The Life and Career of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

This book review was originally published in early 2001.

Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith
By John L. Allen, Jr.
Continuum, $25

According to biographer John L. Allen Jr., Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is a rigid totalitarian who "sold his soul for power." Allen portrays Pope John Paul II's right-hand man as committed to a rule-bound, abstract notion of Christianity who has spent 20 years in Rome providing theological cover for capitalists who exploit the poor, bigots who oppress women and gays, and zealots who make war in the name of God.

As the Rome correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, which styles itself the voice of "progressive" Catholicism in this country, Allen's reporting is usually competent and fair-minded. But this book is neither. Allen comes not to understand and explain Ratzinger but to indict him.

It's too bad, because Ratzinger's story is in many ways the story of the Second Vatican Council and its tumultuous aftermath. It's a story filled with complicated issues, colorful players, and high stakes: Against the backdrop of seismic upheavals in the church and the world, a brilliant youngish academic (Ratzinger was one of Europe's top theologians and an influential insider at the council), is brought to Rome by an equally brilliant and youngish pope. He finds himself locked in one theological and cultural mudfight after another, loses friends, and incurs the scorn of secular elites, while all around him his co-religionists take up sides and cudgels--some hailing him as the faith's great defender, others crowning him prince of a new Dark Ages.

But instead of letting this tale unfold in all its ambiguity and complexity, Allen burdens himself with prosecuting the case for Catholic "progressives" who feel they've been victimized under Ratzinger's tenure. And in his zeal for conviction, Allen loses the trust of the undecided reader early on. You get the feeling as you read this book that you've wandered onto the field of some bloody intramural church score-settling--as Allen does unto Ratzinger what he claims Ratzinger has done unto Allen's progressive friends.

Most of the book reads like yesterday's left-wing Catholic news, as Allen spends long chapters rehashing Ratzinger's pivotal role in debates dating back to the 1970s over liberation theology, women's ordination, homosexuality, and religious pluralism. Allen wants us to believe that the German-born Ratzinger came to his current job carrying psycho-biographical baggage from his childhood under the Nazi regime (the cardinal was born in 1927, six years before Hitler took power). "Having seen fascism in action, Ratzinger today believes the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesiastical totalitarianism," Allen writes.

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