Ratzinger’s Circle

It is by now a regular appointment in Ratzinger’s
annual agenda. 

Between the end of August and the first days of
September, Benedict XVI interrupts, for a few hours, the fast and
methodic pace of his commitments, whether ordinary or extraordinary, to
meet with the more or less aged members of his Schülerkreis, the circle of his former pupils, who
over the Sixties and Seventies prepared their theses for their Ph.D. in
theology or studied to achieve their qualification as University
teachers under the guide of Professor Joseph Ratzinger. 

This year, the
appointment is set for next weekend. Ratzinger’s former students will
meet in Castel Gandolfo to discuss the possible contribution of
theology to the New Evangelization, the topic at the center of the next Synod of Bishops. 

The new topics for discussion will be the analyses assigned to two “external” experts: theologian Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkowitx and Austrian-born Otto Neubauer, an influential member of the Emmanuel Community.

There are still people who wonder why Benedict XVI, even now that he is Pope, keeps promoting an annual meeting with his former students;
these people read this choice as an old-professor’s habit, or perhaps a
form of loyalty tinged with nostalgia about Ratzinger’s own past. 

However, it is exactly the “radiography” of Ratzinger’s Schülerkreis, its
evolution, its composition and its mechanism codified over time that
help identifying significant aspects of the human and intellectual
sensitiveness of the current St. Peter’s successor and his way of
serving the Church.

The circle of Ratzinger’s “PhD students” started
to form already during his teaching years in Münster (1963-1966),
unveiled its organizational structure during the Tubinga years
(1966-1970), but it experienced its golden years in the first half of the Seventies, in Ratisbon. 

Ratzinger reinterpreted in his own way the codified German academic tradition of students gathered around their Doktorvater, “professor-father”. 

Over the years, the group of students, asking to write under Ratzinger’s guide their university theses, and  joining in from all over Germany and from all over the world, increased in size – triggering quite significant academic envy.

Over those years, Ratzinger, due to lack of time
and to meet the increasing demand, experimented his own new method. He
did not follow the PhD students on an individual basis. 

He gathered them
together in scheduled appointments usually held on Saturday morning,
every two weeks. 

During that shared half-day, in turn, each student
submitted the results of their researches to the critique of the
others. 

The wide spectrum of the themes covered by the
theses assigned – from Nietzsche to Saint Augustine, from Camus to the
Council of Trent, from the great medieval theologians to the personalist
philosophers – it is sufficient to confirm that it was not a
theological conventicle fossilized on its esoteric rituality. 

As Stephan
Otto Horn, Ratzinger’s assistant during his teaching years in
Regensburg and diligent organizer of the Schülerkreis meetings,
explained, “If Joseph Ratzinger wanted and could convey to his PhD
students a specific imprint, I believe that, above all, it should be
seen as the effort to open their eyes to the wide spectrum of the faith
and the fullness of theological perspectives.” 

Specifically to promote
such critical ability, Ratzinger did not impose his ideas on anyone. He
guides the discussions of the Doktoranden-Colloquium following a maieutic-socratic method, reducing his participation to a minimum, with a super partes approach
even in case of controversies triggered by the discussion, stimulated
by the democratic-collective atmosphere and the various theological
sensitiveness among the members of the group.

Ratzinger’s brain trust is not a source of
clones prepackaged according to the teacher. Many Monsignors who went
through the Roman Curia, such as Helmut Moll (curator of the XX century
German martyrology) were part of it along with unrepentant Ecumenists
such as the cooperator of the First Hour, Vinzenz Pfnür; German parish
priests such as Martin Trimpe and monks such as Passionist Martin Bialas
and Franciscan Cornelio Del Zotto (the only Italian in the group, who
started his own unique community in Tanzania). 

Among the over fifty
names in the list-address book, there are also the Redemptorist Rèal
Tremblay – teacher of moral theology at the Pontifical Alphonsian
Academy – and the other theologian moralist Vincent Twomey – who has
recently distinguished himself for his proposal of eliminating the Irish
episcopate sectors generationally involved in the clergy sexual abuse
scandals – and Korean-born Jung-Hi Victoria Kim, who in her years of
study in Regensburg wrote under Ratzinger’s guide a more than unique
thesis on the comparison between the caritas of Tommaso d’Aquino and the
jen, the central concept of Confucianism. 

Many of those young
theologians distinguished themselves later as supporters of theological
theses not necessarily aligned with the rules of the Pontifical Roman
Academies. 

Some of them, including Hansjürgen Verweyen and Wolfgang
Beinert, took also distant positions from those of their old teacher,
especially on disputed matters such as women priests and the choice of
creating a single Catechism for the entire Catholic Church.

The group of people convened in Castel Gandolfo
does not even have the appearance of a ring of Curia careerists or
ecclesiastic academy. None of them seems to have profited from their
participation to the Ratzinger’s circle.  

The most famous among them is the Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schonborn, Dominican
theologian made Cardinal by John Paul II. In the years of Ratzinger’s
papacy, only the priest of Benin, Barthélemy Adoukonou was recruited in
the Roman Curia as Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture. 

However, his curriculum – Studies to define Christian hermeneutics in
Voodoo, a long period as General Secretary for the Episcopal Regional
Council for French-speaking West Africa (CERAO) and the foundation of
the ecclesial movement Le Sillon Noir – makes it clear that his
nomination had little to do with his participation to the Schülerkreis of his former Bavarian professor.

Since the times in Tubinga, under recommendation
of the then assistant Peter Kuhn, the circle had started the custom of
organizing  meetings on specific topics every six months, to
discuss them with famous professors and theologians outside the faculty. 

All the “VIPs” of Catholic and Protestant theology – from Karl Barth to
Yves Congar, from Karl Rahner and Walter Kaasper to Wolfhart Pannenberg
– were “visited” or met with the lively group of Ratzinger’s scholars.

 

When the group traveled to Basel to meet Hans Urs
von Balthasar, some of them asked him non-previously-agreed questions on
the balthasarian theological thesis on the empty hell, upsetting the
great Swiss theologian.

 

The regular meeting-discussion model with external
experts and external researchers inspired the self-perpetuation method
of Ratzinger’s Schülerkreis when the former Doktorvater became
Archbishop of Munich, Curia Cardinal and finally Bishop of Rome. Only
in the months between 2005 and 2006 the continuity of the closed door
seminars among the Pope and his former students experienced a critical
moment. 

It happened when the impulsive American Jesuite Joseph Fessio,
after having participated to the meeting in Castel Gandolfo, spoke about
that brain storming in an interview dedicated to the discussion
between the Christian revelation and Islam on which occasion Benedict
XVI sustained the inadaptability of the Islamic culture to the modern
day and the incompatibility between Koran and democracy. 

Conjectures
immediately exploited by the American neoconservative circles and
denied both by the lecturers and by the participants to the meeting. 

The event, which risked to get complicated, was resolved with a public
withdrawal by Father Fessio: the Jesuit, publisher of Ratzinger’s books
in the USA, in a letter published on The Washington Times, humbly
admitted to “have reported incorrectly what the Holy Father had
effectively said”, due to his poor understanding of the German language.

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