The counsel of Trent

Damian Thompson says that the new Pope wants to promote the Latin Mass — and radical purification

Benedict XVI is the first pope in history to have gone about his daily life as a Catholic priest wearing a collar and tie. In this country, the practice is almost unknown; in Europe, it is the mark of a liberal theologian. But the other day the Catholic Herald printed a photograph of Fr Ratzinger dressed like a businessman that dated from 1977, long after his supposed conversion to hard-line conservatism. Apparently Ratzinger, as a professor at Regensburg, was merely following university convention. Even so, it’s a revealing detail, suggesting that, despite shared roots in folk Catholicism, Benedict’s intellectual history has little in common with that of John Paul II. The latter spent most of his academic career in a Catholic ghetto; Ratzinger numbered many Lutheran and Reformed colleagues among his friends, and admits that they shaped his own theology.