The pontificate of Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, of German origin, was solemnly inaugurated on 24 April 2005, a day before the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Italy, two weeks before the commemorations marking the end of the Second World War. The German and Bavarian flags fluttered over St. Peter’s Square without causing any surprise. The election of a German pope means the end of the process of Germany’s reconciliation with Europe and of Europe’s reconciliation with itself. The new pope’s choice of the name Benedict is also very significant, in terms of its dual reference that he himself explained to the cardinals. The reference closest to us in point of time is that to his predecessor Benedict XV, who was pope from 1914 to 1922. He was elected on 3 September 1914, a month after the outbreak of the First World War. He was the pope of a time of war, of the folly of nationalism, of the cannons and rifles blessed by the bishops of all nations. He was especially the pope of peace, who continuously denounced the war as a “futile massacre”, as the “suicide of civil Europe”. He was the pope who with his famous appeal of 1917 proposed a balanced peace, without victors or vanquished, but who was denounced in the belligerent nations as a man who had sold out to the enemy: in France he was called “the boche pope” and in Germany “the French pope”. Benedict XV was the pope of the Gospel. He was the pope of reconciliation and justice. His encyclical Pacem Dei munus of 1920 still remains to this day an irreplaceable appeal to peace, an affirmation of the meaning of peace, and the conditions for a just and lasting peace, i.e. a peace based on reconciliation and justice, respect and charity. He was forced to come to terms with the great massacres of the Christians of the twentieth century, from the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire to the Bolshevik persecution. With all the means at his disposal, with words, with charitable actions, with diplomacy, he sought to defend the values of peace. He was also the pope of the renewal of Church’s missionary enterprise, with a vision that entailed profound respect for the peoples to whom the Church addresses herself, demonstrating that the Catholic mission never enters into national interests, but simply leads to the Gospel. The second reference in the pope’s name, and perhaps the one more forgotten today, is clearly that to St. Benedict, whom Paul VI had designated as Patron of Europe, a constructor of civilization, founder of Western monasticism, creator of a network of monasteries that preserved civilization against the barbarian invasions, thus helping to form a European conscience among many different peoples and to realise, as Andrea Riccardi has written, “a decisive nervous system for Europe”. Europe was fertilized by the Benedictine rule, by the spiritual irrigation carried out by the Benedictines founded on prayer, work and hospitality. On the occasion of the 15th centenary of the birth of St. Benedict, John Paul II said at Norcia in 1980: “Benedict, reading the signs of the time, saw that it was necessary to realize a radical programme of evangelic holiness in an ordinary form, in the dimensions of the daily life of all men. The heroic needed to become normal and quotidian, and the normal and quotidian to become heroic. In this way he, the father of monks, the legislator of monastic life in the West, also indirectly became the pioneer of a new civilization”. Today, re-proposing the example of Benedict is a way of helping to form new responses, faced by the many new forms of barbarism that are undermining our societies, and the difficulties of a Europe that, after the great impulse of the Christian Democrat heads of government of the 1950s, is encountering great difficulties in building a genuine unity that is not just that of the market, in establishing a profound dialogue between the civilizations, especially with the southern hemisphere, and in affirming its own identity with its clear Christian roots. On 1st April 2005, the day before the death of John Paul II, on receiving the prestigious St. Benedict Prize at Subiaco “for the promotion of culture and the family in Europe”, Cardinal Ratzinger said with regard to the old Europe: “the real danger and the gravest peril of our time consists precisely in this imbalance between technological possibilities and moral energies”. Without doubt, Benedict XVI will find moral energy in such great examples, in the monk who unified Europe and in the pope who promoted the virtue of peace and proclaimed the Gospel to the world.
