Benedict XVI Called "Panzer" by the Official German Catholic Church Website

Joachim Frank, president of the Association of German Catholic Journalists, wrote a column dated March 21, 2018, and published the day before Easter on the official website of the Catholic Church in Germany, katholisch.de. He attacked the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who served as such from 1980 to 2005 at the palace of the Holy Office before ascending the throne of Peter from 2005 to 2013.

The Facts

On March 12, during the official presentation of a collection of booklets on the theology of Pope Francis, the prefect of the Secretariat for Communications, Monsignor Dario Vigano, read a letter from Benedict XVI dated February 7, 2018, and meant to applaud this initiative. But this confidential and personal letter had been truncated. The fiasco caused by this communications episode led to Mgr. Vigano’s resignation on March 21.

When the full text of the letter was published on March 17, one paragraph caused a sensation: the pope emeritus voiced his astonishment at the choice of theologian Peter Hünermann as one of the contributors to the booklets; during Benedict XVI’s reign, the theologian had several times attacked both his papal magisterium and that of his predecessor, John Paul II, and he had even taken part in several “anti-papal initiatives”.

In his article, Joachim Frank defended Hünermann and spewed invectives at the pope emeritus:

One cannot help wondering quite how many inner-church conflicts over the course of the past 30 years could have been avoided if this ‘great theologian’ in his cardinal’s and papal robes had refrained from such petty dissensions and narrow-mindedness.

The German journalist regretted that Benedict had not remembered Peter Hünermann as the “co-editor of the large five-volume commentary on the Second Vatican Council” but as a papal critic and the “co-initiator” of the “Cologne Declaration.” Frank wrote that the Declaration had also involved over 200 other professors of theology who “revolted against the authoritarian style of leadership of John Paul II”, against a centralization of episcopal power in Rome, and “thus also targeted their former colleague Ratzinger.”

In Benedict XVI’s Defense

One of the first reactions in support of Benedict XVI came from Joseph Shaw, professor at the University of Oxford and spokesman for those who signed the Filial Correction of Pope Francis. The professor reacted on the information website Life Site News, saying that “it is unjust to paint the Pope Emeritus as resentful.”

The ‘panzer Cardinal’ trope is an absurd self-serving myth, created by people who disagree with Benedict’s positions and don’t have the capacity to form convincing arguments against them.

Joseph Shaw also objected to the idea that the pope emeritus should not be permitted to speak his mind in his private correspondence. “Surely Pope Benedict, in his retirement, is entitled to express his views about the suitability of a particular theologian for a task, in a letter quite obviously not intended for publication,” he argued.

From Theologian with Modernist Tendencies to "Panzerkardinal"

The expression “Panzerkardinal” was coined at the time when Joseph Ratzinger, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was working to correct the abuses in the teaching of the catechism and to bring to a halt the more outrageous liturgical and moral tendencies of the 80’s… and at the same time participating in John Paul II’s most scandalous initiatives to promote ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue, and defending the conciliar novelties that went against the preceding Magisterium, such as false religious freedom. While he did condemn a spirit of the Council that went against its texts, it was only to defend the work and reforms undertaken in the name of Vatican II by Paul VI and John Paul II.

In fact, as the journalist Mounia Daoudi recalled when Joseph Ratzinger was elected to the throne of Peter in 2005:

He who has been nicknamed the PanzerKardinal by his detractors has not always been such a rigorist. Some of his students – for this renowned theologian taught for several years at the University of Tübingen – even dare to use the term progressivist to describe the modernist thinker he was at first. Indeed, Joseph Ratzinger played an important role in Vatican Council II, serving as the peritus (expert) of Cardinal Frings, archbishop of Cologne. History is ironic: it was he who wrote the famous speech in which Joseph Frings called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (then the Holy Office) – over whose fate he would later preside for almost a quarter of a century – a source of scandal.

A front-line theologian, Joseph Ratzinger was suspected of Modernism when he presented his thesis that he had to modify in order to earn his diploma. A reader of Lubac and Congar at the time when these two theologians – Jesuit and Dominican – were struck by sanctions, a close friend of the progressivist circles, a friend of Karl Barth and Karl Rahner, an admirer of Küng and Schillebeeckx, Joseph Ratzinger spent many years fighting for a general reformation of theology and the Church both in her cult and in her government.

He wished to return to the Fathers of the Church in order to bypass St. Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor of the Church, whom he considered fossilized and conventional. Around 1968, he distanced himself from the progressivists who were won over by Marxism, but remained attached his whole life long to the novelties of Vatican Council II, novelties whose roots lie in the liberal values of atheistic humanism and the modern philosophies inherited from the Enlightenment, such as existentialism, historicism, etc.—all philosophies Pius XII warned against his encyclical Humani Generis in 1950.

What irony to see Benedict XVI accused today of pettiness and narrow-mindedness, when the theologian reproached Pius XII and the Church of his times for just that. A key for understanding the evolution is described by St. Pius X in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis on Modernism:

Modernism Creates Permanent Tension between Authority and Progress

The saintly pope explained how the Modernist faith is a principle that leads the Church into perpetual evolution, since – according to this faith -  God constantly reveals Himself in history through the vital phenomena and the emergence of the divine deep in consciences. The Church is henceforth defined as being essentially dynamic, moving forward with Hegelian convulsions: she moves forward thanks to the conflict between the requirements of ecclesial unity that are a result of the collective conscience and the need for new and vital strength perceived by theologians. These theologians act as prophets, pointing out among the signs of the times the evolutions that need to be accomplished. Consequently, there is a need both for authority, and therefore the tradition this authority defends by natural instinct, and for the progressive and dynamic strength that “lies in individual consciences and ferments there”, especially those “who are in most intimate contact with life” (the “prophets”).

In the evolving Church:

...it is by a species of compromise between the forces of conservation and of progress, that is to say between authority and individual consciences, that changes and advances take place. The individual consciences of some of them act on the collective conscience, which brings pressure to bear on the depositaries of authority, until the latter consent to a compromise, and, the pact being made, authority sees to its maintenance.1

Concretely, this compromise means that a theologian, so long as he has no authority, acts as a progressivist force to make the system evolve, because he is an individual conscience more intimately conscious of life – he is a “prophet”; but if he receives a certain authority, he then becomes a conservative force and his role is to let the individual consciences express the sentiment of the divine in them in order to prepare new changes. This also explains how one and the same person can have progressivist ideas as a theologian or thinker, but not wish to apply them as prefect of a dicastery. Hence the venomous grudges of his former classmates.

• 1(Pascendi, §27)