Pope Benedict XVI fought for the restoration of reason and faith in the midst of The Ruin Of Modernity

Upon hearing the news of Pope Benedict XVI’s death on Saturday morning, I immediately thought of a long road trip I took with my wife 10 years ago, from Alaska to Texas, and a lonely stretch of highway in central Wyoming where, trapped in a car with nothing else to do, I listened to hours and hours of interviews conducted in the ’90s with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man destined to become Pope Benedict XVI.

I didn’t know it at the time, but those interviews planted seeds that would take years to bear fruit, which they did in 2018 when my wife and I were received into the Catholic Church.

Now, of course, recorded conversations about philosophy and theology aren’t usually what helps one stay awake on a long road trip. But after nearly a week on the road, we were totally burnt out on music, crime noir novels, and just about everything else we’d brought with us. I asked my wife who was trying to sleep in the passenger seat, if she was bothered if I listened the Ratzinger interviews as I drove, since that was all we had. She assured me it wouldn’t stop her from nodding off.

Three hours later, somewhere in the vast expanse of the Wyoming Basin, we were both wide awake, listening with rapt attention to a man unlike any we’d encountered before. (The recordings, I should note, were not of Ratzinger himself, but English language readings of in-depth interviews he’d done with German journalist Peter Seewald in 1996. A six-disc set of the recordings in English was released after Benedict’s election as pope in 2005.) To my embarrassment, I had never paid much attention to Benedict before then, nor had I seriously considered Catholicism or engaged very honestly with the propositions and teachings of the Catholic Church, so what I heard on that long drive struck me in a way I didn’t expect — and never forgot.

There was a man here who maintained there was no conflict in faith and reason. He was able to convincingly and clearly explain the reasonableness of religious faith, as well faith in Jesus Christ in His crucifixion & resurrection and in the Eucharist. “one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church” He made the Earth his home. Here, too, This was a truly educated man who grasped the entire sweep of Western civilization and, in a kindly and even mirthful way, could level devastating critiques of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and modernity’s blinkered, anemic understanding of human reason and the role it should play in answering ultimate questions.

Those interviews eventually prompted me to go back and read Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg address, which I remembered at the time only because of the feigned outrage it provoked among an ignorant and malicious corporate press that misread it as an attack on Islam. It wasn’t that, but it was an attack on the modern West’s narrow, “scientistic” View of knowledge and Truth, a loud defense of the inherent rationality and reasonableness of faith and a call