When reading Last Testament, the autobiography (written with Peter Seewald) of Pope Benedict XVI, I was intrigued by the discrepancy between my image of Joseph Ratzinger as prefect of the Congregation for the Defence of the Faith (CDF) and the person revealed in these interviews.
I had imagined him as a tall, severe man, served by a richly resourced bureaucracy, and on top of all deviations from true faith and practice throughout the world. A man who played a persistent and methodical political hand in all aspects of church policy.
My image of the man changed considerably after he was elected Pope — he was manifestly short and frail, and seemed poorly served by his Curia. It has been further challenged by these interviews given to the German journalist Seewald.
In them he speaks of his life, his motivations, his limitations, and the circumstances of some controversial events and decisions. The man and his actions appear as more ordinary and less adamantine than I had once imagined.
Benedict would have been well served by a more searching interviewer. Seewald's adulation reminded me of a football fan talking with a club legend: 'Tell us about that game against the Tigers when you took them apart after half time and showed what drongoes they are.' In his responses Benedict constantly has to minimise his own exaggerated influence and acknowledge the disparaged virtues of his opponents.
The man who emerges is a modest person of deep faith, fed by a scholarly reading of the Catholic tradition. He wanted its resources to enliven the faith and practice of the church. This was the program of enrichment rather than change that he understood the Second Vatican Council to have undertaken.
But in much of the theological thinking and practice that followed the Council he saw embodied a program of change that was unfaithful to Catholic tradition.
In his writing and his office he commended a deep understanding of faith and combatted the deviations he saw in many political theologies, in reductive understandings of Jesus Christ and of the Catholic priesthood, and in other accommodations of faith to the ethos of the secularist world.
"His approach was constantly that of the scholar who read texts closely himself and respected critics of his own texts only if they gave them an equally close reading."
He emphasises the continuity in his outlook, claiming persuasively that his views and actions were not influenced by such historical events as