Pontiff combines tough talk, sensitivity

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VATICAN CITY – Two images of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stood in sharp relief during the mourning period for the pope he would eventually succeed.

With his wispy silver hair blowing in the wind, the German prelate stood before the world’s political and spiritual leaders at John Paul II’s funeral April 8 and offered an eloquent, sensitive farewell that moved some to tears.

Ten days later – just before Ratzinger and 114 other cardinals entered the conclave to select the 265th pontiff – he delivered a sharp-edged homily on strict obedience to church teachings that left liberal Catholics wincing.

“He could be a wedge rather than a unifier for the church,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit weekly magazine America.

This was clear in St. Peter’s Square moments after the announcement of Ratzinger’s election and the name chosen by the first Germanic pope in 1,000 years: Benedict XVI. Amid the applause were groans and pockets of stunned silence.

“It’s Ratzinger,” French pilgrim Silvie Genthial, 52, barked into her cellular phone before hanging up.

“We were all hoping for a different pope – a Latin American perhaps – but not an ultraconservative like this,” she said.

But others hugged and toasted the new pope with red wine. “A clear and true voice of faith,” said Maria Piscini, an 80-year-old Italian grandmother, raising a paper cup filled with pinot noir.

The cardinals who selected him knew it would be received this way.

Perhaps no member of the conclave evoked such potent opinions – and has stirred more arguments – as the 78-year-old Ratzinger and the role he’s held since 1981: head of the powerful Vatican office that oversees doctrine and takes action against dissent.

“We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires,” he said Monday in a pre-conclave Mass in memory of John Paul. The church, he insisted, must defend itself against threats such as “radical individualism” and “vague religious mysticism.”

As prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, he was the Vatican’s iron hand.

His interventions are a roll call of flashpoints for the church: the 1987 order stripping American theologian the Rev. Charles Curran of the right to teach because he encouraged dissent; crippling Latin Americans supporting the popular “liberation theology” movement for alleged Marxist leanings; coming down hard on efforts to rewrite Scriptures in gender inclusive language.

He also shows no flexibility on the church’s views on priestly celibacy, contraception and the ban on ordination for women.

In 1986, he denounced rock music as the “vehicle of anti-religion.” In 1988, he dismissed anyone who tried to find “feminist” meanings in the Bible. Last year, he told American bishops that it was allowable to deny Communion to those who support such “manifest grave sin” as abortion and euthanasia.

He earned unflattering nicknames such as Panzercardinal, God’s Rottweiler, and the Grand Inquisitor. Cartoonists emphasized his deep-set eyes and Italians lampooned his pronounced German accent.

“Indeed, it would be hard to find a Catholic controversy in the past 20 years that did not somehow involve Joseph Ratzinger,” John Allen, a Vatican reporter for the National Catholic Register, wrote six years ago.

But among conservatives, he rose in stature. An online fan club sings his praises and offers souvenirs with the slogan: “Putting the smackdown on heresy since 1981.”

Even John Paul apparently needed him close by. Several times Ratzinger said he tendered his resignation because of his age, but each time it was rejected by the pope.

In recent years, he took on issues outside church doctrine. He once called Buddhism a religion for the self-indulgent. In an interview with the French magazine Le Figaro last year, he suggested Turkey’s bid to join the Europe Union conflicted with Europe’s Christian roots – a view that could unsettle Vatican attempts to improve relations with Muslims.

“Turkey has always represented a different continent, in permanent contrast to Europe,” he was quoted as saying.

In a book released last week, “Values in a Time of Upheavals,” Ratzinger also called demands for European “multiculturalism” as a “fleeing from what is one’s own.”

“If he continues as pope the way he was as a cardinal, I think we will see a polarized church,” said David Gibson, a former Vatican Radio journalist and author of a book on trends in the church. “He has said himself that he wanted a smaller, but purer, church.”

Critics complain Ratzinger embodies all the conservative instincts of the last papacy, but without John Paul’s charisma and pastoral genius.

“I think this is the closest the church can come to human cloning,” quipped Gibson.

It’s a joke not too far off the mark.

Both John Paul II and his successor were forged by the horrors of World War II and advanced in the church in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. They also shared a deep drive to try to use Christianity as a grand unifier for the continent after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

But the Polish pontiff came from a nation that suffered greatly during the war. Ratzinger – like many from his generation – carries the burdens and ghosts of Germany’s past.

Raised in the oak forest and pine foothills of Bavaria, he said he was enrolled in Hitler’s Nazi youth movement against his will. At the same time, the policeman’s son entered seminary studies in 1939 as a 12-year-old with “joy and great expectations,” according to his memoirs.

He recalled being deeply moved by the rituals of the church, such as candlelight services and midnight Mass.

But in 1943, he was drafted as an assistant to a Nazi anti-aircraft unit in Munich. Later, he was shipped off to build tank barriers at the Austrian-Hungarian border. He wrote that he escaped recruitment by the dreaded SS because he and others said they were training to be priests.

“We were sent out with mockery and verbal abuse,” he wrote. “But these insults tasted wonderful because they freed us from the threat of that deceitful ‘voluntary service’ and all its consequences.”

He deserted in April 1945 and returned home to Traunstein. It was a risky move, since deserters were shot or hanged. But the Third Reich was collapsing.

“The Americans finally arrived in our village,” he wrote. “Even though our house lacked all comfort, they chose it as their headquarters.”

Ratzinger was identified as a deserter and placed in a prisoner of war camp near Ulm in southern Germany. He wrote that he could see the spires of the city’s cathedral in the distance.

“It was, for me, like a consoling proclamation of the indescribable humaneness of faith,” he wrote.

He and his older brother, Georg, were ordained in 1951. He taught theology and earned a reputation as a forward-looking prelate and took part in the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, a major attempt to modernize the faith.

His doctoral dissertation on the medieval theologian St. Bonaventure tried to draw attention to “dangerous relativism” – a message that he echoed at Mass on Monday.