Servitore di Dio e dell’umanità: La biografia di Benedetto XVI by Elio Guerriero

Abstract

Reviewed by: Servitore di Dio e dell’umanità: La biografia di Benedetto XVI by Elio Guerriero Matthew C. Briel Servitore di Dio e dell’umanità: La biografia di Benedetto XVI. Elio Guerriero. Milan, IT: Mondadori, 2016, 549 pp. We have entered a new era of Ratzinger studies. With the establishment of the Ratzinger Foundation in 2007, the Institut Papst Benedikt XVI and the first volume of the Gesammelte Schriften in 2008, the annual Ratzinger Prize in 2011, and the tenth volume of the Ratzinger-Studien in 2016, we are moving beyond the initial surveys of his thought such as those of Aidan Nichols and Tracey Rowland and into deeper explorations. While there have been a number of studies of individual aspects of Benedict’s thought in the past ten years, we have lacked a synthetic analysis of the man and his thought that goes deeper than the accounts of John Allen and George Weigel, which were written at the beginning of his pontificate and are particularly concerned with the state of the Church in 2005. In French, we have the study of Bernard Lecomte (but it is too brief to carry us far beyond the portraits written by Georg Ratzinger), Peter Seewald’s 2005 Benedict XVI: Ein Porträt aus der Nähe, or Ratzinger’s own brief recollections in Milestones, which are limited to his time before he was consecrated a bishop. Guerriero’s biography, however, is important because it accounts for the whole man. If it is not translated into English (although it is to be hoped that Ignatius Press or Catholic University of America Press may publish a translation; all English translations in this review are my own), its influence in English scholarship may not be apparent. But it will be a landmark in Ratzinger studies in a similar way to that in which Guerriero’s biography of von Balthasar was, in that it draws together all of the previous work on Ratzinger and provides a coherent account of the man and the thinker. We are now in a position to measure Ratzinger’s theological achievement, evaluate it, and carry [End Page 1415] forward those various avenues that he has opened up and we deem likely to carry us to new vistas. Rather than attempting a superficial synopsis of this lengthy book (it is over 250,000 words) that would, at any rate, be largely familiar to readers of Nova et Vetera, I instead organize my comments around five themes. The first regards the character of the book as a whole. In the second section, I briefly discuss how the thick texture provided by Guerriero to Ratzinger’s life and intellectual development (1) allows us better to see the man as a whole and perhaps to empathize with the difficult situations that led him to make some controversial decisions, (2) allows us to understand the broader context of individual works, and (3) clarifies just how deeply involved Benedict XVI was in the magisterium of John Paul II. The third section addresses the treatment of Ratzinger’s theology in this volume. The fourth draws attention to what I would call moments of irony or surprise for those who are tempted to categorize Benedict as a mere reactionary. In the fifth and concluding section, I draw attention both to a moment in which Gurriero sounds a disagreement with Ratzinger and to one or two limitations of the book as a whole. The Character of the Book It may be helpful to compare and contrast this biography of Ratzinger with two well-known modern studies of theologians and hierarchs: that of John Henry Newman by Ian Ker (1988) and that of John Paul II by George Weigel (1999 and 2010). Unlike Weigel’s work on the life of John Paul II, Gurriero’s did not have extended access to Benedict XVI. In many ways, this is a sympathetic look at the man from a historical viewpoint rather than the product of live interviews. It further differs from Weigel’s book in that the two men have such different lives and personalities: Wojtyla the actor became a charismatic pastor and media sensation, while Ratzinger the retiring professor became the shy...