Pope Benedict XVI, Ratzinger Report, Leading Up to the Catholic Catechism

Twenty years after Vatican II the Catholic Church seemed like a boat adrift without a rudder. Cardinal Ratzinger, who would later be ordained Pope Benedict, expressed his concerns and frustrations with the lack of direction in the Church and the misconceptions of Vatican II in interviews with Vittorio Messori, an Italian journalist, who would publish them in the Ratzinger Report.

Ratzinger discusses the frustration of many in the hierarchy of the Church on how so few of the faithful, both critics and champions of Vatican II, actually read and understood the decrees of the Council. Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger saw this a lack of catechesis, so shortly after the 1985 publication of the Ratzinger Report, the Catholic Church started the process of drafting a new Catholic Catechism, soliciting input from over a dozen cardinals, bishops, and theologians. Ratzinger compared the post-Vatican II Church to a “construction site where the blueprint had been lost but everyone continues to build according to his taste.”

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We also reflect on:
• Roles of Pope John XXIII, Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac in the Second Vatican Council.
• How the Council of Trent and Vatican I influenced the decrees of Vatican II.
• How Charles Borromeo implemented the decrees of the Council of Trent.
• The essence of faith, obedience, liturgy, the sacrament of penance, and the sacrament of marriage.
• St Augustine and the two-fold Love of God and love of neighbor.
• Gaudete Et Exsultate encyclical of Pope Francis, On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World, and the preferential option for the poor.
• The 1994 Pontifical Biblical Commission.
• Two methods of biblical interpretation, the patristic method, which studies the writings of the Church Fathers on the Scriptures, and the historical-critical method.
• Role of missionaries in a post-colonial world.
• George Weigel’s biography of Pope Benedict XVI.

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This is original content based on research by Bruce Strom and his blogs. Images in the Public Domain, many from Wikipedia, some from the National Archives, are selected to provide illustration. When images of the actual topic or event are not available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

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