The book was published in 2016; I read it (off my kindle) in 2017. The reviewer is an Irish journalist writing in the interfaith magazine First Things, and it was originally published n 2017. I've excerpted some of the opening paragraphs and a couple of others.
Benedict the Dissident
A random tale from the front line of the Ratzinger media wars: At the time of Benedict XVI’s announcement in 2013 that he was to step down as pope, I was writing for one of the Irish national dailies. One day, I was speaking on the phone to one of my editors—to whose ambivalent care I had filed more than a few robust defenses of the pope—when he suddenly remembered he had something to tell me. He’d been speaking to a senior Italian diplomat who had confided in him the real reason why the pope resigned.
“Really?”
“Oh yes. It’s because he no longer believes in God!” He paused before the punchline: “He’s too intelligent for that!”
Ah! A none-too-subtly coded message: Faith is incompatible with intelligence, and now your hero has tacitly admitted as much. Where does that leave you?
I relate the episode because it offers a measure of insight into the media’s hostility toward Pope Benedict XVI. Really, the thing that most bothered the commentariat about Benedict was that his every word was so coherent and irrefutable. His brilliance was not just a threat to their program but also an accusation: You’re missing something, maybe even everything. His resignation therefore came as a great relief—now they wouldn’t have to work so hard at corrupting every word of the pope’s before publication, or tinkering with the narrative to ensure a consistency of negativity.
The ideology journalists are enjoined to disseminate makes such a mindset essential. Their allotted mission is to make the world free for human desire understood in its crudest form, by the constant insinuation of what Benedict XVI, in one of his crystal phrases, termed “false infinities.” Seen in this light, it is unsurprising that his every word became twisted beyond recognition before being passed into the mainstream. For our catchword-clotted media, Ratzinger was the grim enforcer, the panzer-cardinal, the pope’s policeman, “God’s Rottweiler,” a renegade “liberal” who had become an implacable enemy of “progress,” the “man who couldn’t laugh” . . .
In turn, Pope Benedict had spent his life peering into the culture of which such malevolence was a central element. There was no existential condition of the modern age—skepticism, relativism, positivism, unreason, despair, lassitude, boredom—which he did not lay bare with great tenderness.
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In his hands, theology lost all remoteness, becoming something vital to understanding the time. In his foreword to Last Testament, “One Last Visit,” Peter Seewald describes Pope Emeritus Benedict as “the philosopher of God.” Yes, but he was also the theologian of the humble human seeker, explaining, illuminating, and synthesizing in the hope of reconciling humanity with the Word.
His witness against the age ranks him alongside Václav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Yet Ratzinger was a different kind of dissident. The others, driven underground by regimes whose tyranny had become incontrovertible, became, for a time at least, unambiguous heroes. Ratzinger appeared to belong to an establishment—he was pope, after all—but was really the prophetic voice of dissidence from a darkening future, a free radical before his time.
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It would be invidious to seek to go beneath Pope Benedict’s apparently wholehearted endorsement of his successor. ... There are those who complain that the present pope plays into the hands of a hostile media and those who argue that he cleverly equivocates with a view, perhaps, to keeping the Church intact while bringing it into a new phase. The apparent ambiguity concerns certain moral questions, over which a struggle harking back to Vatican II continues to play out. Other observers point, with some plausibility, to the resonances between many of Pope Francis’s statements and the positions articulated by Benedict, arguing that the change has amounted more to a shift of style than one of substance. (This appears to be Benedict’s own mature judgment.)
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