Posted on: Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Nazi experience left indelible imprint on new pope

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post

VATICAN CITY — In his words and actions, Pope Benedict XVI has shown a determination to hold fast to the moral certainties that have guided him from the horrors of Nazi Germany through the tumult of the 1960s.

But friends and colleagues of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger say that his reputation as a harsh disciplinarian and intellectual bulldog does not fit with the affable man they know.

"He's a kind of simple person. He chuckles," said the Rev. Augustine DiNoia, a Dominican priest from the United States who served as Ratzinger's second-in-command at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department in charge of doctrinal orthodoxy.

Ratzinger's searing experience as a Nazi conscript during World War II left him with an abiding distrust of nationalism and socialism, along with a passionate belief in holding firmly to enduring truths, according to those who know him well.

Born in 1927 into a lower-middle-class family, Ratzinger grew up in Bavaria, a deeply Catholic and politically conservative region. His father was a rural police officer, his mother a hotel cook. His father, he has said, went to Mass three times each Sunday.

Although the Roman Catholic Church in general and the wartime pope Pius XII in particular have been accused of not doing enough to oppose the Holocaust, Ratzinger's personal experience left him convinced that the church was the only institution that could stand up to false ideologies.

"Despite many human failings, the church was the alternative to the destructive ideology of the brown rulers; in the inferno that had swallowed up the powerful, she had stood firm with a force coming to her from eternity," he wrote.

Ratzinger entered a seminary in 1939, following his older brother Georg, who also became a priest. But in 1943 he was conscripted along with his entire class into the antiaircraft corps. He told Time magazine in 1993 that a badly infected finger prevented him from ever firing a shot.

In the final months of the war, Ratzinger deserted. He later spent several weeks in an American POW camp before going home to the town of Traunstein and re-entering the seminary.

In 1951 he was ordained a priest, along with his brother. He later earned a doctorate in theology at the University of Munich.

By the 1960s, the leading lights in Catholic theology were grappling with modernism, and Ratzinger was soon embroiled in a watershed event in his life and the life of the entire church: the Second Vatican Council.

The council, first convened by Pope John XXIII, brought nearly 3,000 bishops and their advisers to Rome for meetings from 1962 to 1965 that caused a revolution in Catholic thinking and practice.

Most famously, Vatican II cleared the way for the Mass to be said not just in Latin but also in the modern languages spoken by Catholics around the world.

But alongside the liturgical reforms came even more far-reaching changes in other areas. The council's "Constitution on Divine Revelation" accepted a critical approach to the Bible. Its "Declaration on Religious Freedom" accepted the idea that governments should be neutral toward religion. Its "Decree on Ecumenism" endorsed the search for unity with other Christians, abandoning centuries of hostility toward Protestants.

Ratzinger attended the council as an adviser to Cardinal Josef Frings, an ecclesial moderate who emerged as a leader of the progressive wing in the debates. The future pope gained a reputation as a reformer at the time, serving on the board of the reformist journal Concilium.

In 1968, many of the reformers, including Ratzinger, were shaken by two events: the anti-establishment and antiwar student riots that convulsed Europe, and the sharp dissent that greeted Pope Paul VI's encyclical against contraception, Humanae Vitae. By 1972, Ratzinger and several other leading theologians left Concilium to form a rival journal, Communio, with a more traditional line.

In a sign of his relative conservatism and rising discontent, Ratzinger left a post at Germany's University of Tubingen to help launch a new, more orthodox Catholic university at Regensburg in his native Bavaria. His academic career ended, however, when he was named archbishop of Munich and Freising and a cardinal in 1977.

Ratzinger first met Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II, the following year, when both came to Rome to attend the conclave to replace Paul VI. When they met, there was "spontaneous sympathy," Ratzinger told John Paul's biographer, George Weigel.

Once he became pope, John Paul called Ratzinger to Rome to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the institutional successor to the Inquisition. It wields enormous influence through its ability to censure theologians and vet documents from other Vatican departments for doctrinal orthodoxy.

By all accounts, Ratzinger wielded those tools heavily. With his antagonism to nationalism, he helped John Paul keep a tight rein on national bishops' conferences.

With his insistence on the supremacy of Catholicism over other faiths, he wrote a letter, Dominus Iesus, that declared that all other religions were "defective" by comparison.

And with his belief in holding fast to absolute truth, he oversaw the disciplining of theologians who questioned the church's doctrine on papal infallibility as well as its bans on contraception and ordination of women as priests.