a time-limited mandate even for the Bishop of Rome!”
Professor Ratzinger’s agreement to the proposal made by his colleagues does not fit the profile of the pure and hard opponent who castles himself to resist the theological trends of the time. But neither can it be invoked to confirm the opposite stereotype, that of an incendiary theologian who was destined sooner or later to change colors.
Seckler, who was one of the article’s authors and who now considers it as a ‘youthful sin’, tells
30 Giorni: “At the beginning, Ratzinger was the only one who did not want to sign the article. His ideas of the episcopate did not coincide with the thesese we denfended in our proposal. So I went to his house, seeking to convince him. We went for coffee and we talked at length. When I left him, I had his signature.”
Even his closest students at the time were perplexed. Trimpe recalls: “Usually the prfessor was very determined in upholding his convictions. In that case, maybe he did not read the article carefully enough or he yielded to pressures to avoid a fuss. Maybe he wanted to avoid further disputes with his colleagues.”
And maybe what was asked of him – a simple agreement to a collective text – did not seem very relevant to him. After the article was published while its collaborators and his students were all concerned about it, Ratzinger did not seem at all worried about his reputation.
He himself showed his students a subtly humorous way of placatinhg their concerns: “When he saw that some of us were scandalized, he smiled and said, 'OK, if you are so outraged, write something, write an article against the proposal and I will help you get it published.'”
And that was how Kuhn and Trimpe prepared a long article which appeared in two installments in the journal
Hochland to rebut, at their professor’s suggestion, the proposal for a time-limited episcopacy which he himself had signed.
Kuhn could not resist adding: “Of course, we published our article only after we and the professor had already transferred to Regensburg. Otherwise, in Tuebingen, they might have arrested us for heresy.”
[TO BE CONTINUED]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/06/2006 23.24]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/06/2006 23.51]