Liberal Germans dismayed at Ratzinger's election

BERLIN - Liberal Germany reacted with a collective sigh of dismay today to the news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been elected the first German Pope for more than 400 years.

The son of a rural police officer in Bavaria, Cardinal Ratzinger is renowned throughout Germany as a vigorous defender of Catholic orthodoxy strongly opposed to the ordination of women priests, contraception, homosexuals and Catholic dissidents.

Admired by conservative German Catholics, he is feared by many of their more liberal counterparts who have dubbed him "The enforcer" and "The panzer cardinal" because of his unflinching commitment to conservative doctrine.

"Certainly no other German churchman divides opinion more than Ratzinger," remarked Cologne's Rundschau newspaper shortly after the Vatican announced his election.

"Most of his critics are to be found in Germany and they are his fiercest," the paper added. "For many in Germany the man with the ice grey hair is simply a symbol of religious dogma and conservatism."

An opinion poll conducted in Germany last week showed that 36 per cent of Germans opposed his becoming Pope whereas only 29 per cent supported his candidacy.

"Many Germans will be swallowing hard and asking themselves how they should respond to his election," remarked Frederike Sittler a religion correspondent for German radio.

"He is renowned as a representative of the cold and dismissive side of Rome."

Unknown to many of his followers in Germany, Ratzinger's past includes brief membership of the Hitler Youth movement and wartime service with a German army anti-aircraft unit - a record which contrasts starkly with his predecessor's role in Nazi-occupied Poland.

However his biographers point out that Ratzinger was never involved in Nazi atrocities and that his father was a confirmed anti-Nazi whose opposition to Hitler's regime forced the family to move home several times.

Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth at the age of 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941.

Two years later he was enrolled in an anti-aircraft battalion that protected at BMW factory making engines where the workforce included slave labourers from Dachau concentration camp.

The Pontiff has insisted that he never took part in combat or fired a shot and said he never fired a shot because one of his fingers was badly infected. He was later sent to Hungary where he was obliged to set up tank traps. While there he saw Jews being deported to the death camps.

He is on record as saying that while he was opposed to the Nazi regime, any open resistance would have been futile. "Neither of us used a rifle against the enemy," his brother Georg insisted last week.

In Germany, Ratzinger is best known for his insistence that German Catholics should not take part in state-sponsored pregnancy advice schemes, a decision which prompted a heated church-state controversy in the early 1990s.

However he also upset many Jews with a statement in 1987 that Jewish history and scripture reach fulfilment only in Christ - a view denounced by his critics as "theological anti-Semitism".

He offended members of other faiths in 2000 when he signed a document which argued: "Only in the Catholic Church is there eternal salvation."

- INDEPENDENT