Among the last visitors, the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

in his refuge in the Vatican Gardens, were the winners of the Joseph Ratzinger Prize 2022, which the "Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzinger - Benedetto XVI" has been awarding annually since 2011 for "special scientific and theological achievements in the context of contemporary discourse", in in close consultation with the namesake (and financed from proceeds from his books).

The two winners of the year 2022 stand equally for the legacy of the Second Vatican Council and for Ratzinger's scientific and personal sympathies.

The French Jesuit and patristic Michel Fédou, who teaches at the Center Sèvres, is a theologian in the tradition of the great conciliar theologian Henri de Lubac and the theology of ressourcement, which strived for church renewal from the sources of Christianity.

The lawyer Joseph Halevi Horowitz Weiler, who teaches at New York University and was the first Jewish scholar to be awarded the prize, has dealt with questions of religious freedom, with the relationship between faith and reason, with values ​​and virtues in a secularized society.

Inward and outward directed

How this approach reflects the complexity of Catholic-Jewish relations since the Council is elucidated in a book by the historian of religion Karma Ben-Johanan, who teaches in Jerusalem war ("Jacob's Younger Brother". Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II. Harvard University Press, 2022).

Two discourses took place in each of the two communities, reports Ben-Johanan: "An internal conversation in which Jewish and Christian claims to truth continue to be largely mutually exclusive, and an outward-looking discourse based on gestures and symbols, sometimes even on friendships,

The award ceremony itself, which Pope Francis carried out on December 1 in the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace, was also rich in gestures and symbols.

Ratzinger's successor insisted on presenting the award personally this time as well.

Francis paid tribute to Joseph Ratzinger's role in the creation of key documents of Vatican II and in their interpretation and implementation.

Only recently did he again underline that the Council would continue to exercise its decisive function, because it had given the necessary orientation to reformulate the central question of the nature and mission of the Church in our time.

Ratzinger's Collected Writings, the German edition of which is almost complete, would provide a solid theological basis for the Church's path: a "living," "synodal" Church,

Noting that his predecessor's magisterium and thought "are not directed towards the past, but are fruitful for the future, for the implementation of the Council and for the dialogue between the Church and the world today, especially in the most topical and controversial areas such as the holistic ecology, human rights, the encounter of different cultures” could be understood as a memorial to the Fondazione Ratzinger, which Francis encouraged to cooperate with the Vatican foundations named after John Paul I and John Paul II.

Because with the conference "Ratzinger's Ecclesiology in its Wider Theological Context" organized at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in October, at which harsh criticism of the "Synodal Process of the Universal Church" proclaimed by Francis could be heard,

The Roman award ceremony, on the other hand, turned into a synodal event, not only because of the clear discursive milestones of the Bergoglio Pope.

Already on the long stairs up to the Sala Clementina, a polyphonic companionship had unexpectedly found itself.

Cardinals and curial archbishops have their own entrée, but on the steps Jesuits chatted with rabbis, lawyers with exegetes, and in the midst of an intensive conversation was the undersecretary of the Vatican synod of bishops, Nathalie Becquart, who the day before had presented a volume with papal texts on synodality ("Camminare insieme" .Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2022).

For more than 75 years, as he writes in his 2006 “Spiritual Testament”, Joseph Ratzinger “accompanied the path of theology”, “with the changing generations he saw theses that seemed unshakable collapse and turned out to be mere hypotheses”.

His own theology will remain an important resource in the journey of his church.

Their reception, which some of Ratzinger's entourage would like to see petrified with a quick canonization, is now in the hands of a lively, defective, guilty, injured and searching community.

Who can be encouraged by the experience that Joseph Ratzinger himself formulated as a legacy: that out of the "tangle of hypotheses" the reason of faith has emerged and is emerging again and again.