Joseph Ratzinger’s coat of many colours

A common but flawed assumption about Joseph Ratzinger is that he is simply an ardent conservative. That’s the figure we see in Netflix’s The Two Popes. Anthony Hopkins’s performance may be a visual feast, but the script leaves no cliché unaired. Better informed observers note that the Vatican’s former doctrinal guardian is a poacher turned gamekeeper who once supported major reform of the Catholic Church but then performed a somersault, partly because of worry about threats including Marxism and moral relativism. Among the truest verdicts is that he has always been torn between different versions of himself. The cultural warrior who could urge Catholics not to practise yoga and to avoid the Harry Potter books has insisted at other moments that there are as many paths to God as there are people.

Being the most distinguished thinker at the Church’s helm in many centuries, Ratzinger has a good story to tell. In outline it runs like this. Science is vital, but the human quest for understanding will never be exhausted by mapping the physical world alone. It isn’t reasonable to suppose that only reason viewed in one narrow way discloses truth to us: a rounded quest for meaning will always include the moral and the aesthetic, while also being open to the numinous. Religion is not on the way out. Instead of resisting a thirst for transcendence, we should focus on how to live with it in ways that promote our flourishing.

The snag is that this positive message has been shadowed by a mixture of authoritarianism and an unduly sombre attitude to wider culture. The Grand Inquisitor label is false. But as one of John Paul II’s chief lieutenants between 1981 and his own election as pope in 2005, Ratzinger oversaw investigations that would shame a secular employment tribunal in their one-sidedness.