A POPE FOR THE GROWN-UPS

New York Post:

April 20, 2005 -- 'WE have a pope," habemus papam, the cry went up at 6 p.m. in Rome yesterday. And out onto the papal balcony walked the 78-year-old German cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger, who will reign under the name Benedict XVI as the 265th leader of the Catholic Church.

By the way the American press has treated the man over the last 20 years, you'd have thought the sun would have turned black at the announcement and the earth trembled in horror. "God's rottweiler," "the panzer cardinal," "the pope's hitman" — these are only a few of the names he's been called since 1981, when John Paul II appointed him to head the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office in Rome that evaluates the orthodoxy of new Catholic writings and practices.

The new pope has small reason to remember the United States with fondness. The homosexual activists, inside and outside the church, always had it in for Cardinal Ratzinger. When he came to Manhattan in January 1988 to deliver a mild talk on recent biblical scholarship to a group of Protestant and Catholic theologians, his talk was interrupted while the NYPD hauled away dozens of hecklers shouting "Stop the Inquisition!" and "No violence against gays!"

That same year, the dissident Matthew Fox, a New Age theologian from San Francisco, responded to his censure from Ratzinger's office by calling the Vatican "a fascist state" and taking out a full-page ad in national newspapers to shout, "I Have Been Silenced!" Meanwhile, the sexual liberationist Charles E. Curran sued the Catholic University in Washington, D.C., after a ruling from Ratzinger caused the school to rescind his license to teach official Catholic theology.

John Paul II's enforcer? "The modern Torquemada"? The labels never stuck with those who know him well — including the cardinals who just elected him Pope Benedict XVI.

"You are looking at the Grand Inquisitor," New York's beloved Cardinal O'Connor quipped while introducing Ratzinger at his 1988 talk. The joke came from the fact that the man was actually known among the church hierarchy as one of the humblest, most self-effacing of its members.

It's true that as Benedict XVI, he will be a conservative — if, that is, you think of John Paul II as a conservative, for there is no one in Rome who was closer to the late pope.

By the election of Joseph Ratzinger, the College of Cardinals has sent a clear signal that it wants the church to continue along the lines established by John Paul II.

Of course, in many ways, it's hard to imagine two popes more different. John Paul II was chosen at age 58, the youngest pope in 132 years; Benedict XVI is already 78 — old, even for the usual run of popes. John Paul was one of the most telegenic people on the planet; Benedict, though he has a quiet charm, projects little of the same charisma.

John Paul came from vibrant Polish Catholicism, flexing its muscles against its Communist overlords, while Benedict comes from a German Catholicism uncertain of how to fight the deathwish that seems to have seized most of Western Europe.

But in other ways, Benedict XVI is as close to the reinstallation of John Paul II as anyone can imagine.

In 1991, John Paul II issued Centesimus Annus, an encyclical on democratic freedom and economics that may be the most pro-American document ever to come from Rome. And then, in 1995, he issued Evangelium Vitae, an attack on abortion and the culture of death that may be the most anti-American document from Rome.

Benedict XVI understands his predecessor's support of both democracy and life — because he understands what ties these issues together. The encyclical that John Paul II issued in between, Veritatis Splendor ("the splendor of truth"), insisted that there are certain moral markers about human life and human behavior that cannot be argued away. A grown-up, serious people doesn't abort its babies. A grown-up, serious people doesn't murder its sick and old. And a grown-up, serious people doesn't destroy the structure of the family just for the sake of easy sex.

The day before he was elected pope, Ratzinger preached to the cardinals, "We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."

The rejection of this — the insistence that there is a better way to live: That's the line John Paul II took in Veritatis Splendor. And that's the line the church insists it will continue taking by the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.

America should be grateful. The Catholic Church has another pope who will keep calling the citizens of the United States to be a grown-up, serious people.