New Pope A Vatican Insider

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger Was John Paul's Right-Hand Man

(CBS/AP)  Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger alienated some Roman Catholics in Germany with his zeal enforcing church orthodoxy.

Ratzinger, a rigorously conservative guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy who turned 78 on Saturday and was chosen the Catholic Church's 265th pontiff Tuesday, went into the Vatican conclave a leading candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II.

"He was known as the enforcer, and this certainly means that that will probably be a continuing theme, much to the disturbance of some of the more liberal elements in the Catholic Church," reports WCBS-AM's Rich Lamb, a veteran Church-watcher.

"He served for 20 years as John Paul's chief theological adviser," said Lamb. "He cracked down on a number of things that would be considered liberal — liberation theology, religious pluralism, challenges to traditional moral teachings."

His performance at John Paul II's funeral may have won the election for him.

"Cardinal Ratzinger had all the qualities necessary — age, intellectual background, formation, human qualities — to succeed John Paul, but the aura of being the inquisitor, the sort of reputation of being the bad cop to John Paul's good cop would have precluded his election," John Peter Pham, author of the book "Heirs of the Fisherman: Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession," told CBS Radio News.

"His performance, above all, at the funeral mass for the late pontiff, where he gave a homily that was not theological but was deeply spiritual and addressed to the crowd really won a number of people over who were convinced that this man was not just a cerebral intellectual but a man who could relate to ordinary people," Pham said.

In the conservative Alpine foothills of Bavaria where he grew up, Ratzinger remains a favorite son who many think will make a good pope. Opinion about him remains deeply divided in Germany, however, a sharp contrast to John Paul, who was revered in his native Poland.

"Only someone who knows tradition is able to shape the future," said the Rev. Thomas Frauenlob, who heads the seminary in Traunstein where Ratzinger studied and regularly returns to visit.

A recent poll for Der Spiegel news weekly said Germans opposed to Ratzinger becoming pope outnumbered supporters 36 percent to 29 percent, with 17 percent having no preference. The poll of 1,000 people, taken April 5-7, gave no margin of error.

Many blame Ratzinger for decrees from Rome barring Catholic priests from counseling pregnant teens on their options and blocking German Catholics from sharing communion with their Lutheran brethren at a joint gathering in 2003.

Ratzinger has clashed with prominent theologians at home, most notably the liberal Hans Kueng, who helped him get a teaching post at the University of Tuebingen in the 1960s. The cardinal later publicly criticized Kueng, whose license to teach theology was revoked by the Vatican in 1979.

He has also sparred openly in articles with fellow German Cardinal Walter Kasper, a moderate who has urged less centralized church governance and was considered a dark horse papal candidate.

"He has hurt many people and far overstepped his boundaries in Germany," said Christian Wiesner, spokesman for the pro-reform Wir Sind Kirche, or We Are Church movement.

Ratzinger himself, in his autobiography, sensed he was out of step with his fellow Germans as early as the 1960s, when he was a young assistant at the Second Vatican Council in Rome.

Returning to Germany between sessions, "I found the mood in the church and among theologians to be agitated," he wrote. "More and more there was the impression that nothing stood fast in the church, that everything was up for revision."

Ratzinger left Tuebingen during student protests in the late 1960s and moved to the more conservative University of Regensburg in his home state of Bavaria.