In his book Called to Communion , published a decade before the beginning of his papacy, Joseph Ratzinger had some strong words to say about the bureaucratic machinery of the Church.

"The more administrative machinery we construct, be it the most modern, the less place there is for the Spirit, the less place there is for the Lord, and the less freedom there is."

He added that in his opinion, "we ought to begin an unsparing examination of conscience on this point at all levels of the Church." In a later collection of essays, titled Images of Hope , he observed that "the saints were all people of imagination, not functionaries of apparatuses."

In recent days one senses that this unsparing examination of conscience might finally have begun. One also senses that in the papacy of Benedict XVI the Church had one of the greatest theologians occupying the Chair of Peter in centuries. And yet, that for all his high intelligence, he never quite managed to contend with the bureaucratic machinery that so often let him down.

The decision to abdicate would not have been a decision made lightly given Benedict's respect for historical precedent and the sacramental nature of his office. He is the last person on the planet to think of the papacy as a job. He never thought of himself as the CEO of a multinational corporation and he sharply rebuked those whose ecclesiology was borrowed from the Harvard School of Business or, worse, some Green-Left women's collective. Christ was and is a Priest, a Prophet and a King, not a business manager.

Benedict believes that the Church is nothing less than the Universal Sacrament of Salvation and the Bride of Christ. For him the keys of Peter are no mere mythic symbol. So a decision to abdicate could only have been made on the basis that he thought worse things might happen to embarrass and confuse the Church's 1.2 billion faithful if he lacked the strength to govern.

Benedict XVI and the next generation of hero-Cardinals

The challenge in choosing Benedict's successor will be to find someone who has the strength and ability to deal with the administrative side of the office of the papacy while retaining at least some of the intellectual flair and imagination of Benedict and his predecessor.

There are many who think that either Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan or Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec could carry these responsibilities well. Certainly both are exceptionally intellectually gifted and are men of imagination - not mere functionaries. They are also in a similar intellectual mould to Benedict. They share the same interpretations of the Second Vatican Council and have drawn deeply from the theological anthropology and moral theology of the Blessed John Paul II. Both Scola's book The Nuptial Mystery and Ouellet's Divine Likeness: Towards a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family build on the foundations of John Paul II's Catechesis on Human Love , his trilogy of encyclicals devoted to each Person of the Trinity ( Redemptor Hominis , Dives et Misericordia and Dominum et Vivificantem ), the moral theology of Veritatis Splendor and the vision of a culture of life and love set forth in Evangelium Vitae . They and quite a few other members of the College of Cardinals are completely on side with this theological project.

Cardinal James Stafford, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago and Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bolgna, for example, are also men who are exceptionally gifted intellectually and have devoted themselves to following the leadership of Blessed John Paul II and then Benedict XVI. In fact, Caffarra was so strongly attacked in the press for defending the teaching of Humanae Vitae that he received a letter of support and encouragement from Sister Lucia of Fatima!

Cardinal Peter Erdo of Hungary, who is the second youngest member of the College of Cardinals, has also distinguished himself in battles for a civilization of life and love against those caught up in the culture of death, as has Cardinal Peter Turkson who justifiably has a reputation for leonine courage.

It is worth mentioning these names in a piece about Benedict in order to make a point most often overlooked: one thing that Benedict has achieved, at great personal cost to himself, is that by soldiering on - accepting the keys of Peter while the Church is attacked by sexual perverts from within and militant atheists from without, and while the Church is still contending with loopy interpretations of the Second Vatican Council - he has given the younger men (the Scolas, Ouellets and Caffaras) time to gain the administrative experience of running important archdioceses. In other words, he has held on until the next generation of hero-Cardinals is capable of moving forward.

Ecumenism and the Anglican Ordinariate

Benedict has also made some significant advances on the ecumenical front - indeed, in many ways one can say that his was a papacy dedicated to Christian unity. Since the divisions within Christianity often occur precisely because of bureaucratic heavy-handedness and intellectual narrowness, it takes someone with a deep sense of history and nose for cultural sensitivities to set about mending the bridges.

It would be an interesting exercise to collect a list of names of prominent Protestant scholars who converted during this pontificate precisely because they could relate to Benedict intellectually. He spoke their Christocentric dialect and was equally at home with them in the field of Scripture studies. He fundamentally broke the mould of the Catholic leader who cites dogma more often than Scripture.

Two disaster fronts on which Benedict worked particularly hard were those of the English schism of 1570 and the Lefebvrist schism of 1988. His provision of an Anglican Ordinariate for members of the Church of England and its international affiliates who were doctrinally 99% Catholic and who were prepared to become 100% Catholic if they were allowed to bring their high Anglican liturgy and a few other English cultural accoutrements with them, is one example of his use of imagination to help a whole group of people to enter into full Communion.

When it comes to the Lefebvrists, it is sadly the case that they can be incredibly narrow-minded and neurotic. They have a penchant for conspiracy theories and many are latently Jansenist (and some not so latently). Nonetheless, on their behalf one could say that prior to the Second Vatican Council, France had a very high Catholic culture. One can still find vestiges of it in the great Benedictine monasteries and the villages that surround them. The Church in France had many martyrs during the Revolution; some estimates of the revolutionaries' death toll are as high as one million.

Given that, it is not surprising that a significant proportion of the French Catholic population was deeply indignant when in the 1960s, after the Council, clerical leaders were going out of their way to affirm the values of the Revolution and to destroy the solemn liturgical traditions. Anyone who has read The Dialogues of the Carmelites by George Bernanos, based on the story of the martyrdom of the Carmelite nuns from the convent of Compiegne, will readily appreciate how daft it would be to try to wipe this heroism from the French historical memory or otherwise to trivialize the sacrifices made at the time of the Revolution.

This is all to say that when dealing with schisms, one really has to address the historical memories and not just the doctrinal formulae, and Benedict XVI was very good at this. He did, however, take an enormous amount of flak for trying to bring home lost sheep. Hans Kung, for example, grabbed the tabloids' interest by saying that, in creating the Ordinariate and holding out olive branches to the Lefebvrists, Benedict was fishing for converts in the muddy waters of right-wing extremism. It probably says an enormous amount about where Hans Kung sits theologically when he regards garden-variety high-church Anglicans as right-wing extremists!

In both cases - the creation of the Anglican Ordinariate and the issue of Summorum Pontificum (which wasn't just for Lefebvrists, but for all those who loved the Missal of St Pius V) - the most common criticism inside the Church came from canon lawyers who thought these gracious gestures created a great deal of administrative untidiness. However, as Benedict XVI observed when he was a Cardinal, those who preferred the Rite of antique usage had been treated like lepers and this was just not right. One cannot, on the one hand, honour the memory of the English martyrs who were sent to the scaffold because they attended this Rite contrary to the edict of a Protestant monarch, and, on the other hand, ban Catholics of the contemporary era from attending the same Rite as if there were something defective about it - this was precisely the point made by Cardinal John Heenan of Westminster to Pope Paul VI. Similarly, there is something highly illogical about tolerating the use of pidgin-English in the liturgy - in the form of banal "modern" hymns and so on - while balking at the Anglicans' King James English.

Ratzinger had always made the point that there is nothing wrong with having a number of different Rites in use, provided each particular Rite is of apostolic provenance rather than something cooked up by a committee of academics or the parish liturgy team last Saturday. He was a liturgical pluralist, not someone with a mania for bureaucratic tidiness.

The members of the Anglican Ordinariate are likely to revere his memory for a long time to come, and the Lefebvrists may well be wishing that they treated him with more respect and were not so recalcitrant. Benedict will also be remembered with great affection by the leaders of the Eastern Churches, because he went out of his way to include quotations from the Eastern Church Fathers in his homilies and he invited Patriarch Bartholomew I to the Synod on the Word held in 2008 - a gesture described by Bartholomew as "an important step towards restoration to full Communion."

Benedict XVI's magisterial teaching

In terms of his magisterial teaching, Benedict XVI wrote three encyclicals and four apostolic exhortations. Sadly, a fourth encyclical on the theological virtue of faith remains in draft form and may never be released. It would have completed the suite of encyclicals on the theological virtues: the first, Deus Caritas Est was focused on the theological virtue of love, and the second, Spe Salvi , on the theological virtue of hope.

Deus Caritas Est dealt with the relationship between eros and agape, and offered a definitely response to the Nietzschean charge that Christianity had killed eros. It also reiterated the central idea of the Conciliar document Dei Verbum - which the young Father Ratzinger had helped to draft - that Truth is a Person. Spe Salvi represents an antidote to the liberal reading of the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes . It makes the point that the only "thing" in which we may legitimately hope is Jesus Christ and that modern ideologies, which can be lethal, are mere mutations of Christian hope.

Benedict's third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate , was a masterful synthesis of late twentieth-century papal social teaching, with a special emphasis on the social implications of the Trinitarian anthropology of John Paul II. At its core was the principle that a "humanism without Christ is an inhuman humanism." It made the point that social justice without Christ is a recipe for secularism.

In many of his addresses Benedict also emphasized that love and reason are the twin pillars of all reality. The relationships between love-and-reason and faith-and-reason were themes to which he often returned. One sensed that he was trying to reconcile the Thomist and Franciscan traditions in a higher synthesis: rather than a system which gives a typically Thomist priority to truth, or one which gives a typically Bonaventurian priority to love, he insisted that love and reason are equally foundationally significant - hence the image of "twin pillars."

Although at the time of its delivery, his address at the University of Regensburg was regarded as something of a public relations disaster, for those who take the time to read the whole address, what it offers is a deep analysis of the relationship between faith and reason - as was proposed by the title of the lecture, "Faith, Reason and the University." As James Schall explained, the central thesis of the address is that both contemporary militant Islam and militant western liberalism share the same voluntarist starting point: they both make the mistake of thinking that what is true is linked to the act of the will, rather than to what is good. For some militant Islamists, truth is linked to the will of Allah; for militant liberals, truth is linked to the will of the individual. The point Benedict was making is that an irrational voluntarism is a common pathological property of Eastern Islamism and Western Liberalism.

The problem, of course, is that the average journalist has no anthropology, no conceptual framework within which to make sense of fundamental ideas like the will, goodness, truth and so on. Hence, the low level of education of print journalists makes it very difficult for world leaders to communicate anything more than shallow sound-bites - this is a problem that dogged Benedict throughout his papacy, and remains an issue for any deep thinking world leader.

Pope Benedict's Apostolic Exhortations addressed the topics of liturgical theology, revelation and Scripture, the situation of the Church in Africa and the situation of the Church in the Middle East. The first two Exhortations reflect Benedict's own theological priorities and interests; the last two reflect the distinctive problems faced by the faithful in Africa and the Middle East, not least being the problem of religious freedom. Of these four Exhorations, the first two will be of enduring theological value, while the last two are likely to provide something of a pastoral plan or at least a significant briefing paper for the next pontiff.

In his first Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum Caritatis , Benedict summarized the high drama of the Eucharist in the following terms:

"The substantial conversion of bread and wine into His body and blood introduces within creation the principle of a radical change, a sort of 'nuclear fission', which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be all in all (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:28)."

In the same document, Benedict concluded that everything pertaining to the Eucharist should be marked by beauty. I've long argued that beauty is Benedict's "favourite transcendental." He shares attraction to the transcendental of beauty so present in St Augustine, St Bonaventure and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and this comes across particularly strongly in his liturgical theology.

As a Cardinal, he coined the expressions "parish tea party liturgy," "primitive emotionalism" and "pastoral pragmatism" to refer to the post-1968 trend of making the Mass more like a Protestant fellowship gathering. He said that this was analogous to the Hebrews' worship of the Golden Calf - a pathetic attempt to "bring God down to the level of the people" that is nothing short of apostasy. Although it has taken time for his liturgical theology to reach the level of suburban parishes, it is now being taken up by the Benedict XVI-generation of seminarians and is being taught in more serious academic institutions, such as the Liturgical Institute at Mundelein. I would expect that the effects of this should start to filter down to the parish-level within a decade.

Verbum Domini , Benedict's second Apostolic Exhortation, addressed the issue of how God relates to the human person through revelation, Scripture and Tradition. The these he explored there include the cosmic dimension of the word, the realism of the word, Christology and the word, the eschatological dimension of the word, the word of God and the Holy Spirit, and God the Father, source and origin of the word. This particular exhortation amplified the central theses of Dei Verbum and the general Trinitarian Christocentrism of the Second Vatican Council.

Finally, though not of magisterial standing, Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth trilogy has been read by millions of people and helped to repair some of the damage of so-called Scripture scholars who approach the sacred texts without faith. Even here, however, journalists tried to spin Benedict's remarks in ways they were never intended. Thus, Benedict's statement that the ox and the ass at the Christmas crib are symbolic of the Jews and the Gentiles was reported as, "pope says that there was no donkey."

Benedict against the philistines

When his magisterial teaching is combined with his scholarly output of over fifty books and God only knows how many academic articles and scholarly homilies, Pope Benedict XVI has offered future generations of Catholics an intellectual treasury. As it is commonly said of St Augustine, if anyone says that they have read everything Benedict has written, they are surely stretching the truth. To push the connection between these two great teachers of the Church a little further, it may well also be the case that, just as today we only know about the Donatists because Augustine had to contend with them, future generations may only know about the strange late-twentieth-century phenomenon of "parish tea party liturgy" because Benedict had to contend with it!

In his early life, Joseph Ratzinger went to war against the dualistic tendencies in neo-scholasticism. Then in the late-1960s, he took up the fight against "correlationism" (accommodating ecclesial belief and practices to the spirit of the times). After that, it was liberation theology, various problems in Christology, ecclesiology and moral theology and finally militant atheism.

Given the successive waves of intellectual combat Pope Benedict XVI has endured in the service of the Church he loves, a future pope may well declare Benedict XVI a "Doctor of the Church." Were that to happen, I think he should also be honoured as the patron saint of people everywhere who are oppressed by bureaucracy - especially bureaucracies run by philistines.

Tracey Rowland is the Dean of the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne and an Adjunct Professor of the Centre for Faith Ethics and Society at the University of Notre Dame (Australia). She is the author of Ratzinger's Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI and Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed. An earlier version of this article appeared on the Catholic World Report.