A papal confidant faithful to doctrine

VATICAN CITY -- The man who appeared on the papal balcony of St. Peter's Basilica to be introduced to the world yesterday as Pope Benedict XVI is the son of a policeman from a small village in Germany who was long seen as the late Pope John Paul II's toughest cop on doctrinal affairs.

The white-haired Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 78, traces his conservatism to his reaction to violent student protests that swept Europe in 1968.

As he rose through the church hierarchy -- as archbishop of Munich, then cardinal, then, most significantly, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican body that enforces doctrinal discipline -- Ratzinger has been associated with conservative Catholicism. He has been outspoken in opposition to liberation theology, homosexuality, feminism, and moral relativism.

In 2003, in the wake of the scandals that rocked the Catholic Church in America, Ireland, and elsewhere, Ratzinger took over the handling of the cases of clergy sexual abuse against minors. He also published a document asking Catholic lawmakers to fight a growing movement in America and Europe to legalize same-sex marriage.

His conservative record has made enemies of some liberal Catholics. But those who know him and work closely with him inside the Vatican say he is a subtle, reflective thinker and warmhearted pastor.

''I think he will play very well, as soon as you get to know him," Cardinal Edward Egan of New York said last night at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. ''I think you have to be slow to make judgments. This is a very unprepossessing, humble, loving gentleman."

As a 14-year-old boy in Bavaria, Ratzinger was forcibly enrolled in the Hitler Youth movement and the German military. He went on to become the quiet author behind many of the Vatican's most enlightened and eloquent documents on the need for healing between Catholicism and Judaism.

Supporters have started a Ratzinger Fan Club with a website that extols what they see as virtues ranging from his talent as a concert pianist with a penchant for Beethoven to his role as the guiding light on matters of church doctrine.

One of the most influential members of the College of Cardinals, he emerged on only the second day of secretive voting in the conclave inside the Sistine Chapel with 114 of his fellow cardinals electing him by a two-thirds majority to serve as the 264th successor to St. Peter.

He was elevated to cardinal by John Paul II's predecessor, Pope Paul VI, and became John Paul's closest adviser, meeting with him daily. He was named the dean of the College of Cardinals in 2002, which placed him as a de facto leader of the church during the pope's final years of failing health and the administrative leader during the transition of the papacy.

In these leadership roles over more than 20 years, he was well known by his fellow ''princes of the church," but the qualities that have made him so widely respected by them are not well known to most of the world's 1 billion Catholics who have seen him defined largely as the doctrinal enforcer for the pope and an unrelenting conservative.

He made headlines in the United States for cracking down on dissident theologians, seeing that some were fired from teaching posts and forcing others to sign statements recanting beliefs seen as straying from Catholic doctrine.

''He has been demonized by the media in the US and Europe so much that a lot of what makes up the man has been overlooked," said Dr. John-Peter Pham, a former Vatican diplomat and author of a book about papal transitions titled ''Heirs of the Fisherman." ''I am the last person to defend some of the things Cardinal Ratzinger stood for, but there is a side of this man that has never been reported, and I think it is going to be discovered in the coming weeks. He's been given a very unfair shake."

In his homily to the cardinals at the start of the conclave, Ratzinger defined what he sees as the central threat to the Catholic faith as it stands against a modern, secular world: what he called ''the dictatorship of relativism."

He describes relativism as a system of ''political correctness" over ''moral absolutes" in which compromise and rejection of absolute positions are enshrined by the goals of a secular, democratic society. Specifically, he has warned against Catholics viewing Jesus as just ''one religious leader among others" and insisted that to be Catholic is to recognize that there is only one path to salvation and that is through the teaching of Jesus.

He was born in Marktl am Inn, Germany, on April 16, 1927, the son of a policeman in a rural area of Bavaria, a predominantly Catholic region of Germany. His entry into the seminary was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II.

In a memoir, Ratzinger wrote that he was enrolled by officials in his seminary in the Hitler Youth program, but that he was forced to do so against his will and that he soon stopped going to meetings. Drafted in 1943, he served for a year in the German military on an antiaircraft unit. Near the end of the war, he deserted and returned to his hometown, and spent time in a US POW camp before being released.

He was ordained in 1951. From 1952 to 1977, he rose through the ranks of German academia and became a professor of theology and dogma at the University of Regensburg, where he also served as vice president until 1977.

It was John Paul II who named him in 1981 to the position that has defined his Vatican career: head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, where for 24 years he took the lead in guarding conservative teaching of the faith.

Material from the Associated Press and the Catholic News Service were used in this report.