Quotes of the Day

In the wide, book-lined hallway on the ground floor of his home office in Tübingen, Germany, Hans Küng runs a finger down a dusty contents page until he finds a name: Joseph Ratzinger. Together with Küng, who had recruited Ratzinger to the theology department at the University of Tübingen in 1966, the young theologian was an enthusiastic participant in the reforms of the extraordinary Second Vatican Council. They dined frequently, and the introvert Ratzinger sometimes accepted rides in the extrovert Küng's Alfa Romeo. The article open in Küng's leathered hands is titled "Collegiality": it advocates greater cooperation between the Vatican and Catholic bishops. "That was Ratzinger," says Küng, slapping the book shut and placing it back on the shelf. "Back then we were on the same side."

They haven't been for a long, long time. For all those wondering whether Pope Benedict XVI has the capacity to change his tune in response to a new set of circumstances, a telling example might be found in the events that occurred not long after the halcyon period Küng so ruefully recalls. Ratzinger had been teaching at Tübingen for two years when the West German version of the 1968 student protests broke out—a bit like the U.S.'s but with less psychedelia and more Marx. The university became a hotbed of radical theology. Students distributed flyers calling the Cross a sadomasochistic artifact. They threw tomatoes and yanked away professors' microphones to disrupt lectures and force "dialogue." "Those were tough times," remembers Küng. "And Ratzinger did not digest them very well."

It was an authority issue: European teachers back then were regarded as almost godlike, and for someone used to that kind of status and Catholicism's rigid hierarchies, such an overturning of authority was traumatic; Ratzinger would later call it "brutal." But, says Wolfgang Beinert, an assistant and friend of Ratzinger's at the time, there was also guilt. Beinert says because Ratzinger had advocated—was known for advocating—a greater openness and a loosening of ecclesiastical authority, the Tübingen strikes "triggered a huge fright. Ratzinger believed that he was in some way responsible, guilty of the chaos, and that the university and society and church were collapsing."

Beinert thinks that at that moment Ratzinger the reformer decided the necessary conditions for reform did not exist. The new Pope, Beinert notes, is a longtime student of St. Bonaventure and St. Augustine, who proposed a world dominated by ordo, God's all-inclusive order. "It is a world Ratzinger knows well," Beinert says. "As a child, Ratzinger grew up on this faith. Only on the basis of such order could you develop free and liberal thoughts." Alarmed by the Tubingen protests, Ratzinger left within a year and took a different path, away from moderate innovations like collegiality and back to order.

It is a thought to ponder. Historically at least, Pope Benedict XVI should be capable of great changes. The question is, Given his experiences before and since that turning point, could he ever be convinced that ordo had been sufficiently restored to again merit experimentation?

Joseph Aloysius Ratzinger was born to parents named Joseph and Maria on Holy Saturday, April 16, 1927, in the town of Marktl am Inn in Germany's southern Bavaria. The family was profoundly Catholic, as was the entire region. Joseph's policeman father attended three Masses every Sunday. His older brother Georg became a priest and went on to conduct a famous choir at the Regensburg cathedral. His sister Maria would become Joseph's longtime secretary and, some believe, his model for the "simple faithful" who needed occasional protection from the wilder ideas of the Catholic academy.

In a memoir of his early years, Ratzinger remembered a happy childhood of nature walks and learning to play the piano, a lifelong hobby. He imbibed deeply of the centuries-old rhythm of Bavarian life, with its seamless combination of the calendars of the farmland and the church. His first true inkling of the fullness of his future calling, however, may have been the profundity of the Latin Mass, for which he had a German translation. "Here I was encountering a reality that no one had simply thought up, a reality that no official authority or great individual had created," he later wrote in his memoir. "It was much more than a product of human history."

The distinction was important because the particular official authority at the time was National Socialism. The Ratzingers, like many Bavarians, especially after Hitler began declaring anti-Catholic sentiments, were anti-Nazi, if not heroically so. Ratzinger's father predicted that a victory by Hitler would bring on the Apocalypse and was at one point demoted in the police force because of his opinions. Although the press has made much of the Pope's having once belonged to the Hitler Youth, such membership was compulsory. In his 2000 book Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith, John Allen concludes that Ratzinger was "only briefly a member ... and not an enthusiastic one." His military service seems to have been similar.

In a 1993 interview with TIME, Ratzinger explained that although he was drafted into the paramilitary corps in 1943, an infected finger prevented him from learning how to shoot. The following year he put up tank traps near the borders of Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary, where, he recalled in the same interview, he saw Hungarian Jews being shipped to their death. At war's end he deserted (again, like many Germans), did some time in an American POW camp and made his way home.

Some Germans tried to forget the worst aspects of the Hitler years. Others transmuted them into a vivid antiauthoritarianism. Ratzinger drew a third moral: an enhanced awe of his church, which—although hardly without blemish—had resisted co-optation more successfully than had German Protestantism. "In the inferno that had swallowed up the powerful," he wrote later, "she had stood firm with a force coming to her from eternity." That idea—that the eternal, divine truth he had experienced through the liturgy and parsed in the catechism was the only bulwark against man-made "truths" ranging from the mischievous to the murderous—would recur throughout his life.

As the brilliant young man with the photographic memory completed seminary and then university, his intuition found its theological grounding in some of St. Augustine's thought. A key concept in Augustine's great The City of God is that the Christian church is superior and essentially alien to its earthly surroundings. Later medieval church theologians like Thomas Aquinas introduced an alternative hypothesis, counseling that God's natural law enabled Christians to enjoy a sensible engagement with the world, a theology that gives hope to Catholic social activists and ecumenists. But Ratzinger, once asked to name two desert-island books, picked the Bible and Augustine's Confessions. Avery Dulles, a Cardinal and a well-known American theologian, said about the new Pope last week, "It's the two cities: city of God and city of man. He sees a world very much in conflict."

Yet Augustine, a bishop, had nothing against activism within the church, and Ratzinger was soon embroiled. At only 35, the still obscure theologian received an extraordinary offer: to act as peritus, or theological expert, for Cologne's powerful Joseph Cardinal Frings at the Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII.

The 1962-65 council continues to define and divide Catholicism. Simply put, church "reformers," including those in the U.S., have seen it as a mandate for the church to come into synch with modern Western culture. That means loosening its hierarchical authority, encouraging internal debate and external outreach and honoring individual freedom of conscience—a principle from Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, which liberals regard as an especially important document and which many Western believers felt allowed them to keep taking part in sacraments like Holy Communion while privately disregarding teachings like the birth-control ban. Traditionalists suggest that the council's reforms were far less expansive than liberals imagine.

Ratzinger was, by acclaim, one of the young lions of the council. But roaring for whom? In 1993 he told TIME, "I see no break in my views as a theologian" over the years. Nonetheless, Allen, his biographer, doggedly culled conciliar notes and Ratzinger's subsequent commentaries to document what erstwhile comrades like Küng remember: despite some conservative stances (Frings delivered a damning critique of Gaudium), the young theologian was a progressive. Allen quotes Ratzinger extolling a "horizontal Catholicity" of the laity and bishops to balance out Rome's dominance and musing that church tradition, rather than being a "given," needs to be understood in terms of "growth, progress and knowledge of the faith." Ratzinger even critiqued the Vatican's heresy-hunting office (soon to be renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and eventually to come under his leadership) as "an all too smoothly functioning [body] which prejudged every question almost before it had come up for discussion."

Just a few years later came the events of '68. Shortly after Ratzinger fled Tübingen, Pope Paul VI, impressed with Ratzinger's Vatican II work, made him an Archbishop and later a Cardinal. During that time Küng's book Infallible? An Inquiry and several other works prompted German bishops to investigate him for theological deviation.

By then, Ratzinger had criticized Küng's theology as being essentially non-Catholic, more attuned to the "school certitude and party certitude" he had come to fear than to the ultimate truth. Now in the hierarchy, according to Allen, Ratzinger seems to have been involved in the Germans' discussions with Roman investigators that led to the removal of Küng's license to teach Catholic theology. A friendship evaporated: Küng would later compare talking to Ratzinger with chatting with the "head of the KGB."

What had happened? Ratzinger's critics have suggested he was swept away by careerism, and the church was indeed moving rightward. As a Cardinal, Ratzinger aided the election of the anticommunist John Paul II by warning a preconclave sermon against "an opening to the left," and John Paul invited him to work in Rome. But given the integrity with which even enemies credit Ratzinger, Beinert's 1968 theory is more plausible: nurtured in the closed and pious Catholic worlds of Bavaria and the seminary, Ratzinger had felt secure enough to champion reform. But Tuübingen convinced him that even fellow Catholics might abuse reform to rationalize worldly fads and pathologies. It was a slippery slope he would spend decades patrolling.

In 1981 Ratzinger became head of the very Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that he had earlier accused of being "too smoothly functioning." Its smooth functions since have been well chronicled, but it is worth noting an effort in which Ratzinger was out ahead of his Pope: the Cardinal's decade-long campaign against liberation theology. Liberation theologians, most of them Latin Americans, interpreted Gaudium et Spes' demand that the church be in solidarity with "the poor" as encouragement to engage in a kind of social gospel activism involving semiautonomous base communities and common rhetoric (and in some case co-operation) with Marxist activists against repressive local oligarchies. A few priests even took up guns. The Pope had a mixed response to the movement, usually condemning it but occasionally condoning it.

Ratzinger, however, was dogged in his opposition. He claimed that liberation theology flirted with the idea that Christ's kingdom can be fully realized in this world through social action, which contradicted Christian belief and, he thought, could easily lead to sanction for non-Christian notions of political utopia. An example he gave was Nazi Germany. Ratzinger's censures, silencings and broadsides over the length of the 1980s effectively crippled the philosophy's influence and wounded the prestige of sympathizers like the Jesuits.

During his tenure as enforcer of the faith, his office took on hundreds of investigations, with dozens of different resolutions and shades of resolution: in some ways Ratzinger could be quite subtle. But most conclusions, in one way or another, recapitulated his favorite theme (that there is only one revelation and only one church that represents it fully) and hinted at a familiar fear: that to accommodate too fully any other system—whether Islam or Anglicanism, the web of rights that support gay-partnership laws or any non-Catholic political effort—is to risk being of the world rather than of the church, with all the consequences that entails.

Benedict XVI seemed to suggest a new openness last week. Reporting on his homily the day after his election, the media focused on an interfaith vocabulary that they had rarely heard him use before: "Concrete gestures are required to [encourage] everyone to that interior conversion which is the basis for all progress on the road of ecumenism." But one listener was more interested in the part of the talk in which Ratzinger promised to ask "help and advice" from his bishops and invoked an old word: collegial. "First signals are important," says Hans Küng, glancing up to the old book of essays. Perhaps, he says, "the papacy is such a challenge that it can even change Joseph Ratzinger."

• David Van Biema