Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

What a party they had over at the Ratzinger Fan Club. You see, yesterday was the 78th birthday of their hero, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger and the candles burned late into the night. In the better quality papers Ratzinger is usually referred to "the Vatican's guardian of orthodoxy", ("the Vatican's hard-line defender of the faith" the New York Times). but he's officially titled Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, an enormously powerful office in the Vatican bureaucracy. For history buffs, the Bavarian-born theologian is also dean of the College of Cardinals, which was founded by another German, Pope Leo IX, who reigned from 1049 until 1054. Synchronicity?

Anyway, one of the great things about Ratzinger is that he's got personality in spades and this has led to an outbreak of nicknaming. So, you can take your pick among God's Rottweiler, der Panzerkardinal, The Enforcer, Cardinal No and John Paul III. As regards the latter, Italian newspapers are reporting that he has already secured at least 40 of the 77 votes required for elevation to the papacy and there's no doubt that he's got a resume that will impress the conclave electors tomorrow. Along with an acclaimed performance at John Paul II's funeral and the well-timed release of a new book on Christian values, the man's had the aura of "vice-pope" for some time now.

And he's also got that something else — that brush with the mysterium iniquitatis that marks people for life. John Allen, Vatican watcher for the National Catholic Reporter and author of the Ratzinger biography "The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith", puts it like this:

As a seminarian, he was briefly enrolled in the Hitler Youth in the early 1940s, though he was never a member of the Nazi party. In 1943 he was conscripted into an antiaircraft unit guarding a BMW plant outside Munich. Later Ratzinger was sent to Austria's border with Hungary to erect tank traps. After being shipped back to Bavaria, he deserted. When the war ended, he was an American prisoner of war.

Under Hitler, Ratzinger says he watched the Nazis twist and distort the truth. Their lies about Jews, about genetics, were more than academic exercises. People died by the millions because of them. The church's service to society, Ratzinger concluded, is to stand for absolute truths that function as boundary markers: Move about within these limits, but outside them lies disaster.

Later reflection on the Nazi experience also left Ratzinger with a conviction that theology must either bind itself to the church, with its creed and teaching authority, or it becomes the plaything of outside forces — the state in a totalitarian system or secular culture in Western liberal democracies. In a widely noted 1986 lecture in Toronto, Ratzinger put it this way: "A church without theology impoverishes and blinds, while a churchless theology melts away into caprice."

No more than John Paul II, whose outlook was shaped by his encounter with Nazism and Communism in Poland, Ratzinger's world view has been very much influenced by his proximity to evil in Germany. Politically, Ratzinger's nearness to John Paul makes him a logical successor, while his age makes him a putative pope with an expiration date. A safe choice, in other words. Atheist-turned-Catholic Jeff Miller at The Curt Jester loves those nicknames, btw.