The influence the dead have on our lives usually fades with time. As those who knew them age and die, it becomes harder and harder to summon them back into our present. One of the quiet surprises of Catholic life today is that, if anything, the influence of Joseph Ratzinger seems to have grown. During his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI was often discussed more than he was actually read. His name appeared regularly in newspaper columns, television debates and ecclesiastical controversies, becoming a familiar figure even to those who had never opened one of his books or delved into his writings. Today – happily – the reverse is increasingly true. Younger Catholics with little memory of the battles that defined his public reputation are discovering his writings for themselves: Introduction to Christianity, The Spirit of the Liturgy, the Jesus of Nazareth trilogy and dozens of other works written over more than half a century.
And there is quite a corpus of writing to dive into. Before his election to the papacy, Ratzinger had already established himself as one of the most important Catholic theologians of the post-war era. By the time of his death, he had produced a body of work stretching from academic theology and biblical scholarship to interviews, homilies, lectures, papal encyclicals and meditations intended for ordinary readers. Much remains untranslated. Some works are difficult to obtain. Even specialists occasionally struggle to locate a particular passage or trace the development of a particular idea across decades of writing.
Patrick Gruhn, a German-born entrepreneur now based in California, is fostering a solution to this problem. He is one of the leading figures behind the newly established Benedict XVI Society, whose aims include promoting the study of Benedict’s theology and supporting academic programmes devoted to his thought. Gruhn is also an investor in the Catholic Herald and serves on its board of directors. As part of the Society’s work, Gruhn is helping to build an AI-assisted research tool that will help users navigate the late pope’s enormous literary legacy – and one that is freely accessible to the public.
Although he works in technology, Gruhn speaks far more readily about theology than software. The origins of the initiative lie less in Silicon Valley than in northern Germany, where, as a teenager, he first encountered Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity. Born in 1981, Gruhn grew up in Hanover, with a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. Northern Germany, he recalls, was not a particularly religious environment. Like many intellectually curious young people, he found himself wrestling with questions about faith, reason and whether Christianity remained plausible in the modern world.
The answer he found in Ratzinger was not a retreat from reason but an invitation to pursue it further. “What it made me understand,” Gruhn told me, “was that faith and reason work together. Before that, I more or less assumed faith was something you simply accepted without being able to align it with reason.”
These insights of Ratzinger had a lasting impact. He began reading more of Ratzinger’s works, including the interview volume Salt of the Earth. Over time, he says, the future pope’s writings led him towards a deeper sacramental life, including daily Mass and Communion. What impressed him was not merely the theology itself but the confidence with which Benedict engaged modern questions. “He even asks the question: is it reasonable to believe in today’s world?” Gruhn said. “Those are exactly the questions you ask yourself when you’re seventeen or eighteen.”
It is not difficult to see why Ratzinger continues to attract new readers. Unlike many 20th-century theologians, he wrote with unusual clarity. His subject was often the relationship between Christianity and modernity: whether faith remained intellectually credible in a scientific age, whether reason could sustain itself once detached from religious foundations and how Christian belief might be lived within increasingly secular societies. These were not merely academic questions. They were questions many ordinary Catholics – and indeed many outside the Church – found themselves asking.
The Benedict XVI Society emerged from conversations between Gruhn, Klaus Wyman, who serves as its president, and Fr Ralph Weimann, a theologian in Rome whose academic work has long centred on Ratzinger’s thought. The Society has also attracted support from figures close to Benedict, including Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the late pope’s longtime secretary, and Cardinal Kurt Koch.
Its ambitions extend well beyond the AI project itself. The Society plans to offer online academic programmes focused on Benedict’s theology, including a master’s degree and eventually a doctoral programme. The intention is to make serious study of Ratzinger’s work accessible internationally rather than confining it to a handful of specialist institutions.
The hope is that the AI component will help support that wider mission. “The idea is not really a chatbot,” Gruhn explained. “It is more like a perfect librarian who knows everything in the books and can point you exactly where to find it.” A user might ask what Benedict wrote about family life, the Eucharist, Europe or religious freedom. Rather than generating a free-floating answer, the platform is intended to identify relevant texts and direct readers right back to the original sources.
Right now, it already includes the documents issued during Benedict’s pontificate that are available through the Vatican website, together with selected secondary material. The larger task now under way is securing access to a much broader range of texts. Some of the challenge is legal rather than technical: many works remain under copyright, requiring negotiations with publishers and rights holders. Gruhn hopes that by the centenary of Benedict’s birth next year the corpus will be significantly expanded.
Given that AI systems find it easy to navigate across the barriers of language, Gruhn hopes the project will help span any these kinds of difficulties. A user might pose a question in English and be directed to a relevant source in German. An Italian-language dissertation analysing Benedict’s theology could become accessible to readers who would otherwise never encounter it. “There may be a great PhD thesis written in Spanish,” Gruhn said. “This makes it available to English-speaking audiences as well.”
That ambition feels distinctly Benedictine. Ratzinger belonged to a generation of European Catholic intellectuals for whom theological scholarship still crossed frontiers with remarkable ease. German theologians read French scholars, Italians read Germans, debates begun in Tübingen or Munich might continue in Paris, Rome or Madrid. Important ideas circulated through universities, journals and seminaries across the continent. In an age when academic life often feels fragmented into separate linguistic worlds, there is something deeply worthwhile – and deeply Catholic – about rebuilding a common conversation.
The current version is very much a work in progress. “We just announced it to the world,” Gruhn said. “It’s really a beta version.” There are also many questions about editorial judgement. Which translations should be treated as authoritative? How should unpublished material be handled? What role should later scholarship play alongside Benedict’s own writings?
On such matters, the Society is working cautiously and carefully. Fr Weimann and his academic collaborators provide theological oversight to help determine which texts should be prioritised and how different versions should be evaluated. Unpublished material, Gruhn says, would only be included where there is clear scholarly value and confidence that publication would respect Benedict’s intentions.
For all the discussion of software and source material, what emerges most clearly from speaking with Gruhn is that the project is not fundamentally about technology. The AI is just a means rather than an end: the real aim is transmitting Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s works and the wisdom they contain.
In an age of information overload, Gruhn says there is a need to remove barriers, make texts easier to discover and encourage readers – scholarly or otherwise – to engage with and encounter the original texts themselves. The Society’s longer-term vision is that academic study and technological tools will reinforce one another. Students and scholars will deepen understanding of Benedict’s thought; their work will enrich the platform; the platform will make further research easier. Over time, a genuinely global community of readers may emerge around one of the 20th century’s most important Catholic thinkers.
Whether artificial intelligence proves to be the ideal instrument for that task remains to be seen. Technologies age more quickly than books. Yet there is something telling in the fact that a project of this sort exists at all. It reflects a growing conviction among many Catholics that Benedict’s work still has more to say than has yet been fully absorbed.
“People are still discovering new insights in Augustine and Aquinas,” Gruhn told me. “I think with Benedict we have really only scratched the surface.”
