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Benedict XVI, Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church; Sovereign of the State of Vatican City

Address: Apostolic Palace, 00120 Vatican City State

Following the death of Pope John Paul II, in April 2005, the College of Cardinals convened in Vatican City to elect the 265th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. They selected Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who had presided over the deliberations as dean of the college. In accepting their decision Ratzinger took the name Benedict XVI. Ratzinger had previously served, since 1981, as the prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican office that protects and promotes doctrinal purity. Under Ratzinger’s leadership, and with his papal predecessor John Paul II’s blessing, the CDF tripled its workload, disciplining at least a dozen Catholic theologians, bishops, and priests, and expanded beyond its investigative capacity to issue broad policy statements on moral and theological matters. As the church became increasingly intolerant of dissent during John Paul’s pontificate, observers noted that the CDF became the most important department in the Vatican. "Cardinal Ratzinger is a singular figure in the history of his office and perhaps the church," Gianni Baget Bozzo, a theologian who specializes in the Vatican, told Daniel Williams for the Washington Post (November 5, 2004). "He takes the initiative on a wide range of subjects in a way that is usually reserved to the pope. That's not to say he acts against the pope. He is trusted. But he is a kind of vice pope." While Ratzinger was often singled out for criticism or praise for the church’s hard-line positions (the Italian press dubbed him the "PanzerKardinal," after the German tank), Father Joseph Fessip, who studied under Ratzinger in what was then West Germany, told Russell Chandler for the Los Angeles Times (November 7, 1986), "There isn't a single issue of church and theology the Pope and Ratzinger would disagree on." Yet Ratzinger’s visibility frequently drew criticism away from the pontiff. "Ratzinger’s job is a thankless one," a high Vatican official told Chandler. "It's inevitable that he would be seen as the ‘fall guy.’ And general civility within the church would avoid an overly blunt, personal attack on the Pope." Although many observers have predicted that Ratzinger will continue to embrace conservative positions as Pope Benedict XVI, others have suggested that his views might be more moderate than expected. "Experience shows that the papacy in the Catholic Church today is such a challenge that it can change anyone: someone who went into the conclave a progressive cardinal can emerge as a conservative pope," the priest and theologian Hans Ku¨ng, whom Ratzinger disciplined while CDF prefect, wrote for the BBC News (April 26, 2005, on-line); he went on to cite the example of Cardinal Montini, who became Pope Paul VI. Referring to Cardinal Roncalli, who became Pope John XXIII, Ku¨ng added, "Someone who went into the conclave a conservative cardinal can emerge as a progressive pope."

Benedict’s belief in an unwavering church stems, some say, from his childhood in Nazi Germany. "Having seen fascism in action, Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism," the journalist and Ratzinger biographer John L. Allen Jr. wrote, according to Williams. "In other words, he believes the Catholic Church serves the cause of human freedom by restricting freedom in its internal life, thereby remaining clear about what it teaches and believes." Benedict’s philosophy is squarely opposed to relativism, the belief that there are no moral or theological absolutes. That belief, in Benedict's view, presents the greatest danger to the church today; he sees it embedded in modern society and in the work of some contemporary Catholic theologians. Although he was a supporter of the progressive reforms of Vatican Council II in the 1960s, Ratzinger’s experience with Marxism in German universities later that decade changed his views and convinced him that the essential truths of theology and morality cannot be debated publicly without resulting damage to the church. Benedict perceives "two cities: city of God and city of man," Avery Cardinal Dulles told reporters for Time (May 2, 2005). "He sees a world very much in conflict."

The youngest son of Joseph Ratzinger, a policeman, and his wife, Maria (ne´e Peintner), a hotel cook, Joseph Alois Ratzinger (some sources spell his middle name Aloysius) was born in the Bavarian town of Marktyl am Inn, near the German border with Czechoslovakia, on April 16, 1927. His family were devout Catholics. Ratzinger’s older brother George became a priest and later conducted the famous choir at the Regensburg Cathedral. His sister Maria became his longtime secretary. Ratzinger later recalled in his memoir Milestones (1998) that his childhood was a happy one of nature walks and learning to play the piano. He also found a mystical resonance in the Catholic Mass conducted in Latin, as it was everywhere pre–Vatican II. "Here I was encountering a reality that no one had simply thought up, a reality that no official authority or great individual had created," he wrote, according to the reporters for Time. "It was much more than a product of human history." In 1937 Joseph Ratzinger retired and moved his family to Traunstein, in Bavaria. There, Ratzinger attended the city’s humanistic gymnasium, a grammar school now called the Chiemgau School, and also attended St. Michael’s Catholic Seminary.

Growing up in Hitler's Germany, Ratzinger was prevented from embracing Nazism, he said, by his faith in Roman Catholicism, which he called in Milestones "a citadel of truth and righteousness against the realm of atheism and deceit," according to Daniel J. Wakin for the New York Times (April 20, 2005). Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth at age 14, as was required of young Germans at the time. His participation was less than enthusiastic. His father had conflicts with the regime, leading him to move his family frequently. When Ratzinger was 14 Nazis killed his cousin who suffered from Down syndrome as part of their systematic extermination of the mentally ill. Ratzinger’s seminary studies were interrupted when he was drafted into an anti-aircraft unit in Munich, in 1943. However, an infected finger prevented him from learning how to shoot. He later joined a unit protecting a Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) factory that produced aircraft engines, and in 1944 he set tank traps near the German borders with Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Hungary. As the war drew to a close, Ratzinger deserted the German army and was briefly held as a prisoner of war by American forces, in 1945.

After the war Ratzinger returned to his studies with the goal of becoming a professor of theology. While studying at the University of Munich, he was drawn to the priesthood. He was ordained in 1951. "I was convinced—I myself don't know how—that God wanted something from me," he told E. J. Dionne Jr. for the New York Times Magazine (November 24, 1985), "something which could be accomplished only by becoming a priest." Ratzinger began teaching theology at the University of Freising. Considered something of a wunderkind, he moved on to professorships at the universities of Bonn (1958), Mu¨nster (1963), Tu¨bingen (1966), and Regensburg (1969), all in Germany. "He fascinated all of us with his wonderful, angelic voice, his clear language, his deep intellect and powerful faith," Max Seckler, a theology professor at Bonn, told reporters for Newsweek (May 2, 2005). At the same time, he wrote books on Christology, patrology, church history, liturgy, homiletics, and other aspects of Catholic doctrine and practice. "From the very beginning, I had a big need to communicate," Ratzinger explained to Dionne. "I wasn't able to keep for myself the knowledge which seemed to be so important to me. The beautiful thing in it was the possibility of giving it to others."

At Vatican Council II (1962–65), the historic conclave of the international episcopate convened by Pope John XXIII for the announced purpose of renewing the church spiritually and reassessing its position in the contemporary world, Ratzinger was theological adviser to Joseph Cardinal Frings of Germany. Frings, encouraged by Ratzinger, joined with French bishops and other German bishops in resisting the efforts of the Roman Curia to block reform. Ratzinger had come to believe that liberalizing reforms were necessary because the church had become too restrictive and stagnant. With the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, Ratzinger wrote draft documents replacing those emanating from the Holy Office, the forerunner of the CDF, and he collaborated in the writing of the speech in which the German cardinal Julius Dopfner sharply criticized the Holy Office for "methods and behavior [that] do not conform to the modern era and are a source of scandal to the world," as quoted by Dionne. Ratzinger himself described the Holy Office as being "detrimental to the faith," according to Time (December 14, 1981), and he was a founding member of the Concilium, an international board of Catholic scholars, many of whom he would later count among the "aggressive polemical forces" undermining the Catholic faith, as reported by Newsweek (December 31, 1984).

As the dean of faculty at Tu¨bingen, Ratzinger began to have doubts about the liberal movement in the Roman Catholic Church. A student assembly there attacked the Gospel as a "mass deception" aimed at maintaining capitalism and called the cross of Jesus "an expression of the sadomasochistic glorification of pain," according to the 2005 article in Newsweek. Many of the protests had underpinnings of Marxist theory. Ratzinger told Dionne that he began to see such theories as hypocritical, "if one only compared them with the praxis," which revealed them to be "a radical attack on human freedom and dignity." An incident in which students aggressively interrupted his class seems to have particularly affected him. "That experience made it clear to me that the abuse of faith had to be resisted precisely," he later wrote, according to the BBC News (April 19, 2005, on-line). By the mid-1970s Ratzinger was openly expressing his concern over the direction the church was taking, a drift toward the "fashionable" left that he had unwittingly helped to set in motion. In 1975 he characterized the decade since Vatican II as "a period of ecclesiastical decadence in which the people who started it became incapable of stopping the avalanche," as quoted by the reporter for Time in 1981.

Pope Paul VI named Ratzinger archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1977. At a synod of bishops that year, Ratzinger met a like-minded prelate, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, the archbishop of Krakow, Poland, and the future John Paul II. "I was particularly impressed by his human warmth and the deep inner rooting in God which appeared so clearly," he told Dionne. "And then, of course, I was also impressed by his philosophical education, his acuteness as a thinker and his ability to communicate his knowledge." Tempered in the crucible of totalitarianism, Cardinal Wojtyla shared Ratzinger's chagrin over what they saw as the spiritual disarray of Catholicism, his urgent sense that the permissiveness and heterodoxy rampant in the church since Vatican II had gone far enough, and his belief in the need for a "restoration" of orthodoxy in faith and discipline.

Following the deaths of Pope Paul VI, in August 1978, and his immediate successor, Pope John Paul I, one month later, Cardinal Wojtyla was elected pontiff, in October 1978. As Pope John Paul II, Wojtyla set a conservative course, reaffirming the church's traditional teachings on birth control, abortion, and divorce; shortening the leash on religious orders; and approving a partial revival of the tridentine Latin Mass, which had been replaced by revised Masses in the vernacular after Vatican II. Pope John Paul II named Cardinal Ratzinger the prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in November 1981. Previously known successively as the Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition (not related to the infamous Spanish Inquisition, which lasted from 1478 to 1834), and as the Holy Office, the CDF has been operating under its current name since 1965. Joaquin Navarro Valls, a Vatican spokesman, told Dionne that John Paul’s selection of Ratzinger was "one the most personal choices of his Pontificate." According to Navarro and others, at first Ratzinger did not want the job, arguably the toughest in the Vatican.

Like Ratzinger, Pope John Paul II was especially concerned over Marxist infiltration of the church in the guise of liberation theology, which holds that the fundamental mission of the church is to enact social change, even to the extent of fostering revolution. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the writings of liberation theologians became extremely popular among Roman Catholics throughout Latin America. In Brazil alone 70,000 groups headed by liberation-theology–inspired church people sprang up, usually outside the ecclesiastically approved parochial structure. Ratzinger claimed that liberation theology came dangerously close to the idea that Christ's kingdom can be fully realized in this world through social action, which contradicted his understanding of Christian belief and, he thought, could easily lead to the rise of false political utopias such as Nazi Germany. In response to some liberal theologians in Latin America who had argued that all baptized Catholics are priests, in 1983 the CDF released a document, written by Ratzinger, reaffirming the church’s rule that only priests can say Mass and consecrate the Eucharist. In April 1984, at the first press conference ever held by a head of the CDF, Ratzinger denounced theologies that "reduce the faith to a duty apart, and use Marxist analysis to interpret not only history and the life of society but also the very Bible and the Christian message," according to Marjorie Hyer in the Washington Post (June 25, 1984). In September 1984 he presented to the press the "Instruction on the Theology of Liberation," a Sacred Congregation document warning of the dangers to faith and Christian living posed by certain forms of liberation theology. Soon afterward, Ratzinger and his Sacred Congregation colleagues forbade the Brazilian liberation theologian and Dominican friar Leonardo Boff from publicly speaking or writing about his work for one year. After a second silencing, in 1992, Boff left the Dominican order. At a meeting chaired by Ratzinger in October 1984, 44 of Peru's 52 bishops voted to endorse the principles contained in the Sacred Congregation document condemning liberation theology. The Vatican considered the vote "symbolically important," because the liberation-theology movement had been born in Peru and dominated rank-and-file clerical and religious activity in that country. An April 1986 Sacred Congregation document signed by Ratzinger and titled "Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation" was slightly more conciliatory to liberation movements than past statements from the Vatican. It noted that serving the poor through charity and working to change oppressive political and economic structures must be priorities for Christians and that armed struggle may be justified "as a last resort" in "the extreme case." However, it noted, "those who discredit the path of reform and favor the myth of revolution . . . encourage the setting up of totalitarian regimes" leading to "merely a change of masters." By the end of the 1980s, liberation theology was no longer a powerful movement within the Roman Catholic Church.

In addition to liberation theology, Ratzinger's targets in the early 1980s included the hedonism and materialism of many American Catholics, the "disenchanted" Catholicism common in Western Europe, the influence of "liberal-radical" theologians, and the hegemony of national bishops' conferences. The last mentioned, viewed widely as a vehicle of democratic collegiality, was considered by Ratzinger to be a bureaucratic innovation that discourages some bishops from properly shepherding their own flocks. In an extensive interview, later expanded into the book The Ratzinger Report (1985), the cardinal explained that the "restoration" of the church under Pope John Paul II was not a return to outmoded structures but the search for "a new balance" for a church threatened by adaptation to "an agnostic and atheistic world," according to Joseph A. Komonchak in the New York Times (December 22, 1985). And, as Robert Di Veroli reported for the San Diego Union-Tribune (September 21, 1985), Ratzinger criticized many Catholic theologians for believing the "spirit of the council" meant that "everything which is new will always, no matter what, be better than that which was or that which is."

In the spirit of restoration of the church, the CDF disciplined many clergymen. It ordered Archbishop Peter Gerety of Newark, New Jersey, to withdraw his imprimatur from Christ Among Us: A Modern Presentation of the Catholic Faith, a book it deemed doctrinally defective. On another occasion it ordered Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, Washington, to withdraw his imprimatur from two books, and it relieved him of pastoral responsibility in several areas. In 1988 the CDF silenced the Dominican priest Matthew Fox for one year for his religiously pluralistic teaching and hiring practices at his Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality, in Oakland, California. An editorial in the National Catholic Reporter, quoted by Rich Cartiere for the Associated Press (October 20, 1988), called the silencing "a fruitless exercise" and opined, "People cannot be told to stop thinking or recording their thoughts. Silencing efforts come from another time." In March 1993 the Dominican Order expelled Fox, who believes the order acted under pressure from Ratzinger.

Ratzinger did not penalize only liberal theologians. In July 1988 he excommunicated the conservative archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had opposed Vatican Council II, for consecrating four bishops against Vatican orders. The consecration marked the first schism in the Roman Catholic Church in over a century. In June 1989 Ratzinger released a 7,500-word "instruction" for theologians and bishops designed to quell public dissent from official church teachings. The document asserts that the church is by nature and divine inspiration a hierarchical institution that demands obedience to central authority personified by the Pope. It also stated that, even though a papal teaching may not be declared "infallible," it is divinely inspired and must be obeyed.

One of Ratzinger’s most controversial decisions was his order, in August 1986, that the prominent moral theologian Charles E. Curran would "no longer be considered suitable or eligible to exercise the function of a professor of Catholic theology," as a result of his refusal to disavow his belief that the Vatican’s positions on divorce, artificial contraception, sterilization, abortion, and homosexual acts are not among the church's "infallible" teachings and therefore should not be considered absolute. Curran, who had been a faculty member at the papally chartered Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C., has since been barred from teaching at any Catholic institution of higher education.

In January 1997 Ratzinger ordered the excommunication of the Sri Lankan priest Tissa Balasuriya for expressing views that clashed with Roman Catholic tenets of original sin, the Immaculate Conception, and baptism. The excommunication was lifted in January 1998, when Balasuriya agreed to sign a profession of faith, although he did not recant any of his views. In April 2001 Ratzinger barred another priest, Roger Haight, from teaching, after his book Jesus Symbol of God was found to contradict church teachings in examining the possibility that non-Christians can get to heaven without belief in Christ.

In an effort to clearly state the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church, in 1992 the Vatican released the church’s first universal catechism since 1566. The catechism was drafted by a council of 12 cardinals and bishops headed by Ratzinger. In addition to outlining many positions that had already been defined, the catechism contained definitions of modern sins, such as driving while intoxicated, paying unjustly low wages, and evading taxes. It stated, among other things, that women priests—approved in 1992 by the Church of England—would not be allowed in the Catholic Church. Ratzinger signed a CDF proclamation in 1996 that the church’s position on women priests was infallible. On July 22, 2001 Ratzinger excommunicated seven women who claimed to be priests after they failed to retract their assertions.

Ratzinger also sparked controversy among adherents of other faiths. In a 1997 interview with the French weekly L’Express, Ratzinger offended many Buddhists when he said that their religion is attractive to many only "because it suggests that by belonging to it you can touch the infinite, and you can have joy without concrete religious obligations"; he also called the faith "spiritually self-indulgent eroticism," according to David O’Reilly, writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer (April 23, 2005). Although the Catholic Church had abandoned its former belief that Judaism finds its completion in Christianity, Ratzinger told a writer for the Italian weekly Il Sabato in 1988 that "the faith of Abraham finds its fulfillment" in Jesus Christ, as Ari L. Goldman reported for the New York Times (November 18, 1987). Although the Vatican said that his words had been misconstrued, Jewish leaders reacted with anger. Ratzinger later eased tensions between the Catholic Church and Jews when he reaffirmed, at a public gathering in Jerusalem in 1994, the Catholic belief that Jews have no collective guilt for Christ’s death. In January 2002 Ratzinger released the treatise "The Jewish People and the Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible." In it he argued that Jews and Christians both are waiting for the Messiah, although Jews are waiting for the first coming and Christians for the second. "The Jewish wait for the Messiah is not in vain," Ratzinger stated in the document, according to Melinda Henneberger in the New York Times (January 18, 2002). The Vatican announced that the work was now part of church doctrine. Rabbi Alberto Piattelli, a professor and leader of the Jewish community in Rome, Italy, told Henneberger that the work "recognizes the value of the Jewish position regarding the wait for the Messiah, changes the whole exegesis of biblical studies and restores our biblical passages to their original meaning."

In September 2000 the CDF released a dictum on religious pluralism entitled "On the Unity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church," in which Ratzinger stated that Christ's church "continues to exist fully and only through the Catholic Church," according to Facts on File World News Digest (September 5, 2000). The document allows that non-Catholics could achieve salvation only if their faith shared the Catholic ecclesiastical structure and understanding of the Eucharist. It condemned "relativistic theories" of religious pluralism and described other faiths as "gravely deficient." Although not a change in doctrine, the document angered many non-Catholics who had been in dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. "It's a jump backwards in terms of ecumenism and with dialogues with other religions," the Reverend Valdo Benecchi, president of the Methodist Evangelical Churches of Italy, told Jeffrey Smith for the Washington Post (September 6, 2000). "There is nothing new about this, but we had hoped they had taken another road. This is a return to the past."

In an expansion of its previous role, the CDF began issuing proclamations in the 1980s on a wide range of moral issues. In an October 1986 letter, Ratzinger urged church leaders to minister to homosexual Catholics and to condemn any violence committed against them. However, he recommended the withdrawal of support from "any organizations which seek to undermine the teaching of the church" regarding homosexuality as immoral, including allowing such groups access to church property, according to Bruce Buursma in the Chicago Tribune (October 31, 1986). In July 1999 the CDF finished a 12-year investigation of an American outreach program for Roman Catholic homosexuals and ordered it to stop ministering to gays and lesbians. Although the two leaders of the program had encouraged gays to remain in the church and held workshops to combat homophobia and cultivate compassion, the church’s investigation concluded that they had failed to comply with its teaching on the "intrinsic evil of homosexual acts." Ratzinger also took a conservative line on artificial birth control and abortion, believing that sexuality without parenthood detaches humans from nature and leaves them to view each other as objects. At a 1991 meeting of cardinals he said that abortion and birth control had caused "a hidden bloodbath," as reported by the Orlando Sentinel (April 5, 1991). In a March 1987 document on bioethics, he declared that surrogate motherhood, test-tube baby production, most methods of artificial insemination, and human cloning techniques were "morally illicit."

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, after several Roman Catholic priests in the United States were publicly accused of pedophilia, many American Catholics demanded a response from the Vatican. According to some estimates, the church had spent more than $1 billion in court judgments and out-of-court settlements in the United States by 2002. In a January 2002 letter, Ratzinger released new rules for dealing with accusations of pedophilia, including a mandate that individual churches open an investigation into any charge of abuse by resident clergy and immediately notify the Vatican. Accusers also had to lodge their charges within 10 years of their turning 18. Controversially, the rules had secretly been released to parishes the year before and did not require churches to notify law-enforcement officials if priests were found guilty. Ratzinger later told Jeff Israely for Time (December 16, 2002) that the pedophilia scandal is an "intentional, manipulated . . . desire to discredit the church" by the media.

In July and August 2003, the Vatican began a campaign against gay marriage, then a burgeoning issue in the United States. In August 2003 the CDF released the treatise "Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons." The document called homosexual marriage "a legalization of evil," which Catholic politicians have a "moral duty" to oppose. The document also stated that recognizing gay marriage "could actually encourage a person with a homosexual orientation to declare his homosexuality or even seek a partner in order to exploit the provisions of the law."

In August 2004, as many Catholics in the United States debated whether the Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, a Roman Catholic, should be allowed to receive communion despite his position in favor of legal abortions, Ratzinger confirmed, in a letter to Theodore E. Cardinal McCarrick of Washington, D.C., that was leaked to the press, that communion must be denied to those who publicly support the pro-choice positions on abortion and euthanasia. However, Ratzinger also stated in the letter that Catholics could vote for someone who was pro-choice on the abortion issue as long as the decision to vote for that person was based on other issues. In another political statement that year, Ratzinger told the French newspaper Le Figaro that Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, should be denied entry into the European Union on the grounds that European culture has been formed by Christianity.

As Pope John Paul II's health worsened in late November 2004, many observers began to put Ratzinger’s name forward as a possible successor to the pontiff. According to Daniel Williams, writing for the Washington Post (November 5, 2004), one Vatican watcher, Sandro Magister, wrote for L'Espresso magazine, "Some look at him as if he were already de facto pope." As the Pope’s condition grew dire in early 2005, Ratzinger and three other cardinals assumed broad day-to-day authority in the management of the church. John Paul chose Ratzinger to compose the meditations to be read aloud during the Good Friday procession in March 2005 as well as to lead the Easter vigil, two of the most sacred and solemn events on the Catholic calendar.

John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, and Ratzinger gave the homily at his funeral. Shortly before eligible cardinals began voting for a new Pope, Ratzinger addressed his fellow cardinals at St. Peter’s Basilica and delivered a withering attack on relativism, warning of the need to preserve traditional Catholic beliefs against modern trends. Some saw the address as amounting to a campaign speech for the papacy, although a number of reports indicated that Ratzinger did not want the position. In past years he had sometimes seemed exhausted and in ill health. He often spoke of his wish to retire and dedicate himself to writing books. On April 19, 2005, on the fourth ballot, Ratzinger received a majority of votes among the 115 cardinals in the conclave, surprising many who had thought that his advanced years would prevent his election. "When the majority was reached, 77 or 78 votes, there was a gasp all round, and everyone clapped," Cormac Murphy Cardinal O'Connor of Westminster, England, told reporters for Newsweek in 2005. "[Ratzinger] had his head down. I think he must have said a prayer, but I didn't see his face."

Ratzinger’s ascent to the papacy upset liberal Catholics, some of whom were seen to leave the Vatican angrily after Ratzinger’s election was announced. "The election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as pope is an enormous disappointment for all those who hoped for a reformist and pastoral pope," Hans Ku¨ng wrote for the BBC News. By contrast, a traditional Catholic, Sam Gregg of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, in Rome, wrote for the BBC News (April 26, 2005, on-line) that Ratzinger "will continue the authentic interpretation of Vatican II that John Paul pioneered. There will be a clear, strong intellectual proposition in defence of Catholic orthodoxy. There will be an attention to the Christian unity that can only be founded upon the truth and there will be a continued critique of moral relativism and the type of secular fundamentalism that we find rearing its head in the EU and the UN." Ratzinger took the name Benedict XVI, reflecting his devotion to historic Catholic figures who had guided the church in times of secular chaos.

At age 78 Benedict XVI is the oldest Pope chosen since Clement XII, who became pontiff in 1730 (at 78 and three months). His age has led to some speculation that his fellow cardinals chose him as a trusted figure for a period of transition. However, most observers believe that Benedict will be a powerful leader. "This man is not just going to mind the store," George Weigel, an American scholar, told Laurie Goodstein for the New York Times (April 20, 2005, on-line). "He is going to take re-evangelization, especially of Europe, very seriously. I think this represents a recognition on the part of the cardinals that the great battle in the world remains inside the heads of human beings—that it’s a battle of ideas." Writing for the American Spectator (May 19, 2005), Roger A. McCaffrey opined that the tone of Benedict’s papacy after 30 days "varies from the expectations of both left and right," including his appointment of a moderate cardinal to succeed him as prefect of the CDF.

Aside from The Ratzinger Report, Benedict’s best-known work in translation is Introduction to Christianity (1970). He has published dozens of books, many in English. In 2000 he published Many Religions—One Covenant, the Church and the World, which focuses on reconciliation between Jews and Christians. He is also the author of Truth and Tolerance (2004), which addresses the issue of religious pluralism. Many of his beliefs are detailed in Salt of the Earth: Christianity and the Catholic Church at the End of the Millennium (1997). His theological work is highly regarded even among those who disagree with him, and he is known as an expert on Martin Luther (1483–1546), the priest who began the Protestant Reformation. "When you read his books, you can see that he writes at the highest level of theology," Karl-Joseph Hummel, director of research at the Commission for Contemporary History, in Bonn, told the writers for the New York Times in 2005. "He looks at politics as ethics; he looks at literature, and the whole of human possibilities, and I don’t think he’s narrow." Within two days of his election to the papacy, Benedict’s writings had displaced J. K. Rowling's latest Harry Potter novel at the top of a German best-seller list.

Pope Benedict is known as a hardworking, shy, soft-spoken man who is self-effacing. "No senior churchman gave up more of himself to serve John Paul II," Weigel wrote for Newsweek (May 2, 2005). "Abandoning any hope of pursuing his major theological projects, he stayed in Rome for more than 20 years, serving a pope who refused his resignation on at least two occasions." As a cardinal, he was known to inspire a great deal of loyalty in his staff. "I've never known him to be angry or vindictive," Thomas Herron, a priest who worked on Ratzinger's staff, told Dionne. "He’s one of the most even-tempered people I've ever met." Even his theological opponents have said that they like him personally. The eighth German to become Pope, Benedict speaks 10 languages. He is known as an accomplished pianist with a preference for Beethoven and Mozart. Weigel noted, "[Ratzinger] is one of only two men I know who, in answering a question, pauses, reflects—and then speaks in complete paragraphs (in his fourth language)."