Pope Emeritus Benedict: 42 Years Later

Cardinal Ratzinger’s Retraction: 

The Fruit of Theological Maturation

Pope Emeritus Benedict showed wisdom and humility when he retracted his statement in favor of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics.

News broke weeks ago that a new volume of Benedict XVI’s collected works was being released in German with an updated version of a 1972 essay, which no longer suggests that the divorced and remarried can receive Communion, as it once did.

But thanks to Sandro Magister and his translator Matthew Sherry, the full text of his “Retractatio” is now available in English.

As CNA reported Nov. 25, Joseph Ratzinger published an essay in 1972, while a priest of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, which argued for access, under certain limited conditions, to Communion for the divorced and remarried. This line of argument was taken up in a 1977 book by Walter Kasper, who was then a priest of the Diocese of Rottenburg.

Father Kasper is now Cardinal Kasper, who in a February address to cardinals advocating for the admission to Communion of the divorced and remarried cited Ratzinger’s essay.

But as doctrine developed, Ratzinger moved away from his 1972 essay, humbly retracting the suggestion he had then offered.

In 1991, he wrote that the suggestions had been made “as a theologian in 1972. Their implementation in pastoral practice would of course necessarily depend on their corroboration by an official act of the magisterium to whose judgment I would submit. … Now the Magisterium subsequently spoke decisively on this question in the person of (St. John Paul II) in Familiaris Consortio.”


.........


Read more: www.ncregister.com