He represents West par excellence, he said. “The Constantinian era, the European era of the church, ends with him.” With Francis, and the opening to the Americas, he said, “the rules are different.”
Mr. Badde said: “Benedict has brought back the fundamentals.
While Benedict preferred ornate clothing from the church’s past and downplayed the return of old Latin rites, his most ardent supporters rejected traditionalist labels , and even conservative, to the point of imprecise.
Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a German aristocrat, said: “It is possible to be a traditionalist in dress, but theologically impossible,” saying she had met a good friend. her husband was Benedict in November, when she knelt down to kiss his ring and hold his hand, but found his voice very emotional. soft to the point of incomprehension.
Yet for decades, the conservative Catholics he admired and the liberals he deposed, Benedict heard loud and clear.
As a staunch defender of church orthodoxy from 1981 to 2005 during the pontificate of his predecessor and mentor, John Paul II, Benedict – then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany – served as the chief catechist of the Vatican. “God’s Rottweiler,” his critics called him.
He acted as an enforcer, conservative compass and culture warrior, steering the church away from what he ultimately saw as excessive liberalization of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. He sought to suppress social activity in the church that he suspected of Marxism. He quashed disagreement among more liberal theologians and took a hard line against homosexuals. He has helped promote clerics modeled after him and John Paul II in the Roman Curia, the bureaucracy that runs the church, as well as in dioceses and religious orders around the world.
