On the Political Order

ON THE EVE OF THE CONCLAVE in which he was elected, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger evoked the image of the Church as a ship battered on every side in a storm-tossed sea.¹ For eight years near the beginning of the twenty-first century, Ratzinger was that barque’s captain. Few waves have rocked the Church more than the political waves of modernity and the rejection of the very concept of a sacral society in which religion and political authority are joined as one body under God. It therefore seems particularly important to inquire into the political views of a thinker who spent much of his life in the front lines of the Church’s broader struggle with secularism and its concomitant denials of the transcendent. Indeed, defining the Church’s role in the public square has become particularly acute in light of Ratzinger’s warning in the same homily of an encroaching “dictatorship of relativism.”

Benedict’s pontificate was a liminal one: both in his being the first Pontiff to be elected in Christianity’s third millennium and in his being the first elected after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the reunification of Europe. In much the same way that John Paul II’s experience of Russia-dominated Poland offered unique qualifications to lead the Church during its struggle with communism, so Benedict seemed well suited for the struggle with the secular relativism of liberal democracies. His intellectual sojourn through five German universities, in addition to his guardianship of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, gave him an insider’s knowledge of the modern West.

Ratzinger speaks of modern secularization as a process that destroyed “the spiritual framework” and “the interpretation of history” that medieval and early modern Christendom had provided. As he says:

This process had a major impact on both politics and ideals. In terms of ideals, there was a rejection of the sacred foundation both of history and of the state. History was no longer measured on the basis of an idea of God that had preceded and molded it. The state came to be understood in purely secular terms, as grounded in rationalism and the will of the citizens.²

In the secular state, Ratzinger explains, the divine legitimation of the political element is abandoned and excluded as mythological: “God is a private question that does not belong to the public sphere or the democratic formation of the public will … Public life came to be considered the domain of reason alone, which had no place for a seemingly unknowable God” (WR, 62). In such a state, religion and faith are relegated to the realm of sentiment opposed to reason; God thus ceases to be relevant to public life.

For Benedict, the political question had been framed in light of the Second Vatican Council’s concession to modern liberal democracy that “the political community and the Church are autonomous and independent of each other in their own fields.” Yet the Council insisted in the very next sentence that “both are devoted to the personal vocation of man.”³ In the post-conciliar Church, and in the face of increasingly secular societies, how ought the Church be related to the “powers that be” in the view of this peritus of the Council who became Pope? What is the personal vocation of man that unifies autonomous communities? Ratzinger had argued that Gaudium et Spes is a kind of “summa of Christian anthropology and of the central problems of the Christian ethos.”⁴ How are the Christian view of man and the Christian ethos to find their place in modern political orders? This essay will examine these questions, while acknowledging that the relation between church and state cannot be isolated from the broader relations between church and society and faith and culture. It will survey Benedict’s thought over the course of his career and then place it in the context of the current debate.

In general, Benedict carves out a position between two extremes for configuring the relationship between religious bodies and the state. The first, called the “confessional...