While Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Romano Guardini, Gottlieb Söhngen and Josef Pieper were friend/mentors, the young Professor Ratzinger himself became a friend/mentor to his own doctoral students ...

Benedict’s Intellectual Mentors and Students

by Tracey Rowland

Henri de Lubac famously said of Hans Urs von Balthasar that he was the most cultured man in Europe of his time (1905-1988). Von Balthasar grew up in a family where everyone spoke at least four languages and had a high level of musical education. His father was a Church architect, his mother was in charge of the Swiss League of Catholic Women, his uncle was a Hungarian bishop who was martyred on Good Friday in 1945 and is now honored as Blessed Vilmos Apor, another relative on the Apor side was a Hungarian envoy to the Holy See, and his sister became the General of a Franciscan order of nuns. In the Balthasar family tree there was also a Jesuit who worked on missions in California. In short Balthasar was born into a family loaded with Catholic cultural capital.
De Lubac came from a similar background in France. He had been born into an aristocratic family of the Ardèche and his father was a banker. During the First World War he served in the French army and was wounded in the head but survived. During the Second World War he worked for the French Resistance assisting in the publication of an underground journal called Témoinage chrétien or Christian Witness which was intended to convince French Catholics of the complete incompatibility of Nazi ideology with Christian beliefs. Given that some of their ecclesial leaders were encouraging them to support the Vichy Regime this was quite important. De Lubac was often in hiding from the Germans and several of his co-workers on the journal, including his fellow Jesuit, Yves de Montcheul, were captured by the Gestapo and executed.

Von Balthasar came under the influence of de Lubac while a student at La Fourvière in the years 1933-37 while Joseph Ratzinger studied de Lubac’s works when he was seminarian in the late 1940s.

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