Will Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI become a Doctor of the Church?

In the days since his death on December 31, several commentators have expressed the hope that Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI and then Pope Emeritus, will eventually be named as a Doctor of the Church. In light of those hopes, I thought it would be interesting to revisit a conversation I had with thenCardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, when I was preparing Witness to Hope, the first volume of my two-volume biography of Pope St. John Paul II.

It was September 20, 1997, and we spoke, as we usually did, in the cardinal’s office in the Palazzo Sant’Ufficio. As always, the cardinal was dressed simply in a black house cassock with no pectoral cross. After discussing several other matters, I asked him about John Paul II’s recent decision to name St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, a Doctor of the Church, after petition to do so had been received from (if memory serves) well over two thousand bishops, in a campaign led by a retired auxiliary bishop of New York, Patrick Ahern. The decision had caused some controversy, as that rare title was typically given to distinguished theologians.

When I asked Cardinal Ratzinger, point-blank, “Why is Thérèse of Lisieux a Doctor of the Church,” the cardinal laughed (which he did readily, caricatures of his personality notwithstanding), and refraining from any comment on the bluntness, even impertinence, of my question, he began to speak—in complete paragraphs, as was his wont. The following is a direct transcription of his response, which I think sheds light on his own concept of holiness and its many expressions:

We have had distinct forms of Doctors of the Church, even before Anthony of Padua. We have on the one hand the great scholastic Doctors, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, who were professors and academicians and great Doctors in the scientific sense; in the patristic period we had great predicators who developed doctrine not in theological discussion but in predication, in homilies; we also have Ephraim, who developed his theology essentially in hymns and music. Now in these times we have new forms of Doctors and it’s important to lift up the richness of the different means of teaching in the Church. We have Teresa of Avila with her mystical experiences and her interpretations of the presence of God in mystical experience. We have Catherine of Siena with an experiential theology. And now we have Thérèse of Lisieux, who [created] in a different… way a theology of experience.

It is important, in our scientifically minded society, to have the message of a simple and deep experience of God, and a teaching about the simplicity of being a saint: to give, in this time, with its extremely action-oriented approach, to teach that to be a saint is not necessarily a matter of great actions, but of letting