Benedict XVI Cover Story

The NYT on-line feature piece this morning is about Benedict XVI's turn to the right in the 1960s. LINK.

Overall, it's not a bad article, though there are some well-placed theological clunkers (but what do you expect at the Gray Lady?). Here are some excerpts:

But while his deep reading and thinking in theology, philosophy, and history were fundamental to development as a theologian, it was the protests of student radicals at Tübingen University - in which he saw an echo of the Nazi totalitarianism he loathed - that seem to have pushed him definitively toward deep conservatism and insistence on unquestioned obedience to the authority of Rome.

Professor Seckler said an intellectual debate played to his strengths. "There was a special problem with Ratzinger," he said. "He's very good, very strong in an argument, in discussion, but when he is confronted by vulgar aggression, he doesn't know how to handle it. The students felt this and saw it as his weak point."

"It is said that he had a shock and he became a conservative, but this is not true," Professor Seckler said. "He didn't become a conservative, but he understood that every reform brings out a bad spirit as well as a good spirit and that he needed to be more discriminating, that he had been naïve in his way of thinking."

Supporters and critics alike maintain that Joseph Ratzinger rarely allows doctrinal differences to become personal.

His rulings came flowing out of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, carefully footnoted and, to critics, repressive and intolerant. Liberation theology of the 1980's, in which leftist clerics in Latin America argued for radical change in society to help the poor, was quashed. Bishops were chastised for straying, like Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle over his tolerant views on homosexuals. More than a dozen theologians, priests and bishops were punished for doctrinal error, and presumably, many other cases have not come to light. In 2000, he published a condemnation of the concept that other religions might be as valid as Catholicism.

We're guessing this last paragraph is the NYT's primary attempt to discredit the man in this piece. We, of course, think it's complemental.

With respect to the first excerpt, Benedict XVI wasn't the only person to see an echo of totalitarianism in the 1960s student agitation. One of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, Eric Voegelin, did too.