Pope Benedict will lead Church in crisis and in need of healing

David Marks

Despite John Paul’s personal magnetism, many of the Church’s 1.2 billion members are disaffected. The faith is losing ground in many parts of the world to other religions and is under threat from radical Islam and secularism.

Details are emerging on how the cardinals made their decision. While many observers had suggested Cardinal Ratzinger was too polarising a figure at this critical juncture in Church history, several cardinals appeared to have fallen into line behind the image of a strong leader who represented unambiguous moral authority.

On the morning of his election, Cardinal Ratzinger had breakfast with four cardinals from Asia and Africa. He knew them all by name and spoke to them in shared languages, according to Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s tough-minded advocacy of Christian identity and the primacy of Catholicism might have appealed to cardinals in parts of the developing world where holders of the faith are under attack and at war with militant

Islam or totalitarian regimes. Over the years, he has silenced dissent within the Church and labelled other faiths “deficient.” At the same time, Cardinal Ratzinger, who grew up in Hitler’s Germany, often is described by admirers as humble and kind. Everyone agrees on his acute

intellectual prowess.

George Weigel, one of John Paul II’s biographers, praised the decision.

“The cardinals chose the best known and most respected of their number, a man they each know as a great listener and a sympathetic listener,” Weigel said. ‘This was not only a tremendous affirmation of the past 26½ years; it was a vote of confidence in Joseph Ratzinger as the man best fitted to give an evangelical thrust to this papacy, a new dynamism in the first decade of the 21st century.”

A subdued Belgian Cardinal Gottfried Danneels, possibly the most progressive member of the college, said he hoped Cardinal Ratzinger’s taking of the name Benedict signalled a shift in the prelate’s focus.

“Cardinal Ratzinger remains and will continue to remain the same person,” he told a group of reporters. “But for the moment he is universal pastor of the Church. He is not anymore the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. When you are a Pope, you have to be the pastor of everyone and everything which happens in the Church.”

Reaction to the election was mixed, both in a St Peter’s Square and around the world.

“In today’s world with its multitude of opinions, not everyone, even in our own church, could and wanted to follow him,” acknowledged Cardinal Karl Lehmann, also of Germany. “But his theological work.