“Benedict on Benedict,” or Jesus, Modern Popes, Ancient Monks

Today is the Feast of Saint Benedict, the sixth century youth who left his place among the Roman nobility to seek God “alone” in the wilderness. In the course of his journey as a monos (a “person alone”—apart from human society—from which we derive the term “monk”), he was first helped by, and later gathered together under his guidance, others who were similarly seeking God. Thus, he became the father of a monastic community, and began a movement that—through the ensuing centuries—became one of the key features of the foundation of the new civilization of Christian Europe.

Today is a good day to remember another person who took the name of “Benedict,” who after a lifetime of service to Church’s teaching office, also became a monk in a somewhat different way, resigning the Papacy and passing the final decade of his life serving the Church through prayer. The work of this “Benedict”—Josef Ratzinger, the late Pope Benedict XVI—will also yield as-yet-unknown fruits for the future in the Church and human society.

Let me note that I completely oppose the idea that the papacies of Benedict and our current Pope Francis (who has also taught me so much) should be cast in conflict with one another. Quite the contrary, in the midst of the tumultuous changes that have been shaking world events and human minds since I was born, the astonishing consistency of teaching, direction, and guidance of the Catholic Church by all the great Popes of my lifetime is something like a miracle. Not that everything that every Pope has said or done is perfect, but there is an overall solidity and groundedness—a multifaceted but unified Catholicity that charts the “narrow path” of truth and love through all the explosive, dangerous, enriching, destructive, gigantic, marvelous, and jarring circumstances and events that we are all still experiencing and enduring up to the present day. 

The papal teaching office makes it possible for us all to hear together how Jesus wants to lead us in His ways and see reality as it truly is. Jesus is present and dwelling with us now in His Church, and He continues to guide and unify His whole People. Because of this, the Popes of our era have not only sustained and developed our understanding of the Catholic tradition (“reform-in-continuity”) but also helped us find some orientation in the otherwise disorienting times in which we live. Like the “miracle” of the Council itself, the Popes of this era have been instruments of the Holy Spirit that help us to engage the enormous challenges of the emerging new epoch.

Returning to Pope Benedict, it must be said that he is far from obsolete. His spectacular patrimony of papal teaching has not disappeared, but continues to offer much that can enrich us.

On the feast of Saint Benedict, we should recall once again Pope Benedict's masterful Catechesis on the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, which is both profound and accessible, the fruit of outstanding scholarship, a life of prayer and meditation, and the teaching charism of the successor of Saint Peter. In the excerpt below (and I encourage people to read the entire series of these homilies), Papa Ratzinger speaks of Saint Benedict, the Father of monasticism in the West, who also set forth an enduring path for all human beings who seek God and have been drawn by the invitation of God's love. 

"St Benedict's life was steeped in an atmosphere of prayer, the foundation of his existence. Without prayer there is no experience of God. Yet Benedict's spirituality was not an interiority removed from reality. In the anxiety and confusion of his day, he lived under God's gaze and in this very way never lost sight of the duties of daily life and of man with his practical needs... In contrast with a facile and egocentric self-fulfilment, today often exalted, the first and indispensable commitment of a disciple of St Benedict is the sincere search for God on the path mapped out by the humble and obedient Christ, whose love he must put before all else, and in this way, in the service of the other, he becomes a man of service and peace" (Pope Benedict XVI, Homily on Saint Benedict, 2008).