“He represented the West par excellence,” he said. “The Constantine era, the European era of the Church, ends with him.” With Francis, and the opening to America, he said, “the rules are different.”
“Benedict brought back the foundations,” said Mr. Badde.
While Benedict favored ornate dress from the Church’s past and facilitated the return of the old Latin liturgies, his most ardent adherents rejected the traditionalist and even conservative labels as so restrictive as to be false.
“Traditionally by dress perhaps, theologically absolutely not,” said Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a German aristocrat who said she saw her close friend Benedict in November, when she knelt down to kiss his ring and held his hand, but his voice so found soft as unintelligible.
For decades, however, Benedict heard loud and clear the adoring Catholic conservatives and the liberals he shot.
As the powerful custodian of Church orthodoxy from 1981 to 2005 during the papacy of his predecessor and mentor, John Paul II, Benedict—then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany—was the Vatican’s chief doctrinal officer. “God’s Rottweiler,” his critics called him.
Acting as an enforcer, conservative compass, and culture warrior, he diverted the Church from what he eventually came to regard as the liberal reach of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. He tried to suppress the social activism in the church that he suspected of Marxism. He suppressed dissent among liberal theologians and took a hard line against gays. He helped promote clergy in his form and that of John Paul II in the Roman Curia, the bureaucracy that governs the Church, as well as in dioceses and orders around the world.
