BERLIN — The man chosen as pope Tuesday grew up in the foothills of southern Germany during the rise of Nazism and as a young man supported theological reform. But he later embraced a rigid conservatism to battle what he saw as threats from secularism and leftist politics.
The son of a Bavarian police officer, Joseph Ratzinger, 78, is known as a gifted yet polarizing intellectual. For nearly 25 years, he served as the Vatican's chief enforcer of doctrine, articulating the church's opposition to abortion, homosexuality, religious pluralism and Latin America's "liberation theology" movement.
Though he is known to some in Germany as "Der Panzerkardinal" for his attacks on dissent, theologians and religion analysts say Ratzinger's life can be parsed into three phases: his devout youth; his university days and participation in the Second Vatican Council; and his determination in his later years, with the support of Pope John Paul II, to reinvigorate conservative Catholic thought amid rising secularism, materialism and globalization.
"You can say there is the young Ratzinger, the middle Ratzinger and the old Ratzinger," said Rainer Kampling, a Catholic theologian at Berlin's Free University. "The older Ratzinger has a great fear that the Catholicism of his youth is under threat by Marxist and secular forces. I think he's rooted too much in the 20th century and not enough in the 21st."
Like John Paul II, Ratzinger grew up in the caldron of World War II and came of age as the Cold War reached across Europe.
Born in April 1927 in the town of Marktl am Inn, Ratzinger spent his adolescent years in the Bavarian city of Traunstein. His family opposed the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, but Ratzinger did not join resistance movements, and like most German teenagers in the early 1940s, he became a member of a Hitler Youth group. At the age of 17, he was assigned to assist an antiaircraft unit, interrupting his seminary studies.
John L. Allen Jr.'s biography, "Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of Faith," describes how the war and Hitler's campaign against Jews pervaded his hometown.
"The horrors of the Reich were right there in Traunstein, staring Ratzinger in the face, just outside the door of the gymnasium or across the seminary playing field," Allen wrote. "After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, a sign hung over the entrance to the Traunstein Stadplatz, the central square in the city, reading: 'Do not buy from the Jew. He buys you, farmers, out of house and home.' On the night of Nov. 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, brownshirt members and other Nazis attacked the homes of Traunstein's few Jewish citizens."
