[Marxism] New Pope hated 60's campus activism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, April 24, 2005
Turbulence on Campus in 60's Hardened Views of Future Pope
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN, DANIEL J. WAKIN
and MARK LANDLER

TÜBINGEN, Germany, April 23 - For all Pope Benedict XVI's decades as a 
Vatican insider, it may have been the crucible of a university town swept 
by student radicalism in the late 1960's that definitively shaped the man 
who now leads the Roman Catholic Church.

During his Bavarian childhood under the Nazis, Joseph Ratzinger became 
convinced that the moral authority based in Catholic teachings was the sole 
reliable bulwark against human barbarism, according to friends, associates, 
and his biographer, John L. Allen Jr.

But while his deep reading and thinking in theology, philosophy, and 
history were fundamental to development as a theologian, it was the 
protests of student radicals at Tübingen University - in which he saw an 
echo of the Nazi totalitarianism he loathed - that seem to have pushed him 
definitively toward deep conservatism and insistence on unquestioned 
obedience to the authority of Rome.

Before he arrived at the university, he had spent most of his time writing 
books and teaching in the Catholic theology departments of several German 
universities. His growing reputation was enhanced by the prominent role he 
was said to have played at the Second Vatican Council called by Pope John 
XXIII in 1962 to formulate doctrines for the church in the modern world. 
(It was concluded three years later, under Pope Paul VI.)

When he arrived at Tübingen in southern Germany in 1966, he was widely 
viewed as a church reformer, a man who wanted to open the church up to 
dialogue with others in the world.

But in his autobiography, he shows that the Vatican Council also alerted 
him to what he deemed dangerous liberalizing tendencies from inside the 
church and to the danger that reform, if not tightly controlled by a 
guiding authority, can quickly go awry.

"Very clearly, resentment was growing against Rome and against the Curia, 
which appeared to be the real enemy of everything that was new and 
progressive," he writes. Academic "specialists," he complains, were 
encouraging the bishops to accept dubious assumptions. One of these 
assumptions was "the idea of an ecclesial sovereignty of the people in 
which the people itself determined what it wants to understand by church." 
The idea of the "church from below," which led to liberation theology, was 
being born and, as he puts it, "I became deeply troubled."

So he was already deeply suspicious of the left wing inside the church, 
when, in 1966, he joined the Catholic Theological Faculty of Tübingen 
University.

He had been recruited by none other than the liberal Swiss theologian Hans 
Küng, the very man who became, and remains, one of his chief political and 
theological rivals. The experience of the student revolt seemed to confirm 
every suspicion that Father Ratzinger already nurtured about liberalizing 
tendencies and the hidden germ of totalitarianism lurking within 
revolutionary movements.

"Marxist revolution kindled the whole university with its fervor, shaking 
it to its very foundations," he wrote of the atmosphere at the university, 
which, like many others in Germany at the time, was rocked by a student 
rebellion against authority.

full: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/international/worldspecial2/24ratzinger.html

---
Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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