Opinion: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was more than 'God's Rottweiler'

Editor’s Note: Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, teaches at Middlebury College. Among his recent books is “The Way of Jesus: Living a Spiritual and Ethical Life.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion articles on CNN.

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The news that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has died will have shocked no one. He was, after all, 95, and had been in declining health for at least a decade: his fragility was, in 2013, cited as the ostensible reason for his resignation, which came as a shock at the time. It had been, after all, 600 years since a pontiff had done such a thing. His successor, Pope Francis, alerted the world to Benedict’s turn for the worse Wednesday, and a kind of death watch ensued.

Some questions many may now be asking: Who was this former pontiff? How did his papacy affect the Christian – especially the Roman Catholic – world? What will be his legacy?

He was, to say the least, a man of deep learning and steadfast purpose. “Benedict XVI was a great pope,” Francis said in 2014. “Great for the power and penetration of his intellect, great for his considerable contribution to theology, great for his love for the Church and for human beings, great for his virtues and his religiosity,” he added.

Indeed, his intellect shines through in much of his writing, which includes “Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration,” a readable and engaging biography of the Christ. His deeply sympathetic study of Mary is full of worthy insights into the Marian tradition.

In all his writing, Benedict argued for keeping “feeling” and “reason” in balance. “For the Church,” he once said, “man is neither mere reason nor mere feeling, he is the unity of these two dimensions.”

This delicate balance preoccupied him in his larger theological project, which began in the mid-1960s with a meditation on the meaning of Vatican II (the effort to “update” the church for 20th century life) and continued until 2020, when he co-authored with his close friend Cardinal Robert Sarah “From the Depths of our Hearts: Priesthood, Celibacy, and the Crisis of the Catholic Church.”

“From the Depths of our Hearts” is a book that breaks no new ground but seeks to reaffirm – and vigorously defend – old verities in a time of obvious stress for the church, when survey after survey showed that Catholics were, in fact, losing faith in the authority of the church, often by the age of ten. “The priesthood is going through a dark time,” he said in this book. And he certainly nailed that one.

This “dark time” goes back many years and seemed to overwhelm him as pontiff, a role he occupied from 2005 until his resignation in 2013. As might be expected, the church struggled to come to terms with the meaning of this resignation. He was prompted, perhaps, by physical weakness. That made life difficult, as he was facing a host of problems that required more energy than he could muster. Then came a provocative investigation by the former Dominican friar Mark Dowd for the BBC in 2013, which probed the enormity and variety of the Vatican’s many problems. The revelation of deep Vatican secrets by Benedict’s once-faithful butler was one major source of agitation.

The mess was terrifying to behold. The horrific problem of child sexual abuse by clergy was at best a problem he dealt with awkwardly, never with any obvious sense of direction. There were rumors of gay cliques in the church, and widespread homosexuality in seminaries, all of which Benedict abhorred. And then there was the Vatican Bank, also rife with scandal.

Whether Pope Benedict had no idea what was happening, or no idea how to control what was happening, it’s clear he lacked the obvious political skills that were soon evident in his successor, Pope Francis. For his part, Pope Benedict made some feeble attempts to confront the multiple problems of the church. In 2010, he said that “the greatest persecution of the church does not come from the enemies outside, but is born from sin inside the church.” He pointed to “a profound need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn on the one hand forgiveness but also the necessity of justice.”

His life story was surely compelling. Born Joseph Ratzinger in 1927, in rural Germany, he was the youngest of three children. His father was a policeman, his mother a cook in various hotels. Young Ratzinger was apparently a shy and scholarly boy who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. His father hated the Nazis, but neither father nor son could avoid history. He was drafted into the Hitler Youth program – this was compulsory, not a personal choice – and he served in the Nazi army when seminarians were pulled into the ranks in 1943. In the waning days of the war, Ratzinger became an army deserter, and he was for several harrowing months a prisoner of the Allied invasion.

After his ordination to the priesthood in 1951, he rose through the ranks, largely in the role of theologian, teaching at various universities. It must have come as a relief for him to return to the life of the mind!

His deeply orthodox views played well with his fellow priests, who admired his commitment to Catholic dogma, and he eventually became dean of the College of Cardinals in 2002. His views on almost every aspect of Christian doctrine found a precise formulation in his dozens of books, which addressed topics as diverse as birth control, homosexuality and the dialogue between faiths. What he most disliked was what he called the “dictatorship of relativism.” He argued for the cultivation of a ” friendship with Christ … that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth.”

Yet his views, often marked by inflexibility, earned him the nickname “God’s Rottweiler,” and sometimes he outraged the wider public, as when in 2006 – his first year in the papacy – he attacked Islam, going after Muhammad in a way that created an uproar. “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman,” he infamously said. The tenor of his remarks was so egregious that The New York Times, in an editorial, urged him to make amends: “He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating that words can also heal.” Benedict responded by saying he “deeply regretted” that his words “sounded offensive to the sensibility of Muslim believers,” but the apology was hardly sufficient.

Benedict represented theological positions on a range of matters from contraception to homosexuality that went well beyond what most Catholics today find palatable. But his reactionary views live on, informing attitudes on the US Supreme Court, which boasts a surprising number of Catholics who eagerly embrace a view of the world influenced by Benedict’s vision.

Yet Benedict will, I hope, be remembered as more than “God’s Rottweiler.” He was a man of honest intellect who, though rigid in so many ways, embraced the faith of his childhood with a singular passion and dug into the layers of theology with energy and persistence. He believed in what he considered the incontrovertible truth of the gospels, and his resolute stance had a noble aspect.