Leonardo Boff, the popular liberation theologian from Brazil and former Franciscan priest, has expressed a desire to “embrace” and effect a “kind of reconciliation” with the man who once silenced him – Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the now-retired Benedict XVI.
Boff told Germany’s Catholic media site katholisch.de on 7 April that he hoped to have the opportunity to do that when he comes to Rome to visit Pope Francis, though he did not say when that would be.
The 78-year-old theologian also said he wished Benedict all the best for his 90th birthday, which his former mentor celebrates on Easter Sunday.
Before becoming Pope, the then-Cardinal Ratzinger headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). And in 1985 his office and the Congregation for Religious sentenced Boff to a yearlong “period of obsequious silence” for publishing a book the CDF had earlier said, “endanger(ed) the sound doctrine of the faith.” He then described the second phase of their relationship as “some-what controversial.” That was in the 1980s when Ratzinger was the CDF prefect and called Boff to Rome. “I had to sit on the very same chair Galileo (1564-1642) and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) had sat on and I was put through a proper canonical and juridical doctrinal process,” he recalled.
