Saranyana has PhDs in Theology and in Philosophy and Literature. He also as a degree in Political and Economic Sciences. He is a regular contributor to the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia. It was a freezing January in 1980, when Joseph Ratzinger, then the archbishop of Munich, was spending some days at his home in Regensburg. There, in the native Bavaria of the first Pope Emeritus in history, Ratzinger received the young Catalan priest who was working on his thesis on St. Bonaventure. In fact, they had already maintained professional correspondence for ten years.

After that, Saranyana met with Ratzinger many more times, both in Munich and Rome. He also visited Ratzinger after he was elected Pope. Saranyana has therefore followed this papacy very closely, which is why the Vice Rector for the University Community invited him to speak at the UIC.

Saranyana structured his lecture around the basic foundations of this papacy and how Benedict XVI was able to further some of the issues raised by the Second Vatican Council that continue to prove elusive today, even to members of the Vatican. “That Council was completely new for the Church”, he said. “The Holy Father was able to achieve a balance between those who shared certain ideas and those who did not. The problem with this is that he has received criticism from both sides.” He went on to explain that such tension within the Church is normal. “But it caused the Pope great suffering”, he said. “His successor will have to continue doing this work”.

The professor from the Universidad de Navarra believes that the Pope is a man who, as a teacher, managed to establish a dialogue with today's world. He summarized the papacy in three dialogues: “a dialogue with the empirical sciences, a dialogue with the culture of the Enlightenment and a dialogue with the liberal state, a result of the French revolution”. According to Saranyana, these are issues that the Second Vatican Council attempted to address, but there is still much to do. “Benedict XVI's papacy was brilliant. However, its course had just begun”, he explained. “For this reason, I think the next Pope should also be an intellectual”.

While answering the audience's questions, Professor Saranyana explained that there is another unresolved matter brought up by Vatican II: religious freedom. “It's still misunderstood by many governments”, he said. “It doesn't mean that the government should be indifferent or neutral; it means that it should respect people's religious convictions, expressed publically or privately, as long as they don't disrupt public order. For example, why have leaders from all around the world offered words of farewell to Pope Benedict, while here the government has remained silent? For many people, it’s difficult to understand that the Church is not primarily the hierarchical structure, but the people.”

“The great legacy of Benedict XVI is his message about the relationship between faith and reason: we need to analyse faith and we need to use reason”, Josep Ignasi Saranyana said in conclusion. "We need to think for ourselves, but without losing sight of our Christian principles".