For someone who would end up being one of the most influential figures in my Catholic life, my relationship with Pope Benedict XVI got off to an inauspicious start.
It was 2005 and he had just been elected pope. News coverage was playing on the TV in my high school’s mezzanine. I, a teenager who was Catholic in the sense that someone might prefer a certain brand of frozen pizza because it’s just what their family ate, took one look at the elderly German prelate, and concluded that the only noteworthy aspect of him was that he bore a striking resemblance to Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.
And yet, God works in mysterious ways. As the Lord guided my Catholicism from a mere tribal family ritual to more of a unified vision of life, and then further, something rooted most fundamentally in relationality with Jesus Christ, it was Benedict XVI who he used as his instrument.
At first, I was compelled by his intelligent and piercing criticisms of modern, secular culture. His insight that the privatization of faith had practically reduced the role of God in our lives to that of “a God with nothing to do”; his criticism of the ironic stunted narrowness of materialistic rationalism, which denied the “full breadth of reason”; his relentless condemnation of the “dictatorship of relativism.”
But eventually, I came to see that Benedict XVI was far more than just a social or cultural commentator. Or rather, that his social and cultural criticisms flowed from something far deeper: his sincere, intense, and intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.
It was Benedict XVI’s line in “Deus Caritas Est” that provided an opening for my own relationship with the Lord to become something more than just an intellectual exercise, helping connect the head and the heart. “Being a Christian,” Benedict taught, “is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and decisive direction.” That person, of course, is Jesus Christ.
The encounter with Christ was the heart of Benedict XVI’s entire theological project, because it was the heart of his life. It undergirded the way he taught about morality, the liturgy and sacraments, ecclesiology and the development of doctrine. To miss this is to fundamentally misunderstand the man— which, sadly, so many people in the secular media, but even in the Church, apparently did and continue to do.
When I visited Benedict in St. Peter’s Basilica this past week, where his body lay until the funeral the following day, I experienced a twinge of sadness that I had never been in his presence while he was still alive. A dead body, separated from the soul, is not the same as a living person, after all. How much I would’ve loved to be in the presence of this man who had been such an influence upon me through his writing and his witness from afar.
But if Benedict is not here with us on earth, then we have good reason to hope and believe that he is in (or at least on his way to) heaven. And from this place of being, fully united with the Jesus he loved so much while on earth, he can be more influential and impactful upon my life, the lives of all who love him, and indeed the whole Church and the world, then he’s ever been before.
Liedl, a Twin Cities resident, is a senior editor of the National Catholic Register and a graduate student in theology at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul.
