Europe’s Last Civilised Mind: A Personal Reflection on Pope Benedict XVI

Benedict was not only Priest, Bishop, and Pope, but he was also one of the finest minds Europe and the world possessed in the latter 20th century.

From The European Conservative

By Sebastian Morello

Pope Benedict’s expansive mind formed me in the humane habits of awareness that harmonise the intellect and the affectivity of the heart with the culture and civilisation that is our proper inheritance.

his morning, my wife, children, and I gathered around the image of the Sacred Heart in our home and prayed for the repose of the soul of Pope Benedict XVI. A couple of decades ago, I could never have imagined that I would do such a thing. Back in 2005, I remember my history teacher announcing to his class that “a new pope’s been picked.” He explained that the new pope—a Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—was a well-known regressive, an “Inquisitor General,” “God’s rottweiler,” and he would no doubt fail to “bring the Catholic Church into the 21st century.”

Perhaps such an evaluation was forgivable. After all, I was being educated at a frightfully Whiggish Anglican boarding school, and its schoolmasters were only marginally less ignorant than their pupils. Little better could hardly have been expected. But, knowing what I know now, I suspect that similar things were being said throughout the country in the Catholic Church’s own schools.

Four years later, on the south coast of India, I was received into the Catholic Church. The nun whom I had met in the Himalayas prior to that, who had evangelised and partially catechised me, could not be present at my reception into full communion with Rome, because she was in that very hallowed city for an audience with Pope Benedict as I was crossing the Tiber in Tamil Nadu. On her return a week later, she told me that she’d mentioned me to the Holy Father and told him of my reception into the Church that day. She reported that Pope Benedict had told her that he would pray for me, and handed her a rosary—which he blessed—to deliver to me. (That rosary now sits here on my desk as I presently write.)

Pope Benedict became for me a great guide and light, as he did for so many. It soon became apparent that I had entered a Church that had been engaged in a masochistic exercise of self-repudiation for decades. I found myself surrounded by Catholics who were thoroughly embarrassed by the very religion I’d embraced. They didn’t much like me either, because of my singular defect of actually believing in their religion. The way that Pope Benedict constantly testified to the love we ought to have for our tradition was hugely encouraging. His tireless presentation of patristic theology, his calling of the Church back to the priority of Holy Scripture—especially by his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy—and his insistence that the liturgy’s sacredness must be respected by the Church’s ministers, was an unceasing source of moral and spiritual strength for those striving to be faithful in a rupturing Church.

Ratzinger had chosen the name Benedict at his ascension to the throne of St. Peter because St. Benedict was not only the patron of Europe, but his Order had been the preserver of Europe in ages of civilisational decay; in Pope Benedict’s own words:

The name Benedict … evokes the extraordinary figure of the great ‘patriarch of western monasticism,’ St. Benedict of Norcia, co-patron of Europe with Cyril and Methodius. The progressive expansion of the Benedictine Order which he founded exercised an enormous influence on the spread of Christianity throughout the European continent. For this reason, St. Benedict is much venerated in Germany, and especially in Bavaria, my own land of origin; he constitutes a fundamental point of reference for the unity of Europe and a powerful call to the irrefutable Christian roots of European culture and civilization.

This was a key theme in the reign of Pope Benedict: Europe is a creation of the Gospel’s permeation of culture, and any ‘Europe’ that does not recognise the primacy of Christianity has already lost the means both to understand itself and unify itself.

I read Benedict’s three encyclicals as they appeared, and his transcribed interviews with Peter Seewald, and I studied his books, especially The Spirit of the Liturgy, Truth and Tolerance, and his small meditation on morality and the philosophy of religion entitled On Conscience, among others. Pope Benedict’s expansive mind—and for this I will always be grateful—formed me in the humane habits of awareness that harmonise the intellect and the affectivity of the heart with the culture and civilisation that is our proper inheritance.

As an undergraduate philosophy student, I recall quoting the following passage from Truth and Tolerance in an essay I wrote about the connaturality of faith and reason, to the shock and dismay of my (analytic philosophy) tutor:

The first encounter between Greek thought and biblical faith took place, not in the early Church, but in the course of the biblical path itself. Moses and Plato, belief in the gods and enlightened criticism of polytheism, theological ethics and ethical teaching drawn from ‘nature’ had already encountered each other within the Bible itself.

From Pope Benedict I first learned that, downstream from the Kerygma, our entire understanding of culture, civilisation, Logos itself (or rather, Himself), is inextricably bound up with the sanctification of our world by the Incarnate Word and the new order of grace that He introduced. I came to see that, as long as we still had Pope Benedict, we had with us a great civilised mind formed by the wisdom tradition that is Europe—but perhaps also the last of such minds.

I was fortunate enough to be present at an address delivered by Pope Benedict in the piazza outside the Basilica of the Holy House of Loreto, when I took a pilgrimage there a decade or so ago. Much of what he said that day has faded in my mind, but I have not forgotten his remark—mid-speech—about the central importance of St. Thomas Aquinas in the intellectual life of the Church, a comment that I interpreted at the time as a personal confirmation that I was right to have chosen the Angelic Doctor as a sure guide in my scholarly endeavours. About a year later, I found myself near the sanctuary in the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran just as Pope Benedict was offering the sacrifice of the Mass. I vividly recall his piety as he seemingly lost himself in the mystery that he was confecting. That same devotional ‘presence’ I personally witnessed for the last time when, later that year, I joined the Corpus Christi procession that Pope Benedict led through the Eternal City’s streets.

Benedict’s liberation of the ancient apostolic Roman Rite, and his accompanying condemnation of the myths that had been assiduously disseminated by the Church’s adversaries regarding its supposed abrogation, was a supreme gift to the faithful. His generosity was seen yet again in his institution of the Ordinariates for Catholics with an Anglican patrimony, so they could preserve the effects of that grace that had operated in those centuries of sorrow and separation. He gave new life to the Church in the United Kingdom with his 2010 visit to these isles, when he personally beatified the now St. John Henry Newman. All the gifts that he bestowed upon the Church cannot be named here, for they were so many.

On the day after Pope Benedict announced his decision to abdicate, a friend and I attended a recital of Bach’s St. John Passion in London. At the interval, my companion looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “I fear that Europe’s last great, civilised mind has just retreated into obscurity.” Those words echoed over and over within me as I listened to those voices singing out the sacred words of Holy Writ in the language of our vanishing Pope. My friend’s words continued to haunt me, and I recalled them two weeks later as I knelt in Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, uniting my prayers for Pope Benedict to those of the city’s faithful at the very moment that he gave up the See of St. Peter.

Pope Benedict, however, was not a perfect pope. He never overcame the post-war, liberal optimism that was so typical of his generation, nor the conciliar desire to reconcile the Church with the modern world, whose very existence is rooted in the repudiation of the Gospel and the legal enshrinement of materialism. Whilst he watched throughout his life the effects of the Second Vatican Council, as they corroded the Church from within, he could never bring himself to adopt the critical attitude that might have eventually reversed the Council’s relentlessly corrosive consequences. He repeatedly made terrible appointments, especially to the College of Cardinals, but also to episcopal sees, elevating modernists and progressives to senior positions. It was as if he still believed that what the Church needed was ‘balance’—a few orthodox clerics here and a few heretical ones there. Many felt that what the Church needed, however, was fidelity. Most saddening of all—despite the far stricter measures that he introduced to deal with abuse of minors and vulnerable adults by clergy—is that there remains evidence that he didn’t always handle such cases with the desired prudence or promptness. It was often said by Pope Benedict’s progressivist critics that he never should have been a pope, and would have been better off as a professor for the rest of his life—there may be some truth in that.

Whatever his failings, there was a widespread feeling among conservative Catholics that the progressivist onslaught of the half-century following that infelicitous Council was now coming to an end. When Pope Benedict abdicated, many of us were both shocked and hurt by his decision, and we worried about who might come to take his place. Nothing—truly, nothing—could have prepared us for the catastrophe that was about to be inflicted on the Church.

Pope Benedict’s respect for tradition, his insistence on clear and orthodox doctrine, his call to liturgical reverence, his veneration of the Church Fathers, his love of Scripture, his subtle and yet piercing account of culture and its hoped-for renewal—all this was profoundly encouraging to an otherwise demoralised faithful. It is hard not to feel that with his death, Europe has lost one of the last minds that truly understood her.