What happened at Tubingen?
It took me a month to answer that question. According to the
media, Tubingen is the German university where, in 1968, Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger — the future Pope Benedict XVI — became a
conservative. He did so, according to media accounts, because of
left-wing student protests in 1968, when Ratzinger was a
professor.
Is that true? That a brilliant and deeply reflective theologian
and priest simply freaked out over some student protests and became
orthodox? Perhaps, but if so the more compelling question the media
ignored is, if the protests changed Ratzinger, what exactly about
them did it? The New York Times, Washington Post,
L.A. Times, TV pundits and Newsweek were all
vague: there were student protests. The kids were influenced by
Marxism and even invaded Ratzinger’s classroom to perform sit-ins.
This instantly formed and remains the media template for judging
the new pope’s life.
But to me it all seemed more than a little bogus. Sure, Pope
Benedict seems a gentle soul — but this drove him from the campus
and made him a conservative? When an anonymous source who may or
may not even be real asserts that American troops fighting the war
on terror flushed a Koran down the toilet, it runs in
Newsweek and causes pandemonium around the world. Yet the
same magazine can’t be bothered to investigate the simple question
of what formed the pope’s worldview. It’s hard to believe, but it
seems the liberal bias in the media is still, after all these
years, causing more than a few reporters to cover for communists.
In its coverage, Time magazine (and remember these people
are journalists paid handsomely to get the story) offered a
tantalizing tidbit: at one point student protestors had referred to
the Cross of Christ as “a sadomasochistic object.” Well, at least
here was something genuinely scandalous and offensive. So who said
it? Time doesn’t answer. What else was said? Silence. In
his book Why I Am a Catholic, Garry Wills only refers to
Ratzinger’s irrational fear of the “noisy students” in 1968. Noisy
students — how bad could that be? Did Ratzinger just flip out?
Curious, I ordered the reissue of John Allen’s biography of
Ratzinger, now titled Pope Benedict XVI. It’s over 300
pages. Surely Allen, a liberal but fairly competent report for the
National Catholic Reporter, would have the answer. He
reports that, in the “Annus Mirabilis” of 1968, Marxist students
did indeed take over the campus at Tubingen. Moreover, the
Protestant Students Union issued a flyer that asked the question,
“So what is Jesus’ cross but the expression of a sado-masochistic
glorification of pain?” The flyer also asserted that “The New
Testament is a document of inhumanity, a large-scale deception of
the masses.” Allen also reports that a Protestant colleague of
Ratzinger’s urged the students, “The cry of ‘Cursed be Jesus!’ must
never again be heard in our midst!” The students didn’t care.
Despite the obfuscations of Time, Newsweek, et
al., I was finally getting the story. But there was still an
omission — Ratzinger’s colleague talked about the cry “Cursed be
Jesus!” Where did it come from? Here Allen was no help. He quotes
Ratzinger, explaining that Tubingen showed him “an
instrumentalization by ideologies that were tyrannical, brutal, and
cruel. That experience made it clear to me that the abuse of faith
had to be resisted precisely if one wanted to uphold the will of
the council…. I did see how real tyranny was exercised, even in
brutal forms — anyone who wanted to remain a progressive in this
context had to give up his integrity.” But who cursed Jesus?
Finally, finally I found the answer, in Salt of the Earth, a book-length
interview with Ratzinger himself. The book includes the full text
of the quote used above by Allen. It’s very instructive first to
reread the above quote used by Allen. At the end of it is the line,
“I did see how real tyranny was exercised, even in brutal forms —
anyone who wanted to remain a progressive in this context had to
give up his integrity.”
I hit paydirt in the material that had been elliptically clipped
out by Allen. For between the phrase ending “brutal forms” and the
line “anyone who wanted to remain a progressive” is some very, very
crucial information. The ellipses in fact omits a paragraph in
which Ratzinger cites the memoir of his Protestant colleague
Wolfgang Beyerhaus, who was also at Tubingen. Beyerhaus recalled
the lines on the flyer, but also the title of the flyer: “Jesus the
Lord — Partisan Kasemann.” Kasemann is a German colloquialism
meaning “nonsense, rubish, balderdash.” The students — those noisy
harmless mice in Garry Wills’s recollection — were cursing the
name of Christ. It was professor and Ratzinger colleague Ulrich
Wickert who implored the young Marxists not to curse the name of
Jesus, all to no avail. Ratzinger: “It never got quite so bad in
the Union of Catholic theology students, but the basic current,
which surged powerfully into it as well, was the same. So I knew
what was at stake: anyone who wanted to remain a progressive in
this context had to give up his integrity.”
Imagine for a moment that some members of the U.S. Army issued a
flyer calling the Koran an instrument of oppression and Mohammed
balderdash and rubbish. Do you think the media would report all of
it? MOHAMMED CALLED RUBBISH would be the front page of every paper
and the lede item on the nightly news. There would be outraged
press releases by anti-discrimination groups and sensitivity
seminars convened. That cursing the name of Jesus Christ may have
played a part in Ratzinger’s philosophical development? Not worth
mentioning.
It should also be said that the very premise of the media’s
coverage is questionable. The idea that a brilliant theologian and
author like Ratzinger dove headfirst into the dark side of orthodox
Catholicism because of student protests alone, and not after deep
reflection and study, is shaky at best. Indeed, it could be argued
that Ratzinger remained a liberal while the students embraced the
far left. Still, Ratzinger the neocon who lost it at an innocent
student sit-in is now the media default position on Ratzinger.
We’ll be dealing with it for a long time, truth be damned.
