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 Steadfast Beliefs in a Tumultuous World
 
 By Alan Cooperman
 
  VATICAN CITY, April 19  --  In his words and actions, the man who on Tuesday became Pope Benedict XVI has shown a determination to hold fast to the moral certainties that have guided him from the horrors of Nazi Germany through the tumult of the 1960s  --  even though these beliefs appear to be falling out of public favor across Europe and much of the developed world.
 
 The choice of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 78, to succeed John Paul II signals a stubborn unwillingness by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church to abandon Europe to secularism. Despite John Paul's efforts to re-evangelize the church's historic heartland, Catholicism has been waning for decades across Western Europe, and nowhere more than in the new pope's home country, where an ecclesiastical tax collected by the government has produced a well-funded church whose pews are largely empty and whose influence on public life is in decline.
 
 The cardinals could have turned away from Europe and chosen a pope from the vibrant congregations of Latin America, Africa or Asia. But in electing Ratzinger they chose to make one more attempt to hold on to the Christian identity of the continent, said the Rev. Joseph Fessio, a friend and former doctoral student of the new pope.
 
 Fessio, who is provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Fla., said the name that Ratzinger chose for himself  --  Benedict  --  is a sign of his determination to re-energize European Catholicism.
 
 "The Benedictine order, in the midst of a collapsing and immoral superpower called the Roman Empire, civilized and Christianized Europe," Fessio said. "Today, Cardinal Ratzinger is our best hope to revitalize Christian culture in Europe  --  and probably our last chance, too."
 
 Fessio and others who have worked closely over the years with Ratzinger say that his reputation as a harsh disciplinarian and intellectual bulldog does not conform with the affable man they know.
 
 "He's a kind of simple person. He chuckles," said the Rev. Augustine DiNoia, a Dominican priest from the United States who served as Ratzinger's second-in-command at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department in charge of doctrinal orthodoxy.
 
  Yet the new pope faces a major challenge: overcoming the perception that he is a cold, forbidding figure and demonstrating the friendly, pastoral instincts that made his predecessor so compelling, particularly to young Catholics. Unless Benedict can project a kindly aura and brighter outlook, it is hard to imagine how he can succeed where even John Paul failed, said Giuseppe Alberigo, a professor of church history at the University of Bologna who has known the new pope since the 1960s. 
 
 "He has a shy character, rather mild, but with a rigidity on important questions," Alberigo said. "I don't think that a pope with such a pessimistic vision will be able to deal with the great social problems of the world, or the issue of Islam." 
 
 Ratzinger's searing experience as a Nazi conscript during World War II left him with an abiding distrust of nationalism and socialism, along with a passionate belief in holding firm to enduring truths, according to those who know him well. 
 
  Born into a lower-middle-class family, Ratzinger grew up in Bavaria, a deeply Catholic and politically conservative region. His father was a rural police officer, his mother a cook in small hotels. His father, he has said, went to Mass three times each Sunday.
 
  Ratzinger's biographer, John L. Allen Jr., has pointed out that his formative years coincided with the life span of the Third Reich. He was 6 when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and 18 when the war ended in 1945.
 
  Though his family made no public show of opposition  --  in fact, one of his great uncles had written a series of crudely anti-Semitic books  --  Ratzinger has described his father as opposing Nazism, largely as an outgrowth of his faith. "My father was one who with unfailing clairvoyance saw that a victory of Hitler's would not be a victory for Germany but rather a victory for the Antichrist," he wrote in his 1998 memoir, "Milestones."
 
  Although the Roman Catholic Church in general and the wartime pope, Pius XII, in particular have been accused of not doing enough to oppose the Holocaust, Ratzinger's personal experience left him convinced that the church was the only institution that could stand up to false ideologies.
 
  "Despite many human failings, the church was the alternative to the destructive ideology of the brown rulers; in the inferno that had swallowed up the powerful, she had stood firm with a force coming to her from eternity," he wrote.
 
  Ratzinger entered a seminary in 1939, following in the footsteps of his older brother Georg, who also became a priest. But in 1943 he was conscripted along with his entire class into the Nazi antiaircraft corps and sent to defend a factory that made aircraft engines. He told Time magazine in 1993 that a badly infected finger prevented him from ever firing a shot.
 
  He was subsequently drafted into forced labor, then into an army unit. In the final months of the war, Ratzinger deserted from his unit. He later spent several weeks in an American POW camp before making his way back home to the town of Traunstein and reentering the seminary.
 
  In 1951 he was ordained a priest, along with his brother. He went on to earn a doctorate in theology at the University of Munich, where he developed a love of patristics, the study of the key thinkers in the first eight centuries of the church. 
 
  By the 1960s, patristics had gone out of style. The leading lights in Catholic theology were grappling with modernism, and Ratzinger was soon embroiled in a watershed event in his life and the life of the entire church: the Second Vatican Council.
 
  The council, first convened by Pope John XXIII, brought nearly 3,000 bishops and their expert advisers, including many theologians, to Rome for a series of meetings from 1962 to 1965 that resulted in 16 major documents and caused a revolution in Catholic thinking and practice.
 
  Most famously, Vatican II cleared the way for the Mass to be said not just in Latin but also in the modern languages spoken by Catholics around the world. But alongside the liturgical reforms came even more far-reaching changes in other areas. The council's "Constitution on Divine Revelation" accepted a critical approach to the Bible. Its "Declaration on Religious Freedom" accepted the idea that governments should be neutral toward religion. Its "Decree on Ecumenism" endorsed the search for unity with other Christians, abandoning centuries of hostility toward Protestants.
 
 Yet many of these documents created as many questions as they answered  --  questions that were still being debated by cardinals as they went into this week's conclave, such as how far Catholics should go toward accepting other faiths as paths to God, and how much power the pope should share with bishops and their national associations.
 
  Ratzinger attended the council as an adviser to Cardinal Joseph Frings, an ecclesial moderate who emerged as a leader of the progressive wing in the council's debates. The future pope gained a reputation as a reformer at the time, serving on the board of the reformist journal Concilium. 
 
  In 1968, many of the reformers, including Ratzinger, were shaken by two events: the anti-establishment and antiwar student riots that convulsed Europe, and the sharp dissent that greeted Pope Paul VI's encyclical against contraception, Humanae Vitae. By 1972, Ratzinger and several other leading theologians left Concilium to form a rival journal, Communio, with a more traditional line.
 
  Dennis Doyle, a historian of the church at the University of Dayton in Ohio, said there is still debate over whether Ratzinger's views changed, or whether he remained constant and the world changed around him. What is clear, he said, is that Ratzinger "has always been quite happy with the results of the council in terms of basic documents" but felt that the implementation was becoming "too political, too focused on immanence  --  God's presence in this world  --  and not focused enough on transcendence, God's invitation to man for communion in eternity."
 
  In a sign of his relative conservatism and rising discontent, Ratzinger left a prestigious post at Germany's University of Teubingen to help launch a new, more orthodox Catholic university at Regensburg in his native Bavaria. His academic career effectively ended, however, when he was named archbishop of Munich and Freising and elevated to cardinal in 1977.
 
  Ratzinger first met Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II, the following year, when both came to Rome to attend the conclave to replace Paul VI. They had crossed paths at the Second Vatican Council and had read each other's books, but when they met in person, there was "spontaneous sympathy," Ratzinger told John Paul's biographer, George Weigel.
 
  Once he became pope, John Paul called Ratzinger to Rome to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the institutional successor to the Inquisition. Though it has a staff of only about 40, it wields enormous influence through its ability to censure theologians and vet documents from other Vatican departments for doctrinal orthodoxy.
 
 By all accounts, Ratzinger wielded those tools heavily. With his antagonism to nationalism, he helped John Paul keep a tight rein on national bishops' conferences. With his insistence on the supremacy of Catholicism over other faiths, he wrote a letter, Dominus Iesus, that declared that all other religions were "defective" by comparison. And with his belief in holding fast to absolute truth, he oversaw the disciplining of theologians who questioned the church's doctrine on papal infallibility as well as its bans on contraception and ordination of women as priests.
 
  Some of the new pope's ardent admirers believe that he is not, by nature, rigid. 
 
  "He has been misrepresented because of the role he has had as prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. Anyone who has that job is always disliked," said the Rev. Thomas Williams, dean of theology at the Pontifical University Regina Apostolarum in Rome.
 
  But as pope, he will face a church that is still deeply divided on many issues and pulled in many directions, from demands for a tough stand against the impact of economic globalization in Latin America, to calls for the empowerment of women and the laity in the United States, to open violation of the ban on condom use by bishops concerned about HIV/AIDS in Africa. Given his lifelong belief in constancy, it is hard to see how Benedict XVI could waver now.
 
 Special correspondents Sarah Delaney and William Magnuson contributed to this report.
 
   

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