Early Intuitions on Joseph Ratzinger’s Idea of a Catholic University of the Future

Abstract

This paper examines Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s reflections on knowledge and universities over sixty-five years, focusing on the constant features in his thought by analyzing his first and last pronouncements on these topics. Rather than summarizing all his writings, the author provides a comparative analysis of Ratzinger’s early address in 1959 as a newly appointed professor at the University of Bonn and his later speeches as Pope. In the 1959 lecture, Ratzinger talked about the challenge of modern secularism, emphasizing an increasing split between faith and reason and the growth of “neo-paganism” within the Church, while also highlighting the implication of technological globalization that was going to reshape the role of Christian universities in the modern world. The paper further develops how Ratzinger’s concerns evolved, particularly his critique of the rupture between faith and reason and the secularization of the Church, up to his reflections in 2022 on how Christian universities must maintain a connection with faith and reason. Drawing on Ratzinger’s lifelong exploration of these issues, this paper points out three constant features of his thought: the imperative of the integration of faith and reason at universities, “creative minorities” as an imperative internally, both in the Church and at the level of academia; and the specific chance given by contemporary secularization to Christian universities for a renewal of their educational mission.

1. Introduction

The intersection of faith, reason, and the modern university has been a continuing focus of Joseph Ratzinger’s intellectual journey throughout more than six decades of profound theological and philosophical inquiry. From his inaugural lecture as a young professor at the University of Bonn in 1959 to his final reflections on the mission of the Church with regard to Christian higher education in 2022, Ratzinger offered incisive critiques and hopeful visions for the role of universities as centers of holistic human formation.

This short contribution does not seek to address, even in only summarising form, the great subject of ‘faith, reason, and the university’ in the thought of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. I may refer the reader here to specific in-depth studies on the subject.1 It does not even want to confine itself to the analysis of only one of the multiple aspects of the subject, such as the academic and cultural context in which the vision of Ratzinger was born and developed2 or the great intellectual currents that he incorporated, starting with the thought of Augustine and of Bonaventure, to whom he dedicated his first great scholarly works.3 As regards the cultural ancestry of Ratzinger, special mention should naturally be made of John Henry Newman, whom Ratzinger, as he did with Augustine, frequented intellectually from his seminary days and whom he would list together with the Bishop of Hippo and St. Bonaventure as one of his greatest sources of inspiration.4 The relationship between Newman and Ratzinger, which was centred around the primacy of the conscience anchored in truth, is in effect so significant as to have deserved, recently as well, in-depth studies, such as that edited by Emery de Gaál and Matthew Levering or the work by Hermann Geissler, a man with a deep knowledge of the thought of Newman and at the same time a close collaborator of Joseph Ratzinger at the CDF for more than a decade.5 Lastly, I also do not intend here to explore the subject of the importance that Joseph Ratzinger attributed to the ‘educational challenge’ in and for the life of the Church, as early as when he was Archbishop of Munich and Freising in Bavaria. This was the reason, as Benedict XVI himself revealed much later, that led John Paul II at the outset to call him to lead the Congregation for Catholic Education and only subsequently to be the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).6

The aim of this contribution is much more limited. I intend to take advantage of the overall view of the thought of Ratzinger that is offered to me by my privileged position of being the translator and editor of the edition in Italian of the Opera omnia (his ‘Collected Works’), to highlight some of the early writings of Ratzinger on the subject. In general, great weight is not given to these writings, and above all to their deep interconnections. This is all the more the case in light of the importance that is unanimously attributed today to the three great speeches that Benedict XVI dedicated to the subject of faith, reason, and research: that given in Regensburg on 12 September 2006, that written for the visit to ‘La Sapienza’ University on Rome of 17 January 2008, and lastly that given at the Collège des Bernardins on 12 September of the same year.

Given this focus on the first and last major addresses that Ratzinger gave on the topic, this study attempts to disclose the constant features in his vision while highlighting the sophisticated ways in which his thinking answered to the changing historical situations. Ratzinger consistently challenged the reductionist tendencies of modern reason, critiqued the rise of intra-ecclesial secularism, and pointed out the opportunities presented by globalization for a renewed encounter between faith and reason. These themes reflect his commitment to the Christian university as a locus for the integration of knowledge, where disciplines coalesce around the search for truth understood in its fullest transcendent and immanent dimensions.

This paper locates Ratzinger’s early reflections in his later writings and speeches to reveal a continuous belief in the indispensability of theological inquiry and moral reasoning within the university framework. The paper also probes how his vision for “creative minorities” within Christian-inspired higher education could offer pathways to renewal within an era of secularization, technological hegemony, and a fragmentation of the intellectual and moral consensus. By undertaking a comparative analysis of his thought, this research attempts to be a contribution to existing debates on the future of universities as spaces for transformative intellectual and spiritual formation.

2. Ratzinger’s Early Views

The first speech of Joseph Ratzinger at a university and for universities was his inaugural lecture as holder of the Chair of Fundamental Theology at the University of Bonn on 24 June 1959, sixty-five years ago. With a certain amazement felt by those present, the then thirty-two-year-old newly appointed professor did not begin by discussing a specific theological question, as is tradition for this kind of lecture. Ratzinger wished most of all to highlight a challenge of historic proportions which certainly related to faculties of theology. But more than this, he points out, that challenge concerns the whole of the Christian university world or the university world of Christian inspiration. It is a challenge that was so decisive that it took the form, as he underlined years later, of an authentic educational challenge (Ratzinger 2020).

If the origins and the justification of a university lay in general terms in the yearning for knowledge that is specific to man, in knowing both what he himself is and everything that surrounds him is—namely, in knowing the ‘truth’—then Ratzinger’s time is marked an epochal turning point, with the establishment in the world of universities, even those of Christian inspiration, of an idea of reason that recognized as ‘truth’ only what was positively verifiable and measurable. In this outlook one could not rationally aspire to know any other kind of truth, in the reasonable certainty that in a not distant future every ‘secret of nature’ would be scientifically explainable, that is to say that everything that man at one time attributed to the transcendent (God is nature) could be referred back to nature and its laws. Consequently, the idea was spreading that in the final analysis the task of a successful Christian university in the future would consist of fostering this trend: becoming increasingly less ‘authoritarian’ and increasingly ‘tolerant’; increasingly less inclined to impose truth from above and give ‘objective’ value to everything which, instead, from an empirical point of view was not ‘real’ in a strict sense.

Certainly, nobody would be denied the right to believe subjectively in a transcendent dimension, but the involvement of this dimension in the domain of the process of knowledge was in the final analysis a contradiction in terms. Given this, the discipline that at that moment Joseph Ratzinger was preparing to teach seemed to have its days numbered. In this new panorama, theology, namely systematic and rational thinking about God, appeared as absurd and as unacceptable.

In this his first lectures of 1959 Ratzinger describes the phenomenon of the rupture between the ‘God of the philosophers (that is to say, of the ‘physicists’) and the God of faith’. If truth is only what is demonstrable empirically by the physicians, that is to say, by the scientist and researcher, that God has no more nothing to do with the sphere of reason, but only with a private sphere of personal feelings without any public relevance. This rupture, for the young Ratzinger, was to be located in a wider context marked by another two special phenomena linked to the first and which, together with the first, were the most significant and important of his epoch. He describes both phenomena between 1958 and 1962.

The first of these other two phenomena—which he described 1958 in a conference called “The New Pagans and the Church”—was ‘intra-ecclesial neo-paganism’ (Ratzinger 2010). Contrary to what the official statistics on the number of baptisms might have led people to believe about the extension of the Church, in reality, his time was a time of rapid spread of a new practical paganism, of which believers were in varying ways aware within the Church, which thus became, at the level of facts, a small minority. With a significant reduction in her members, the Church would also rapidly lose a large part of her influence in public life, and thus a large part of the privileges and institutions that had derived from her being a mass phenomenon. However, precisely this trend also constituted a great opportunity: a ‘minority’ Church made up of small ‘Christian fraternities’ existing out of conviction and conscious decisions and not out of habit; a Church made up of ‘creative minorities’, of ‘leaderships’—not an, ipso facto, ‘all in’ Church; a Church in which, for example, the sacraments are administrated with prudence and full consciousness, not given away, cheapened, made worthless. This Church of ‘leaderships’ would have brought out once again her attractiveness. The secularization that was underway in reality should have been understood in positive terms as the beginning of a rebirth, the beginning—certainly painful but also health-giving—of a process of ‘de-worldliness’, a kind of modern ‘return to the origins’; on the condition, however, that the meaning of the moment and the opportunities that it offered were fully grasped.

The third and last phenomenon of his time that the young Ratzinger adjudged ‘epochal’ and of a universal scope was the ‘gigantic movement of unification of the world’ that he saw taking place rapidly in front of his eyes. By now, he wrote in 1961, it was not only possible, for example, to have breakfast in Germany, lunch in Egypt, and then supper in some eastern country; it was also, and above all else, possible to speak, discuss, and be understood increasingly at a global level through a ‘single unified language’—that of technical and technological progress of a Euro-American kind (Ratzinger 2012b).

This unification and ‘technologization of the world’ had its center in Europe and above all in the West, and its propulsive force was a sort of ‘technical religion’—a ‘kind of religious adoration of man for himself’—that was spreading and growing stronger hand in hand with its practical advance. Human beings increasingly encountered nature through ‘the filter’ of what they—with their intelligence and their will—were able to do with nature, including human nature. The idea of creation and a creature made in the image of God was being increasingly replaced by nature and man as products of man’s own action towards an improvement of the world that would guarantee man all the happiness to which by his ‘nature’ he could aspire. The young professor Joseph Ratzinger underlined that in this case as well, it was not a matter of being ‘pessimists’—or even worse of accusing technology of ‘heresy’—and not even of ingenuously being ‘optimists’. Instead, it was a matter of looking at reality lucidly, and then, on the basis of the trends described, of seeing together with the dangers also the opportunities that this absolutely unprecedented historical moment offered the Church to relaunch her universal mission, specifically at an educational level. As is known, John XXIII confided to Cardinal Josef Frings—who had chosen Ratzinger as his expert at the Second Vatican Council—that he himself would have liked to have made the speech that Ratzinger had written for the Cardinal: the famous ‘Genoa speech’ of 1961.

3. Later Reflections and the Continuity of Thought

After those by now far off years (1958–1961), Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI dedicated many speeches and writings to the subjects of knowledge, universities, and the challenge of education. The last such intervention was in October 2022. Ratzinger wrote it personally only two months before passing away, two years ago, specifically for an American Catholic university, for an international conference organized by its department of theology on the idea of the Church of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI (Benedict XVI 2022). On this occasion, he emphasized once again, amongst other things, how illusory it was to think that the Church would be really ‘updated’, that she would become more attractive and really fulfil her mission, primarily her educational mission, if she adopted the rupture between faith and reason in a widespread climate of infra-ecclesial neo-paganism; if she definitively abandoned the divine and salvific dimension of Christ by reducing him to a purely human and moral figure, making him, according to time and context, a revolutionary or ‘a progressivist’. Thereby the Church would forget, however, the most important thing: that paradoxically it is the need for eternal life that confers its absolute urgency on the moral duty of this life. This is because precisely when ‘heaven’ alone is by now in front of us and no longer above us does the interior tension of human existence and its responsibility to the community loosen.

From 1958 to the three-year period 2005–2008, namely from the ‘Bonn speech’ to the last three addresses given by Benedict XVI in universities on universities (at Milan, Regensburg, and Rome) (Benedict XVI 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2008), the three great epochal and global trends that the young professor talked about—the rupture between faith and reason in the field of knowledge; the spread of neo-paganism inside the Church; and globalization and the mentality that underlies it—had advanced at a speed and with a pervasiveness that at that time were unimaginable. In 1959, for example, Joseph Ratzinger cited the Kinsey Report on various kinds of sexual behavior, without naturally being able to imagine the extent to which the rupture between sexuality and fertility would lead to the planning and the production of sets of human beings outside any kind of sexual relationship (with the disturbing consequences and ethical dilemmas that would follow). It is evident that one is not dealing solely with a ‘physical’ challenge. This was said clearly by William Heseltine, the founder and head of Human Genome Sciences, when recently, on the occasion of the establishment of the Society of Regenerative Medicine, he declared: ‘The real goal is to keep people alive forever’. As known, Joseph Ratzinger commented on this and similar issues very early (Ratzinger 2012a). Lastly, in his Encyclical Letter Spe salvi on Christian Hope, Benedict XVI asks himself: ‘Do we really want this—to live eternally? […] In some way we want life itself, true life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know the thing towards which we feel driven […]. The term “eternal life” is intended to give a name to this known “unknown”. Inevitably it is an inadequate term that creates confusion. “Eternal”, in fact, suggests to us the idea of something interminable, and this frightens us; “life” makes us think of the life that we know and love and do not want to lose, even though very often it brings more toil than satisfaction, so that while on the one hand we desire it, on the other hand we do not want it. To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and, in some way, to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John’s Gospel: “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (16:22).’ (Benedict XVI 2007).

To conclude, one should ask oneself: from that time until now, for Ratzinger, has higher education of a Christian inspiration fully grasped those challenges and responded adequately? In this sense, what positive possibilities are offered to such higher education in our time, today? On this subject I would like to highlight three constant features in the answer given by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.

For him, today as sixty-five years ago, to highlight the limits of modern reason from within does not mean to affirm that one must ‘go back’ to a pre-modernity in which science was basically considered heretical. What is valid in the modern development of the human mind should be acknowledged without reservations. Who is not grateful to the modern mind for the great possibilities that it has opened up for man and for the advances that have been achieved in the human field? The ethos of the scientific approach—the wish to search for the truth and obey the truth—is, and always will be, an essential part of the Christian spirit and its educational approach. However, the criticism of the modern intelligence leveled already at that time has found confirmation today more than ever; specifically, in the observation of reality, which is and always will be the last true litmus test of truth (we cannot but remember this even more today, on the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the death of St. Thomas Aquinas).

Francis F. Collins, the former director of the Human Genome Project, declared that ‘thanks to science, for us the creation has become decipherable’ (Ratzinger 2013). But Benedict XVI asked himself in his ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ whether reality does tell us this. He observed how during our epoch a dark sensation of the ‘non-decipherability of the creation’ has been increasingly spreading: a ‘non-recognizability of truth’, not of functional truth (how can I use nature for my ends?), which has become increasingly visible, but of the truth about man himself: what he is, where he comes from, why he exists, what good and evil are. That truth that cannot be read in a purely empirical way. This, however, he observed, has as its consequence (in addition to a widespread sense of despair and a strange lack of desire for the future) the real danger of re-establishing in the final analysis the whole of ethics solely on the basis of the law of evolution. This, as is known, ineluctably finds its key notion in the model of selection, and thus in pure pragmatism and the cruel law of the strongest, which, however, in the final analysis, constitutes the negation of everything reason, knowledge, and education want to be, really propose themselves as. Observation at all levels increasingly tells us that technical reason on its own is not sufficient to grasp the totality of truth. Knowledge and experience tell us that in this sense we are on the threshold of a possible epoch of a ‘crisis of humanity’, as Joseph Ratzinger was already observing significantly in the year 2000 (Ratzinger 2000), and as we read, for example, in Global Trends 2023: Alternative Worlds, a report of the National Intelligence Council (2012): ‘We are at a critical juncture in human history which could lead to widely contrasting futures’.

On the positive side, however, it is as if today we have found ourselves, observed Benedict XVI, at the moment of a kind of ‘return to the future’. It is as if we found ourselves specifically at the privileged moment of the first encounter of faith and reason when they came together once and for all. Namely, when to Paul—who originally had the firm intention of evangelizing Asia Minor—a Macedonian (a Greek) appeared in a dream who called to him and asked him: “Come over to Macedonia and help us!” (Acts 16:6–10). The encounter of Athens and Jerusalem, between faith and reason, since then has made the greatness, of a moral character as well, of the West. Faith allows man to be reasonable; reason allows faith not to up end itself in fanaticism; reason does not make faith useless but from faith reason receives the support that protects it from the precipice and allows it to remain truly itself. Today more than ever before, in the ‘civilization of technology’, the sense of the useful and the sense of power have urgent need of the help and the support of the sense of God, and thus rediscover and reaffirm the power of the moral conscience. Universities of Christian inspiration are useful as never before to orient knowledge on the basis of an integral reason.

It is obvious that the West, and especially the United States of America, are at the center of ‘globalization’ and the mentality that underlies it, and this is as true today as it was yesterday. But there is another element of the USA that always particularly fascinated Benedict XVI, an element that means that great attention should be paid to America. Always opposed to a Church of State, American society has always been particularly aware that humanity and coexistence are possible if founded on a basic moral consensus that reason on its own cannot give and that no majority on its own can generate. This made ‘secularity’ of an American kind particularly valuable in the eyes of Benedict XVI. Today, indeed, it seems to be flourishing again, according to a recent survey carried out by the Pew Research Centre which found that 57% of American adults expressed a positive vision of the influence of religion on American life.

At the beginning of its journey in this world, Christianity did not hesitate to acquire the language of the Greco–Roman ‘global’ civilization, which at that time was shared by and understood by everyone. Today, exactly thanks to this humus, Christian-inspired realities could particularly value and adopt the unified language produced by technological progress which is shared by and understood by everyone.

No institutions more than the traditional institutions of higher education of Christian inspiration have over recent decades experienced in the West the phenomenon of ‘infra-ecclesial neo-paganism’ and a reduction in size because of a decline in the members of the faithful. And yet Benedict XVI saw an opportunity precisely in this development. What applies to new ‘creative minorities’ of the Church that are able ‘to move mountains’ also applies, and applies even more, to creative minorities in the world of higher education.

This reduction in size makes it, first of all, possible once again for lecturers and students to have a living experience of what makes a universitas scientiarum really attractive and in scholarly terms at the cutting edge; that is to say that we—despite all the specializations that at times make us unable to communicate with each other—shape a whole and work in the totality of a single reason with its various dimensions, thereby acting together in a shared responsibility for the correct use of reason. In mass universities—and this is stated by one who, as a student, went to the largest university in Europe with more than 120,000 students—this experience is neither possible nor imaginable. And in the large universities of Christian inspiration that are still in existence, one often has the impression that the ‘strength’ due to the positions of power and privileges that still exist is matched by a weakness at the level of ideals, an imposition of uniformity, and a downward leveling of thought. Here again one does not manage fully to reason in terms of a ‘creative minority’.

Naturally enough, nobody, and first and foremost not Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI himself, has ever thought that the ‘return to the future’ can take place at a stroke of a pen and be imposed from without. Benedict XVI was aware that a ‘re-flourishing’ can only take place gradually, from within and ‘all together’, starting from the relationship of all Christians with non-believers and the inter-disciplinary and inter-university nexuses. He was, however, convinced that an apparently small university world—a creative minority—which has its basis and propulsive force in the ‘modern’ experience of Christian fraternity not limited to theology, could offer a very significant impulse to all this.

What the young Ratzinger, and the old as well, seemed to look for in a Catholic university of the future was the development of excellencies: of inclusive excellencies based on the experience of ‘modern’ Christian fraternities at their heart, excellencies that become increasingly a center of scientific and human attraction, as well as leaderships of the university world of the future in a logic not of opposition, but of encounter, dialogue, and mutual enrichment.

4. Conclusions

Beginning with early work in the 1950s and concluding with final contributions in the 2020s, Joseph Ratzinger’s reflections on knowledge, universities, and the role of faith in higher education create a profoundly deep schema to understand the challenges and opportunities facing Christian-inspired universities today. Throughout these decades, Ratzinger continuously confronted the tension between faith and reason, the rise of secularism within the Church, and the sweeping forces of globalization and technological progress. This would indeed tend to mean his thought moved on to embrace trends. Still, some constant features within the insistence on truth having an integrative nature, the critical importance of moral reasoning, and the impulse behind universities to nurture intellectual community harnessed on Christian values remained central to his vision.

Ratzinger’s early reflections have focused on this growing dichotomy between faith and reason, undermining theological studies and the broader Christian intellectual tradition. He criticized the rise of secularism within the Church, a technocratic worldview reducing humanity and nature to the level of mere objects, and called upon Christian universities to avoid fragmentation in their pursuit for a more integrated understanding of human existence. In his later writings, particularly as Pope Benedict XVI, he would so nuance this vision—recognizing the existential challenges that emanate from the modern repudiation of transcendent truths—but saw in secularization and globalization a moment of opportunity wherein Catholic universities could relaunch an integration of faith and reason in service of intellectual, moral, and spiritual development.

In conclusion, Ratzinger’s thought on higher education challenges the contemporary Christian university to critically engage with the secular world while remaining true to the deeper truths that define the human condition. His work provides a blueprint for universities of Christian inspiration to navigate the complexities of modernity and to contribute meaningfully to the ongoing dialogue between faith, reason, and culture. As higher education continues to evolve in response to global challenges, Ratzinger’s vision offers a compelling reminder of the transformative potential of education grounded in Christian values. This education seeks not only to expand knowledge but also to shape human beings who are intellectually rigorous, morally aware, and spiritually engaged.