The youthful Father Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, later, Pope Benedict XVI, was a brilliant theologian and academic who, at age 31 in 1958, was already a full professor at Bonn University. But before turning to the priesthood, he had been a POW in the Second World War. It was a war in which humanity seemed to have […]
The youthful Father Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, later, Pope Benedict XVI, was a brilliant theologian and academic who, at age 31 in 1958, was already a full professor at Bonn University. But before turning to the priesthood, he had been a POW in the Second World War. It was a war in which humanity seemed to have lost its soul. But no sooner had the world vowed to settle issues peacefully, and established the United Nations as a backstop than humans resumed wars.
These events did not halt human progress, as the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin, the first human into space, on April 12, 1961, and the United States launched Alan Shepard, the second, on May 5, 1961. The world was barely recognisable, and the Catholic Church was forced to locate itself in a grossly distorted world tainted by the biting and potentially destructive Cold War.
In his 1975 book, The Runaway Church, Peter Hebblethwaite quoted a British bishop as saying that but for the Second Vatican, which held from 1962-65, “the Church would have been like the Loch Ness monster: rumoured to exist, of venerable antiquity, actually seen by some, but of not much relevance in the contemporary world.” Ratzinger, at 35, attended the Second Vatican as an aide to Cardinal Joseph Frings.
Cardinal Siri of Genoa argued that “the Council was the greatest mistake in recent ecclesiastical history.” Some bishops, like Dr. McQuaid of Dublin and Cardinal MacIntyre of Los Angeles, were in revolt. Some 100,000 priests left within ten years, and to some, like Ratzinger, who had initially supported the liberal movement of the Church, the Second Vatican was like a genie that had escaped from the bottle; it had to be recaptured and rebottled.
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