Thomas Rausch, emeritus professor of Catholic theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and specialist in the areas of Christology, ecclesiology, and ecumenism, presents in this work a fair and balanced, if sometimes heady, assessment of Pope Benedict XVI. Significantly, Rausch does not shy away from a critical examination of Benedict’s life as professor, prefect and pope, often pointing out his inability to integrate new data into his thinking.

This 2022 book has been revised and updated from the original that was published in 2009, and in many respects, offers an alternative glimpse into the Benedict we thought we knew; a man who was called to sacrifice his preferred life as an academic to serve the Church, first as Archbishop of Munich, then as prefect for the CDF, and then of course as pope. In this revised edition, Rausch seeks to give a retrospective on Benedict’s final years as pope and his resignation, which remains perhaps one of the most significant moves in his long career, and indeed in the history of the Church.

As a peritus, or theological adviser to the Second Vatican Council, Ratzinger’s instinctive tendency was much more toward ressourcement, or a return to the sources of Christian faith and life, than aggiornamento, which literally means to “bring up to date,” which he felt ran the risk of treating the past as a kind of romanticism.(55) Benedict’s particular brand of theology owes a considerable debt to the heritage of Plato, St. Augustine and St. Bonaventure. From Plato, he learned to understand and privilege truth as the intelligible. His anthropology or view of the human is deeply Augustinian, and his epistemology and understanding of eschatology are profoundly stamped by his study of Bonaventure. (40)

Rausch points out that Benedict’s theology begins from the principle that God has spoken in our history, that the divine self-disclosure takes place in the person of Jesus, the Word made flesh. He wants scripture to be the word of God, not just another historical text. (63) Regarding Christology, Benedict’s portrait of Jesus is strongly Johannine: grounded in high-Christological claims that Jesus was one with God, claiming a universalism that breaks the boundaries of Judaism, proclaiming a realized eschatology, and sketching a Jesus whose kingdom is out of this world and whose teaching contains minimal social ethics. (100)

Benedict’s ecclesiology, according to Rausch, sees the church’s structures as Christologically grounded in Jesus’ choice of the Twelve and their role in the primitive church. Key concepts include the constitutive nature of the Eucharist, the church as communio, the successio apostolica, and the Petrine ministry. The concept of communio informs all of his theology. (118)

Rausch believes that Ratzinger will be remembered as a world-renowned scholar who became pope largely against his own wishes. As a young theologian, he played an important role in the development of some of the Second Vatican Council’s most important documents, among them Dei Verbum, Lumen Gentium, Gaudium et Spes, and Ad Gentes. He continued to play a major role in the Church as a theologian, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and finally as pope. Benedict’s deepest conviction is that being a Christian is the result of entering into a relationship with the person of Jesus, who is love itself, and who loves human beings and creation itself passionately. (139)