From “grand inquisitor” to pope: Benedict XVI to head crusade vs. secularism, democracy

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With the selection of Josef Ratzinger as the new pope, the Roman Catholic hierarchy has placed at its head a hard-line enforcer of Church dogma, and one of the Vatican’s fiercest opponents of not only Marxism, but liberalism, secularism, science and virtually all things modern.

I think that Benedict XVI is really a compromise candidate; his election made possible to postpone - maybe for a few years - the necessary, but extremely hard job of tackling the problems that the Catholic Church is facing and choosing the way it will take in the future. The cardinals chose status quo for this time; next time the situation will be even more critical.

One wouldn´t be totally surprised if there would be a some kind of split in the Catholic Church in the coming decades. After all, they were a quite common feature in the Church during large part of it´s history. We could end seeing competing conservative and liberal cardinals electing competing popes. Not likely, but the world has seen been bigger surprises in the past few decades.

It has been claimed that one of the mistakes of the Catholic Church in the late Middle Age and during Renaissance was to elect lawyers instead of theologians as popes. They knew and protected the office and powers of the popes against Church Councils and laymen, but spiritual matters tended to get too little of their attention. It maybe that the election of learned theologians as popes instead of more feet-in-the-ground men will be seen as a mistake in the future. Benedict XVI may know everything about Catholic doctrine and be an efficient leader of the Vatican burocracy, but the way he faces the more down-to-earth matters will decide the success of his reign, and if he wants to be remembered as a succesful pope, he may have to be less than totally succesful protector of orthodoxy, and make compromises. After all, today´s popes can´t force people to be members of the Catholic Church - the luxury that most of their predecessors had - they have to make people want to be members of the Catholic Church.