Pope's fans are found online

NEW YORK -- The moment Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger emerged from the Sistine Chapel as Pope Benedict XVI, his fan club website -- run by a bespectacled American who lives in Queens -- crashed because so many visitors went there.

The website received a total of 328,000 hits on Tuesday, about 300 times the number of visitors it had received two days earlier.

''It's still a bit wobbly, but I think people can get into it now," said Christopher Blosser, the 31-year-old webmaster of the site, Ratzingerfanclub.com.

Shy, soft-spoken, and intellectual, Blosser, who works as a Web designer in Manhattan, has read 15 books authored by the former cardinal and can name the titles of articles about or by him like some Red Sox fans can recite baseball stats. Blosser has never met Ratzinger, but he speaks of him as if he had.

''It's hard to separate the impressions one gets from the press portrayals, and to get beyond and read and learn about the man himself," said Blosser, who sports a ponytail, wears black, and loves hard-core rock music and Johnny Cash.

A former Protestant who converted to Catholicism, Blosser started the fan club in 2000, about the same time the church issued the ''Dominius Iesus." The controversial document, written by Ratzinger, said ''the church of Christ, despite the divisions which exist among Christians, continues to exist fully only in the Catholic Church."

Blosser noted that Ratzinger was speaking in his role as prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. ''He was basically given the job to preserve the Catholic doctrine. It was probably a job he wouldn't wish for himself, but he was handed the job by the pope, and he fulfilled it," Blosser said in an interview.

The document so angered Protestants and liberal Catholics that Ratzinger's image as ''God's Rottweiler," the Vatican's enforcer, was cemented, said Blosser. He found the reaction of Ratzinger's critics so absurdly hilarious that he decided to create a satire of the ''Grand Inquisitor," using baseball caps, coffee mugs, and pins with the smiling face of the cardinal.

''It was originally inspired as a satire to the reaction by some people who saw Ratzinger as this Darth Vader of the Catholic Church," said Blosser.

The website became a place for supporters of Ratzinger to meet and discuss their admiration. ''There are probably [more] Ratzinger fans that are inclined to come out of the closet now," said Blosser.

The website includes an explanation of Ratzinger's compulsory enrollment in the Hitler Youth and German military as a boy growing up in Bavaria. It opens with a prayer and shows the former cardinal signing autographs. The site includes positive and negative feedback: One writer congratulates Blosser for having the insight to start the fan club, but another one writes, ''This site is a joke. It's supporting what in effect is a form of extremism."

The small commission Blosser receives for the sale of the mugs and T-shirts is used to manage the website.

Blosser said religion has always been a big part of his life. His grandparents were missionaries in Japan and China. Blosser, the oldest of four children, was born in Japan but spent most of his childhood in Hickory, N.C. There, his family experienced a mixture of Protestant religions while attending a Southern Baptist church, an evangelical Protestant church, and one run by Mennonites. Blosser's father is a professor of philosophy at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, where Blosser earned bachelor's degrees in philosophy and theology.

''He grew up surrounded by books," said his father, Philip Blosser. ''Frankly, at his age, I wasn't reading half the books he's reading."

Blosser said in that college, he went through his existentialist phase and ''my Nietzche 'God is dead' phase." He became serious about his Christian faith during his junior year after rediscovering the writings of C.S. Lewis.

About that time, he also began to noticed he was far more impressed by the Catholic scholars he was studying than the Protestants. That was also about the time his father introduced him to the works of Cardinal Ratzinger.

''He must of been impressed by him and put up this website," said Philip Blosser, who converted to Catholicism in 1996, one year before his son. ''The former cardinal always had a reputation. Being a staunch conservative, the Catholics leaning to the left regarded him in derogative ways, and my son found this amusing and, so he began sporting mugs and trucker hats on the website . . . It was all tongue-in-cheek and it began to take off. He's always had a slightly twisted sense of humor, but you know, I am proud of the boy."