Benedict on Benedict

The pope ought "to be the guarantor of obedience . . . The pope himself cannot even say, I am the Church, or I am the tradition, but he is, on the contrary, under constraint; he incarnates this constraint laid upon the Church. Whenever temptations arise in the Church to do things differently now, more comfortably, he has to ask, Can we do that at all? The pope is thus not the instrument through which one could, so to speak, call a different Church into existence, but is a protective barrier against arbitrary action." Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, God and the World, Ignatius Press (2002), p. 377.

God and the World: A Conversation With Peter Seewald