adversity

I consider my previous post one important step in my own understanding of Catholicism. I came to Catholicism as an adult shortly after Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope. That evening in April 2005 I was working on financial matters and watching CNBC when the new Pope was announced. I had heard about him before, but did not know much about his work.

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I knew he was a serious candidate for the papacy and even learned that he had been called a nazi by one of his former colleagues (Hans Kung) at the University of Tubingen. Probably this was the ringing bell, as I recall to have thought: "Well, to be attacked in this manner in Church circles he must be a very special man".

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When I learned he had chosen the name Benedict XVI, my first reaction was: "How strange, Benedict...". Only later I learned that the Portuguese equivalent of Benedict was Bento. In the following days I tried to learn more about him in the Internet and later I started to buy his books, and books about him, both in Portugal and abroad. By now, I have some fifty of them.

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I felt there was something in common between the Pope and myself. As I went through his books, the books of his critics, and his biographies, my first suspicions were confirmed, and my consideration for him increased sharply.

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First of all, he was an academic like myself. He spend very little time of his life as a priest. Most of his active life had been spent as a Professor of Theology in Germany, and this included the famous Faculty of Catholic Theology of the University of Tubingen.

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Second, since the mid-eighties that I had been writing for the Vida Economica newspaper and had been commenting on the Social Doctrine of the Church. Pope John Paul II published two Encyclicals in the eighties on social and economic matters, Laborem Exercens (1981) on human labour and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) on social and economic development. I was not impressed by any of them. To this day I do not hold Pope John Paul II in very high intellectual regard, certainly not in social matters.

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Then in 1991 came the Encyclical Centesimus Annus on the centenary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and it marked quite a change relative to the previous social Encyclicals of Pope John Paul II. I praised quite highly Centesimus Annus in two or three articles I wrote at the time for Vida Económica, all of them are reprinted in my book Catalaxia. I also suspected at the time that someone of a very high intellectual caliber was now advising the Pope. My suspicions were confirmed later. It was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who by then had been for ten years in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

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When I read his works after he became Pope what impressed me most was his claim, forcefully argued, that Catholicism is a rational doctrine. I had abandoned Catholicism as soon as I could get rid off it in my early adolescence, after being forced by my mother to attend the Church and Cathequesis. Educated as an economist I was not supposed to pay any attention to Catholic doctrine. My preferred authors were people like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and other famous economistas. In Mises I admired the rational economist, in Friedman the great, invincible, debater, even though Hayek was the most persuasive of them all. I consider now that I was educated in Protestantism, Economic Protestantism to be sure.

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As I went through the works of Joseph Ratzinger, I became more and more persuaded that he was right. Catholicism is a rational doctrine. Then, I found out that what I had considered the great ideas of economists and philosophers, some of them having won the Nobel Prize, actually were all in Catholicism. For example, Hegel's famous trilogy of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, is actually the distinctive way of Catholic thinking, and the theological thought of Ratzinger is an excellent example at that. More recently, G. K. Chesterton put it in a better perspective to me: "The best os Protestantism is what it retained from Catholicism".

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But what attracted me most to Ratzinger was a trait of his personality which I share with him, namely, his enormous capacity to attract adversity. He is a soulmate of mine, I thought, in this regard one of the very few soulmates I have ever encountered in my life.

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I deeply admire his capacity to state the truth, however unpopular it might be, and stand for it, regardless of consequences. He does not do it on purpose, it is something that comes naturally to him. God put that trait on him and, as a Pope, he has been paying a heavy price for it. There is a price to be paid for truth and rationality. But there is no choice: the alternative is irrationality and violence. That is why I think we should stand for Pope Benedict and for the Church.