Reply #34: He is the Grand Inquisitor...

[JackRiddler]

No fooling. He heads the Office for Enforcement of the Doctrine of the Faithful, which is the direct successor office to the centuries-old Grand Inquisition. He is therefore the leading hardliner, enforcer and book-censor of the Church, and was JP2's right-hand man.

That he was in Hitler Youth as a German of that age at that time is kind of irrelevant, and hey, he did desert. Good for him. That's not as important as his adult life: close connections to Opus Dei and, most significant, his authorship of the 2000 document that upheld the supremacy of Catholicism and denigrated all non-Christian religions as illusions, with pretty much all non-Christians and most non-Catholics on their way to hell. This was followed by a direct hit on Buddhism as a "selfish" paganism by JP2, but although the document is the most important issued in JP2's reign, none of that was mentioned in all the media coverage until now, with Ratzinger's election.

R. has been an outspokenly conservative force and social-issues hardliner in the politics of Germany (where I first became aware of him many years ago, as I lived there for 14 years) and is quite unpopular there, including among Catholics. The Church democratization movement is strongest in Austria and Germany, and he is its bugaboo and chief enemy. Many high officials and intellectuals of the German Catholic church spoke out against his nomination last week, but this went completely unnoticed outside the German-language press.

Knowing all this, and knowing the situation of the Church and among the Cardinals of whom he was the speaker (2/3 appointed by JP2 and a very conservative lot), I called Ratzinger as the new Pope weeks ago in this very space. Do I get a prize?