Here is the text of my homily for Sunday 8 January 2023 at Saint Mary’s, Greenville.
On this Solemnity of the Epiphany, the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer points to the heart of what we celebrate today by singing to God our Father that “today you have revealed the mystery of our salvation in Christ as a light for the nations, and when he (Jesus) appeared in our mortal nature, you made us new by the glory of his immortal nature.” Revelation. Mystery. Salvation. Light. Immortal Glory. All of these ineffable realities are contained in the single and simple word epiphany, meaning the showing forth or manifestation of God in man, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Given the richness of this feast, I cannot think of a more perfect occasion on which to thank God for the life, wisdom, and witness of Joseph Ratzinger, one of the finest theological minds ever to serve the Church and the man who became late in his life the faithful servant of the servants of God, Pope Benedict XVI. His funeral was celebrated in Rome last Thursday, and since Ratzinger’s death on the final day of 2022, countless printed and spoken words have been dedicated to explaining his work and legacy in a time of profound crisis and polarization in the Church.
I have been a student of Joseph Ratzinger in the informal sense for more than 40 years, and his work has always helped me understand the Gospel and experience the love of God more deeply. Ratzinger’s writing, which is filled with symphonic beauty and pellucid brilliance, is unfailingly luminous and numinous, and it is full of both clarity and charity, profundity and simplicity.
In 1981, Pope John Paul II called Ratzinger to Rome from his post as the Archbishop of Munich, and until his election to the Chair of Peter after John Paul’s death in 2005, Cardinal Ratzinger was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. To him fell the difficult task of defending and promoting the teaching of the Gospel without addition or subtraction, not least by correcting theologians who had gone astray in their written work. Ratzinger’s theological adversaries were the source of the black legend of God’s Rottweiler or Der Panzerkardinal, the cruel dictator seeking to impede enlightened scholarship, when in fact he was merely explaining what is and what is not compatible with the Christian faith based on divine revelation, the deposit of faith that was once for all delivered to the Church.
In person, Joseph Ratzinger was shy, self-effacing, and unfailing gracious - in all the languages of Europe, both ancient and modern. He was a deeply learned and humane man, a scholar of the first rank in command of the Western intellectual tradition in a way unmatched by all but a few people. But above all else, Joseph Ratzinger was a radically converted disciple of Jesus Christ who lived his entire life at the heart of the Church as a man of faithful prayer and devoted service to others. In other words, Joseph Ratzinger was nothing at all like the caricature created by his intellectual rivals.
Ratzinger’s theological adversaries rightly saw him as one of the main obstacles in their attempt to change the doctrine of the Catholic Faith into a form of Neo-Gnosticism that could make peace with Marxism and the Sexual Revolution and still be called orthodox Christianity. By advancing a false anthropology in the name of freedom, the revisionists sought to fashion a new form of Christian faith and life which it was Ratzinger’s obligation to resist, and so they created the image of Ratzinger as a ruthless Inquisitor and made that illusory figure a target of fierce opprobrium in the hope that ad hominem attacks would blunt the effectiveness of his pellucidly clear teaching of the Gospel. But their strategy failed.
It is hard to hate a man who radiates peace, joy, love, equanimity, and patient endurance for the sake of leading all persons to know, love, and serve the living God in Christ Jesus. And that is precisely who and what Joesph Ratzinger was. He wanted every soul to find the authentic freedom of the children of God by living in union with Jesus Christ through faith, hope, and love.
But in our time, cynicism, skepticism, and relativism make it difficult even for the baptized to know that there is a truth beyond our own desires and that we can know such truth in any meaningful way. We live in an age of irony and self aggrandizement in which too many of us, when challenged by the Gospel, behave like proud Herod demanding autonomy rather than like the humble magi seeking enlightenment. And so we must ask: can we know anything at all about God, and if we can, how so, and if so, what difference does that make to the way I live my life?
Pope Benedict XVI spent his entire life answering these questions by explaining to anyone who would listen that both faith and reason lead to knowledge of the truth by encountering the reality outside of our own minds. From a lifetime of thinking theologically and following Christ in the Way of the Cross, Ratzinger knew that accepting the truth of divine revelation, especially when done in harmony with right reason and authentic science, has the power to re-shape our lives by grace through faith leading to authentic human freedom. This liberty in turn makes it possible for us to live in keeping with God’s eternal plan for human happiness, a plan which was gradually revealed over long ages to Adam and Noah, to Abraham and Moses, to David and the Prophets. In this way, God fashioned a people for himself and promised by his Covenant that a Messiah would come from Israel to redeem and rule all the tribes of the earth by uniting Jews and Gentiles in a universal kingdom of justice, love, and peace.
In the fullness of time, this revelation of God was completed and perfected by the Lord Jesus Christ in his holy birth and hidden life, in his baptism and public ministry, in his teaching and signs of divine glory, and above all in his suffering, death and Resurrection for the redemption of the entire human race. This is the Passover Mystery of both Israel and the Church, and the sacred duty and high privilege of Christian disciples is to bear witness to the revelation and mystery of Jesus Christ by our words and deeds - words and deeds which point not to an ideology but to the Lord Jesus himself, the God-man who is the light of the nations and who offers immortal glory to every man, woman, and child who will ever live.
To bear witness to this eternal plan of salvation, God gives many gifts to his servants, and among them is the gift of sacred theology, the intellectual discipline of faith seeking understanding. A thousand years from now, I expect that Joseph Ratzinger will still have an honored place among the most outstanding theologians ever to serve the Church, but here we should note that theology in the primary sense is not found in a library, a study, or a lecture hall.
No, primary theology is found first in divine worship, in the sacred liturgy of the Church by which adoration is given to the living God and in which the Word of God is proclaimed and explained for the salvation of the world: both the Word of God written in holy Scripture and the eternal Word of God made flesh in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah who remains with us in the seven sacraments of the New Covenant. Joseph Ratzinger was a truly exceptional academic theologian, but he was first and last a man of deep prayer who sought to adore and unveil the face of the God-man to the world through the Church’s worship in which we encounter and are transformed by the beauty of holiness.
This is why one of Pope Benedict’s highest priorities was the renovation of the sacred liturgy in keeping with the principles laid down by the Second Vatican Council. Benedict was not an antiquarian aesthete trying to revive an imaginary golden age of the past; he was, instead, a prudent master of God’s house who brought forth things both old and new from the Church’s treasury. Benedict’s goal was to teach modern man how and why to pray, how to understand that we exist for the praise of God’s glory, and how to grasp that until and unless we live in keeping with our noble purpose and high destiny we will always be unhappy because we will remain closed in upon ourselves and shut off from the very reason of our existence, the love of God.
In 1962 when he had been a priest for only eleven years, Father Ratzinger was asked to attend the Second Vatican Council as a theological expert, and during the four years of the Council, Ratzinger earned the respect of the bishops and theologians who were engaged in a world historical event that would shape the life of the Church for generations or even centuries to come.
The conciliar document which most directly reflects Ratzinger’s work is called Dei Verbum, the Word of God, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. This text is a short but profound proclamation of the salvation of the world by Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh and the only Savior of the entire human race, whom we come to know and love in the apostolic tradition and above all in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, the Word of God written in human words.
Pope Benedict spent the remainder of his long life helping the Church receive and understand the documents of the Second Vatican Council as contemporary expressions of the Gospel of Jesus Christ which is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, and Benedict knew from decades of struggle that the primary challenge to the Church in our time is to awaken saving faith among all the baptized (and the ordained) by personal conviction and conversion through acceptance of the Gospel as the supernatural gift and saving truth of divine revelation.
Pope Benedict’s teaching is an effective response to the great apostasy of our time, the falling away from true faith in Jesus Christ which has plunged so many souls into darkness, including sadly not a few theologians, priests, and bishops. As a university professor, a diocesan bishop, the longtime collaborator of Pope John Paul II, and as the Successor of Saint Peter, Joseph Ratzinger proclaimed that in Jesus Christ, the human race has received true and certain knowledge of God’s revelation, mystery, salvation, light, and immortal glory. But that knowledge is incomplete unless it always leads to love, to friendship with the Lord Jesus which is the only path to a share in the divine life of the Most Holy Trinity.
Just before he died last week, the most erudite man in the world uttered his final words as a last testament to the most important dimension of all human life, and these words tell us in summary why God became man, how we should receive that gift of the Incarnate Word, and that this saving truth can change us from the inside out into persons capable of living with God in unbounded glory, forever. As he prepared to pass through the door of death into the eternal life first promised to him at his Baptism, Joseph Ratzinger, our Father Benedict, speaking to the Lord who created him, justified him, sanctified him, and we pray will glorify him, said simply: Jesus, I love you.