St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI: Defenders of the Faith

What have St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI in common with G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc? What have they in common with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis? The answer is that they worked so closely together, were such good friends, and acted in such harmonious unison that they almost seem inseparable. One can’t look at one without seeing him in the light of the other.

This is why George Bernard Shaw called Chesterton and Belloc the “Chesterbelloc”, seeing them as a single collaborative entity; and this is why Tolkien called Lewis the “great encourager”, without whose encouragement he would never have finished The Lord of the Rings, even as Tolkien’s own philosophy of myth had been instrumental and crucial to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. Lewis’s debt to Tolkien is that if he had not known Tolkien, he might not have become a Christian and would not have written The Chronicles of Narnia; Tolkien’s debt to Lewis is that if he had not known Lewis he would never have finished The Lord of the Rings. Paradoxically, we have Tolkien to thank for Narnia, and Lewis to thank for Middle Earth. Such are the benefits, the power and the glory when two worlds collude.

The comparison of the collusion of Chesterton and Belloc, and that of Tolkien and Lewis, with that of the two great popes, St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI helps us to understand the place and importance of Pope Benedict as a resolute defender of the Faith.   

The election of Cardinal Ratzinger as St. John Paul II’s successor in 2005 was greeted with grief and horror by those heretical theologians and cafeteria Catholics whose heresies and backsliding equivocations had been condemned by the new pope during his many years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As usual, these wolves in sheep’s clothing howled in unison with the wolves in the secular media, uniting themselves with the avowed enemies of the Church in their hatred of the hero of orthodoxy who had forced them into retreat during his years as St. John Paul II’s faithful and fearless servant. In the war of words that followed the pope’s election, the enemies of orthodoxy decried the new German Shepherd as “God’s Rottweiler.”

Although the gentle and saintly Ratzinger did not deserve such an epithet, it is ironically apt that the wolves who would devour the flock should hate the German Shepherd who had courageously stopped them from doing so! The irony is that these enemies of the new pope were effectively attacking the previous pope, soon to be a canonized saint of the Church, because Cardinal Ratzinger had been St. John Paul II’s closest and most trusted ally throughout almost the entirety of John Paul’s papacy. St. John Paul had appointed Cardinal Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith in November 1981, only three years into his papacy, and kept him as his right hand man for the entirety of the remainder of his many years as pope. An attack on Benedict at the time of his election was ipso facto an attack on the saint who had been pope for over a quarter of a century.      

St. John Paul II had long been a great admirer of Ratzinger. He had read all of Ratzinger’s books in the original German and had admired his intellect and his orthodoxy for many years. Now the charismatic Pole had made the brilliant Bavarian his right-hand man, the two men forming a dynamic duo, defending doctrine, restoring tradition and forcing the modernist ascendancy into retreat. Without Ratzinger’s presence, St. John Paul II’s papacy would not have been the force for tradition-oriented renewal that it subsequently became. The union of the future saint with his future successor was a marriage of minds and hearts made in heaven.

There is little doubt that one of the richest gifts that Ratzinger has bequeathed to the Church is his tireless work in both word and deed to restore the splendor of the liturgy. As far back as 1975, only ten years after the Second Vatican Council, Ratzinger was writing of the need to oppose the “rationalistic relativism, confusing claptrap and pastoral infantilism” which were degrading the liturgy “to the level of a parish tea party and the intelligibility of the popular newspaper.”

Asked to comment on these strident words in 1984, almost ten years after they were first written, Ratzinger was asked whether he still stood by what he had said. “Absolutely,” he replied, adding that things had deteriorated further in the intervening years, so that many more liturgical “treasures” had been “squandered away.” St. John Paul II’s agreement with his closest collaborator was evident in the same year, when he granted a special indult Quattuor Abhinc Annos, issued by the Congregation of Divine Worship, permitting the use of the pre-Vatican II Missal, published by St. John XXIII in 1962. Four years later, in 1988, St. John Paul II issued Ecclesia Dei, a Motu Proprio exhorting bishops to make “broad and generous use” of the 1984 indult “on behalf of all the faithful who sought it.”

Cardinal Ratzinger’s publication of The Spirit of the Liturgy in 2000 must be seen in the light of St. John Paul II’s active encouragement of liturgical tradition. There is no way that Ratzinger would have sought to write and publish this pivotally important book, at a time that he was seen to be the pope’s closest and most trusted adviser, if he hadn’t received the pope’s support and endorsement. In this masterful book, the future pope was calling for a dynamic and courageous restoration of the splendour of the Church’s liturgical inheritance. Even as he was summoning the faithful to silence in prayer, he was calling them to action. Even as he called the faithful to kneel for Communion, he was exhorting them to stand and fight for the ancient traditions of the Church’s worship. Here at last was a leading figure in the Church, the closest ally of St. John Paul II, who was prepared to take the fight to the monsters of modernity. Like a modern St. George coming to the defence of the Bride of Christ, a true damsel in distress, he wielded his sword of truth and lance of reason in a battle to the death with the dragon of disorientation.

Almost twenty years after St. John Paul II’s Motu Proprio, his successor’s own Motu Proprio was being written in light of “the continued requests of these members of the faithful, long deliberated upon by our predecessor.” Implicit in Benedict’s discussion of St. John Paul II’s efforts to succor and support tradition-oriented Catholics is the failure of most bishops to respond to his predecessor’s indult and exhortation. It was clearly the shameful and woeful neglect of the faithful by most of the world’s bishops, in defiance of the wishes of a saint of the Church, that had prompted Benedict to act with his own Motu Proprio, which effectively bypassed the bishops, thereby liberating tradition-oriented priests and millions of tradition-loving Catholics from the indigent indifference or obstructive hostility of lukewarm or modernist members of the hierarchy. 

Let’s conclude this celebration of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI by returning to almost the last duty that Cardinal Ratzinger performed before he was elected pope. At the homily he gave at the papal conclave on Monday, April 18, 2005, two days after his seventy-eighth birthday and a day before his election as the successor of St. Peter, Ratzinger coined the phrase, “the dictatorship of relativism”, which encapsulates the nihilism of the zeitgeist as brilliantly as St. John Paul II’s coining of the phrase, “the culture of death”, almost exactly ten years earlier in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, issued on the Feast of the Annunciation, 1995. In their indefatigable defense of the Faith against the culture of death and its dictatorship of relativism, these two great popes were united in life as we can be sure that they are united in death. May they pray for the present pope that he might share in the lasting legacy that their successive papacies have bestowed on the Church.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at Inside the Vatican and is reprinted with permission.