'Above all, I entrust myself to your prayers'

The following is a sampling of current and past remarks and writings of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected yesterday to succeed Pope John Paul II.

After he was named 265th pope and chose the name Benedict XVI:

''Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me -- a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord. The fact that the Lord can work and act even with insufficient means consoles me, and above all I entrust myself to your prayers.

''In the joy of the risen Lord, trusting in his permanent help, we go forward. The Lord will help us, and Mary, his very holy mother, stands by us."

On Monday, in a homily at a preconclave Mass, Ratzinger lashed out at moral relativism:

''Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.

''We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."

In his homily on April 8 at the funeral Mass for John Paul II:

''We can be sure our beloved pope is standing today at the window of the father's house, that he sees us and blesses us . . . Today we bury his remains in the earth as a seed of immortality. Our hearts are full of sadness, yet at the same time of joyful hope and profound gratitude."

The new pope's recently published book, ''Values in Times of Upheaval," includes ruminations on the religious needs of Christian Europe. The following is an excerpt from Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper of Munich:

''To survive, Europe needs a critical acceptance of its Christian culture. Europe seems, in the very moment of its greatest success, to have become empty from the inside. Crippled, as it were."

In December 2002, Ratzinger was among the cardinals who criticized US news media coverage of the priest sex abuse scandal. His comments were reported by Zenit.org, a news agency that covers the Catholic Church: ''In the Church, priests also are sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower."

In 2000, he wrote a declaration called Dominus Iesus, or Lord Jesus, stressing the superiority of Catholicism. An excerpt:

''Some prayers and rituals of the other religions may assume a role of preparation for the Gospel, in that they are occasions or pedagogical helps in which the human heart is prompted to be open to the action of God.

''One cannot attribute to these, however, a divine origin or an ex opere operato salvific efficacy, proper to the Christian sacraments. Furthermore, it cannot be overlooked that other rituals, insofar as they depend on superstitions or other errors, constitute an obstacle to salvation."

In 1998, Ratzinger issued a document on papal primacy -- a topic of intense ecumenical discussion -- saying that, as a matter of faith, only the pope has the authority to make changes in his universal ministry. An excerpt:

''From the beginning and with increasing clarity, the Church has understood that, just as there is a succession of the Apostles in the ministry of Bishops, so too the ministry of unity entrusted to Peter belongs to the permanent structure of Christ's Church and that this succession is established in the see of his martyrdom."

Compiled from wire services, the Vatican, Catholicculture.org.