The election of Cardinal Ratzinger as the 265th Bishop Of Rome and head of almost 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide has been greeted with mixed feelings.

I have heard many things (good and bad) about Joseph Ratzinger over the past few years so I decidecided to have a look into what the big fuss was about.

I heard Honduras Cardinal Rodriguez Mariaga 3 years ago atthe RDS during the Mission Alive Festival and found his anti neo-liberalism and 'Option for the Poor' a powerful message for a world which seems to have lost any sense of personalism.

I believe one of the most interesting things will be who the new pope will elect to take up his old post as doctrinal chief of the Church.

Below is a little (or not so little as it has turned out) background sketch on who Benedict XVI has been, is, and may become:




Joseph Ratzinger was born in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria, in Germany on April 16th, 1927.
The son of a police officer who was staunchly anti-Nazi, in 1937 Ratzinger's father retired and settled in the town of Traunstein.

When Ratzinger turned 14 in 1941, he was required by law to join the Hitler Youth, but according to his biographer John Allen (www.natcath.org) he was not an enthusiastic member.

He requested to be taken off the rolls and reportedly refused to attend a single meeting.
In 1943, at the age of 16 he was, along with the rest of his class, drafted into the Flak or anti-aircraft corps. The were made responsible for the guarding of a BMW plant outside Munich.

He was then sent for basic infantry training and was posted to Hungary, where he worked setting up anti-tank defences until fleeing in April 1944 (an offence punishable by shooting on the spot or hanging - in order to stop others from resisting their service ).

In 1945 he was briefly held in an Allied POW camp, where he attended de-Nazification classes. By June 1945 he was released, and alongside his brother Georg, entered a Catholic seminary.

He was ordained on June 29, 1951

At the Second Vatican Council (1962 - 1965), Ratzinger he had served as a chief theological expert, to the reformist Josef Cardinal Frings of Cologne, Germany.

From 1966-69, he was a colleague of Hans Küng at the University of Tubingen. Kung once commented that, "his ideology is a medieval, anti-Reformation, anti-modern paradigm of the church and the papacy".

He was confirmed in his traditionalist views by the liberal atmosphere of Tübingen, especially the Marxist leanings of the student movement of the 1960s.

In 1972, he founded the theological journal Communio (link ( www.communio-icr.com/) with Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and others.

On November 25, 1981 Pope John Paul II named Ratzinger prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
It was formerly known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition but renamed in 1908 by Pope Pius X.

In the Vatican, he has been the driving force behind crackdowns on liberation theology, religious pluralism, challenges to traditional moral teachings on issues such as homosexuality, and dissent on issues such as women's ordination.

He was closer to John Paul II than any other cardinal, and Ratzinger and John Paul were called "intellectual bedfellows."

It will be up to him to decide who will follow him as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Benedict speaks ten languages (among them German, Italian, English, and ecclesiastical Latin).

He is an accomplished pianist with a preference for Mozart.

He is the seventh German pope. The last German pope, Victor II, was elected in 1055 and died in 1057. He is also the oldest cardinal to become pope since Clement XII, who like Ratzinger was elected at age 78.

His nominal predecessor, Benedict XV was the pope that presided over the church during World War I.
He is best known for the 1914 encyclical "Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum", which called a halt to infighting in the church.


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Some statements of Ratzinger:

-"There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a 'just war.'"

-At a pre-conclave mass at St. Peter's Basilica he declared, "We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires".

-Ratzinger specified that strong and open supporters of abortion should be denied the Catholic sacrament, for being guilty of a "grave sin."

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For further information check out:

* Allen, John L.: Cardinal Ratzinger : the Vatican's enforcer of the faith. - New York : Continuum, 2000

Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cardinal_Ratzinger
www.natcath.org