New book is a celebration and a guide to the wisdom of Joseph Ratzinger

On December 31, 2022—three years ago today—the world lost one of the greatest Catholic leaders of the past century: Pope Benedict XVI. But, in addition to his many pastoral roles as priest, bishop, prefect of doctrine, pope, and pope emeritus, Joseph Ratzinger also served the Church as a brilliant and prolific theologian.

Since the late 1970s, most of the many books, addresses, and interviews of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI have been published by Ignatius Press. And his Collected Works, which will be available in English over the coming years through Word on Fire Academic, totals twenty-five volumes.

For those looking for a more immediate one-stop shop of Ratzinger’s thought, Our Sunday Visitor has released a helpful new primer from Benedictine College theologian Matthew J. Ramage: The Essential Guide to Ratzinger: The Man and His Message.

Ramage, who is a regular contributor to CWR, opens the book with an epigraph from Ratzinger summarizing his own theological project: “My basic impulse,” he explained, “was always to free up the authentic kernel of the faith from encrustations and to give this kernel strength and dynamism. This impulse is the constant of my life.”

What is that “authentic kernel” of Catholicism precisely? What, for Ratzinger, is the essence of what it means to be a disciple of Christ and a member of the Church—the essence he wanted to purify and reinvigorate his whole life long?

Ramage suggests a few overarching themes in the opening chapter, but the most fundamental and conspicuous throughout the course of the book seems to be a penchant for synthesizing “domains that are often separated.”

“Ratzinger’s entire life and ministry,” he writes, “enshrined the Catholic ‘both-and’ principle.” Indeed, in 2007, Benedict XVI referred to Catholicism as “the religion of the great ‘et et’ [and-and],” concluding: “The exact meaning of ‘Catholic’ is ‘synthesis.’”

We even see this both-and principle incarnated in Ratzinger’s long service to the Church. As Ratzinger’s successor would later observe, the “pastoral” and the “theological” are themselves often divided from one another, “as though they were two opposing, separated realities.” Yet the two are fundamentally united and mutually implicative—a truth that Ratzinger incarnated in his very person: He was both a great pastor and a great theologian—two interlocking and interdependent movements toward God.

Throughout the course of this Essential Guide, Ramage—a studied disciple of Ratzinger’s substance and style—gives a tour that’s both comprehensive and clear, distilling deep research into manageable summaries on a host of subjects. We encounter in twelve chapters Ratzinger’s perspective on Scripture and its interpretation, Jesus of Nazareth, Christian faith in an age of unbelief, and the Church in the public square—just to name a few.

Again and again, Ratzinger’s both/and wisdom shines. Ramage explains how his thought harmonizes faith and reason in general, and creation and evolution in particular; truth and love, or logos and agape; divine causation and creaturely causation; the Christ of faith and the historical Jesus; divine law and human freedom; the divinization of man and the transformation of the cosmos; unity and variety in the Church; the vertical and the horizontal in the liturgy; and more.

“Christian spirituality,” Ramage reflects at one point, “is a balancing act”—and Ratzinger, he shows time and time again, had exquisite balance. On any given polarity, he was always careful to harness the strengths of both sides while avoiding the weaknesses of each without the other.

One especially prominent both-and—one whose importance has only increased in the intervening years—is the union of the old and the new in the life of the Church. Ratzinger celebrated tradition but also embraced authentic progress; he resisted an ossified traditionalism with no feet to move, but also pushed back against an open-ended progressivism with no sense of place.

As Ramage shows, this old-new unity manifests in Ratzinger in different ways, including his writings on Vatican II (both deep preconciliar roots and legitimate postconciliar developments), Scripture (both the patristic-medieval and historical-critical approaches), science (both biblical teaching and scientific discovery), and liturgy (both ancient and modern expressions of worship).

And the golden thread uniting all of them is a desire to, as Christ himself teaches, bring out of the Church’s treasury both “what is new and what is old” (Matt. 13:52)—not, as so many Catholics do, choose new at the expense of the old, or vice versa.

To read Joseph Ratzinger is to spend time with a great teacher. He’s thoughtful yet accessible, careful yet compelling, gentle yet directional—and, like all great teachers, he stoops to conquer, conveying his own understanding of and care for his subject precisely to draw you into that same understanding and care. The man never gets in the way of his message, nor does he simply convey it like some lifeless object; instead, he facilitates an encounter with truth.

And that message, that truth, is nothing other than the very Logos of God become man—the communio of heaven and earth in Christ, and in his Body, the Church, “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23). This is the heart of Benedict’s Catholic wisdom: the Christ who is both divine and human and both Head and Body—the “Total Christ,” as Saint Augustine, one of the great inspirations of both Benedict XVI and Leo XIV, put it.

“All not-at-one-ness, all division,” Ratzinger proclaimed in his beloved Introduction to Christianity: “rests on a concealed lack of real Christliness.”

With this guide to one of the modern Church’s keenest and kindliest guides, Matthew Ramage offers a wonderful addition to the library of anyone seeking to better understand Ratzinger, the Catholic Church, or the divine Wisdom that governs both.

The Essential Guide to Ratzinger: The Man and His Message
By Matthew J. Ramage
Our Sunday Visitor, 2025
Paperback, 256 pages

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