A pope who believes it is far better to be right than popular

Pope Benedict XVI will not expect the Roman Catholic Church to grow under his papacy. Indeed there is a sense in which he will not want it to. For his stance is that it is better to be right than to be popular.

Pope Benedict XVI will not expect the Roman Catholic Church to grow under his papacy. Indeed there is a sense in which he will not want it to. For his stance is that it is better to be right than to be popular.

He will see his primary job, to judge from his past pronouncements, as mounting a rigorous defence of Catholic identity. The notion that Rome should dilute its teaching to engage with secular culture will be resisted. And if people don't like it, that will be fine.

Western secularism is, he believes, the greatest threat to Christianity. He would rather the Church was a true remnant, and if that means being a diminishing one, so be it. The favourite Ratzinger metaphor for the Church of the future is taken from Christ's parable of the mustard seed - that great things will eventually grow from the tiniest seed.

So expect no changes in the vehemence of the Vatican's adherence to what it calls "culture of life" issues. On everything from contraception and abortion, to stem-cell research and gay marriage to euthanasia, battle will continue. And the hard line will be maintained on priestly celibacy and the ordination of women. To be Christian, he insists, is to resist the prevailing social current. Christianity may need to become smaller and less culturally significant to remain faithful. It is hard to imagine that the Catholic Church could have chosen anyone more damagingly divisive. For all the cheering of the loyalists in St Peter's Square, many Catholics will have been hit by a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs as the word Josephum was pronounced in Latin from the balcony. Surely they couldn't have chosen Ratzinger. But they had.

This was the man who made no mention of social justice in his address to the cardinals (John Paul II had at least balanced his ultraconservative sexual morality with a progressive agenda on social issues). This was the man who had made no mention of collegiality - the Vatican II notion that the government of the Church must be shared between the bishops rather than gravitating entirely to the Pope.

This was the man who had insulted other faiths, after they had been embraced by John Paul II, with a document Dominus Iesus, that reasserted the superiority of Catholicism over other faiths and Christian denominations. He had barred Catholic priests from counselling pregnant teenagers on their options. He had blocked German Catholics from sharing communion and told divorced and civilly remarried Catholics they could not take the sacraments.

Expect some surprises however. Under Benedict XVI the Vatican may cut off funds from universities it sees as already lost to secularism. "Merely to guarantee institutions is useless if there are no people to support those institutions from inner conviction," he has written.

Like many conservatives the new Pope also has an aversion to big government. "Future reforms," he has written, "should aim not at the creation of yet more institutions, but at their reduction." Though whether that means a decentralisation of Vatican power remains to be seen.

New bishops will continue to be ultraconservatives, even if this means as it did under John Paul II, that they are not pastorally up to the job. Theologians can expect to be confined to the narrowest margins of discussion and exploration.

Lip service will continue to be paid to Vatican II - though not to Pope John XXIII's key notion of aggiornamento, the idea that the Church must embrace what is good in the modern world. The new Pope sees the strengths of Vatican II as being in its emphasis on going back to the patristic and scriptural basics. A Ratzinger papacy will look not forward, but back.

The new Pope was once asked on Bavarian television whether it was, as Catholic theology insists, the Holy Spirit rather than human politicking which picks out the pope.

He replied: "The Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us." There was room for human error as well as divine inspiration. The proof of that is that there are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit would obviously not have picked.

The world's one billion Catholics must hope that Pope Benedict XVI does not turn out to be one of them.

Philosophies of Cardinal Ratzinger

On John Paul II

"We can be sure our beloved pope is standing today at the window of the father's house, that he sees us and blesses us ... Today we bury his remains in the earth as a seed of immortality. Our hearts are full of sadness, yet at the same time of joyful hope and profound gratitude."

On Islam

"It is true that the Muslim world is not totally mistaken when it reproaches the Western Christian tradition for moral decadence and the manipulation of human life ... Islam has also had moments of great splendor and decadence in the course of its history."

On Judaism

"That the Jews are connected with God in a special way and that God does not allow that bond to fail is entirely obvious. We wait for the instant in which Israel will say yes to Christ, but we know that it has a special mission in history now ... which is significant for the world."

On faith

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires"

On women's ordination

"The fact that the church is convinced of not having the right to confer priestly ordination on women is now considered by some as irreconcilable with the European Constitution."

On sex abuse scandals

"In the Church, priests also are sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower. In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than 1 per cent of priests are guilty of acts of this type. The constant presence of these news items does not correspond to the objectivity of the information nor to the statistical objectivity of the facts."

On homosexuality

"Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

"It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church's pastors wherever it occurs... The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in work, in action and in law."

"Above all, we must have great respect for these people who also suffer and who want to find their own way of correct living. On the other hand, to create a legal form of a kind of homosexual marriage, in reality, does not help these people."

On celibacy

"We have such difficulty understanding this renunciation today because the relationship to marriage and children has clearly shifted. To have to die without children was once synonymous with a useless life: the echoes of my own life die away, and I am completely dead."