The new pope: Ambivalence in Germany

last updated 8 January 2015

Vatican City

Many believed there would never be a German pope, said Heinz-Joachim Fischer in Frankfurt’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. But Joseph Ratzinger, henceforward Pope Benedict XVI, is a special case. For the past decade, he has been closer to the papacy than anyone else. He singlehandedly wrote many of the encyclicals that bear John Paul II’s signature. The late pope approved of Ratzinger’s insistence that church doctrine is not a flexible set of guidelines that can change with the times, but a divinely inspired rulebook, fixed and inviolate. Most Vatican watchers have long perceived him as “the successor John Paul II would have chosen.” And even his detractors admit that his is “a formidable intellect.”

Yet Ratzinger had plenty of enemies before he was named pope, said Philipp Gessler in Berlin’s taz. Many of them numbered among his German colleagues. As head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith—the Vatican agency that once conducted the Inquisition—he was the enforcer of Catholic doctrine, and he quickly became known for his severity. Progressive theologians and bishops suffered under his ideological rigidity; several were defrocked. He had “no understanding of people’s feelings,” and his condemnations “could seem fueled by hate.”

Such intensity cowed the other cardinals, dissident Swiss theologian Hans Küng told Paris’ Libération. Ratzinger’s influence over his peers is “enormous.” It was he, for instance, who “imposed absolute silence” on the cardinals in the runup to the conclave, “a first in church history.” Equally intimidating was his reverence for John Paul II, an adulation that crossed over into literal worship at the pope’s death. “He prayed to the pope as if he were already a saint.” At the funeral, he made what was probably his only break with traditional church doctrine when he declared that John Paul II was surely already in heaven (which would imply that the late pope skipped the Purgatory step, something only saints can do).