Cardinal Ratzinger's life to date can be told as three distinct stories, write, Jeffrey Fleishman and Sebastian Rotella
The man chosen as Pope on Tuesday grew up in the foothills of southern Germany during the rise of Nazism. He was an architect of theological reform before abandoning those ideas for a rigid conservatism to battle what he saw as threats from secularism and leftist politics.
The son of a Bavarian police officer, Joseph Ratzinger (78) is known as a gifted yet polarising intellectual. For nearly 25 years, he served as the Vatican's chief enforcer of doctrine, articulating the Catholic Church's opposition to abortion, homosexuality, religious pluralism and Latin America's "liberation theology" movement.
Though he is known in Germany as Der Panzerkardinal for his attacks on dissent, theologians and religion analysts say Ratzinger's life can be parsed into three phases: his devout youth; his university days and participation in the second Vatican Council; and his determination in his later years, with the support of Pope John Paul II, to reinvigorate conservative Catholic thought amid rising secularism, materialism and globalisation.
"You can say there is the young Ratzinger, the middle Ratzinger and the old Ratzinger," said Rainer Kampling, a Catholic theologian at Berlin's Free University. "The older Ratzinger has a great fear that the Catholicism of his youth is under threat by Marxist and secular forces. I think he's rooted too much in the 20th century and not enough in the 21st."
Like John Paul II, Ratzinger grew up in the cauldron of the second World War and became a man as the Cold War reached across Europe.
Born in April 1927 in the town of Marktl am Inn, Ratzinger spent his adolescent years in the Bavarian city of Traunstein. His family opposed the rise of the Nazi party in the 1930s, but Ratzinger did not join resistance movements and like most German teenagers in the early 1940s became a member of a Hitler Youth group. Interrupting his seminary studies at the age of 17, he was assigned to an anti-aircraft unit.
John Allen's biography, Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of Faith, describes how the war and Hitler's campaign against Jews pervaded the new Pope's home region.
"The horrors of the Reich were right there in Traunstein, staring Ratzinger in the face, just outside the door of the gymnasium or across the seminary playing field," Allen wrote. "After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, a sign hung over the entrance to the Traunstein Stadplatz, the central square in the city, reading: 'Do not buy from the Jew. He buys you, farmers, out of house and home.' On the night of November 9th, 1938, Kristallnacht, brownshirt members and other Nazis attacked the homes of Traunstein's few Jewish citizens."
Many of the region's Jewish citizens were either sent to Dachau concentration camp or fled Germany. Their homes were seized and auctioned off. A few non-Jewish residents sheltered Jews or helped them escape, according to the book.
In a recent interview, Ratzinger's brother, Georg, also a priest, said it was impossible to resist Nazism. But Allen said the would-be pontiff viewed the church as a buttress against Nazi evils, adding that Ratzinger's father and the local pastor criticised the Reich.
Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles agreed that Ratzinger's father was an anti-Nazi, and said Ratzinger's membership in the Hitler Youth should not be taken as an indication of Nazi sympathies because membership was mandatory. In his 1998 memoir, Milestones, Ratzinger wrote: "No one doubted that the church was the locus of all our hopes. Despite many human failings, the church was the alternative to the destructive ideology of the brown [ Nazi] rulers; in the inferno that had swallowed up the powerful, she had stood firm with a force coming to her from eternity. It had been demonstrated: The gates of hell will not overpower her."
Ratzinger was released from the anti-aircraft unit in September 1944, according to Allen's account, and almost immediately was drafted into the German army. He deserted in April or May 1945 and was briefly held as a prisoner of war by US forces near his home in Traunstein.
After Ratzinger was freed by the Americans, he studied at St Michael's Seminary in Traunstein, and he and his brother were ordained priests on the same day in 1951.
Ratzinger went on to study philosophy at the University of Munich and received a doctorate in theology from Freising. An accomplished pianist who enjoyed taking long walks in the German mountains, he was groomed early as a Catholic intellect.
Even critics call him urbane and cultured, and according to the Vatican, he speaks eight languages including German, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
He was a progressive and eloquent voice during the 1962-65 second Vatican Council, when the church became more open under Pope John XXIII. He helped draft an attack on the church laws dealing with heresy, which dated to medieval times and which the draft said were a "source of scandal" to the world.
Ratzinger's reform-minded tendencies, however, began shifting in the late 1960s. As a professor at Tübingen University, he opposed Marxist student demonstrations and left the institution for another teaching post closer to his home in Bavaria. West Germany, like much of the western hemisphere, was awash in radical philosophies at the time. In a 1997 interview with the publication Salt of the Earth, Ratzinger described such political ideologies as "tyrannical, brutal and cruel. That experience made it clear to me that the abuse of the faith had to be resisted".
In 1972 Ratzinger and other theologians started a Catholic journal, Communio. Five years later he was named archbishop of Munich and Freising and was elevated to cardinal by Pope Paul VI.
Pope John Paul II assumed the papacy in 1978, and Ratzinger's intellect and doctrinal writings impressed the new pontiff. In 1980 he appointed Ratzinger to chair a synod on laity. By this time, John Paul had begun his globetrotting and was also seeking to centralise church authority in the Vatican and move towards more conservative teachings.
John Paul believed he had found a kindred voice in Ratzinger, but the cardinal was reluctant to permanently leave his post in Munich. In November 1981, however, Ratzinger agreed to John Paul's request to head the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, a position he held until this month.
Vibrant and strong in his beliefs, Ratzinger is also known as a quiet, almost shy man, with hard blue eyes. Friends and critics alike describe him as an engaging man who can talk on topics ranging from classical music to the gospels.
"Cardinal Ratzinger is known for his gentleness and timidity," said Mario Marazziti, a leader of the Saint Egidio Community, a Catholic movement that works with the poor. "When people greeted him crossing St Peter's, he seemed almost stunned that people recognised him."
But his doctrinal fervour has gained him many detractors and set him against former colleagues, including the liberal theologian Hans Küng, who was influential in securing Ratzinger's appointment at Tübingen University. Ratzinger criticised Küng's views, and in 1979 the Vatican suspended his licence to teach theology.
About one-third of Germany's population of 82 million is Catholic. Like other European nations, church attendance has dwindled over the last decade and Ratzinger's stands against abortion counselling, homosexuality and ecumenical communion services have angered many in this country.
A poll this month by Der Spiegel magazine found that 36 per cent of Germans were opposed to a Ratzinger papacy and 29 per cent were supportive. Another 17 per cent of the 1,000 people surveyed said they didn't care.
Some Germans have complained that Ratzinger's opposition to Catholics sharing communion with Lutherans in ecumenical services has stifled relations between the faiths.
"He's insulted other religions, and it's very disappointing," said Christian Weisner, a leading member of the international We Are the Church movement that seeks a more open church.
Weisner and other critics added that the Vatican's 2000 document Dominus Jesus - which was written chiefly by Ratzinger and asserted the primacy of Catholicism while branding other religious groups "deficient" - was a setback in relations with Muslims and other denominations.
Ratzinger had said in recent years that he would leave the Vatican and return to Bavaria and write. But as he stood on Tuesday amid a sea a flickering flash bulbs and looked down from St Peter's balcony in his new vestments, his destiny was set in Rome.
In his 1997 autobiography, About My Life, Ratzinger wrote of his love for the mountains around his home and how he was baptised with the "just consecrated water of the Easter night.
"To be the first child baptised with the new water has been considered a remarkable act of fate," he said. "It has always filled me with gratefulness . . . because this could only be a symbol of a blessing."
Geraldine Baum in Rome, Teresa Watanabe in Los Angeles and Christian Retzlaff and Petra Falkenberg in Berlin contributed to this report. - (LA Times-Washington Post Service)