Five years ago, American nuns were mad as hell and weren't going to take it any more. Their National Coalition wrote an open letter to Pope John Paul II: "In your encyclical, That All May Be One (1995), you asked, 'What changes need to be made in the exercise of papal authority that could make the papal office a source of unity rather than division among Christians?' We would like you to consider silencing Cardinal Ratzinger."
The good cardinal had just issued his extraordinary denunciation of all other religious faiths as "gravely deficient". His notorious Dominus Iesus document was produced by the Catholic Church's latter-day Inquisition, better known in polite circles as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The nuns, together with a wide swathe of public opinion around the world, were "appalled" by the document. "Cardinal Ratzinger," they told the pope, "sees the goal of dialogue as the conversion of the other party. This attitude creates barriers to dialogue and fosters religious arrogance and bigotry."
Needless to say, the nuns were ignored. In fact, one, Sister Jeannine Gramick, was threatened with dismissal if she revealed that she had been silenced and removed from her ministry by the Vatican for refusing to say if she agreed with another Ratzinger edict - the truly disgraceful one dealing with the "intrinsic moral evil" of homosexual love.
To listen to the reaction in Ireland to the election of Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, you'd think he was a cuddly sort of a person, brainy but very, very nice. The unprecedented parade of clerics across the national airwaves fell over themselves to combat his pervasive Panzerkardinal image. But it felt more like a desperate damage limitation exercise than any kind of an honest appraisal of the man's uniquely totalitarian record within the Vatican.
What makes Ratzinger's election so remarkable is that it directly contradicts many of the aspects of his predecessor which had been the focus of such glorification a bare week ago. Key among these was the praise heaped upon John Paul II for his ecumenical work in building bridges between the Catholic Church and other faiths.
Ratzinger had in the past voiced criticism of this initiative. In 1986, when Pope John Paul gathered the religious leaders of a number of faiths at Assisi to pray for peace, Ratzinger commented that "this cannot be the model" amid conservatives' fears that such a move would prompt a concept of relativism - that one religion was as good as any other.
The new Pope's condemnation of relativism was repeated in his homily earlier this week at the pre-conclave Mass in Rome. He conjured up dire images of Christians buffeted around by a long list of "isms". His antipathy to any ideology other than that of "a clear faith based on the creed of the church" has long been a central plank of his belief. It was much in evidence in his successful campaign to suppress those advocating the theology of liberation in Latin America. "Religion must not be turned into the handmaiden of political ideologies," he wrote in his book, Salt of the Earth.
But that view has not prevented him from meddling in the recent US presidential election by instructing American bishops that it is wrong to give communion to anyone who favours the availability of abortion; or indeed from stating that Turkey should not be admitted to the EU, being "founded upon Islam" as opposed to Europe's roots in Christianity.
Ratzinger's dismissal of the uproar caused by revelations of clerical child sexual abuse and cover-up as "a planned campaign" was deeply duplicitous - of all the cardinals in Rome, he had a uniquely accurate picture of the enormous scale of the problem, as he had instructed that all reports of clerical abuse were to be sent directly to his office.
His profoundly pessimistic and even weird views of women are well known, from his letter to bishops last year attacking feminism as turning women into the "adversaries" of men, to his extraordinary statements about the pill, made in a pastoral letter to his fellow German clerics. "With the pill," he wrote, "a woman's own sort of time and thus her own sort of being has been taken from her. As the technological world would have it, she has been made continually 'utilisable'."
As for the frequently expressed hope by Catholics that the new Pope should have an appeal for young people, it is worth looking at what Benedict XVI has to say about rock music. Addressing the Eighth International Church Music Congress in Rome in 1986, he characteristically did not mince his words. Rock and roll is a "vehicle of anti-religion", he thundered, where man "lowers the barriers of individuality and personality" to "liberate himself from the burden of consciousness". The now official - even, dare we hope, infallible - papal view of rock music describes it as a secular variant of an age-old ecstatic religion, "the complete antithesis of Christian faith in the redemption".