READING RATZINGER.(Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger)

In May, 1984, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger summoned the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff to Rome. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Boff had helped create the movement known as liberation theology, working with poor Catholics in Latin America to create small, autonomous groups called "base communities." Influenced by Marxism, the movement redefined Christianity as a critique of the oppressive social and economic order, and it often considered the Roman center of the Church part of that order. In "Church: Charism and Power," a collection of essays published in 1981, Boff argued that the base communities were the core of the true Church: "The Church is directed toward all, but begins from the poor, from their desires and struggles." He justified the base communities as an essential part of the radical changes produced by the Second Vatican Council, in the early nineteen-sixties. These changes included the performance of Mass in the vernacular and a willingness to acknowledge elements of religious truth in other Christian denominations and even in other religions.

At the time, Ratzinger was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office formerly known as the Inquisition. It was a job he had for nearly twenty-five years, before becoming Pope, last April. When Boff appeared at the yellow palazzo where the Congregation does its work, Ratzinger questioned him on relations between the Catholic Church and Christianity as a whole. In reply, Boff cited Chapter 1, No. 8 of Lumen Gentium ("Light of the Nations"), one of the documents of Vatican II, which explained that the true Church "subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him. Never-theless, many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its visible confines." Boff took this passage as a qualification of the Church's traditional exclusivity.

The history of this paragraph suggests that those who drafted it shared Boff's interpretation. For the first two years of the Council, the draft document stated simply and directly that the mystical body of Christ "is" the Catholic Church. But in the fall of 1964 the word "subsists" was added, together with the passage about elements of truth from outside the Church. The official commentary explained that the change was meant to make the text "more harmonious with the affirmation of ecclesial elements which are elsewhere." The Dominican theologian Yves Congar glossed the passage the way Boff did: "Vatican II acknowledges, in sum, that non-Catholic Christians are members of the mystical body." Ratzinger himself published a short book on Vatican II in which he wrote enthusiastically, if generally, of the Church's new openness.

Yet now, in 1984, Ratzinger read the same text in a very different way. To understand the chapter, he argued, one must bear in mind a theologically weighty noun--substantia--closely related to subsistit, the verb that the Council fathers had used. Substantia, meaning "substance," refers to the essence of a thing (as in "transubstantiation"). According to Ratzinger, when the Council used the verb "subsists" it stated in the strongest terms that the true Church "both is, and can only be, fully present" in the Roman Church, with all its hierarchies. Lumen Gentium, he argued, offered no support for Christian institutions created without Rome's sanction. Reframing the debate in this way, Ratzinger went well beyond the historical circumstances of the document's origin; nowhere had the drafters mentioned the noun "substance." Ratzinger treated Boff with respect, and listened attentively to his defense of his views, but he did not soften his judgment. After Boff returned to Brazil, the Congregation published a formal critique of his work stating that Boff had drawn from Lumen Gentium "a thesis which is exactly the contrary to the authentic meaning of the council text"--that is, to Ratzinger's rather acrobatic interpretation of it. Less than two months later, another notice required Boff to cease writing, editing, and teaching, and to maintain "obedient silence" for an unstated period, a verdict that Boff accepted.

This story, as minute and vivid as a medieval miniature, reveals Ratzinger at work, wielding proof texts that in his hands are as powerful, and as malleable, as articles of the Constitution in the hands of an ideologically partisan jurist. Are such attitudes typical of the new Pope? In his time as Prefect, Ratzinger treated a number of other Catholic dissidents in much the same way. He was a censor, and he did his job well. Liberal observers have for years seen him as the Church's Cerberus, a snapping guard dog who threatens all dissidents with appropriate punishment. Many conservative Catholics, by contrast, revere what they see as the austere purity of his beliefs.

Whatever observers think of Ratzinger's views, all agree that what he does will matter tremendously. The Pope is the spiritual head of the oldest and largest religious organization in the world, a church with more than a billion members. There has been speculation about whether the Grand Inquisitor will show a milder countenance in his new office, but one vital form of evidence about him has generally been ignored. Before Ratzinger became a bishop and a censor, he was a professional theologian. He comes to his work as an…