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THE STORY OF JOSEPH RATZINGER
The years of teaching in Bonn and Münster
Tradition and freedom:
the lectures
of the young Joseph
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The first years of Professor Ratzinger’s teaching as remembered
by his students. «The room was always packed.
The students adored him. He used a beautiful and simple language.
The language of a believer» |
by Gianni Valente
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 | | Joseph Ratzinger in a photo
of 1961, preparing a lecture
in the library
of the Bonn seminary | | |
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«It was the beginning of the 1959-1960 winter semester. In lecture
room 11 of the University, full of students, the door opened and a young
priest entered, who looked at first sight as if he might have been the
second or third curate of some large city parish. He was our lecturer in
Fundamental Theology, and he was 32 years old». So the then student
Horst Ferdinand, who died two years ago after a life spent in the
administrative offices of the German Federal Parliament and its embassies,
noted in his unpublished manuscript of memoirs the tip-toe beginning of the
university career of Joseph Ratzinger. An adventure that had begun some
months earlier, which the professor who then became Pope also narrates in
his autobiography as a beginning vibrant with splendid promise: «On
15 April 1959 I started my lessons, by now as professor of Fundamental
Theology at the University of Bonn, in front of a vast audience that
greeted with enthusiasm the new accent they believed they detected in
me».
In those years Bonn was almost by chance the capital
city of Adenauer’s Germany. In the country, amputated of the eastern Länder left behind the Iron
Curtain, the economic and social rebirth was proceeding at a dizzying pace.
In the 1957 elections the Christian-Democrat Party won an absolute majority
of votes. After the Nazi nightmare, the German Church was offering with
legitimate pride its own essential contribution to the new beginnings of
the nation. In a climate that might have led to triumphalism, the young
priest-professor Ratzinger had collected in 1958, in an article
written for the magazine Hochland, the reflections suggested by the brief but intense pastoral
experience gone through some years earlier as chaplain in the parish of the
Precious Blood in Bogenhausen, the upper-class district of Munich. He
described as a statistical «trick» the cliché that
portrays Europe as «a Continent almost wholly Christian». The
Church in the post-war world seemed to him a «Church of pagans. No
longer, as once, a Church of pagans become Christians, but a Church of
pagans who still call themselves Christians and in truth have become
pagans». He spoke of a new paganism «that grows without let in
the heart of the Church and threatens to demolish it from the
inside».
Bonn was a small city that was still tending its war
wounds, but the young and bright Bavarian professor came from the sheltered
and familiar world of the Domberg, the heights of Freising on which stand
clustered side by side the cathedral, the seminary where he had trained and
the School of Higher Theological Studies where he had given his first
courses in Dogmatic and Fundamental Theology in 1958. And the capital city
on the Rhine where he had been called to teach seemed a throbbing and open
metropolis. He wrote, again in his autobiography: «From every
direction came stimuli, all the more so since Belgium and Holland were
close and, traditionally, the Rhineland is a door open toward
France». For him it was «almost a dream» to have been
called to the chair sought in vain by his teacher Gottlieb Sohngen. And the
greatest gratification was the reception from the students.
A special professor
In his autobiography Ratzinger depicts the first months
of teaching in Bonn as «a feast of first love». All his
students from that time well remember the undergraduate grapevine that made
them crowd to the lessons of the enfant prodige theologian. The scholar of Judaism Peter Kuhn, who was
to become assistant lecturer under Professor Ratzinger in the years of
teaching at Tubingen, says: «I was then a twenty-year-old Lutheran. I
was attending the Evangelical Theological Faculty, after following the
lessons of Karl Barth in Basle. I knew the Bavarian Vinzenz Pfnür, who
had followed Ratzinger straight from Freising. He told me: listen, we have
an interesting professor, he’s worth the trouble of listening to,
even if you are a Protestant. At the first seminar, I thought immediately:
this man is really not like the other Catholic teachers I know». In
his manuscript Horst Ferdinand goes on: «The lectures were prepared
down to the millimeter. He gave them by paraphrasing the text that
he’d prepared with formulations that at times seemed to fit together
like a mosaic, with a wealth of images that reminded me of Romano Guardini.
In some lectures, as in the pauses in a concert, you could have heard a pin
drop». The Redemptorist Viktor Hahn, who was the first student to
“doctor” himself with Ratzinger, adds: «The room was
always packed, the students adored him. He had a beautiful and simple
language. The language of a believer».
What was it that so gripped the students in those
lessons given out in a soft, concentrated tone, without theatrical
gestures? It’s clear that what the young professor had to say was not
of his making. That he was not the protagonist. «I have never
sought», Ratzinger himself explains in the book-interview The salt of the earth, «to
create a system of my own, my own particular theology. If one really wants
to speak of specificity, it’s a matter simply of the fact that I set
myself to think together with the faith of the Church, and that means
thinking above all with the great thinkers of the faith».
The ways suggested by Ratzinger to the students so that
they might relish the adventurous discovery of the Tradition are the ones
that also gripped him in his university studies: the historicity of
Revelation, Saint Augustine, the sacramental nature of the Church.
Sufficient to read the titles of his courses and seminars in his first
years of teaching. In the 1959-1960 winter semester the course was devoted
to the “Nature and reality of Revelation”. The following
semester, the title of the course was “The doctrine of the
Church”. In the summer semester of 1961 he dealt with
“Philosophico-religious problems in the Confessions of Saint Augustine”…
If there was a distinctive feature to Ratzinger’s
lectures, it had nothing to do with a particular display of academic
erudition. The language had a limpid simplicity that allowed the core of
the questions faced, even the most complex, to be glimpsed with immediacy.
Roman Angulanza, one of the first students from the times in Bonn, says:
«He had reformulated, as it were, the way of giving lectures. He
would read the lectures in the kitchen to his sister Maria, who was an
intelligent person but hadn’t studied theology. And if the sister
showed she liked them, it was the sign for him that the lectures were all
right». Ninety-two year old Professor Alfred Läpple, who was
Ratzinger’s prefect of studies at the seminary in Freising, adds:
«Joseph always said: when you’re lecturing, the great thing is
when the students put down their pens and listen to you. While they go on
taking notes of what you’re saying, it means that you haven’t
struck them. But when they put their pens down and look at you while
you’re speaking, then it means that maybe you’ve touched their
hearts. He wanted to speak to the hearts of the students. He wasn’t
interested in only increasing their knowledge. He would say that the
important things in Christianity are learned only if they warm the
heart».
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 | | Up, the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität of Bonn; above, the Westfälische Wilhelms Universität of Münster | |  | |
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Precisely from the relish of rediscovering Tradition by
reading the Fathers a total and malleable openness to the questions, and
the ferment that made the theological thinking of those years vibrant, was
stirred in the young professor. In Bonn there were still elderly
professors, trained in the canons of the strictest anti-modernism, who
limited themselves to offering schematic neo-Scholastic theology to avoid
trouble with Rome. He didn’t seem conditioned by intimidation and
academic conformity. Hahn says: «I was struck when once in a lecture
he took as his text a passage in the Old Testament to compare the image of
Church circulating in those years with the empires of the Medes and the
Persians, who believed they would last for ever in virtue of the static
immutability of their laws. He added with energy that one should defend
oneself from that image of the Church». Peter Kuhn confirms:
«Compared to him the other professors seemed rigid and arthritic,
shut in their schema, above all toward us Evangelicals. He faced all the
questions without fear. He wasn’t afraid of launching out, while
other professors never left the rails of a tedious
self-congratulation».
The freedom and openness stood out in his relations
with the Protestant world. Quite a lot of students from the Evangelical
Theological Faculty – something not at all common in those years
– hastened to the lectures of the young Catholic professor who, in
the summer semester of 1961 gave the fundamental seminar on the topic
“Church, sacrament and faith in the Confessio
augustana” and in the winter semester of
1962-1963 even devoted his course to the Tractatus
de potestate papae by Phillip Melancthon. The
then student Vinzenz Pfnür, the one who had followed Ratzinger from
Freising to Bonn, was assigned a thesis on the doctrine of Justification in
Luther. And quite a few years later, as Professor of the History of the
Church, he was to make his contribution to the Catholic-Lutheran agreement
on Justification signed on 31 October 1999 in Augusta. He told 30Days: «In 1961 Ratzinger
wrote, for the Protestant Lexicon, Die Religion in Geschichte und
Gegenwart, an article on Protestantism from the
Catholic perspective. At that time it was quite unusual for a Catholic to
be asked to write for that publication. In that article Ratzinger set out
the elements of argument with the dialectical and existentialist theology
then dominant in the Protestant sphere. But he stressed that despite the
distance between the two “systems”, there was closeness in what
was transmitted to believers as the patrimony of the Church both on the
Catholic side and on the Protestant side, for example in prayer».
Ratzinger and Schlier became friends
The young Bavarian professor’s freedom from
schematism also emerges from his elective affinity with figures considered
on the borderline by the theological establishment of that time. It was in
Bonn that Ratzinger met and began to frequent Heinrich Schlier, the great
Lutheran exegete converted to Catholicism in 1953. Pfnür explains:
«As student of Rudolf Bultmann Schlier was a master of the
historico-philological exegetical method. On the question of the
“historical” Jesus, for Schlier it was certainly possible to
reconstruct decisive stretches of the life of Jesus, but the Jesus of the
faith is not accessible through the reconstruction of the historian, but
only through the four Gospels as unique legitimate interpretations. But
Bultmann’s theological existentialism was in danger of reducing the
Resurrection to an inward, mental and psychological phenomenon experienced
by the disciples within their own vision of faith. Whereas for Schlier the
Gospels, as they are read and interpreted by the Church, describe real
events, and not inward visions produced by the religious feelings of the
apostles. It was on this shared perception that Ratzinger and Schlier
became friends». An approach that assumes and also enhances with
critical discernment important features of Bultmann’s teaching on the
mode of approaching Holy Scripture, without aprioristic no-go areas. Around
the late ’sixties and the early ’seventies the two professors
were both to animate the weeks of study for young theologians organized at
Bierbronnen, in the Black Forest. Schlier was also to be guest at the
periodical theological gatherings of the circle of the students doing
doctorates with Ratzinger, begun in systematic form in the period of
teaching in Tübingen. But in the Bonn years Ratzinger’s fondness
for the great exegete doesn’t seem to have been shared by the rest of
the academic body. After his conversion to Catholicism, something that
deprived him of the possibility of teaching in the Evangelical Faculty,
Schlier found no place in the Faculty of Catholic Theology, and ended up
“parked” in that of Philosophy, to teach Ancient Christian
Literature. Students from all over Germany, from Holland, from Belgium,
came to listen to him. «But some professors», Peter Kuhn
recalls, «were hostile to him. They considered his coming from
Lutheranism and from Bultmann suspect. And certainly they were also envious
of the breadth of his human and intellectual horizon».
Another “borderline” friendship marking
Ratzinger’s years in Bonn was with the Hindologist Paul Hacker, whose
qualities of genius are traced in strong colors in Ratzinger’s
autobiography. Coming from Lutheranism, Hacker also became a Catholic, by a
route made up also «of whole nights» spent «discussing
with the Fathers or with Luther, in front of a bottle or even more than one
of red wine». Ratzinger benefited largely from Hacker’s
boundless knowledge of Hinduism when he had to shape the lectures on the
history of the religions that were part of the course of Fundamental
Theology. It was precisely on Hinduism that Ratzinger’s interest in
the world of the religions focused in those years. «Some
students», Kuhn recalls, «complained jokingly about it. They
said: Ratzinger is totally absorbed in Hinduism, he talks to us only of
Rama and of Khrisna, we can’t take it any more…». But to
those years also dates Ratzinger’s first significant meeting with a
figure from the Jewish world: Rabbi Horowitz, who held seminars at the
Evangelical Theological Faculty.
The years of the Council
In those years many chairs in the Faculty of Theology
of the German capital were held by renowned professors. There was the great
historian of the Church Hubert Jedin who, according to some students of the
time, was responsible for Ratzinger’s call to Bonn. There was the
historian of dogmas Theodor Klauser, the star of the Faculty, always
elegant, going round the city in his crimson Mercedes (Ratzinger used
public transport or walked, and was recognizable from a distance by the
inevitable beret that he himself mockingly called «my helmet of
readiness»); there was the other Bavarian dogmatist Johann Auer, whom
Ratzinger was to meet again as a colleague in the years of teaching in
Ratisbon. A small group of students also began to gather round the
professor: Pfnür, Angulanza and a few others. On Sundays Ratzinger
invited them to lunch in his cottage on the Wurzerstrasse in Bad Godesberg,
where he had moved after leaving his earlier arrangement at the Albertinum
Theological monastery. His sister Maria lived with him and she was a good
cook. Sometimes Auer also joined in those Bavarian banquets.
In Bonn Ratzinger also engaged his first assistant:
Werner Böckenförde, who died two years ago. A native of
Münster with a strong character who at times gave the impression of
wanting to “direct” his professor. Angulanza explains:
«Böckenförde esteemed Ratzinger as theologian, but was more
interested in the processes and happenings of a politico-ecclesiastical
sort, things he judged in very critical manner. The relation between the
two was formally correct but not familiar».
The calm and dynamic atmosphere in which his work was
done in Bonn was, however, destined to vanish. The hundreds of students who
crowded the lectures of the thirty-year-old professor aroused the envy of
old professors like Johannes Botterweck (Old Testament) and Theodor
Schäfer (New Testament). Angulanza recalls again: «I
wouldn’t know how to judge Schäfer, because I never attended his
dry lectures, in which he restricted himself to quoting his Compendium to the Introduction of the New Testament in tedious fashion. To us students, Botterweck seemed full
of himself, presumptuous and argumentative». The academic envy grew
when John XXIII summoned Vatican Council II and the cardinal of Cologne,
Joseph Frings, after hearing a lecture by the young Bavarian teacher on the
theology of the Council, chose him as his theological advisor with a view
to his participation in the Council sessions. Frings and his secretary
Hubert Luthe – the future bishop of Essen and a classmate of
Ratzinger at the University of Munich – sent their collaborator the schemata of the documents
readied by the preparatory Commission to get his opinion. Ratzinger, as he
tells in his autobiography, got from them «an impression of rigidity
and of insufficient openness, of an excessive link with neo-Scholastic
theology, of thinking too much professorial and too little pastoral».
It was Ratzinger who wrote the famous lecture read by Frings in Genoa 19
November 1961 on “Vatican Council II in the face of modern
thought”, that summarized the expectations of reform stirred in most
European episcopates by the coming ecclesial assembly. When the Council
began, Frings brought his advisor with him to Rome and gained for him
official appointment as theologian of the Council. He was to get help from
him in drafting the interventions that represented the arguments of the
reforming wing of the Council assembly. And he was to give his collaborator
the chance to become one of the leading figures “behind the
scenes” of the Council. But this use of the thirty-five-year-old
theological talent was not welcomed by all in Bonn. And the air grew
thicker.
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 | | Joseph Ratzinger, as expert
for the Vatican II Ecumenical Council,
in a photo from autumn of 1964 | | |
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Invidia clericorum
In the circle of those taking doctorates under
Ratzinger there were two Orthodox students, Damaskinos Papandréou
and Stylianos Harkianakis, today both metropolitans of the Ecumenic
Patriarchy of Constantinople. But the Faculty Council rejected their
request to take their doctorates in the Catholic Faculty. While Ratzinger
was away on a trip to Rome for the Council, the marks of the tests of some
of his students were lowered by his detractors. And the thesis of the
student Johannes Dörmann on the new knowledge acquired on the theory
of evolution from the studies of Johann Jacob Bachofen (the first person to
theorize the existence of an original primitive matriarchy) was blocked
with the argument that it was not a theological work. Ratzinger was
reminded of the drama he himself had gone through with his examination to
qualify as lecturer, when the professor of Dogmatic Theology, Michael
Schmaus, his co-supervisor, had tried to fail his thesis on Saint
Bonaventure, branding it as modernism. And he realized that it was time for
a change of air.
In 1962 the chair of Dogmatic Theology at the renowned
University of Münster came free: the great dogmatic theologian Hermann
Volk, appointed bishop of Mainz, asked for his successor to be Joseph
Ratzinger. Viktor Hahn recalls: «The professor at first refused
the invitation: he didn’t want to leave Bonn, also so as not to
distance himself from Cologne where the collaboration with Frings had
begun. But four months later he went back on his decision and accepted.
Undoubtedly the hostilities around him had grown with his nomination as
expert to the Council. I asked Professor Jedin whether it had been the
other professors who got rid of him. He told me: you might not be
wrong». Botterweck, in gossip among colleagues, was to boast of
having «made him flee» Bonn.
In Münster Ratzinger took a small house with his
sister Maria on the Annette von Droste Hülshoff avenue, near to the
Aasee man-made lake. The top floor was to house two of his students, the
“loyalists” Pfnür and Angulanza, who worked with him at
the University as scholarly collaborators. Of a morning he would say mass
in the chapel of a nearby clinic, and then go into the Faculty by bicycle.
Peter Kuhn relates: «Münster is a low-lying city, it’s not
far from Holland, everyone got around there by bike, as many still do
today. I told Pfnür to buy one for our professor, but he’s a
parsimonious sort and found a second-hand one, so ramshackled that I still
mock him today, saying that because of that bicycle the Pope’s knees
hurt even now …». In Münster the circle of students
wanting to take their doctorates with him grew larger. With the more
intimate the tradition of Bavarian lunches continued. Sometimes the squad
of theologians with their professor found themselves eating at a tavern on
the lake that seemed made to measure for them: it was called Zum Himmelreich, At the Kingdom of
Heaven.
The atmosphere Ratzinger found in the Faculty was
cordial and stimulating. «The Münster Faculty», Pfnür
recalls, «was a rising Faculty that offered better spaces and
financial possibilities than Bonn. And dogmatic theology was the field of
action most suited to Professor Ratzinger, where his patristic and
scriptural knowledge could truly come out». The “classic”
lines of Ratzinger’s teaching were reshaped in the light of what was
happening at the Council then taking place in Rome. In 1963 his courses
were devoted to the Introduction to dogmatics and to the doctrine on the
Eucharist. The seminars focused on the theme “Scripture and
Tradition”. In 1964 and in 1965 the seminars centered on the Lumen gentium Constitution of
Council Vatican II. In the 1965-1966 winter semester one of the courses of
Dogmatic Theology consisted of a retrospective of the Council that had just
concluded, while the seminars were based on the Council Constitution Dei Verbum on Revelation.
There were no problems with colleagues. Joseph Pieper
was teaching in Philosophy. In Theology there was the combative Erwin
Iserloh, known for his resolute opposition. The teaching staff was joined
in those years by other young promises of German theology such as Walter
Kasper and Johannes Baptist Metz, conceiver of the political theology with
which Ratzinger was to quarrel in the years to come. But at the time of
Münster nobody seemed to suffer the partiality that the students
reserved for him. Pfnür says again: «The people enrolled on the
course were about 350, but an average of 600 attended the lectures.
Students from other Faculties such as Philosophy and Jurisprudence also
came to hear Ratzinger. We printed the hand-outs of the course of
Ecclesiology on the centrality of the Eucharist, and we sold 850 copies of
it». Kuhn mocks softly: «Pfnür had set up a small printing
shop in Münster. The lectures were cyclostyled, and then whole
packages were sent all over Germany, to Ratzinger fans scattered in the
other theological Faculties».
His intense participation in the Council contributed to
Professor Ratzinger’s growing reputation. He wrote opinions for his
cardinal, he was charged with drafting the schema for documents alternative
to those prepared by the Roman Curia. He frequented and collaborated with
all the great theologians of the Council: Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Jean
Daniélou, Gérard Philips, Karl Rahner. «To us
students», Pfnür recalls, «he said that he was
particularly impressed by the Latin American theologians and bishops
». Back in Germany at the end of the Rome sessions, he offered public
reports on the work of the Council at packed lectures. Occasions of
reflection in which Ratzinger’s judgment also freed itself of the
progressivist vaunting and polemical excitement that already seemed to be
infecting other “reformist” theologians of the Council.
«Every time I returned from Rome,» he says in his autobiography
«I found an ever more agitated state of mind in the Church and among
theologians. The impression was increasing that in the Church there was
nothing stable, that everything can be subject to revision».
Pfnür explains today: «The first signs of chaos appeared not so
much in the Faculty as in the parishes. The parish priests began to change
the liturgy to their own liking, and on that he straightaway made very
critical judgments».
In the Faculty things continued to go in the proper
way. Ratzinger enjoyed the unanimous respect of colleagues and students.
Hahn spoke to 30Days
of an emblematic episode: «One day I found the lecture room full:
everybody wanted to hear a public disputatio between Professor Metz and the Swiss theologian Hans
Urs von Balthasar, who had criticized his political theology. Metz asked
Ratzinger to chair the debate. Our professor, between one comment and
another from the two contenders, summed up their thinking with an
expository richness that made even the darkest passages of the two debaters
clear and interesting. At the end the audience applauded both Metz and von
Balthasar with respect. But the longest and most enthusiastic applause went
to the referee».
The crowded courses, colleagues who esteem him, the
relationships woven with bishops and theologians all the world over…
What drove Ratzinger to leave Münster?
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 | | Ratzinger, Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the School of Higher Philosophical-theological Studies in Freising, in 1959 | | |
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The “invitation” from Küng
The professor, by now of worldwide fame, was not one of
those people who enslave themselves to follow the idol of an
academico-ecclesiastical career and pass over their dear ones. His sister
Maria, who stood by him with almost maternal dedication, hadn’t
managed to settle down in the handsome Westphalian city. For her the most
beautiful place in Münster was the station, from which so many trains
leave for Bavaria. Hahn recounts: «Some years later, when I asked him
why he left, he confirmed that his sister was unhappy in Münster. She
had devoted her life to him, and he couldn’t but take account of her
homesickness». So, when in 1966 an invitation came for the second
chair of Dogmatic Theology from the Faculty of Catholic Theology in
Tubingen, Ratzinger didn’t think too long about it. On his first trip
to the Swabian city Pfnür, who was in charge of the move, accompanied
him as usual. To welcome them there was a theologian whom Ratzinger had
known since 1957 and whom he had also met at the Council. A person who
respected him and had even worked on his colleagues in the Faculty to get
him to Tübingen. He invited them to lunch and showed himself full of
concern and cordiality toward the new acquisition of the Tübingen
Faculty. His name was Hans Küng.
To be continued…
(with the collaboration of Pierluca Azzaro)
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