Wall Street Journal - April 20, 2005
Gabriel Kahn and Alessandra Galloni in Vatican City, David Luhnow in Mexico City and Matthew Karnitschnig in Vienna

In his two-decade career as John Paul's unyielding enforcer of church doctrine, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, has combated what he views as the chief adversaries of God and the church: secularism and moral relativism. He cracked down on leftist priests in Latin America in the 1980s, and gave a sermon last month in which he denounced "filth" in the church. That was interpreted as a reference to, among other things, the sex-abuse scandal in the U.S. church and careerism in the Vatican.

Thus many leading Catholics yesterday viewed the choice of Benedict as a decision by the cardinals to stake the future of Catholicism on its base -- its teachings about God and Jesus, and its most-committed believers. That is what many within the church feel is most urgently needed: a pope who wants to reassert Catholic identity.

The choice of Benedict carries risks. While Pope John Paul II's personal warmth smoothed the edges of traditionalist messages -- no birth control, no marriage for priests, no ordaining of women -- the former Cardinal Ratzinger will be pushing the same philosophy without the same deep wellspring of charisma. Some of what Benedict seeks will meet resistance in parts of the world where the Catholic faith is waning, such as Europe.

Some wonder whether he will give short shrift to concerns in the third world, such as poverty. His opposition to condoms will have consequences in Christian Africa, where the Catholic faith is flourishing in many AIDS-stricken nations. His declarations of the supremacy of Catholicism over other religions may disenchant the Muslim and Jewish leaders to whom John Paul reached out during his papacy.

But in choosing Cardinal Ratzinger, the cardinals are signaling that Roman Catholicism is a religion, not a government or a social-services organization, and popular opinion won't decide its course. The focus may prove to be on spreading a robust version of the Catholic doctrine, even if that threatens a loss of adherents in places such as North America.

"Ratzinger is saying the biggest problem is not issues like poverty, but rather the direct assault on the center of the church and the church's identity," says Oscar Aguilar, a lay professor at Mexico's Universidad Iberoamericana, a Jesuit university in Mexico City. "They are armor-plating the doctrine. This shows there was pretty good consensus on the main danger facing the church: the dictatorship of 'relativism,' the wave of everything in the 20th century that ranged from New Age to Marxism to liberation theology."

In his native Germany, a country split evenly between Catholics and Protestants, the new pope has been criticized by many both in and out of the church for being out of tune with the mainstream.

"I'm speechless," said Rainer Kampling, a Catholic theologian at Berlin's Free University who doubts the German pope will be able to unite the church. "Many here hold him in high esteem as a defender of Catholic doctrine, but many German Catholics also strongly reject him. Few are on the fence."

Like much of the rest of Europe, Germany has evolved into a solidly secular society. But secularism is what Benedict sees as a great evil facing Europe and the world-wide church. His choice of the name Benedict is telling: St. Benedict is the patron saint of Europe. In books and speeches, Cardinal Ratzinger has repeatedly emphasized that the problems the church faces in Europe are the result of the church's decision to stray from its theological foundations. The result has been a weaker Europe and a weaker church, he says.

In his former role as Vatican watchdog for orthodoxy, Benedict was known for his staunch defense of dogma. He once said in an interview: "I am not the Grand Inquisitor." His career is marked by crackdowns on wayward theologians.

But Benedict's interpretation of Catholic theology goes far beyond that. In his writings and speeches, he has indicated that he believes that faith in God must flourish first at the grass-roots level, among small groups fighting a daily struggle against evil forces. A bottom-up fidelity to the tenets of the Catholic faith, he says, will in turn build a stronger church.

In his brief address to the crowd in St. Peter's Square after being selected pope, Benedict referred to his doctrine, calling himself "a humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord."

Benedict has often referred to the church as a small "boat" tossed about by waves of dangerous ideologies such as Marxism, liberalism, atheism and agnosticism, urging Catholics to always be alert. To many supporters, Benedict is a protector of the faith, a strong captain who will defend the church against the ideological threats facing it. "From a theological point of view, a pope must be conservative. Religion is not business; it is the word of Christ," says Giorgio Rumi, a history professor at Milan's Catholic University.

In a homily he gave on Monday before the cardinals convened in the Sistine Chapel for their vote, Benedict lashed out against what the church brands as relativism -- the philosophy that there are no absolute truths.

"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.

The selection of Benedict, who was considered a front-runner, came after what is thought to be only four ballots -- a fast outcome for a church that is in many ways divided on issues such as how it should confront its waning influence in Europe or how the Vatican should be run.

In the quarter-century since the last pope was chosen, the demographic center of Catholicism has shifted southward. Now more than half of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics are from the developing world. Beyond their shared belief in God and Jesus, the issues they confront in their daily lives are radically different from those of their northern brethren.

Often, Catholics in the Southern Hemisphere are sharply more traditional in their faith than those in Europe or North America, where Mass attendance and church influence have waned. That may put them squarely in Benedict's corner. Yet people in those regions are often struggling against manifold problems -- chief among them poverty and AIDS -- that many people believe require starkly different solutions than the doctrinal orthodoxy for which Benedict is known.

In Africa, for example, many have been hoping that the new pope will use his moral weight to focus the world's attention on the need to help the continent. The increasing number of Africans, and African Catholics, growing poorer and dying of AIDS will provide a great moral challenge to the church in the 21st century. John Paul's enthusiastic support for debt forgiveness for the poorest countries at the turn of the millennium lent a religious imperative to that cause and helped endear him to Africans.

Benedict's elevation disappointed some who had hoped for a pope from the developing world, for whom problems such as poverty and corruption might have been priorities. Because of the conclave's diversity -- the voting cardinals were from 52 countries -- several of the frontrunners were from the developing world for the first time in conclave history.

"He may not be very worried about the poor man," said Francis Thonippara, director of the Center for Eastern and Indian Christian Studies in Bangalore. "He is a man of intellect more worried about doctrine." India, home to 17 million Catholics, had a home-grown candidate in the conclave, Bombay archbishop Ivan Dias.

The spread of AIDS is also challenging the Vatican's position against the use of birth control, particularly condoms. In some African countries, condoms are being widely deployed in the fight against AIDS in spite of church teaching. Some nuns working with AIDS victims, and communities at high risk of exposure to HIV, privately advocate the use of condoms as they watch parishioners die. Those are precisely the kinds of compromises with church teaching that Benedict has tried to quash.

John Paul involved the church in the growing debate over globalization and how to protect poor people from the vagaries of the free market. Many of his bishops from Milan to Mexico City took up the cause, trying to cast the church as the moral conscience of capitalism and often defending anti-globalization protesters.

In Latin America, Benedict is perhaps best remembered as the cardinal who shut down many of the seminaries teaching "liberation theology," a potent combination of Christian concern for the poor and some elements of Marxist thought that spread throughout the region in the 1960s and 1970s. Cardinal Ratzinger authored a two-part critique of liberation theology in the early 1980s. He clamped down on figures such as Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian priest considered the father of the movement, and led a move to close seminaries that were hot spots for liberal thought. Even a former student of Cardinal Ratzinger's, Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, came under intense scrutiny for his writings and eventually left the priesthood after being censured by the cardinal. Cardinal Ratzinger succeeded in isolating liberation theology in pockets of the region.

But Pope John Paul II's later focus on the plight of the poor helped the Vatican gain momentum in Latin America. Indeed, the Vatican's outspoken concern about the excesses of unbridled capitalism and globalization have created hope in Latin America that the poor will again be a leading concern for Rome, despite Cardinal Ratzinger's record.

"My guess is Pope Benedict XVI will be in line with John Paul II's commitment to the poor and will be outspoken on issues of economic justice," said Tom Quigley, a policy adviser on Latin American issues at the U.S. Conference of Bishops in Washington, D.C. Mr. Quigley pointed out that Cardinal Ratzinger recently lifted his opposition to beginning the process of sainthood for El Salvador's late bishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero -- an outspoken liberal bishop gunned down in 1980 during that country's civil war.

Benedict must grapple with a church beset by problems that extend far beyond adherence to doctrine. One is the culture of lax internal management that critics say prevailed in the Vatican under John Paul. Some blame that culture, at times slow to react, for allowing issues like the sex-abuse scandal involving American priests to spiral out of control.

That appears to be one area where Benedict could break sharply with his predecessor. As head of the most powerful office in the Vatican bureaucracy, he often intervened swiftly and firmly in all sorts of Vatican affairs, and developed a reputation for precise, detail-oriented management.

But what has animated Benedict most of late has been the ills facing the church in Europe, once Catholicism's backyard but in recent times its weakest flank. In Europe, Catholic adherence is in free-fall. Benedict has written at length on how many of the conflicts in modern European culture stem from the continent's drift from its Christian roots.

"Europe, at the moment of its greatest success, seems to have been emptied out on the inside." he wrote recently in a book entitled "Without Roots," referring to Europe's spiritual decline.

Son of a police officer, Benedict was born on April 16, 1927, in Marktl am Inn, Germany. As a teenager, he lived through the years of Nazi rule and World War II -- an experience he recalls at length in his memoirs.

Like many Germans of his generation, he was a member of the Hitler Youth, a mandatory organization set up by Hitler in 1933 to train young boys in Nazi ideology. Drafted into a Nazi antiaircraft brigade in 1943, he served a stint digging antitank trenches on the Austro-Hungarian border.

According to his autobiography, "My Life," he eventually deserted the army when he was 18 and returned home to Traunstein. There, U.S. soldiers identified him as a German soldier and held him in a prisoner-of-war camp for several weeks before he was released and re-entered the seminary.

Yesterday, members of the Jewish community hailed Benedict's record in promoting dialogue between Catholics and Jews, saying the new pope's years under Nazi rule laid the foundations for subsequent efforts to forge stronger relations between the two faiths.

"He witnessed how Jews were sent to death camps. He was a witness to the horrors of the Holocaust, like John Paul II," says Rabbi Marc Schneier, Chairman of the World Jewish Congress Commission on Intergroup Relations. "The new pope...was very instrumental under the leadership of John Paul II in seeking a rapprochement between Catholics and Jews."

How Benedict deals with people of other faiths could be one of the issues that defines his papacy. Catholicism's expansion in the developing world means that it is bumping up ever more against Islam, sometimes violently. John Paul tried to address that through grand gestures of dialogue. Benedict, on the other hand, is best known for authoring a 2000 document, which reasserted the supremacy of Catholicism in relation to other faiths. Some felt the document made inter-religious dialogue difficult because they felt it denied the legitimacy of other faiths.

Joseph Ratzinger was ordained in 1951 and then spent several years teaching theology, before being appointed Munich bishop in 1977. He was made cardinal that year by Pope Paul VI.

Over the years he was known for his austere and unflappable style. Yet over the past weeks, as the jockeying for the papacy picked up steam, he has shown the world a softer side.

His thin white hair blowing over his large spectacles, Cardinal Ratzinger choked up with emotion as he presided over the funeral of John Paul II. In the days before the conclave, when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims lingered around St. Peter's Square, he was seen several times greeting them with a handshake or a sign of the cross. TV viewers watched as he frequently cleared his throat and patted his forehead in apparent weariness as he delivered his pre-conclave homily on Monday morning.

But he has signaled no soft-pedaling of his long-held beliefs. In his speech yesterday at St. Peter's, as he appeared for the first time before the faithful as pope, Benedict said: Trusting in the Lord, let us go forward."

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Matt Moffett in Rio de Janeiro, Elizabeth Bernstein in New York, Roger Thurow in Zurich, Kristine M. Crane in Rome and Eric Bellman in Bombay contributed to this article.

Write to Gabriel Kahn at gabriel.kahn@wsj.com and Alessandra Galloni at alessandra.galloni@wsj.com.

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