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Joseph Ratzinger’s coat of many colours

12 December 2020

9:00 AM

12 December 2020

9:00 AM

Benedict XVI: A Life,Volume I: Youth in Nazi Germany to the Second Vatican Council, 1927-1965 Peter Seewald

Bloomsbury, pp.500, 30

A common but flawed assumption about Joseph Ratzinger is that he is simply an ardent conservative. That’s the figure we see in Netflix’s The Two Popes. Anthony Hopkins’s performance may be a visual feast, but the script leaves no cliché unaired. Better informed observers note that the Vatican’s former doctrinal guardian is a poacher turned gamekeeper who once supported major reform of the Catholic Church but then performed a somersault, partly because of worry about threats including Marxism and moral relativism.

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