Who is the real Joseph Ratzinger?
I have had long-time Vatican watchers say to me, more than once, “Maybe it’s really just that he wasn’t who we thought he was.” I suspect there is a lot more to this than most people might imagine. I think we made the mistake of believing the press. We were delighted that the bitterly anti-Catholic media hated and feared him. We failed to recall that they know nothing at all about Catholicism.
What the papers never told us was that as a young priest and theologian Joseph Ratzinger was known as a “progressive,” as the term was understood in 1962. This reputation was cemented during his work as the peritus, the theological advisor, of one of the Council’s most influential of the bishops of the progressive camp, Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne. Frings’ claim to fame in that great drama was a speech criticising the CDF – and its prefect Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani – for the “conservatism” in the “schema,” the documents prepared by the CDF for guiding the bishops’ discussions.
