Pope Benedict XVI promises to continue church reforms
Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, listed top priorities of his papacy in a message read in Latin to cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel for the first Mass celebrated by the 265th leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
He said his “primary task” would be to work without fail to reunify all Christians and that sentiment alone was not enough. “Concrete acts that enter souls and move consciences are needed,” he said.
The new pope said he wanted to continue “an open and sincere dialogue” with other religions and would do everything in his power to improve the ecumenical cause.
The message was clearly designed to show that Benedict was intent on following many of the groundbreaking paths charted by John Paul, who had made reaching out to other religions and trying to heal the 1,000-year-old schism in Christianity a hallmark of his pontificate.
Benedict referred to his predecessor several times in his message, including a reference to the late pope’s final will, where John Paul said he hoped new generations would draw on the work of the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 meeting that modernized the church.
“I too … want to affirm with decisive willingness to follow in the commitment of carrying out the Second Vatican Council, in the wake of my predecessors and in faithful continuity with the 2,000-year-old tradition of the church,” he said.
John Paul, with Benedict as his doctrinal enforcer, supported council reforms but cracked down on what both men considered excesses spawned by the changes, including calls for priests to be allowed to marry and admission of women into the priesthood.
The Vatican’s hard-line enforcer of church orthodoxy under John Paul II for almost 25 years, Benedict had gone into the two-day conclave as one of the favorites to be elected pope. He emerged Tuesday as the oldest pontiff at the time of his election in 275 years and the first Germanic pope in almost a millennium.
A wildly cheering crowd of more than 100,000 welcomed Benedict when he stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as dusk fell Tuesday and gave his first blessing as pope.
Pilgrims on St. Peter’s Square shouted “Benedetto!” and “Viva il Papa,” waved national flags, hugged their neighbors and jumped in joy. Many shed tears of bliss; some wept in disappointment.
By contrast, St. Peter’s Square was nearly empty early Wednesday, although by the end of the Mass a few hundred people had gathered to watch the proceedings on giant television screens.
Benedict said he had been surprised by his election, and German Cardinal Joachim Meisner told reporters late Tuesday that he had looked “a little forlorn” when he went to change into his papal vestments in the Room of Tears — a room that earned its nickname because many new pontiffs get choked up there, realizing the enormity of their mission.
Meisner added: “By the time dinner came around, Ratzinger was looking much better and very much like the pope.”
In his first words as pope delivered from the loggia overlooking St. Peter’s Square, Benedict paid tribute in accented Italian to “the great John Paul II.” He called himself “a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord.”
It was a sign of John Paul’s charismatic legacy looming over the new pontiff, who is described by people who know him as intellectual, cultured and rather reserved.
Benedict said Wednesday he felt John Paul’s presence as he wrestled with two conflicting emotions: thanks to God for the gift of being pope but also “a sense of inadequacy” in carrying out the responsibility.
“I seem to feel his strong hand holding mine. I feel I can see his smiling eyes and hear his words, at this moment particularly directed at me: ‘Be not afraid.'”
Benedict turned 78 on Saturday, the oldest pope elected since Clement XII in 1730. His age clearly was a factor among cardinals who favored a “transitional” pope who could skillfully lead the church as it absorbs John Paul II’s legacy, rather than a younger cardinal who could wind up with another long pontificate.
His election in four ballots over two days — the first of Tuesday’s afternoon session — concluded one of the shortest conclaves in 100 years.
A conservative on issues such as homosexuality, the ordination of women and lifting the celibacy requirement for priests, Benedict has led the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — a position he used to discipline church dissidents and uphold church policy against attempts at reform by liberals and activist priests.
Joy over the selection of a new pope immediately mixed with worries that Benedict could polarize a global church, whose challenges include growing secularism in rich countries and inroads by evangelical groups in regions such as Latin America.
“He could be a wedge rather than a unifier for the church,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit weekly magazine America.
Among the crowd on St. Peter’s Square, Benedict also brought out sharply differing reactions.
Evelyn Strauch, a 54-year-old housewife from Ratzinger’s home state of Bavaria, buried her head in her hands and wept.
“This can’t be true,” she said. “I had hoped so much that we would get a good pope who would do something for women. … This is so terrible.”
Mark Wunsch, 27, a religious philosophy student from Denver, Colorado, was elated.
“The cardinals elected a good and holy man who was close to Pope John Paul II,” he said. “He’ll be a wonderful and good leader in preaching the truth and love.”
Benedict inherits a range of pressing issues. These include priest sex-abuse scandals that have cost the church millions in settlements in the United States and elsewhere, chronic shortages of priests and nuns in the West, and calls for easing the ban on condoms to help fight the spread of AIDS.
And he has to follow in the footsteps of John Paul II, the global pontiff who made 104 international trips in his more than 26 years as pope and set new standards in reaching out to other religions.
In an indication that he would indeed travel and continue to reach out to young people like John Paul, Benedict said Wednesday he planned to attend the church’s World Youth Day celebrations in Cologne, Germany this August.
Two images of Ratzinger have emerged in recent days.
With his wispy silver hair blowing in the wind, the German prelate stood before the world’s political and spiritual leaders at John Paul’s funeral April 8 and offered an eloquent and sensitive farewell that moved some to tears.
Then, just before the cardinals entered the conclave Monday morning, he made clear where he stands ideologically, using words that John Paul would surely have endorsed. He warned about tendencies that he considered dangers to the faith: sects and ideologies like Marxism, liberalism, atheism, agnosticism and relativism — the ideology that there are no absolute truths.
Benedict has denounced rock music, dismissed anyone who had tried to find “feminist” meanings in the Bible, and last year told American bishops it was appropriate to deny Communion to those who support abortion and euthanasia.
Ratzinger is the first Germanic pope in nearly 1,000 years. His faith is rooted in Bavaria, the Alpine region with Germany’s strongest Catholic identity. Like many of his generation, he carries the burden of Germany’s past.
In his memoirs, the policeman’s son wrote of being enrolled in Hitler’s Nazi youth movement against his will when he was 14 in 1941, when membership was compulsory. He says he was soon let out because of his studies for the priesthood.
In 1943, he was drafted into a Nazi anti-aircraft unit in Munich as a helper, a common fate for teenage boys too young to be soldiers. He wrote that he escaped recruitment in the dreaded Nazi SS because he said he was a priest in training.
He and his older brother were ordained in 1951. He taught theology and earned a reputation as a forward-looking prelate. He took part in the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, a major attempt to modernize the faith, but had some reservations.
Returning to Germany between sessions of the council, “I found the mood in the church and among theologians to be agitated,” he wrote in his memoirs. “More and more there was the impression that nothing stood fast in the church, that everything was up for revision.”
In 1977, Ratzinger was appointed bishop of Munich and elevated to cardinal three months later by Pope Paul VI. He was one of only two cardinals in the latest conclave who were not chosen by John Paul.