The man who should be Pope

5 March 2005

Piers Paul Read looks over the candidates to replace John Paul II, and says that Cardinal Ratzinger has got what it takes

It has been said that many in the Vatican regard the Church in Western Europe and North America as a lost cause. To choose a new pope from among the European cardinals would be like promoting the regional manager of an unsuccessful branch of a global conglomerate to be its CEO. However, there is one European cardinal who has been forthright and fearless in confronting secularism and defending the orthodox teaching of the Catholic Church — Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Cardinal Ratzinger is the liberals’ b�te noire — the bad cop to Pope John Paul II’s good cop. The son of a Bavarian police chief, a liberal theologian during Vatican II and later Archbishop of Munich, he is a poacher turned gamekeeper. It was he who ruled that the impossibility of ordaining women was an infallible teaching, and that the Church of England was not a Church ‘in the proper sense’. He also roundly condemned the rejection of Rocco Buttiglioni as a commissioner by the European Parliament as the persecution of a Catholic for his beliefs. Contrast this with the expressed view of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s adviser on foreign affairs, Sir Stephen Wall, that Buttiglioni’s rejection was merely ‘a political attack’ on the Italian President Berlusconi.

On the face of it, all this would make Cardinal Ratzinger a contentious figure and therefore ineligible; but there can be little doubt that his courageous promotion of orthodox Catholic teaching has earned him the respect of his fellow cardinals throughout the world. He is patently holy, highly intelligent and sees clearly what is at stake. Indeed, for those who blame the decline of Catholic practice in the developed world precisely on the propensity of many European bishops to hide their heads in the sand, a pope who confronts it may be just what is required. Ratzinger is no longer young — he is 77 years old: but Angelo Roncalli was the same age when he became Pope as John XXIII. He turned the Church upside-down by calling the Second Vatican Council and was perhaps the best-loved pontiff of modern times. As Jeff Israely, the correspondent of Time, was told by a Vatican insider last month, ‘The Ratzinger solution is definitely on.’