A HARD FAITH.(Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger)

For many Catholics, the white smoke that curled into the Vatican sky in the early evening of April 19th quickly came to be seen as a distress signal. When it was revealed that the new Pope was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who had adopted the name Benedict XVI, Father Richard McBrien, a Notre Dame University theologian interpreting the event for American television, was plainly taken aback. Asked his response, McBrien hesitated, and then said, "Surprised." The day before, McBrien had predicted that the College of Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church surely would not select Ratzinger as the next Pontiff, and warned that if Ratzinger became Pope "thousands upon thousands of Catholics in Europe and the United States would roll their eyes and retreat to the margins of the Church."

Now McBrien urged patience. There was some chance that Benedict might rise to his new station; in any case, McBrien said, "he is seventy-eight. We're not talking about a long pontificate."

Such evident discomfort was widely voiced by liberal Catholics, and was reflected in the early portrayals of the new Pope in the press and among the commentariat. The German Ratzinger was depicted as a rigid dogmatist, whose election foreshadowed possible schism, if not the destruction of the Church. Ratzinger had earned such derision by the fact of his service, nearly a quarter-century long, as the Church's guardian of the faith. In that role, he had enforced Church doctrine with a rigor that many Catholic theologians found chilling. But the animus directed at Ratzinger (who said he had prayed not to be elected) was also aimed, at least implicitly, at the pontificate of the man newly entombed in St. Peter's Basilica, Pope John Paul II.

Because Karol Wojtyla's outsized presence so neatly suited secular description--he was the media-age Vatican pol who helped to bring down the Soviet Union--it had been possible to overlook the radical core of his papacy. His predecessor John XXIII, who began his pontificate by convoking the transformational Second Vatican Council, is credited with opening the Church to the modern world. John Paul II commenced his tenure on a starkly different note. His first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis ("Redeemer of Man"), in 1979, opened with the words that foreshadowed his central theme: "The redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history." Beginning with this letter to the Church, and developed through a vast body of writing and preaching, Wojtyla's bold proposal for the world was that there is one abiding Truth, and in it resides the most promising hope for humankind. Liberals admired the Pope's ecumenical gestures--his historic visit to the synagogue of Rome, his pilgrimage to Jerusalem's Western Wall, his day of prayer with leaders of the world's other religions at Assisi in 1986--but they were dismayed by the publication, in 2000, of Dominus Iesus, the Church's declaration that Jesus Christ is the only true way to salvation.

Vatican II had acknowledged the validity of what is "true and holy" in other religions, which had led the Church toward what John Paul II saw as a dangerous acceptance of religious indifferentism. His 1990 encyclical, Redemptoris Missio, warned against the "incorrect theological perspectives" that led to the idea that " 'one religion is as good as another.' " The eternal mission of the Church, he wrote, was Christian evangelism to the world.

In his manifest, and deeply spiritual, Christocentrism, John Paul II had been the sort of Roman Catholic that even an evangelical Protestant could admire. (The Catholic writer Michael Novak quotes a Southern Baptist friend as having once remarked about John Paul II, "I'm as anti-papist as you can get. But you've got a Pope who knows how to Pope!") In an age he constantly decried for its relativism, Wojtyla proclaimed an absolute Truth, based on a fundamentally orthodox theology. Ratzinger's job was to hammer out the administrative details--punishing dissident theologians, framing the Pope's exclusion of women from the priesthood as infallible teaching, discouraging liturgical novelty, and so on.

It was this fundamentalism of John Paul that Cardinal Ratzinger was defending in his instantly famous homily at the Mass for the election of a new Pope, on April 18th. "We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism," he said, "which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."