Benedict XVI: A Life – Professor and Prefect to Pope and Pope Emeritus, 1966-The Present
by Peter Seewald
Bloomsbury, 2021

Peter Seewald concludes his monumental life of Pope Benedict XVI with this second volume, which covers virtually all the modern epochs of the Catholic Church in the last half-century, from Second Vatican Council to the massive child abuse scandals that rocked the Church starting in Ireland in 2009, which one commentator referred to as “the 9/11 of our faith.” The story also follows Benedict from his powerful behind-the-scenes position as Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith through the decades to his decision to become the first ‘pope emeritus’ in Church history (and the first Pope to resign since 1294).

Seewald covers all of this in meticulous, exhaustively-researched detail, and his years-long access to Benedict in conversations and interviews will certainly make these volumes indispensable for future historians. Every Pope warrants a biography of this lavish length and detail, and yet only a few of them have had one.

Those future historians will need to observe the same caution that current-day readers will need to observe, the foremost being: always keep in mind the potential payments being made for all that irreplaceable access. Joseph Ratzinger, the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI, has always been a guarded, stringent thinker, speaker, and writer, a secretive but never sympathetic figure, which should make readers cautious when they encounter passages like this:

Joseph Ratzinger incorporated a new intelligence in recognizing and expressing the faith and at the same time defended the piety of simple people. He was a nonconformist and non-comfortable; his conversation partners were always also people who were at odds with the Establishment. He gave the papacy a new quality. He rid it of false attributes, unnecessary pomp, the lust for power, and showed Christ’s representative as a symbol of Christ being in the world. Without any ifs or buts, he was wholly dedicated to what the office had to give.

Counterpoints to these kinds of pronouncements - and there are plenty of them in this book - are everywhere in the world except in Seewald’s pages. Back in 2016, for instance, Alexander Stille could write in the New Yorker: “During most of his tenure, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith was too busy disciplining anyone who dared step out of line with Church teachings on personal sexuality and family planning to bother with the thousands of priests molesting children.” Which is only one such criticism, and a comparatively mild example of what might be leveled at Ratzinger at virtually any point in his long ecclesiastical career.

The abuse scandal looms over this book, and Seewald’s portrait of Ratzinger through it all, buttressed by extensive research, is as clear-cut as anything in either volume of this biography: at every turn, it shows Ratzinger single-mindedly working the levers of Curia politics and bureaucracy in order to root out the guilty, to establish meaningful, often unprecedented punishments for them, and somehow to manage to near-impossible feat of acknowledging the mind-numbing scope of the problem while simultaneously preventing it from destroying the very Church he would one day come to lead. Readers who come to this book assuming Ratzinger himself must have been complicit - or at least complacent - in this scandal will finish it convinced otherwise.

And yet, through it all, the man himself always quietly repulses. Brave he may occasionally be in odd, clerical ways; sharply intelligent he most certainly is in every capacity where the reader encounters him, from clerical administration to systematic theology. But likable? Never, not even - in fact particularly not even - when he’s speaking directly to Seewald in any of their many interviews, including the final one conducted via email in 2018, where the pope emeritus writes this:

A hundred years ago anyone would have found it absurd to speak of homosexual marriage. Today anyone opposing it is socially excommunicated. The same goes for abortion and creating humans in a laboratory. Modern society is formulating an anti-Christian creed and opposing it is punished with social excommunication. It is only natural to fear this spiritual power of Antichrist and it really needs help from the prayers of a whole diocese and the world church to resist it.

Readers mustn’t expect this biographer to resist, even gently, the implication from a former (or is it current? Can there actually be such a thing as a pope emeritus? Absent an email interview with Jesus Christ, can any Christian actually know?) Pontiff that abortion and homosexuality are tools of the Antichrist. But they might hope he wouldn’t amplify such noxious nonsense with any of his own, as in hyperventilating passages like this, where, it’s true, “creating humans in a laboratory” is never mentioned - but only just:

What had he actually managed to achieve? The world had entered a post-Christian age. The church had lost its power to shape society. People got spiritual stimulation, if at all, from streaming services, or from things on YouTube or Instagram which promised happiness, success and a fulfilled life. The Holy Eucharist? Always dispensable. 

To call such a straw man insulting to the world’s billion Catholics (“always dispensable”? The mind boggles) is putting things mildly, and it stirs sympathy for any biographer compelled to endure such self-pity from a bitter old man who was only just recently an absolute monarch. Pope Benedict, a key figure in half a dozen ways in modern Church history, will be the subject of many more biographies (probably many will yet appear in his own lifetime), but few will be as sympathetic and none as intimate as this two-volume masterpiece by Peter Seewald. Whether that sympathy is earned, and whether that intimacy was too high a price to pay for the mountain of priceless information it yielded, will be up to readers to judge. Certainly big biographies of Benedict’s far more amiable successor won’t make such gripping reading.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.