By DONALD DeMARCO
Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger was born to a devout Catholic family on April 16, 1927 in the village of Marktl am Inn, in Bavaria. He came into the world on Holy Saturday on the feast day of Benedict Joseph Labré, who was canonized in 1883 by Pope Leo XIII. When he was five years old Joseph declared that he wanted to become a priest.
In 1933 Hitler came into power and ushered in a reign of horror. A cousin of Joseph’s had Down syndrome. In 1941, Nazi officials came and took the boy, who was roughly the same age as Joseph, away for “therapy.” He never came back. He was murdered as part of the Action T4 campaign of Nazi eugenics. He was considered one of the many who were deemed “undesirable,” “defective,” or “useless eaters” and therefore had to be permanently removed from society.
That notion that certain human beings could be classified as something less than human remained with Joseph Ratzinger throughout his life. He recognized that what undergirds various attempts to dehumanize people, from the Nazi ideology to more current ideologies that rationalize abortion, embryo research, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia, is a disregard for the dignity of the human person. The truth of the human being became a dominant and permanent concern in Ratzinger’s mind.
When Ratzinger became a bishop in 1977, he chose the motto “Cooperators of the truth.” As he stated, “I chose that motto because in today’s world the theme of truth is omitted almost entirely, as something too great for man, and yet everything collapses if truth is missing.”
It is not enough to defeat Hitler. One must reinstate truth. In the contemporary world, when the sanctity of human life — which is at the core of the truth of man — is omitted and replaced by an abstract notion of “choice,” a swarm of assaults against life ensues. Ratzinger was acutely aware of the philosophical roots of the problem.
He carried this concern for the truth of the human being through his years as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1981-2005) and into his papacy. He saw clearly the inadequacy of relativism as a replacement for truth, explaining how it led inevitably to what he called the “dictatorship of relativism.”
Ratzinger was also keenly aware of how Academia is not an ally of truth, often claiming that it is either unattainable or nonexistent. Relativism, skepticism, nihilism, and deconstructionism were commonplace in universities.
As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he made perhaps his most important defense of human life, in that capacity, with the release of Donum Vitae (“Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origins and on the Dignity of Procreation,” 1987).
The instruction reaffirms the inseparable connection between the unitive and procreative dimensions of the marital act. Artificial technologies that replace the conjugal act lead to regarding the child conceived as an object rather than as a gift of God. Technologies that assist (but do not replace) the marital act are licit. Thus, surgically opening a blocked Fallopian tube can be licit, while in vitro fertilization is not.
Essentially, the instruction holds to the position that both Life (in its origin or at its conception) and the Conjugal Act have great dignity and that neither of these two dignities can be compromised in any way. The instruction describes the truth about new life and the truth of the conjugal act.
Because truth is the factor that illuminates who human beings are and how they should live, it is far more reliable than emotion, convenience, or desperation.
Accordingly, the then Cardinal Ratzinger stated that Donum Vitae is relevant to everyone: “In the light of the truth about the gift of human life, and in the light of the moral principles which follow from the truth, everyone is invited to act in the area of responsibility proper to each and, like the good Samaritan, to recognize as a neighbor even the littlest among the children of men.”
As Pope Benedict XVI, he returned once again to the theme of truth in his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate: “…The natural law, in which creative Reason shines forth, reveals our greatness, but also our wretchedness insofar as we fail to recognize the call to moral truth.”
Trying to live without the light of Reason is like trying to read a book in the dark. It is a strange characteristic of modern man that he often prefers something other than the light of reason and the guidance of truth to navigate through the various challenges and obstacles that life presents.
Reason, of course, needs to be “purified,” a word he uses several times in his 2005 encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. In one instance, he states that “if reason is to be exercised properly, it must undergo constant purification, since it can never be completely free of the dangers of a certain ethical blindness caused by the dazzling effect of power and special interest.”
Although reason and truth are not as readily accessible as apples are on an apple tree, they are nonetheless indispensable. Additional work is required so that reason is purified and truth is deepened. To use reason to provide rationalizations is to use reason to the exclusion of truth.
Cardinal Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla did not meet each other until 1978 at the first conclave. Philosophically and theologically they had much in common and agreed on the challenges of the time and the need to recapture the joy and authenticity of the Second Vatican Council.
As George Weigel documents in his monumental biography of John Paul II, Witness to Hope, they both understood the necessity to inform the world that the Gospels represent Truth. Weigel goes on to say that Wojtyla recognized in the shy, scholarly Ratzinger a contemporary intellectual who was a more accomplished theologian than himself. Together they made a formidable intellectual team.
Toward the end of his life, Pope John Paul II referred to Cardinal Ratzinger as “my trusted friend.”
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