The Pope. Habemus Benedict XVI

Some Catholics are encouraged, some dismayed by the surprisingly quick election of a new pontiff

IN HIS first utterance after being chosen to lead the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, Benedict XVI called himself a “simple, humble worker” for Christ. He was perhaps trying to allay doubts raised by the choice of a hard-line, German pope. He took the same course the next day when, celebrating his first mass as pontiff, he spoke of wishing to continue “the promising dialogue with other civilisations”.

Joséph Ratzinger is the son of a police officer from rural Bavaria. He served in the Hitler Youth and then in the Nazi Wehrmacht. That should not be of concern: his desertion in 1944 is evidence of a distaste for Nazism. Modest in his private life, the new pope has long lived in a small flat near the Vatican which, until her death in 1991, he shared with his sister. He has never been part of the social circuit in Rome that lures more worldly prelates. His gaze is often as open and innocent as it seemed when he stepped on to the balcony of St. Peter's on the evening of April 19th to acknowledge the cheering crowd.

Yet “simple” and “humble” are not words that spring to mind in assessing Benedict XVI. He is a master of that most subtle and casuistic of disciplines, theology. Under his predecessor, John Paul II, he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's “ministry” for maintaining orthodoxy, particularly among theologians. He did the job with a vigour and self-assurance that made him hated by liberal Catholic intellectuals. All the more so since Benedict XVI was once one of them. Like Pius IX in the 19th century, the new pontiff has traced a wide arc, from progressive to reactionary.

In 1962, when John XXIII set Catholicism on course for radical change, the young Joséph Ratzinger was among the theologians called to Rome for the second Vatican council. Four years later, he joined the theological faculty at Tubingen, recommended by a friend, Hans Kung, whose own progressive ideas later led to his being barred from teaching in the church's name. For the two Germans, as for so many, the watershed came with the student revolts of 1968. To some, they constituted a necessary, if boisterous, challenge to the complacent conservatism of post-war Europe. To the future pope they were the thin edge of the devil's cloven hoof: if unchecked, they could tip the continent into Marxism, atheism and chaos. Increasingly, the young theologian was questioning the need to question the fundamentals.

By 1977, when Paul VI plucked him from a professor's chair in Regensburg to install him in the archbishop's palace in Munich, he was perfectly in tune with the then pope's more cautious approach. He served for only four years before being called to Rome by the even more energetically conservative John Paul II.

A key point about the new pope is that he is a powerful intellectual who, unlike his predecessor, has led a relatively sheltered life. The quietly spoken Bavarian cannot be expected to deploy the profoundly human qualities that enabled Karol Wojtyla to spread a warm glow over severe doctrine. He may be as cerebral, but he is also less mystical. And for almost 25 years, Benedict XVI has been a bureaucrat.

That is not, of itself, a handicap. Many cardinals wanted a pope who understood the Curia, the church's administration. Only such a man, they argued, could break the grip exerted by the centralising John Paul II and restore to dioceses that operate in different cultural and political contexts a capacity for initiative and a margin of discretion. But any such shift can scarcely be expected from the man who helped John Paul II to homogenise Catholicism.

So what can be expected of the new pope? He himself gave a possible clue before the death of John Paul II, when he inveighed against the “filth” in the church “even among those...in the priesthood”. That suggests that Benedict XVI may tackle the paedophilia that has been rife among Catholic clergy with a determination sadly lacking in his predecessor. Yet, in other respects, he stands for little change. Not surprisingly, a conclave of cardinals almost all chosen by John Paul II opted for a candidate who promised continuity. And, not least, brevity. At 78, Benedict XVI, though in glowing health, is unlikely to have a long reign, unlike his predecessor. Yet he stands for the same take-it-or-leave-it form of Catholicism that he so skilfully helped his predecessor to define.

In Africa and Asia, people may take it, often as a bold, clear alternative to Islam. But in Europe, North America and, most significantly, in Latin America, Catholics are increasingly leaving it. A Chilean archbishop reminded the cardinals gathered in Rome that the Latin American church was losing followers at the rate of 1% a year. The Vatican's hostility to Latin America's “liberation theology” is partly to blame.

The views of the new pope, and his uncompromising way of expressing them, could make him a divisive force in rich countries as well. It is not just issues like birth control, married priests and women's ordination that divide Catholics. Aspects of Benedict XVI's thinking, such as his opposition to Turkey's accession to the European Union, have ramifications that go far beyond the church. Europe matters to the new pope, as the name Benedict suggests - Paul VI designated Benedict as the patron saint of Europe.

Letting the Turks into the EU, the then Cardinal Ratzinger said last year, would be “a huge mistake” and run “counter to history”. This shocked those eager to embrace the reality of a multicultural Europe. But it was music to the ears of those who identify Europe with Christendom. What worries some Turks about it is not that the new pope may be anti-Turkish or anti-Muslim, but that he may, in a political sense, be anti-secular. If the pope's agenda is to reimpose religious authority over historically Christian countries, that could give heart to Muslims, in Turkey and elsewhere, who support “political Islam”.

A more optimistic view is that the new pope is a Christian Democrat in the modern, European sense: part of the political movement that draws inspiration from Catholicism but accepts the rules of the democratic game. Benedict XVI is certainly close to European Christian Democracy in one respect: his views on social and economic questions are well to the left of the Anglo-Saxon free-market consensus. He may surprise many by the vehement way he denounces global inequality, and seeks to prick the conscience of the rich. Nor will he be shy about denouncing bad government in the developing world.

As for the “democracy” bit, Cardinal Claudio Hummes of Brazil, a prelate once tipped for pope, said recently that the church should not impose its convictions and methods on society but strive instead “to propose and not impose, serve and not dominate.” In Brazil, as in many other places, people are waiting to see if the new pope will be so modest.