I’ve been spending a lot of time in the company of the Pope Emeritus lately, not literally of course but within the pages of his books. I’ve been reading his memoirs, published when he was still known to the world as Cardinal Ratzinger, and was struck by his description of the unholy alliance between ideological Marxism and theological Modernism.

Shortly after Ratzinger’s joining of the faculty at the University of  Tübingen in 1966, the university succumbed to the madness of the 1960s. The philosophy of existentialism and the ideas of Heidegger, which had dominated the intellectual life of the university, were replaced by a Marxist ascendency. “Existentialism fell apart,” wrote Ratzinger, “and the Marxist revolution kindled the whole university with its fervor, shaking it to its very foundations.” More disturbingly, the theology faculty, which might have been expected to have resisted this Marxist tendency, became the very ideological epicenter from whence the earth-shattering and iconoclastic movement had emanated. Ratzinger considered the development nothing less than “the destruction of theology”, the inversion of Christian hope so that religious fervor is directed towards political action to the exclusion and elimination of the role of God:

Hope remains, but the party takes the place of God, and, along with the party, a totalitarianism that practices an atheistic sort of adoration ready to sacrifice all humanness to its false god. I myself have seen the frightful face of this atheistic piety unveiled, its psychological terror, the abandon with which every moral consideration could be thrown overboard as a bourgeois residue when the ideological goal was at stake. All of this is alarming enough in itself; but it becomes an unrelenting challenge to the theologian when the ideology is presented in the name of the faith and the Church is used as the instrument. The blasphemous manner in which the Cross now came to be despised as a sign of sadomasochism, the hypocrisy with which some still passed themselves off as believers when this was useful, in order not to jeopardize the instruments that were to serve their own private ends: all of this could and should not be made to look harmless or regarded as just another academic quarrel. Since, at the height of these debates, I was dean of my faculty … and a member also of the commission in charge of designing a new constitution for the university, I experienced all these things at very close range indeed.      

Although Ratzinger was referring to the Marxist upheaval in the academy in the late-1960s one can’t help but see the shadow of the Nazi past in his description of his experience at the University of Tübingen. As a child in 1930s Germany, Ratzinger had seen “the frightful face of this atheistic piety unveiled, its psychological terror, the abandon with which every moral consideration could be thrown overboard as a bourgeois residue when the ideological goal was at stake”. He had already lived in a culture in which “the party takes the place of God, and, along with the party, a totalitarianism that practices an atheistic sort of adoration ready to sacrifice all humanness to its false god”. He had, as a child, “experienced all these things at very close range indeed” and one can only wonder at what he must have thought and felt as he seemed to see history repeat itself. As his Marxist and modernist colleagues on the theology faculty were declaring the death of God, he must have been seeing the resurrection of Big Brother.