International Conference
“Remembering Pope Benedict XVI: Life, Teaching, Legacy”
Campo Santo Teutonico, Rome, 30 December 2023
REMEMBERING BENEDICT XVI:
HIS DEATH IN THE LIGHT OF ETERNAL LIFE
1. Joseph Ratzinger was born on the 16th of April 1927 and baptised immediately afterwards, on Holy Saturday. In this way, his life was linked to the Paschal Mystery from the very beginning, and this always filled him with gratitude[1] In the liturgy of the Church, however, Holy Saturday is the day of God’s silence, the silence of Jesus Christ’s burial, the passivity of death. On Holy Saturday, it becomes clear that we humans will be completely alone in death, as all relationships are broken off in it. Death is loneliness par excellence; and its essence is the absence of relationships. This is the dark and sad side of Holy Saturday.
However, Holy Saturday also has a bright and comforting side. On this day, we primarily recognise that Jesus Christ died and was buried and descended into the realm of death, as we confess in the Creed. The Lord went to the place of the greatest loneliness and total lack of relationship and with his warming love, he brought movement into the rigor mortis of the underworld and transformed the realm of death into a place of new life: “the voice of God resounded in the realm of death”. The unimaginable occurred: namely, Love penetrated “hell”.[2] With these words, Pope Benedict XVI expressed the brightest side of Holy Saturday during the veneration of the holy shroud in Turin: since Christ brought love to the place of death, there is life in the midst of death, new relationship and communication, namely communion with God. For communion with God proves to be stronger than the disintegration of the body. At this point it can already be said that it is part of Pope Benedict's theological legacy that he has explained the mystery of death and life in a new way.
2. This already hints at what the Christian faith calls eternal life. It is the final fulfilment of our human life that is given to us by Christ, with whom we may dwell for eternity. Eternal life means definitively entering into the community of God and loving Him, as Pope Benedict XVI expressed in his last words before his death: “Lord, I love you.” This summarises in one word what eternal life is all about: allowing oneself to experience the love of God to the fullest and worshipping Him in love.
Eternal life is perfection in Christ; those who belong to Him live eternally. So, if eternal life is being in Christ, then it automatically includes being with all the people who together form the one body of Christ. For Pope Benedict, heaven is therefore an elementary communal reality: “Heaven is a stranger to isolation. It is the open society of the communion of the saints, and in this way the fulfilment of all human communion. This is not by way of competition with the perfect disclosure of God's Face, but, on the contrary, is its very consequence.”[3]
3. This shows that eternal life is the most precious gift of God and his love for us. Human love is already designed for indestructibility and therefore for infinity; it is, as it were, “a call for infinity.”[4] But human love is not able to give such infinity by itself. Rather, it is the boundless and infinite love of God that wants eternity for every human being. Christian faith gives us this confidence when we live in the hope that only God can give. He alone is able to give us what we cannot, namely eternal life. Pope Benedict has described this truly Christian hope in these profound words: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love.”[5] This description of eternal life is not surprising when you consider that for Pope Benedict, God is that love, with which he encounters us humans and which he has definitively revealed in his Son Jesus Christ.
It is the boundless love of God that gives us eternal life. Even if man is created for immortality, this is not simply a natural fact. It fulfils itself in the relationship with Him who is eternal and gives eternal life. God is immortal, namely, as a relational event of triune love. This is what the Trinity stands for: “God is not ‘atomic’: he is relationship, since he is love. It is for this reason that he is life.”[6]
The unmistakable characteristic of Joseph Ratzinger’s theological thinking on life after death lies in this relational event, which forms the basis for the Christian hope of eternal life. He teaches a dialogical understanding of eternal life, as he expresses in these words: “Immortality does not simply result from the self-evident fact that the indivisible cannot die, but from the saving act of one who is love and has the power to save: Man can no longer perish totally because he is known and loved by God. If all love wants eternity – God’s love not only wants it, but also works and is it.”[7]
4. This should make it clear that the hope of eternal life with God is the central theme; it belongs to the innermost centre of the Christian faith. The Christian belief in eternal life after death is the central moment of our faith. At its core, the confession of eternal life is nothing other than the confession that God is real and lives: “Without an answer to the question of God, death remains a cruel riddle, and any other answer leads to contradiction. But if God is God, the God who showed himself in Jesus Christ, then there is eternal life, and then even death is a road to hope.”[8] What kind of God would this be if he only remained faithful to his creatures during their relatively short life on earth, but capitulated before their coffin? God is a God of life, he remains with us when we have become completely lonely in our death: “What is affirmed is that God himself, and the communion he offers, are life. To belong to him, to be called by him, is to be rooted in life indestructible.”[9]
Belief in eternal life is therefore the reason for Christian hope in human life. Indeed, what kind of hope would this be if it were only hope for our earthly life and its sole power were to bring us closer to the death-proof end of our life in the grave? Christian hope worthy of the name goes beyond death. Therefore, despite all the smaller and larger hopes that we humans need every day to live, the very great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole and can give us humans eternal life: “Man's great, true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God – God who has loved us and who continues to love us ‘to the end,’ until all ‘is accomplished’.”[10]
Hope in God is centred above all on his love for justice. For without God’s justice, human suffering and injustice in our history would have the last word for all eternity. Only God is able to create justice beyond death for all the dead. That is why faith in the Last Judgement is hope: “The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope.”[11] In the eyes of Pope Benedict, the question of justice “constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favour of faith in eternal life.”[12]
5. This very hope shows that eternal life does not only begin after our death, but already in our present life. Whenever God’s will is done in our lives as it is in heaven, earth also becomes heaven. Since we will be completely in Christ and in his body – the Church – in eternal life, the Christian enters the realm of eternal life wherever he enters the ego of Christ in his life. This means that the real dividing line between death and life “does not actually run through biological death”, “but between being with the One who is life and the isolation which refuses such ‘being-with.”[13]
Christian faith gives us this certainty. It is already promised to us in baptism. In baptism, our death and our new birth are sacramentally performed by God. It becomes definitive in death. Pope Benedict says: “From baptism onwards, we belong to the body of the Risen One and in this sense are already attached to our future.”[14] If, in this sense, baptismal theology is death theology, then the whole of Christian life aims to ensure that our death will one day be the “realisation of our baptism”[15].
The prefiguration par excellence of eternal life is given to us in the celebration of the Eucharist. It is the celebration of the paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In it, the fulfilment of man and the whole of creation is present, which is why it is called pharmakon athanasias, the remedy of immortality. For Pope Benedict, every “Eucharist is Parousia, the Lord’s coming, and yet the Eucharist is even more truly the tensed yearning that he would reveal his hidden Glory”[16].
The hidden splendour of the Lord has already been revealed to Pope Benedict. He, who was born and baptised on a Holy Saturday, may now – we may assume – enjoy the very bright side of Holy Saturday for eternity, that life triumphs over death and that God’s love is stronger than the death of man. Pope Benedict XVI is now fully immersed in the Paschal Mystery; for him the eternal Easter has begun.
[1] Cf. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Milestones. Memoirs 1927-1977, trans. by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1998), 8.
[2] Benedict XVI., Meditation. Veneration of the Holy Shroud, 2 May 2010, in https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2010/may/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20100502_meditazione-torino.html [18.12.2023].
[3] J. Ratzinger, Eschatology. Death an Eternal Life (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 235.
[4] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Indroduction to Christianity, trans. by J. R. Foster, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1990), 302
[5] Benedikt XVI., Spe salvi, Nr. 3.
[6] Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology, 158.
[7] Joseph Ratzinger – Benedikt XVI., Schwierigkeiten mit dem Apostolicum. Höllenfahrt – Himmelfahrt – Auferstehung des Fleisches, in: Ders., Grundsatzreden aus fünf Jahrzehnten (Regensburg 2005) 43-60, zit. 55.
[8] J. Ratzinger, Stätten der Hoffnung – Die römischen Katakomben. Betrachtung zum Allerseelentag, in: Ders., Auferstehung und ewiges Leben = Gesammelte Schriften. Band 10 (Freiburg i. Br. 2012) 665-669, zit. 668.
[9] J. Ratzinger, Eschatology, 114.
[10] Benedikt XVI., Spe salvi, Nr. 27.
[11] Spe Salvi, Nr. 44.
[12] Spe Salvi, Nr. 43
[13] Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology, 207.
[14] Own translation: Vorwort Papst Benedikts XVI. zur Neuausgabe 2007, in: J. Ratzinger, Auferstehung und ewiges Leben = Gesammelte Schriften. Band 10 (Freiburg i. Br. 2012) 31-35, zit. 34.
[15] Joseph Ratzinger, Zur Theologie des Todes, in: Ders., Auferstehung und ewiges Leben = Gesammelte Schriften. Band 10 (Freiburg i. Br. 2012) 296-309, zit. 308.
[16] Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology, 203.