Easy choice faces tough challenge

As the world held its breath and waited to see who would appear on the balcony of St Peter's Basilica yesterday afternoon, the unexpected question occurring to me was this: "Since when has religion been so exciting?" The drama unfolding had all the electricity of a World Cup final or close-fought Ashes Test match.

And then he appeared: the ohsofamiliar face of Joseph Ratzinger, now to be titled Pope Benedict XVI, 264th successor to St Peter. And I have to admit to a chill sense of anticlimax and disappointment. The favourite had walked it. One might liken the sensation to being a Tory and waking up on 6 May to find that Tony Blair is still Prime Minister with a large majority.

Four more years at least, of much the same. Ratzinger is 78, the oldest man to be made Pope for more than a century. But above all he is the man whose fingerprints are already all over modern Catholicism, for better or worse, because he was for many years the most influential man in the Vatican after Pope John Paul II himself. It is curious, though, that they were not personally very close. Ratzinger, though head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had to wait his turn for his weekly papal audience and was sometimes kept standing throughout.

But the choice was still an easy one for the cardinals to make, easy to the point of lazy. Ratzinger is cleverer than most of them, and one of only two in the conclave who was appointed by the previous Pope, Paul VI. As the senior man among them, he stood for continuity and coherence. He has an extraordinary track record compared with the rest of them, who are, on the whole, a rather grey bunch of prelates.

His father was a policeman in Weimar Germany who resigned rather than take orders from the Nazis when they came to power. Though his son Joseph was briefly conscripted into the Hitler Youth, he came out of it by enrolling in a seminary to be trained as a priest, one of the few exemptions the Nazis allowed. When forced to man an antiaircraft battery at the end of the war, he deserted and was captured by the

Americans. As pasts go, it is not exactly boring.

There is nothing in his story to suggest Right-wing sympathies. The previous Pope was a Polish nationalist: no way is Ratzinger a German nationalist. Indeed, a strongly progressive and anti-Nazi mood took root in post-war Germany Catholicism, and he was one of a number of leading theologians who pushed for the reforms adopted by the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965. But his rapid promotion from being a theology professor to Archbishop of Munich was a time of transition, when he gradually came to the conclusion that some of the things being promoted in the name of the Second Vatican Council, such as liberalisation of Catholic sexual ethics, went much too far. When he was called to Rome to head the department formerly known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition, therefore, he was widely seen as a poacher-turned-gamekeeper. Liberal theologians received no favours from him. The disciplinary proceedings he presided over were widely attacked as contrary to natural justice.

Yet I once heard him preach a remarkably enlightened sermon as Archbishop of Munich to the parishioners of Oberammergau, on the eve of the latest production of their famous Passion Play. Much controversy had been generated by the allegation that it was anti-Semitic and seemed to reinforce the charge that the Jews, then and subsequently, were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. Responsibility lay instead with all sinners, Catholics in particular as they should know better, he said. But this was not just the teaching of the recent Council, then regarded by many villagers as a strange and new-found thing. It was the doctrine of the Council of Trent in the 16th century, he told them, and it went right back to St Paul. I have never seen the anti-Semitic slander of deicide ( godkilling), source of the "teaching of contempt" for the Jews that marred popular Catholicism in Europe for centuries, so effectively demolished - a German Catholic rebuking German Catholics, many of whom must have been ex-Nazis. And for a reticent man, speaking with great feeling and conviction.

It is on the emotional not the theological level that Benedict XVI will be quite a different kind of Pope from John Paul II. He is shy. Preaching at the papal funeral mass two weeks ago, he did not know how to respond to the spontaneous applause of the large congregation made up mainly of young people. Pope John Paul II knew how to milk such moments; the body language was instinctive and surefooted. Ratzinger just stood there looking awkward, embarrassed that his usually immaculate white hair was being blown about by the wind.

His voice is light, and his warmest moments are one-to-one rather than on a vast stage. He listens - perhaps more than his predecessor. He is subtle and spiritual. But a 78-year-old cannot have the energy to do much globe- trotting. Given the widespread view that the previous papacy went on far too long, his age obviously did not count against him. If he is a mistake, the cardinals may have told themselves, at least we will not be stuck with him for too long.

I sense, though, that something deeper lay behind their decision.

The name he has chosen, Benedict, is the patron saint of Europe, and this Benedict thinks European culture is normative for Christianity. Nothing alarms him more than the secularism and "the dictatorship of relativism" - against which he preached at the start of the conclave - which he sees as sweeping the continent.

And yet, the cardinals were asking-themselves, how come three million or more young people from this allegedly godless continent had flocked unbidden to Rome for the funeral of an uncompromisingly conservative Pope? Wasn't it because they saw that Karol Wojtyla really stood for something, even if they did not agree with him about everything? He made the faith personal; he urged audiences

all over the world to aspire to be better, and not to be afraid. And something clicked.

So the cardinals have chosen, against all the clamour for a black or South American Pope, to make Europe their priority. And they have chosen to continue with the formula that they saw, or hoped, was beginning to work for John Paul II. Joseph Ratzinger has thought all his life about Europe: how his native land went so wrong and took so many others with it; how secularism seduces us with false freedom leading nowhere; how humanity needs beacons of truth to lead it to its destiny.

But falling congregations and emptying seminaries are symptoms of a profound shift the like of which has not been seen in Europe for 500 years. Though there is a considerable risk of merely causing further alienation, those three million mourners at his funeral suggest that the way pioneered by John Paul II has possibilities that have not yet been exhausted. And once the problem was presented in that way, Joseph Ratzinger virtually chose himself. The cardinals have asked their best thinker to crack their most difficult problem. Faced with the scale of such a challenge, he may yet surprise us. I hope he does. I badly need surprising, and so does Europe.