Pope Benedict XVI: shaped and dislocated by history, by Owei Lakemfa

Young Father Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, was a brilliant theologian and scholar who, at age 31 in 1958, was already a full professor at the University of Bonn. But before turning to the priesthood, he had been a prisoner of war during World War II. It was a war in which humanity seemed to have lost its soul. But no sooner had the world sworn to settle problems peacefully and established the United Nations as a safety net than humans resumed wars.

In Asia, the two-stage Vietnam War, first against France and then against the United States, broke out on December 19, 1946. The world moved closer to another world war with the war of three years of Korea, which began on June 25, 1950. The rather bloody Chinese civil war which left more than a million dead, also broke out in 1948, ending only with the triumph of the Maoist revolution.

The French murdered more than two million Algerians from 1954 to 1962 in a vain attempt to prevent Algerian independence. In other parts of Africa, the "high winds" of independence were so strong that in 1960 alone, 17 countries of various shapes emerged from the yoke of colonialism, many of which, such as Kenya and Cameroon, visible scars.

These events did not stop human progress, as the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin, the first human into space, on April 12, 1961, and the United States launched Alan Shepard, the second, on May 5, 1961. The world was barely recognizable, and the Catholic Church was forced to locate itself in a grossly distorted world marred by the biting and potentially destructive Cold War.

What role did the church play when the world was on its knees, bleeding profusely? Was the church talking to itself rather than communicating with the congregation? In any case, how can he communicate when the priest only says Mass in Latin, which nearly 100% of the Catholic faithful do not understand?

Did he know the world he operated in? Should the Church deal only with the ancient past, or also with the modern world? Was it relevant and in danger of disintegrating and disappearing into folklore? The Church decided that the solution was to convene the Second Vatican Council, which would bring bishops around the world to hold up a mirror, to identify with the hopes and needs of Catholics around the world, to reach out to d other churches and religions and pave the way to the future.

In his 1975 book, The Runaway Church, Peter Hebblethwaite quoted a British bishop as saying that without Vatican II, which was held from 1962 to 1965, "the Church would have been like the Loch Ness Monster: rumored to be of venerable antiquity, indeed seen by some, but of little relevance in the contemporary world. Ratzinger, at age 35, attended Vatican II as an assistant to Cardinal Joseph Frings. This obviously had a positive impact on him until after 1968, when his opinions visibly began to change.

However, the Council had introduced democracy into a hitherto highly hierarchical institution, with whoever the Pope was as the infallible Vicar of Christ, the bishops as the undisputed successors of the Apostles, and the priest as the Man of God in the parish. But Vatican II gave rise to another argument. If Jesus said that the time is coming when God will no longer be worshiped in Jerusalem (the Temple) John 4:21, and that: "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" ( John 4:24). Where is the place of the Church as temple? But the implication is this: if worship leaves the temple and God is worshiped only in spirit and in truth, that will be the end of the priesthood. This could mean that the Church was engaging in self-liquidation.

There were many progressive outcomes of the Second Vatican Council, such as the need for the Church to identify with the meek, the poor, and the helpless...