Resigned to God’s Will

An Essay by Josh Brumfield, Ph.D.

I’m a homegrown New Orleans Catholic, unreflectively practicing in my early years but relatively devout.  It was in college that I first intellectually engaged with my faith when some friends and I began wrestling with Pope John Paul II’s Wednesday audiences. He became beloved to me, a hero of sorts. My wife and I named our first born after him, and I was heartbroken when he passed on to the Lord, but in retrospect, I all too easily turned his writing into a sort of mind game. I pondered and puzzled over his Theology of the Body,  excitedly discussing new insights  with my friends, but for the most part, it all remained rather philosophical. Perhaps this is unfair to myself, but sometimes I deem I took a certain pharisaical pride in giving notional assent to St. John Paul’s writings. 

When Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI, I barely knew who he was. I was about to start an MA in theology, though, and I got to know him quickly. My professors, Drs. Chris Baglow and Brant Pitre, put his Introduction to Christianity and Spirit of the Liturgy into my hands, and I immediately found myself enfolded into Benedict’s own personal search for the face of the Lord. He spoke directly to my heart. Deus Caritas Est convinced me of God’s love in a way I had never quite grasped before. Spe Salvi enabled me to live under the sign of Hope. It showed me that for years my faith had been merely informative but not performative. I now knew, in my heart, that this whole Catholic thing was not a set of ideas, but an encounter with a Person, a walking with the Lord. I eventually wrote my dissertation on Pope Benedict’s understanding of Eucharist and Mission in the Church and frequently brought his writings with me to adoration. 

His resignation was a real gut punch. I didn’t know how to react. Many of my friends and some of my professors were harshly critical of him— angry at him for abandoning the Church in difficult times. I was confused. I didn’t feel anger the way others did, but I felt lost. What had he done? Why had he done it? I wanted to defend him, but I didn’t know how. This man, this spiritual father who taught me how to seek for and to love the Lord… could he have given up? Could he have bowed out in cowardice? Was there some scandal brewing? Some major health issue that had not yet been made public? I had assumed his holiness, but … what now? 

***

All too often the People of God fail to recognize God’s holy ones for who they are. We are quite  blind to the presence of holiness in our midst. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus makes precisely this point when, after the temptation in the desert, he returns to His hometown of Nazareth. Upon entering the synagogue our Lord is handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and unrolls it to read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me…” Upon completing the reading and in response to the incredulity of His listeners, He adds: 

“Surely you will quote me this proverb, ‘Physician, cure yourself,’ and say, ‘Do here in your native place the things that we heard were done in Capernaum.’”

And he said, “Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.

Indeed, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the sky was closed for three and a half years and a severe famine spread over the entire land.

It was to none of these that Elijah was sent, but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon.

Again, there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet; yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.

When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury.” (Luke 4: 23-28)

By referencing Elijah and Elisha, Jesus expands the scope of “no prophet is accepted in his own native place” into a general statement about God’s people. We are notoriously inept at recognizing God’s holy ones, choosing to persecute or kill them instead of honor and follow them. The pattern holds from Elijah and Elisha to Jeremiah, from John the Baptist to Jesus, who understands this scapegoating tendency in us so well that He crowns the beatitudes with:

“Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” 

(Matthew 5:11-12)

This isn’t merely a biblical problem. Christians cannot claim to have taken Jesus’ sermon to heart. The many great saints whose sufferings were inflicted by the Church bear witness to her blindness to holiness. Athanasius of Alexandra, the great opponent of Arianism and defender of the divinity of Christ, was exiled five times for a total of 45 years. Maximus the Confessor had his arm amputated and tongue cut off by fellow Christians to prevent him from speaking and writing against monothelitism. Our own Maid of Orleans, Joan of Arc, could be considered another example among countless others.

True, we no longer treat our scapegoats quite so violently, but perhaps Pope Benedict belongs among the number of those who have had every kind of vile thing uttered against him for love of Jesus. 

After all, he has been castigated as being both too “progressive” and too “conservative” at different points in his life. There are quite disparate groups of Catholics who, even now, shortly after his death, have begun  to expound their criticisms of him with gusto.  For his role in pushing Vatican II beyond the manualistic neo-scholasticism of the 1950s, some traditionalist Catholics have labeled the young Ratzinger a “liberal modernist.” On the other end of the spectrum, he was given the monikers “Panzer Cardinal” and “God’s Rottweiler” for his intervening in matters of theological orthodoxy as Prefect for the Congregation of the Faith. And then, of course, came the resignation, when previous supporters and admirers of the German pope began to accuse him of cowardice or self-serving weakness. 

He was a genius and one of the important theologians of the 20th Century, but having a brilliant mind and being an influential theologian does not qualify one for canonization. 

Could a man who was so polarizing really be a saint?

***

Perhaps now, nearly 10 years after his resignation, in mourning for his death and in gratitude for his life, I can reevaluate his resignation. Could his resignation be a sign, not of weakness, but of immense strength and trust in the Lord? A mark of the man humble enough to know his limits, holy enough to trust the Lord to guide him through the stormy waters that he must have expected would follow? 

Now I see that the only way to make sense of that momentous decision is in view of his character. In light of everything else, the marks of his life, the consistent sacrifices he made for the church, his courage to walk away from his Nazi troop and to hold the line against the floodwaters of heterodoxy, his willingness to do the job at hand, to stick up for the faith of the simple believer, his commitment to Truth… The only way to accurately interpret this man’s resignation is via his relation to the Lord whose face and will he sought. 

Perhaps in prayer he received a conviction from the Lord, a real assent to the idea that God was telling him to resign without himself knowing why. This would be evidence of a really personal and intense prayer life, the sort that brings conviction: this is something the Lord is calling me to do, even if I don’t necessarily know why or fully understand it. If this is the case, then the resignation reveals a man who is not deeply allured by the power and prestige that come with the papacy, and a man who is not afraid to enter into relative silence while many wrongly think ill of him, to sacrifice his reputation and his influence in obedience to the Word. 

As Cardinal Prefect of the CDF, Ratzinger asked Pope John Paul to allow him to retire on more than one occasion, expressing a desire to remove to a quiet academic life of reading and writing. Of course, John Paul said no. But, after his resignation Benedict stayed out of the public eye. For someone who really wanted to write and contribute to the theological conversation to say,  "No, I’m just going to spend time in quiet and prayer," reflects a holy indifference to his own will in deference to the good of the Church.

The other bit of evidence is his body of work: those who approach Benedict's words with an open mind cannot help but be moved by a heart that speaks eloquently of his love of the Lord. I have frequently been brought to prayer through studying the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, and other saints. It is the same with Ratzinger’s works: they exude a love for the Lord, a true personal search for the God of Jesus Christ that is the mark of sanctity. 

His resignation is not a sign of weakness, selfishness or some conspiracy. No, we should see it as evidence of a heart resigned to God’s will and evidence of impressive sanctity. Perhaps here we see Benedict’s own echo of Jesus’ prayer to the Father in Gethsemane, here our German Shepherd put on Christ and prayed, “not my will, but thine be done.” His last years, I hope, were marked by that childlike joy of which he so often wrote, the joy that flows from resting within Jesus’ obedience to the Father. 

So, I continue to pray for him, trusting the wisdom of the Church to decide upon a potential future canonization, but I've begun to ask for his intercession, too.

Dr. Josh Brumfield is the author of The Benedict Proposal: Church as Creative Minority in the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI.