At a time of an ailing Pope, the voice of Joseph Ratzinger is increasingly heard as that of the Vatican. And yet, the Church?s enforcer is also a singular freethinker. From American politicians, to women, and Turkey, his views have dominated the headlines this year

CARDINAL Joseph Ratzinger, the Catholic Church?s doctrinal tsar, is generally spoken well of around the water coolers of the Vatican, and not just out of fear of the legendary Panzer-kardinal. It is also because Ratzinger is seen as personally gracious and modest, someone who does not go out of his way to build empires, or to involve himself in other people?s business.

This does not mean, of course, that Ratzinger lacks opinions about their business, going well beyond matters that pertain directly to his competence as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Nor has he ever been shy about expressing them.

At the Eighth International Church Music Congress in Rome in 1986, for example, Ratzinger blasted rock music as a ?vehicle of anti-religion?. He said rock and roll is a secular variant of an age-old ecstatic religion, in which man ?lowers the barriers of individuality and personality? to ?liberate himself from the burden of consciousness?. Rock is thus ?the complete antithesis of Christian faith in the redemption?.

In March 1997 Ratzinger offered a similarly harsh judgement on Buddhism, calling it ?an auto-erotic spirituality? in an interview with a leading French newspaper. Buddhism, said Ratzinger, ?seeks transcendence without imposing concrete religious obligations?.

Over the years Ratzinger has even been willing to express a few criticisms, however tame, about his boss.

In 1986, when John Paul II called religious leaders from around the world to Assisi to pray for peace, a move conservatives feared would promote a ?one-religion-is-as-good-as-another? form of relativism, Ratzinger said: ?This cannot be the model.?

In a 1995 interview, Ratzinger was asked to describe what John Paul meant when he said the third millennium would be a ?springtime of the human spirit?. Ratzinger sketched the Pope?s hopeful vision that after two millennia of division, the third would be one of unity among peoples and religions. But ?at the moment I do not yet see it approaching?, he added drily.

Every time Ratzinger makes such a statement, the official gloss is that he was merely expressing a ?personal opinion?. John Paul II himself has sometimes agreed. In 1995, on the papal plane, when a reporter asked for a comment on Ratzinger?s book-length interview with Vittorio Messori called The Ratzinger Report, the Pope replied succinctly: ?It?s his personal opinion.?

This is in many ways a perfectly defensible distinction. One would not want a Church so afraid of conversation that its senior officials were muzzled, especially someone with the intellectual baggage of Joseph Ratzinger. And it is not as if his word automatically becomes church policy: twice since 1986 the Pope has assembled religious leaders in Assisi, despite Ratzinger?s misgivings, and rock music is commonplace even at papal liturgies: World Youth Day would not be the same without at least one number from ?Gen Rosso? or ?Gen Verde?, the Focolare movement?s male and female pop troupes.

Recently, however, Ratzinger?s public statements have kicked up an unusual amount of dust ? even by his own rather tumultuous standards.

During a series of spring ad limina visits by American bishops, Ratzinger gave several the private impression that he favoured ?going slow? on denying Communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians. When a couple of these bishops passed the word to their colleagues, Ratzinger felt the need to strike a firmer line. He sent a letter to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the Archbishop of Washington DC, in which he said that if such a politician does not heed warnings from his pastor, then the pastor would be justified in withholding the Eucharist. This would not be a sanction, Ratzinger argued, but a response to the person?s public unworthiness. When that in turn was perceived as at odds with the stance taken by the Americans to allow each bishop to decide, Ratzinger wrote yet another letter on 12 July: the position of the US bishops was ?very much in harmony? with his own, he said.

Then, in a 13 May speech at the Italian Senate, Ratzinger asserted that the United States is actively promoting a policy of ?Protestantisation? in Latin America and the ?dissolution? of the Catholic Church there in favour of ?free Churches?. Ratzinger said the policy stems from an American conviction that the Catholic Church ?cannot guarantee a stable political and economic system, and therefore fails as an educator of nations, while the free Churches will render possible a moral consensus and a democratic formation similar to that of the United States.? Officials of the US Government expressed bewilderment at the charge.

In August, shortly before the Pope?s visit to Lourdes, Ratzinger came out against the candidacy of Turkey to join the European Union. In an interview with the French publication Le Figaro, Ratzinger said that Turkey has always been ?in permanent contrast to Europe?, and that it should look instead to play a leadership role in a network of Islamic states. ?In the course of history, Turkey has always represented a different continent,? Ratzinger said, giving as an example the Ottoman Empire, which once invaded Europe as far as Vienna. ?Making the two continents identical would be a mistake,? he said. ?It would mean a loss of richness, the disappearance of the cultural to the benefit of economics.?

It is perhaps unfair to add to this list the recent document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on male/female collaboration, since it was not a personal stance of Ratzinger?s, but rather a text approved by members of the congregation and ratified by the Pope. Yet the document reflects, at least in part, Ratzinger?s own biases. Consider his comments about feminism from a 1988 conference on biblical scholarship in New York: ?Whatever else one may say about them, [they] do not even claim to be interested in understanding the text itself in the manner in which it was originally intended ... they are no longer interested in ascertaining the truth, but only in whatever will serve their own particular agendas.?

This sort of commentary is often not reflective of a consensus, even at senior levels in the Vatican. Nor is Ratzinger becoming either more conservative or more outspoken as he ages; he has long been both ? always in an urbane, intelligent fashion (see box above).

Why, then, have his latest comments created a ruckus?

For one thing, Ratzinger chose to wade into two of the hottest controversies of the moment: the debate over the bar on Communion which some bishops have favoured for the Democratic presidential challenger, John Kerry, and over Turkey?s prospects for EU membership. He had to know that doing so would generate a reaction, especially when, as on the American debate, he appeared to take somewhat shifting positions.

More profoundly, however, the reaction reflects not so much Ratzinger or what he had to say, but the moment in which the Catholic Church finds itself. With an ailing Pope functioning more at the level of symbolism than governance, Vatican policy is being set from the Apostolic Palace these days only on very big picture questions, and even then only in the most general sense. Normally some of this slack would be picked up by the secretary of state, who functions something like a prime minister to the Pope?s presidency. Yet the current occupant of the position, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, is largely captivated by Italian politics, preferring to leave most other questions to the relevant offices of the Roman Curia.

It is increasingly difficult to know what the ?Vatican line? on any given question might be, with different officials staking out different positions. Thus the public comments of senior cardinals, even when they are voicing merely ?personal opinions?, are scoured with unusual vigour to try to determine to what extent they might hint at an emerging official policy.

More and more, therefore, when Joseph Ratzinger speaks, it is difficult for people not to hear ?the Vatican? ? even when they ought to know better.

Despite these dynamics, there is little indication that Ratzinger or similarly outspoken Vatican colleagues, such as cardinals Alfonso L?pez Trujillo in the Pontifical Council for the Family or Renato Martino in the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, have any intention of lowering the volume. The idea that there exists a single entity out there called ?the Vatican?, with one mind and one will, and hence only one view of any issue, has always been essentially a myth; that point has never been more clear than it is today.

John L. Allen Jr. is the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and the author of a biography of Joseph Ratzinger. His latest book is All the Pope?s Men: the inside story of how the Vatican really thinks (Doubleday, 2004).

Guardian of the doctrine

JOSEPH RATZINGER was born in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria, in 1927, and grew up under Hitler?s shadow in the Thirties. His family was anti-Nazi, but not involved in resistance; his father, a policeman, accepted assignments in progressively smaller towns in order to stay clear of politics. The young Ratzinger drew inward, immersing himself in the florid Bavarian piety of the era. In later reflection on the war and Nazism, many German theologians of Ratzinger?s generation, such as the famed moralist Bernard H?ring, saw the dangers of blind obedience as its central lesson, fuelling a reform streak in German Catholicism. Ratzinger, however, drew a different conclusion. Only a Church with a strong central authority and rock-solid doctrinal verities, he concluded, can withstand a hostile state or culture. This conviction ? one he shares with Pope John Paul II ? has informed much of his later Vatican career.

Ratzinger was the peritus, or theological expert, of Cologne?s Cardinal Josef Frings at the Second Vatican Council. At the time, Ratzinger and his boss stood with the liberal conciliar majority. Ratzinger was the ghost writer of a famous speech by Frings at the council, in which he defined the office Ratzinger now heads as a ?source of scandal?. His book from that era, Introduction to Christianity, is considered a classic even by many of his later theological opponents. Badly shocked by the student uprisings of 1968, however, Ratzinger adopted a steadily more conservative posture.

In 1977, Paul VI named Ratzinger to the archdiocese of Munich-Freising, and in 1978 made him a cardinal. As a member of the German Bishops? Conference in 1979, he supported John Paul II?s decision to strip his erstwhile colleague, Hans K?ng, of his licence as a Catholic theologian, cementing the rift between the two men. In 1980, Ratzinger was the relator, or chairman, of the Synod on the Laity, where he earned high marks. The Pope asked Ratzinger to head the Congregation for Catholic Education in 1979, but he demurred, saying he could not leave Munich so soon. In 1981, however, he took over as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Over his 23 years in that role, Ratzinger has been the architect of some of the most controversial aspects of John Paul?s pontificate: the crackdown on liberation theology in Latin America, crusades against gay marriage and feminism, putting a brake on the theology of religious pluralism, and narrowing the boundaries of dissent. On the other hand, Ratzinger is believed to have on occasion acted as a moderating force, opposing, for example, a formal declaration of infallibility for the teaching on birth control. Inside the Vatican, Ratzinger is not seen as a bull in a china shop. Colleagues and subordinates say he is gracious and mild, not one for empire-building. At 77, his health is basically sound, and most observers believe he will remain by John Paul?s side as long as possible.

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