Gänswein’s Who believes Is Not Alone is detailed, informative, never sensational

I.

Joseph Pearce once remarked that he tends to look away from Vatican politics on the grounds that it is better not to peer too closely into the engine room of the Barque of St. Peter. Nevertheless, to judge from Archbishop Gänswein’s account of his several decades working at the Vatican, the mechanical bowels of that craft are enormously more interesting than they are dispiriting or disillusioning. Human beings have an innate and irrepressible curiosity concerning what goes on behind the scenes, behind closed doors, and downstairs of any institution, as the proved by the immense success of Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey—and I suspect that the Vatican is no different.

Gänswein is a German Prelate of the Church with a doctorate in canon law and an Archbishop since 2012, who entered the Roman Curia as a member of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in 1995 and in 2003 joined the staff of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the invitation of Cardinal Ratzinger as the Cardinal’s personal secretary. Two years later the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI appointed him Principal Private Secretary to His Holiness, and the following year Prelate of His Holiness. In December of 2012, Gänswein was made Prefect of the Pontifical Household, a position he held until shortly after Benedict’s retirement, during which time Gänswein continued as personal secretary to the Pope Emeritus until Benedict’s death on December 31, 2022.

Almost certainly, no man alive possesses a more intimate and detailed knowledge of this Pontificate than does Msgr. Gänswein, as his book suggests.

It is not a sensational work, for the single and simple reason that Benedict’s reign was not, despite the media’s attempts to make so the-called “Vatileaks” affair into a papal scandal. (As the Catholic journalist John R. Allen, Jr., wrote at the time, “It’s not so much the content of the leaks, but the fact of them, which is the real problem.”) Of far greater institutional and human interest are the common, routine, and humble details of the domestic life of the See of St. Peter as shared by the Pope and his retinue, including his servants, his confidants, and his advisors; a sense of which the Gänswein conveys admirably without neglecting the thematic aspects of Benedict’s pontificate, concretely expressed by the encyclicals released in the course of its eight year duration and illuminated further illuminated in its afterlife of another eight years.

The first chapter, covering Ratzinger’s early career, and those dealing with his work for the pontificate of St. John Paul II as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, provide a moving portrait of the close relationship between the two men, the one a theologian, the other a philosopher and man of letters. “Pope Wojtyla’s collaborators,” according to Gänswein, “testify that he never made an important decision without first consulting Cardinal Ratzinger….”

And he consulted him frequently on many specific issues, one of them being the distortion of Christian love for the poor by instrumentalizing the Faith in the interest of making it a means to advance revolutionary political movements, as is the case with “liberation theology,” which greatly concerned Ratzinger. The Pope himself, owing to his personal history, had directly experienced the practical results of applied political ideology. In a homily he preached on November 26, 1981, the day after his appointment to the position, the new Prefect preached a homily in which he asserted, “Political morality consists precisely in resisting the seduction of words that distort the humanity of man and his full capability. The moralism of chimerical political aspirations is immoral because it intends to realize things that no one but God can bring about.” Eleven year later, he added in a doctrinal note (again as Prefect) that democracy must be based not on relativistic principles but on “the true and solid foundation of non-negotiable ethical [ones], which are the underpinning of life in society.”

The chief encyclicals issued during John-Paul II’s pontificate to which he contributed substantially are those whose themes ran on truth and its relationship to freedom and dealt with modern social problems: Ecclesia de Eucharistia (2003), Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Re Socialis, and Centesimus Annus (1991), all concerned with the dignity of man and the need always to view and treat him as an end rather than a means. Nevertheless, Gänswein believes that those “most dear to his heart,” and to which he himself made significant contributions, are devoted to doctrinal issues: Veritatis Splendor (1993), Evangelium Vitae (1995), and Fides et Ratio (1998).

II.

According to Gänswein, every cardinal entering a conclave believes, or tells himself he believes, that his brother cardinals and the Holy Spirit will somehow pass lightly over him–and touch upon someone else. In the case of Joseph Ratzinger, Gänswein states that the successor to St. John Paul II “told me he said nothing more than ‘Accepto’…and when asked his name he responded simply, ‘Benedictus’”—after Benedict XV and St. Benedict of Norcia, co-Patron of Europe, born around the middle of the fifth century A.D. and a monk, author, and theologian. In Gänswein’s estimation, the conclave chose wisely. After 27 years of close magisterial teaching, “[it] was time for a period of assimilation. A good successor would foster a fuller understanding of Wojtyla’s teaching and bring it to completion. And who else could it possibly be but Ratzinger, his closest theological collaborator?”

As for the Gänswein himself, whom the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had invited in February 2003 to be his personal secretary and who had stayed on at the Holy Office until John Paul II’s death, his continuation in the role throughout Benedict XVI’s eight year pontificate and afterward was quite natural. “The evening Cardinal Ratzinger was elected I found myself standing next to the Pope. I suddenly realized that no one teaches you how to be a papal secretary.” Don Stanislaw Dziwisz, who had been performed the same office for Jean Paul II, advised him:

First of all, you must be his castle: protect him from anything that could crush him. Secondly, find the right working pace; use your mind, your heart, and even your nose to keep every situation under control: the whole world is now his best friend and everyone will want something from him.

Gänswein devotes an entire chapter to what he calls “Stumbling blocks with the Vatican Bureaucracy.” These are, as one would imagine, endless. Dealing with them, and with the necessary making of appointments, weighed heavily on him and the new Pope during the early years of Benedict’s pontificate. So did concern for the progressive weakening of the Christian faith in Europe that prompted Angelo Cardinal Scola to suggest the establishment of a dicastery to work with the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples to address the issue of Catholics already evangelized who had allowed their practice of the Faith to lapse. “This was the beginning of the pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization,” led by Agostino Cardinal Vallini, in part because of his pastoral experience as a diocesan bishop.

“The point here is this,” Gänswein insists:

Benedict did not intend to strengthen the curia and the Church by nominating only those who were completely in line with his own theological vision. To the contrary, he explicitly stated that ‘there should be room in the College of Cardinals for those with temperaments and opinions different from mine, provided they remain faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church.’ And it must be noted that 67 of the 115 voting cardinals at the conclave in 2013 were nominated by Pope Benedict.

Gänswein describes 2011-2012 as the period when “the darkest page of our pontifical family’s story was written—namely, the leak of confidential documents from the papal apartments. Looking back on that situation, I still feel like a father who doesn’t know that his own son is stealing jewels from his own wife, and, even after the true nature of the crimes comes to light, he cannot harbor even the slightest suspicion toward his own son.” In January 2012, Il Fatto published a text sent by the Columbian cardinal to Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, to inform him that anonymous informers were alleging that Paolo Cardinal Romero, Archbishop of Palermo, had told Chinese officials that the Pope and Cardinal Scola had taken him into their confidence regarding some of the most important matters facing the church; that the Pope hated Bertone; that he was already considering a successor to the See of St. Peter and that he had Scola in mind to replace him; and that Benedict would die within the next year, presumably by assassination.

Neither the Pope nor his close associates gave credence to any of this. The text in question, however, was followed up by a recorded anonymous message from the whistleblower explaining that he was among a group of Vatican employees who wished to reveal the truth of scandalous things taking place in the Vatican. The Gendarmerie immediately commenced an investigation; following the release of further documents, Benedict established, by pontifical mandate, a commission of cardinals with broad discretion to question anyone “at every level” of the Vatican hierarchy as they deemed necessary. It was Gänswein, working “by induction from our working procedure,” who was able to identify the culprit as the Pope’s [personal] butler, Paolo Gabriele, a conclusion confirmed by the Gendarmeria. “Confirmation of these charges,” Gänswein reports, “was a hard blow to Pope Benedict, who had come to consider Paolo a son, just as all of us in the pontifical household considered him not only a co-worker, but a brother.”

Gabriele was indicted by Vatican magistrates and tried in October 2012, when he testified that he had stolen the documents to fight “evil and corruption” and to put the Vatican “back on track.” Evaluations of his mental health proved inconclusive; he was given a sentence of 18 months (reduced from three years) for theft, to be served within Vatican City. As previously noted, the revelations were themselves of no great import, the damage done being chiefly to the Vatican’s image and that of Benedict’s pontificate.

“Obviously,” Gänswein notes, “”it is impossible to summarize the magisterium of Benedict XVI in a few pages. It was as dense in quality as it was voluminous in quantity.” But, the “decisive core of this inheritance is the Christocentric witness he bears as a believer, in everything he did and said.” Hence the Pope’s conviction that he must write a life of Christ in three volumes “as a synthesis of his own theological vision, centered on his certitude that the salvific message of Jesus was not simply a doctrine, but a concrete encounter with the person of Jesus….”

Ratzinger accomplished this task with Jesus of Nazareth in three volumes, perhaps the best of all his works; in my opinion for its demonstration, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the Scriptures—the Old Testament and the New—are divinely inspired texts, that no collection of human minds at work across a period of nearly three millennia could have produced a work of more than a thousand pages in which the smallest detail corroborates all the tens of thousands of others to form a seamless account that always reaffirms, while never contradicting, itself; thus refuting the myriad claims that have been made over the centuries that the whole is a fraud, the authors of the New Testament having invented their texts by working from the prophecies of the Old one.

In volume two, Benedict writes, “The question of whether Jesus only existed in the past or continues to exist in the present hinges entirely upon the resurrection….The Christian faith rises or falls on the truth of the witness that Christ has been raised from the dead.” Further, “the account of the resurrection becomes per se ecclesiology: the encounter with the risen Lord is the mission that gives the nascent Church its very form.”

And in the third volume, he insists that the virginal birth and the historical Resurrection of Christ from the dead are

the bedrocks against which the faith is measured. If God does not have power over matter as well, then he is no longer God. But he does possess this power, and the conception and resurrection of Jesus Christ inaugurated a new creation. So, insofar as he is the Creator, he is also our Redeemer.

Other major themes of Benedict XVI’s pontificate identified by Gänswein are the Church’s obligation to foster relations between cultures by a process of “inculturation,” infusing and strengthening different traditions with a greater knowledge of Scripture, and by cultivating a relationship between the Christian Faith and great art (“the world of the beautiful”), partly as a means of emphasizing the beauty of the Faith itself.

In his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, he chose for his subject the first of the greatest of the theological virtues, observing that the word “love” has been so exploited and misused that people today hesitate to use it. In its successor, Spe Salvi, he considered the second of these virtues in a document of which Gänswein writes, “I would like to say personally that this is the encyclical I would want to have with me if I were shipwrecked on a deserted island. Every time I reread it and reflect on it, I discover new details that respond to the most basic existential questions of every man and woman alive today.” In this encyclical, Benedict poses an excruciating question that Gänswein believes to be central to his entire magisterium: “Do we really want this—to live eternally? Perhaps many people reject the faith today simply because they do not find the prospect of eternal life attractive. What they desire is not eternal life at all, but this present life, for which faith in eternal life seems something of an impediment.”

Owing to what Gänswein describes as the Pope’s firm commitment to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, Benedict placed special emphasis also on ecumenism, interreligious exchange, and religious freedom through political freedom. “Religious freedom,” he insisted, “is not the exclusive patrimony of believers, but of the whole family of the earth’s peoples. It is an essential element of a constitutional state….” Finally, one must add, given the primacy of “climate change” in public discourse in the present day, Benedict asserted humanity’s responsibility for the natural world of God’s creation, and also the Church’s:

Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian creed, the Church cannot and must not limit herself to passing on to the faithful the message of salvation alone. She has a responsibility towards creation, and must also publicly declare this responsibility. In doing so, she must not only defend earth, water, and air as gifts of creation belonging to all. She must also protect man from self-destruction. What is needed is something like a human ecology, correctly understood. (my italics)

“A correct understanding of the relationship between man and the environment will not end by absolutizing nature or by considering it more important than the human person,” or by divinizing it and elevating it to the pantheon that neo-paganism is building for it.

The preceding outline, brief as it is, should be more than sufficient to refute the claim—made long before Pope Benedict’s election to the papacy, during his reign, and subsequent to his resignation—that Joseph Ratzinger was a rigid, authoritarian, and reactionary figure—”God’s Rotweiler—in the Church of Rome. The plain fact is that he was exactly the opposite: an enlightened (in the true sense), highly civilized, sensitive, and gracious man of high polish, a brilliant theologian and an accomplished scholar of deep learning and wide historical imagination, who assumed, late in life and as a matter of duty, a role that he never sought and would have preferred to have avoided but that he performed conscientiously and effectively for as long as he felt he had the strength to continue in it. And when he stepped aside from it he did not step away from it, so to speak; as Msgr Gänswein makes clear in the final chapters of this book.

III.

In 2007 the International Association Football Federation designated Brazil as sponsors of the World Cup of Soccer in 2014. On a visit to Madrid in August of 2011 for the occasion of the 26^th World Youth Day, Pope Benedict, realizing that the next FIFA event would be held in Ri de Janeiro, decided that the subsequent Youth Day should be advanced from 2014 to 2013, in order to avoid the two events from competing with each other. In Madrid, the Pope in his final meeting invoked the Lord, asking him to smooth “‘the way of all young people in the world that they may meet again with the pope in this beautiful Brazilian city.’… One might accept or deny the pope’s conviction,” Msgr. Gänswein writes, “but—and I say this to clear the air of any equivocation—it was precisely the question of his personal participation in that World Youth Day that triggered reflection on his part, which little by little intensified with respect to the continuation of his pontificate….I am therefore quite convinced that were the date confirmed, as it should have been, for 2014, Benedict would not have allowed himself to dwell on his physical and mental weariness in the course of 2012, but would have advanced steadily throughout the year 2013.”

Gänswein argued that internet connections and big screens would allow him to appear to be present in the flesh for the occasion, but Benedict was firm. “On the whole, what I have been able to do I have done, for the Church my abdication would be better, with an election of a younger and more vigorous pontiff. This is the right moment, the problems of recent months have subsided, I can pass the helm to another with too much difficulty.” It seemed obvious to his secretary that he feared the danger of a struggle within the Curia in the course of choosing his successor. He may also have been alert to the possibility of a sedevacantist movement following his resignation, despite the fact that he was acting in accordance with the Code of Canon Law (ca., 332, 2), which states that, “Should it happen that the Roman Pontiff resigns from his office, it is required for validity that the resignation be freely made and properly manifested, but it is not necessary that it be accepted by anyone.” The document on which the date and signature of Pope Benedict XVI are inscribed, as well as the statement of resignation, was recorded by an apostolic protonotary and placed in Vatican archives for historians and other interested parties to consult in future.

Benedict stepped down from the See of St. Peter on February 28, 2013. Gänswein records that “I lived the last day of his pontificate as if in a daze.” The outgoing pope delivered a warm address of gratitude to the 90 members of the College of Cardinals present in Rome that day. Dean Angelo Sodano offered a tribute on behalf of the College. “Holy Father, with deepest love we have tried to accompany you on your way, reliving the experience the disciples had on the road to Emmaus, who after walking with Jesus along a good stretch of the road said to one another, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us as he spoke?’”

One cardinal vicar attempted to comfort Gänswein, then told the pope that his secretary had been in tears. “A pope comes and a pope goes, but importantly there is always Christ,” Benedict replied.

IV.

Out of office, Joseph Ratzinger was resolved never to interfere with the new pope’s reign. Gänswein records, however, that he followed events at the Vatican closely, partly by reading L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, regularly and carefully. After his return from Castel Gandolfo, where he lived for several months after his retirement, he returned to the Vatican and he took up residence at the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, where he and Gänswein hosted him twice, while Pope Francis invited them to Casa Santa Marta which he had chosen for his residence in preference to the papal apartments.

Not foreseeing his resignation, Ratzinger had begun composing an encyclical for the “Year of Faith” (October, 2012-November, 2013) to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, a document that remained unfinished at the time of his exit. Pope Francis finished the work, leaving it mostly as his predecessor had written it but adding what Gänswein calls a “substantial final part in harmony with themes dear to the heart of [Francis].” Six months later, “an infamous interview” between the pope and the editor of La Civiltà Cattolica was published, a copy of which Francis sent to the Pope Emeritus along with a request for his comments. Ratzinger complied, saying that he agreed with everything the Pope said but adding, “I would like to add two particular points…The first point is in regard to abortion and the use of contraception. The second concerns the problem of homosexuality.” Ratzinger conceded that some people in the pro-life movement indeed show a lack of “wider vision,” that their mission has a “one-dimensional aspect,” and that a “rebalancing” was indeed necessary. Nevertheless, “the public battle against this concrete and practical denial of the living God remains a necessity….The philosophy of gender in play here [too] teaches us that…the human being is a product of itself.”

Gänswein observes that certain of Francis’ assertions in Evangelii Gaudium “sound foreign to Benedict’s theological sensibilities, as when the Pope urges a ‘missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times, and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation.’” Again: “There are times when the faithful, in listening to completely orthodox language, take away something alien to the authentic Gospel of Jesus Christ, because that language is alien to their own way of speaking to understanding one another.’” In spite of his reservations, the Pope Emeritus responded, as always, cordially and respectfully. One may begin to understand his restraint when one recalls that this is the same man who had declared (at the Mass of Possession of the Chair of the Bishop of Rome on May 7, 2005) that the pontiff’s “power is not being above, but at the service of, the Word of God. It is incumbent upon him to ensure that this Word continues to be present in its greatness and to resound in its purity, so that it is not torn to pieces by continuous changes in usage.”

Benedict remained true to his pledge of non-interference and loyalty to the Pontiff  despite his reservations regarding a number of Francis’ initiatives, especially when he felt that the Pope failed to treat certain theological questions with sufficient clarity. One such instance arose from the two phases of the synod of the family, the first in October of 2014 and the second–“The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the Context of Evangelization”—whose outlines had been developed by Walter Cardinal Kasper at a consistory of cardinals in February, 2014. In this speech Kasper had quoted Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith and again as Pope, when he had declared that divorced and remarried people, though not able to receive sacramental Communion, could nevertheless make a spiritual one. Shortly after Kasper’s remarks, Francis gave a similar talk in which he described the synod’s purpose as being “to deepen the theology of the family and discern the pastoral practices which our present situation requires,” while avoiding “casuistry.”

In Benedict’s mind, a question remained: Whoever receives spiritual Communion becomes one with Christ. Why, therefore, could that person not also receive Communion of the sacramental variety? While acknowledging that the language of the Magisterium can be hard for modern lay people to understand, the essential substance of the Church’s teaching must never be diluted. “Certainly, it is difficult to make the demands of the gospel understandable to secularized people. But this pastoral difficulty must not lead to compromises with the truth.” Benedict was similarly perplexed following the release of which Amoris Laetitia, which he thought left highly important matters ambiguous, and thus vulnerable to equivocal interpretations.

Still, perhaps the Pope Emeritus’ most profound—though of course unspoken—disagreement with his successor concerned Francis’ motu proprio, Traditionis Custodes, which he recognized at once as the Pope’s response to his own Summorum Pontificum of 2007 granting full recognition to the Tridentine Mass. According to Gänswein, Benedict thought the old rite’s prohibition in parish churches would make traditionists feel persecuted by “an enemy.” And he was understandably puzzled by Francis’ subsequent statement that, “Now I hope that with the decision to stop the automatism of the ancient rite we can return to the true intentions of Benedict XVI and John Paul. My decision is the result of a consultation with all the bishops of the world made last year.”

Apart from these objections, however, Gänswein states unequivocally that

it was always clear in Ratzinger’s mind that there was only one rite, subsisting in the coexistence of an ordinary and extraordinary form. The one intention of his motu proprio was to repair the gaping wound that had formed over time, be it voluntarily or involuntarily….We cannot say: Before, everything was wrong, but now everything is right; for in a community in which prayer and the Eucharist are the most important things, what was earlier supremely sacred cannot be entirely wrong.

Lastly, Benedict pondered the answer Francis gave an interviewer for Corriere della Sera who has asked his opinion of “non-negotiable values,” to which the Pope replied, “Values are values, and that’s it. I can’t say that among the fingers on my hand one is less useful than another. Therefore, I don’t understand in what sense there can be negotiable values. “Without uttering a public judgment,” Gänswein writes, “Benedict, on a personal level, understood Francis’s affirmation to be a change of direction and a veiled criticism of John Paul II, as if the pope were saying that everything is negotiable.”

Benedict XVI died believing that the future of the Church of Rome was as an “interiorized, simplified, smaller Church,” but one with greater power than in the past. In a hedonistic age, the Church simply seemed too restrictive to too many people, while Christianity had been displaced in the modern age by science and “a disordered elevation of rationality.” Therefore, his wish was that theology,

in its encounter with science and in dialogue with the philosophies of today must cling once more to the fundamental question of what holds this world together. A true civil religion will not conceive of God as a mythical entity, but as Reason itself that precedes and makes it possible for our reason to seek it out and recognize it.

Joseph Ratzinger lived far longer than he, and some of his doctors, expected, and outlived his younger brother Georg by several years. At about three o’clock on the morning of December 31, 2022, the night nurse saw him look toward the crucifix on the wall and heard him say, softly but speaking distinctly, “Signore, ti amo!” He was unable to speak intelligibly after that, and died six and a half hours later.

Who Believes Is Not Alone: My Life Beside Benedict XVI
by Georg Gänswein, with Saverio Gaeta
St. Augustine’s Press, 2023
Hardcover, 261 pages