Report from Rome
The New Pope Benedict XVI

By Carol Eisenberg
Newsday
April 21, 2005

Vatican City - By the time Anne Burke of Chicago faxed off an urgent plea to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in late 2003, she had all but abandoned the idea that anyone in the Vatican would talk to her lay panel investigating the U.S. priest sex abuse crisis.

The pope's ambassador in the United States had refused even to reply to her letter. She was told that he considered it a breach of protocol to talk to her or her panel - no matter that the group had been charged by the U.S. bishops to probe the scandal.

In a last-ditch effort, Burke faxed a letter directly to Ratzinger and several other Vatican officials. She was surprised to get an appointment to meet with the German cardinal and his top staff members on a Saturday morning a few weeks later.

"He could have said to us, 'you people are out of line. Go home and be quiet,'" she recalled. "But he didn't. He reached out and he listened. It was an engaging, 2 1/2-hour conversation. He took in everything we had to say and answered our questions. And we pulled no punches: We told him what was going on in terms of the extent of the actual abuse by the priests and about our dismay with the U.S. church hierarchy."

The man Burke describes meeting in January 2004 bears no resemblance to the church official described in British newspaper headlines as "God's Rottweiler" or as the "Panzerkardinal" by German press. After being impressed by his welcome in Rome, she describes being even more deeply moved several weeks later, when she received a personal letter from him after her 30-year-old son was killed in a freak snowmobile accident.

"He had heard of the sad news of my son and he expressed his sorrow and condolences, and reminded us to have consolation in our faith," Burke said. "It was a very, very beautiful note. I still have it."

Those who admire Pope Benedict XVI describe him as a kind, generous and extraordinarily intelligent man who has been unfairly demonized by the Catholic left because of the job he held under John Paul II as chief enforcer of Catholic doctrine - the modern-day equivalent of the Grand Inquisitor of the Holy Roman Inquisition.

"No one who has ever dealt with this man personally knows him to be anything else than brilliant, humble, pious and a great listener," said George Weigel, the biographer of John Paul II.

But some of those who have fallen under his sword insist that he listens only to those things that fit his spiritual and philosophical world view, and that his reputation as a punitive cop is richly deserved.

"Ratzinger will be the inquisitor general of the 21st century," declared Matthew Fox, a former Dominican priest who was expelled from the order for his views on sexuality and original sin. "He led the assault on theologians and women, yoga (calling it "dangerous" because it gets you too much in touch with your body), homosexuals (who are "evil"), liberation theology, ecumenism and interfaith, and now he's been made the spiritual head of 1.1 billion people."

By all accounts, the new Catholic leader is a figure of extraordinary range - and contradiction. He grew up amid the horrors of Nazi Germany and describes being enrolled in the Hitler Youth and later the Nazi army against his will, yet sees unfettered individualism in the world today as the major threat to civilization. He came of age as a liberal theologian who helped birth Vatican II, the 1960s council that modernized the church, but for the past 20 years has helped to crack down on some of those same ideas.

And though he is often described as a good listener who is said to enjoy a good debate, he has silenced dozens of those who strayed from Catholic orthodoxy over the past 20 years, whether they espoused liberation theology, the movement in Latin America that sought to place the church on the side of the poor, or raised questions about the role of women in the church.

"Beneath the competing analyses and divergent views, this much is certain: Ratzinger has drawn lines in the sand and wielded the tools of his office on many who cross those lines," wrote John Allen, author of a biography of Ratzinger. "Whether necessary prophylaxis or a naked power play, his efforts to curb dissent have left the church more bruised, more divided, than at any point since the close of Vatican II."

At the same time, Allen said Benedict XVI is universally credited with being a very spiritual man, "and if you talk to any bishop here, they will tell you that is he a terrific listener."

Raised in the pine foothills of Bavaria, Ratzinger grew up the son of a policeman and was deeply shaped by his experience as a child in Nazi Germany. He has written in a memoir about how he was forced to participate in Hitler's Nazi youth movement not long after he began seminary studies at age 12.

In 1943, he was drafted as an assistant to a Nazi anti-aircraft unit that guarded a BMW plant outside Munich. Later, he was shipped off to build tank barriers at the Austrian-Hungarian border. He wrote that he never fired a gun because of a finger infection, and 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."

Allen contends that Ratzinger's experience under the Nazis profoundly shaped his view of the church. "The church's service to society, Ratzinger concluded, is to stand for absolute truths that function as boundary markers," Allen wrote. "Move about within these limits, but outside them lies disaster."

Later, Ratzinger would become a theology professor in Germany, associated with some of the leading liberal theologians of his time, but reportedly was deeply disturbed by the student revolts of 1968 and retreated from some of his earlier positions in the years afterward.

"Especially after the student revolutions in Germany in the late 1960s, he became much more cautious of positions that could lead to the same kind of disruption of society," said the Rev. Ray Douziech, general consultor for the Redemptorist Congregation in Rome. "And of course, the church was part of society."

But others said that his much-ballyhooed transformation from liberal to conservative is an oversimplification, and that the man himself should not be confused with the role he played for 24 years. "He will play well as soon as people come to know him," said New York Cardinal Edward Egan. "This is a very unprepossessing, humble and, if I may say, lovely gentleman."

Egan told the story of leaving Rome in 1985 to go to New York after many years working as a canon lawyer. He received a call from Ratzinger's secretary, telling him to come to the cardinal's office the next morning to say farewell. "This is a man who certainly owed me nothing, and who had no obligation, but who came back from a retreat to say goodbye to me," Egan said. "If this is hard-line, I'd like to know what soft-line is."

Certainly there are glimpses of a man very different from his popular image.

There is the caring friend who delivered the poetic homily of his longtime collaborator at John Paul II's funeral. And there is the pastoral leader who laid out the themes of his papacy yesterday and called for dialogue and rapprochement within and without the Catholic church.

And many believe his choice of the name Benedict XVI, recalling both the patron saint of Europe and the World War I-era pope whose sought to reconcile a deeply divided church - as well as a divided world - was a signal that he wants to bring together a fractured flock.

"What I saw in his talk [yesterday] and his public statements at the time of the pope's death is someone who's searching to find the right kind of balance," said R. Scott Appleby of the University of Notre Dame. "On the one hand, the lead message is that 'I'm going to be a unifier. I'm ready for dialogue.'

"But he pretty quickly follows that with a message that the truth of Christianity is the cornerstone of everything we do. It's as if he's saying, 'I want to be a unifier, but don't misunderstand me. I'm not going to give away the shop.'"

This story was supplemented with wire service reports.