Ratzinger upheld faith; Benedict must spread it

Unlike 26 years ago in St. Peter's Square, no one had to ask "Cardinal who?" when the name was announced. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger went into the conclave as the favorite of London bookies and came out as Pope Benedict XVI.

He was the best-known candidate as the church's disciplinarian, having run the kinder, gentler successor office to the Inquisition. In that job, the German-born cardinal won uncomplimentary nicknames like "The Panzerkardinal." That was his role: bad cop to Pope John Paul II's good cop. He disciplined theologians for seeming to be overly respectful of other churches, while John Paul gave a pectoral cross, a symbol of high church office, to the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury. In his last homily as a cardinal Monday -- a talk that had the ring of a campaign speech -- the new pope gave fellow cardinals a dynamite charge to uphold the faith against a palette of modern ills from Marxism to "vague mysticism."

As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, his job was to protect the faith from errors. As pope, he is called on not only to protect the faith but to spread it. That opens opportunities not associated with the office he held for 25 years; popes get the chance to say "yes" as well as "no." He enters his pontificate with a reputation as a conservative, but past performance isn't always a predictor. Pius IX, who reigned from 1846 to 1878, was reputedly a liberal at his election but ruled as the most reactionary pope of the past three centuries.

In another sense, though, Pope Benedict's selection is deeply conservative. As his predecessor's collaborator and at age 78, he can't represent the hope to strike out in new directions. (Neither, famously, could Pope John XXIII, who called the Second Vatican Council in 1962.) Some thought the new pope might come from the Southern Hemisphere, where the church is growing, rather than from Old Europe, where it needs tourist dollars to keep cathedrals open while the formerly faithful vote for politicians who legalize divorce, abortion, gay rights and other initiatives opposed by the Vatican. Pope Benedict represents a strong bid to win back the old flock before attending to the needs of the new flock.

Modern communications, and the way Pope John Paul used them, give Pope Benedict a wider audience than the church. In his old job, he had to question the orthodoxy of some of the pope's fans. Now he inherits that base to use or lose according to his understanding of what God asks of him.