The difficulties with the Church and also the contradictions against the Church were raised more by him, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, than by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II. In his first words after his election as Bishop of Rome , Benedict XVI. he understood himself as a “simple and humble collaborator in the Lord’s vineyard”, as a “collaborator in truth” and as a “collaborator in joy”: “The world lives by the fact that there is joy in it, that it is not suffocated in gloomy seriousness of ideologies”. So I read as a schoolboy almost fifty years ago by the then theologian Joseph Ratzinger. That’s what it was all about in the end when Joseph Ratzinger or Benedict XVI. the beauty of the liturgy has emerged. Reducing religion to morality was repugnant to him. Faith and the sacraments cannot be reduced to ascetic cracking of the whip or to ethical or political commands. Living in the footsteps of Jesus is not above all a promise or a command, but a gift.
