The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Ratzinger the Professor: the influence of Cardinal Newman

Categorised as News and published Friday, January 23rd, 2009
Father Richard John Neuhaus and Cardinal Newman
Message from the Actor of the Cause for the 208th Anniversary of Newman’s Birth

We’re pleased to report on a new book by Gianni Valente, published in Italian, Ratzinger Professore: Gli anni dello studio e dell’insegnamento nel ricordo dei colleghi e degli allievi (1946-1977) (Milan: Edizioni San Paolo, s.r.l., 2008) [‘Ratzinger the Professor: the years of study and teaching as recalled by his colleagues and students’].

This book, by an well known Italian journalist, highlights Joseph Ratzinger’s academic history, from his seminary formation, teaching posts, and involvement in the Second Vatican Council, right up to his continuing links with the academic world as Cardinal and as Pope. Inevitably, John Henry Newman makes a significant appearance: it’s well known that Newman’s writings have been an important influence on Benedict XVI, and the book serves to emphasise some of the particular ways that the English theologian played a part in Ratzinger’s own theological development.

Alfred Läpple, Ratzinger’s Prefect of Studies at the seminary at Friesing in the post war years, had begun a dissertation on Newman’s theology of conscience before the war, a ‘pioneering theme’ at that time, Valente notes. Later, speaking at the 1990 conference on Newman in Rome, Ratzinger spoke of the passion that Läpple had aroused in him and his associates: ‘Newman’s teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all in its sway. … We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party, which understood itself as the fulfilment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual. One of its leaders had said: “I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler”. The appalling devastation of humanity that followed was before our eyes’ (p. 22). Valente suggests that Ratzinger’s drawing to Newman was part of his reaction against such ‘annihilation’ of conscience.

Läpple sheds his own light on the attraction which Newman exercised on both him and his students: Newman combined liberty with obedience. Läpple is quoted: ‘there was among us a great liberty in viewing and judging things. It was for this reason that Newman fascinated us so much. How could someone who had lived so freely as an Anglican have submitted himself to the Catholic doctrine on the primacy of the Church? For Newman it wasn’t acceptable to think that the Pope could be a limit on the freedom of the baptised’ (p. 28).

Later in the book, Läpple describes the intellectual links between Ratzinger and Gottleib Söhngen, one of the Professors of the future Cardinal in the theology faculty at Munich. Läpple writes that ‘for Ratzinger, as for Söhngen, God is not, in the end, a summum bonum that you can know, and demonstrate the existence of, through exact theological formulations. The mystery for him [Ratzinger] isn’t a meeting with an abstract definition, but with an ‘other’ who has loved us first, and who we can thank. For this reason we’d had a keen interest in the personalism of Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher who’d said that the best thing you can say about God is to thank him. And for the same reason we grew in our shared passion for Newman, who for his episcopal [sic.] motto had chosen Cor ad cor loquitur, ‘heart speaks to heart’ (p. 39).

It’s to be hoped that the book will be published in English too.

Click here to buy the book on Itacalibri