Eminent Australian theologian recalls the ‘shy, brilliant German professor’

By Catherine Sheehan

According to Australia’s most eminent Catholic theologian, Professor Tracey Rowland, Pope Benedict XVI was “an absolutely brilliant theologian” and likely to go down in history as a “scholar-saint”.

Professor Rowland, who is Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia and a member of the International Theological Commission, won the Ratzinger Prize for theology in 2020, the first Australian and the third woman to receive the prestigious award.

She met with the retired Pope Benedict in person in 2021 to receive the award.

“He was, I think, shy and professorial,” Professor Rowland told the Catholic Standard.

“Very comfortable talking about intellectual ideas, very respectful, gracious in his manners… a shy, brilliant German professor.”

His greatest contribution was in the area of fundamental theology, Professor Rowland said, which deals with the basic principles of theology.

“There’s hardly an area of fundamental theology where he hasn’t written an article or a book about the different approaches to that area.”

“When one reads Pope Benedict, one can become certain that one’s on the right track if one isn’t clear about which is the right position.”

“For me, reading Benedict or Ratzinger… gives a person a certain amount of confidence that their instincts are right, or, as the case may be, their instincts are wrong. But either way, there’s a sense that this man is trustworthy.”

Pope Benedict was interested in the integration of philosophy and theology, she said, and preferred the more human, or relatable, approach of St Augustine, to the more scholastic style of St Thomas Aquinas.

As a young man he had a “major influence” on the Second Vatican Council, she said, in particular on the drafting of the document Dei verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation.

In terms of the modern world, Professor Rowland said, his greatest concern was the separation of faith and reason.

“He was concerned about rise of ideologies that are not based upon anything reasonable, let alone anything theological.

“Now, they don’t even want pure reason. They just want political correctness.

“And so, he was really concerned about the attack on the reason. That was one of his major concerns.”

Professor Rowland said she had no problem believing that Benedict would be canonised one day.

“He could so easily have become corrupted as many of them did, but he didn’t.”

“I think that his legacy will be his intellectual work, and that he will be regarded in a hundred years the way that John Henry Newman is regarded today, like a scholar-saint,” Professor Rowland said.