With all that has been said about the passing of Pope Benedict XVI, most of it neglects the larger historical context—his prediction of the end of our era and his vision for the one to follow it.
One must begin back in the decade following the horrors of World War I in April 1917. By then the Enlightenment Era’s victory for universal peace and prosperity was reckoned so successful as to justify a serious proposal to “outlaw war.” It resulted in a Kellogg-Briand Pact that was signed by all the world powers, including the US and Germany.
Over his lifetime, Ratzinger became a dominant force in the intellectual debate over the influence of progressive liberalism in the West and the world, notably debating with atheist philosophers like Jurgen Habermas with mutual concessions and respect. His life spanned the early optimism and dominance of Wilsonian idealism, Nazi rule and defeat in World War II, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Soviet Union.
He rejoiced in the Cold War victory but did not see it as The End of History or believe that it produced a new man to populate it. To Ratzinger, 1991 was no more a final victory than it was 1917. Indeed, his magnum opus, a collection of articles written du-ring the 1990s until his papa-cy, Truth and Tolerance, predicted the end of the Enlightenment itself.
By the close of the 20th century, it had become clear to both the religious Ratzinger and secular Habermas that Western reason, science, democracy, and unbounded freedoms were failing. The Nazi and communist alternatives had fallen but the “feeling that democracy is still not the right form of freedom is fairly general” Ratzinger noted. Critics were raising valid questions about its legitimacy.
How free are elections? To what extent is the people’s will manipulated by publicity, that is by capital, by the agency of a few people who dominate public opinion? Is there not a new oligarchy of the people who decide what is modern and progressive, what somebody enlightened has to think? How fearsome this oligarchy is, the way they can publicly execute people, is well enough known. Anyone who gets in their way is an enemy of freedom because he is preventing freedom of expression.