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The Cardinal likes to spend 15 minutes each afternoon at the piano. He is particularly fond of Mozart and Beethoven. "Brahms," he says, "is too difficult for me." Other difficulties include modern technology -- computers, stereos, gizmos and cars. He has never earned a driver's license. His talents lie in another realm. He can, say his associates, refine doctrine from a chaos of arguments. Says an aide: "He has the ability to synthesize a lot of collected, sometimes contradictory, information and put it into words that are compelling, straightforward and above all true to what he believes." And what he believes is often what the faithful are expected to accept.
Ratzinger's behind-the-scenes interrogations and investigations exert a subtle chill on Catholic intellectual life. His actions imposed an 11-month "penitential silence" on Leonardo Boff, Brazil's exponent of liberation theology (who has since quit the priesthood); they also led to the removal of Charles Curran, a proponent of birth control, from teaching theology at the Catholic University of America. (He is now at Southern Methodist University.) In fact, Ratzinger sometimes seems to be turning his back -- literally -- on modern notions. The pre-Vatican II church, he said last April, was theologically correct in having priests "oriented toward the Lord," facing away from the congregation at Mass. He agreed, however, that a reversal would be impractical.
In the early 1960s, no one would have thought Joseph Ratzinger would become the enforcer of conservatism. At the Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965, Ratzinger and Kung were young theological stars advising the West German contingent. In those heady days, Ratzinger and Kung applauded from the sidelines as Joseph Cardinal Frings, the Archbishop of Cologne, electrified the council by calling the prosecutorial tactics of the very office Ratzinger now leads "a cause of scandal to the world." Ratzinger is said to have ghostwritten most of that speech.
The progressive views he expressed during the council evolved out of wartime experience. Though drafted into a paramilitary corps, the teenage Joseph saw no combat because of a badly infected finger. He never learned to fire a gun, and his weapons were never loaded -- even when he performed guard duty in a BMW plant. But there he saw laborers conscripted from a branch of the Dachau concentration camp. He also remembers seeing Hungarian Jews being shipped to their death. "The abyss of Hitlerism could not be overlooked," he said. The depredations of the officially atheistic regime led to his conviction that religion was crucial to civilization. "Only the Christian faith had the possibility to heal these people and give a new beginning," he says. He was ordained a priest in 1951, and moved on to a brilliant career as a theologian that reached its first peak at the Second Vatican Council.