Pope Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, accumulates all the contradictions of the Catholic Church from the Second Vatican Council until today. He was one of the young theologians of the influential German-language group that doctrinally fueled the openness promoted by John XXIII. To those under 50, all this will sound Chinese, but for them to understand that Pope is the closest thing to the current Francis that Catholicism has had in the last 70 years. But Ratzinger, and the Church as a whole, went into panic mode when they saw the effects that the theses of Vatican II had on Catholicism: hundreds of thousands of secularizations, loss of power and lack of sympathy from Western conservative sectors. So Ratzinger went from disciple of Karl Ranher to judge of Leonardo Boff, maximum expression of what many considered an excess of dissolution in the secular world. As the vaticanologist Juan Arias liked to say, Ratzinger led, with an iron hand, the former Holy Office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. From that vantage point, and under the protective mantle of John Paul II, the German cardinal made the counter-reformation of Vatican II, an amendment to his own work. This ability to radiate security led him to be elected Pope when he was too old for it. They thought they could handle it, but Ratzinger, a rationalist masquerading as a mystic, reinvented himself again. And he was the first pope to resign in eight centuries. Before doing so, he amended himself again. He started a crusade against pedophiles and their cover-ups and against the shadow government of the Vatican in the time of the Polish pope. His last service was to pardon the butler who had leaked the documents of the so-called ‘Vaticanleaks’. And when his forces failed him for opponents of such size, he resigned, but forced all the cardinals who had to vote for his successor to read a confidential report on the methods of covering up pedophilia and the business network based on diplomatic immunity. of the high hierarchy of the Church. After reading those papers, the cardinals did not repeat the mistake of voting for someone from the Roman curia. The fear of Modernity continues to be the pending subject of Catholicismor, more of its hierarchy than of its bases.
