As the many reports of these days show, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was also a Pontiff who maintained the tradition of his predecessors of undertaking Apostolic Journeys abroad, and not only to Italy. A series inaugurated four months into his pontificate when he traveled to his homeland for World Youth Day in Cologne.
He returned to Germany twice more, in 2006 (to Bavaria, where the well-known "Regensburg incident" took place) and in 2011, on an official visit to the country.
In total, Benedict XVI has made 24 apostolic trips abroad, several to Europe (three times to Spain), but also to Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Cuba), the United States (2008), Africa (Cameroon, Benin) and Australia (2008), as OMNES also reported in recent days.
Confirmation in faith
Evidently, the first reason for these trips outside the Vatican to distant countries is of a spiritual nature; the Vicar of Christ goes on pilgrimage to lands inhabited by baptized Catholics - even where they are in the minority - to confirm them in the faith and to bring them the closeness and blessing of the whole Church.
There are also political reasons, since these are visits to a specific country, with its own institutional representation that welcomes him -and above all invites him-, with its own traditions and cultures, problems, challenges and future prospects, which each Pontiff carries out to value and integrate into the whole of his magisterium, always leaving seeds of possible growth and development.
This was, therefore, also the case of Benedict XVI, who during his seven-year term at the head of the universal Church did not fail to meet with various political and cultural leaders of European countries and international realities.
This experience - and the speeches he delivered from time to time on his various travels - allows us to extract a series of reflections on fundamental questions of society, such as the relationship between justice and religious freedom, the confrontation between faith and reason, the dynamics that exist between law and law, and so on.
Ratzinger-style diplomacy
On these themes, his private secretary, Monsignor Georg Gänswein, offered in 2014, a year after the resignation of Benedict XVI, some reflections that highlight precisely the "political" impact of Ratzinger's formatted diplomacy, dwelling on five major speeches of the Pope Emeritus, addressed to as many different contexts and audiences, but from which emerge certain "key ideas" developed "in an organic and coherent manner."
The first of these speeches highlighted by the Prefect of the Pontifical Household is undoubtedly the one delivered onn Regensburg, Germany, September 12, 2006.The real importance of this pronouncement, pronounced in an academic context and conceptually based on the relationship between faith and reason and on the God-logos, does not, of course, lie in the criticisms that followed. Evidently, the real importance of this pronouncement does not lie in the criticisms that followed.
A second speech was delivered at the United Nations in New York two years later, focused on human rights and the project that sixty years earlier led to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Gänswein then highlighted as significant the speech he delivered at the Collège des Bernardins de Paris (September 12, 2008), addressed to the cultural elites of a country considered secularized and hostile to religions. Benedict XVI recalled here the contribution of the Christian faith to the development of European civilization.
In 2010, on September 17, Benedict XVI spoke in London in the seat of that Parliament which, among other things, decreed the death of Thomas More as a result of religious dissension. On that occasion he was able to appreciate the liberal democratic tradition, while denouncing the attacks on religious freedom that were taking place in the West.
Lastly, of political and diplomatic importance were his speech to the German Bundestag on September 22, 2011, in which Benedict XVI addressed the question of the foundation of the legal order and the limits of the consequent positivism dominant throughout the twentieth century in Europe.
Based on these pronouncements, Benedict XVI's Particular Secretary glimpses a common thread in three perspectives.
Religion and Law
The first of these has to do with the core of Benedict XVI's thought on the contribution of religion to public debate and, consequently, to the construction of the juridical order. This can be seen very well in the speech to the Bundestag in Berlin, when Ratzinger states: "In history, juridical orders have almost always been religiously motivated: on the basis of a reference to the divine will, what is just among men is decided.
Contrary to other great religions, Christianity has never imposed on the State and society a revealed law, a juridical order derived from a revelation. Instead, it has referred to nature and reason as the true sources of law, it has referred to the harmony between objective and subjective reason, a harmony which, however, presupposes that both spheres are founded on the creative Reason of God".
He had proposed a similar concept at Westminster Hall, to allay fears that see religion as an "Authority" that somehow imposes itself in legal and political matters, thwarting freedom and dialogue with others.
Benedict XVI's proposal, rather, has a universal vision and is situated precisely in the interrelation between reason and nature. Gänswein reflects: "The first and fundamental contribution of Benedict XVI is the reminder that the ultimate sources of law are to be found in reason and nature, not in a mandate, whoever it may be".
Reason and nature
A second pedagogical perspective concerns the area of the relationship between reason and nature, in which "the destiny of democratic institutions is at stake, their capacity to produce the "common good", that is, the possibility, on the one hand, of deciding by majority vote a large part of the matter to be legally regulated and, on the other, of continually striving to recognize and reaffirm what cannot be voted on", recalls Monsignor Gänswein.
In his public speeches, Benedict XVI openly denounces the temptation to reduce reason to something measurable and compares it to a concrete bunker without windows. Rather: "We must reopen the windows, we must see anew the immensity of the world, the sky and the earth, and learn to use all this in a just way," he said in Berlin.
That is why we should not be afraid to measure ourselves with reality, thinking that the only way to access it is to reduce it to preconstituted or even preconceived schemes. Here there is practically 'a correction of modern rationalism, which makes it possible to re-establish a correct relationship between reason and reality. A positivist or self-sufficient reason is incapable of getting out of the swamp of uncertainties", comments Gänswein.
Interrelation between reason and faith
Finally, a fundamental paradigm of the entire pontificate, the interrelationship between reason and faith, shines brightly in the speeches that the then Pontiff delivered with the European continent as a reference point. "The culture of Europe was born of the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome; of the encounter between faith in the God of Israel, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and the juridical thought of Rome. This triple encounter shapes the intimate identity of Europe," Ratzinger said again in his address to the Bundestag.
The reflection on how the Christian faith has contributed to the rehabilitation of reason emerges instead from the content of the speech at the Collège des Berardins in Paris, when the emeritus cites the example of Western monasticism as an opportunity for the rebirth of a civilization until now "buried under the ruins of the devastation of barbarism" - recalls Gänswein - having "overturned old orders and old certainties".
In short, in Benedict XVI's view there is a profound relationship of friendship between faith and reason, and neither wants to subjugate the other. He said at Westminster Hall: "the world of reason and the world of faith - the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief - need each other and should not be afraid to engage in a profound and continuous dialogue, for the sake of our civilization. Religion, therefore, for any legislator, is not at all a problem to be solved, legislators are not a problem to be solved, 'but a vital contribution to the national debate'.
