Journal of Ecumenical Studies

Many wonderful things can be said of Pope Benedict XVI (Professor Josef Ratzinger), and many have been said in the wake of his recent death (on December 31, 2022, at the age of 95). I think that it will also be worthwhile to share a few things with the general public, particularly other Catholics, about my very limited—yet, I think, insightful—contacts with him many decades ago.

My first "contact" with him was in 1964, the year my wife, Arlene Anderson Swidler, and I launched a new scholarly quarterly, the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, devoted to intra/interreligious/ideological dialogue (which is still publishing cutting-edge articles focused on dialogue, at Temple University). The first issue of J.E.S. contained articles by Ratzinger and Hans Küng, along with other scholars active in the Second Vatican Council, which was going on at the time. (I cannot provide other specifics now, as I am teaching this year in the Islamics Faculty of the University of Suleimani, Iraq, where J.E.S. unfortunately is not available.)

I first met Küng face-to-face in 1963, when he made a lecture tour all across the United States on Vatican II, which was going on in Rome each Fall of 1962–65. He was in demand to lecture at many U.S. universities. I was able to get him to lecture at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where my wife and I had begun to teach the year before, because I had earned a Licentiate in Catholic Theology at the University of Tübingen in 1959. (As far as I know, I was the first layperson ever to earn a degree in Catholic theology, but doubtless there have been countless laity who have done so, subsequently.) [End Page 287]

Prof. Heinrich Fries was the leading Catholic theologian in interreligious dialogue in the 1950's, and it was with him that I did my Lic. Theol. degree in ecumenism at Tübingen. However, in the middle of working for that degree, Fries moved to Munich University. Küng came to Tübingen as his successor and worked with me on technical matters in finishing my Tübingen degree. This was the beginning of my and Arlene's intense lifelong friendship with Küng (who died in 2021 at age 93).

Probably few people today know that Ratzinger was brought to the Catholic Theology Faculty at Tübingen by Küng, who had been made the Dean of the Catholic Theology Faculty and who put forward Ratzinger's name for the position. He was quickly hired! They had known one another from the days both had been young faculty working on their Doctor Habilitation, the second doctoral degree with a second dissertation that German university professors have to earn before they can even be considered for a faculty position. Both Küng and Ratzinger had taught at the same German university, and they worked together for the four years of Vatican II. Küng welcomed Ratzinger and his mother to Tübingen and helped them find a place to live. They frequently visited each other then.

Just after Vatican II ended (December, 1965), I was appointed an official member of the American Catholic Bishops' Committee of Theological Dialogue between Catholics and Reformed Christians, which lasted for more than a decade.

At the same time, the entire Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Tübingen—including, of course, Küng and Ratzinger—worked vigorously to produce in 1965 a special issue of their official journal, Tübinger Quartalschrift, which devoted outstanding scholarly essays in each professor's specialty to two basic questions: (1) "Was it possible, and desirable, to have bishops and lesser officials elected by the people of the diocese, including the laity?" (2) "Was it possible, and desirable, for church officials, including diocesan, to be elected for limited terms of office?" The answers were all Yes's—including Ratzinger's.

However, the "revolutionary" events that went on in the Catholic Church in the 1960's and 1970's were matched in and with the secular world—especially among...