Street music and free beer as town of Pope’s birth celebrates

A TRADITIONAL German tuba band blared and free beer were on tap last night in the main square in the southern German town where Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, was born.

Soon after Ratzinger’s election, people in the tiny Bavarian town of Marktl am Inn began gathering in the square, in the shadow of the house that was once the new Pope’s home.

Although Ratzinger’s family moved away from the town when he was two and the new Pope has said he has no memory of the place, the house has a plaque in his honour, and the font where he was baptised is displayed in a museum. “We are totally happy,” said Mayor Hubert Gschwendtner, who hopes having a Pope from Marktl will mean more investment in the town.

“It’s completely wild that the new Pope is from Marktl. We are completely in awe and congratulate Joseph Ratzinger from the bottom of our hearts,” he said.

Critics, including those from his native Germany, detect a lack of sympathy and understanding for the outside world, or much pastoral experience. An opinion poll in the German newspaper Der Spiegel found opponents of his election as Pope outnumbering supporters by 36% to 29%.

The conservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei, which enjoyed firm support from the late Pope John Paul II, welcomed the new Pope.

Opus Dei’s prelate, Bishop Javier Echevarria, pledged support for the new Pontiff. “This is a time of great joy,” he said.

The choice of the conservative has divided Latin America, a region where he battled leftist priests and whose poor and hungry often cannot afford to follow Roman Catholic doctrine.

Church bells tolled from Mexico to Brazil as the Vatican announced the successor to the late John Paul II. But joy was tempered by disappointment that the new Pontiff was not from Latin America, home to about half the world’s Catholics.

While some welcomed a figure who has been a strict defender of Catholic orthodoxy for more than two decades, others worried his ideas might clash with Latin America’s social problems.

Ratzinger had disciplined Latin American priests who followed the Marxist-influenced Liberation Theology, in which radical churchmen joined the poor and oppressed to fight against social injustice and military regimes in the 1970s and 1980s.

Like his predecessor, he is likely to find that church opposition to birth control does not fit easily with developing world realities, where widespread poverty is often exacerbated by large families and where some governments have promoted contraception.

Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian Liberation Theologist who left the priesthood under pressure in 1992, said he believed Ratzinger would pay attention to Latin America, where there were important social questions and many people were turning to away from Catholicism to evangelical movements.

In communist Cuba, the Auxiliary Bishop of Havana, Mon. Alfredo Petit, commented on Ratzinger’s choice of name, Pope Benedict XVI. “The name chosen is very appropriate for these times, because Benedict XV was a man who fought to establish justice and peace ... I think this will be the new Pope’s programme too,” he said.