The world/s 1 billion Catholics have a new leader. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany will officially become Pope Benedict XVI during an installation ceremony on Sunday.

It was a relatively quick and easy choice for the College of Çardinals. The new pope/s election took only a few ballots, in large part because Cardinal Ratzinger was the late Pope John Paul II/s chief lieutenant at the Vatican, and because Ratzinger is considered a traditionalist and theologically conservative at a time when the Catholic Church seems to many to be searching for some form of unification.

Not everyone is pleased with Ratzinger/s election. He headed up the Vatican/s doctrinal office in recent years, and was considered the strongest voice in the reprimanding of Catholic theologians, helped engineer a centralization of authority in Rome, and has been a tireless opponent of liberalizing church practices. He is 7 or has been in the past 7 against admitting women to the priesthood and allowing priests to marry.

His positions on important church issues have alienated local bishops, and five years ago he authored a paper that chastised other Christian denominations as "deficient," and when leaders of those other Christian faiths protested, he dismissed them as "insignificant."

It would appear that the new pope has many fences to mend, if he is to be the person to bring the Catholic Church together.

But the church has as one of its chief foundations the ideal that leadership should have a temporizing effect, and the fact that Ratzinger chose Benedict for his papal name may be a clue as to what the church has in store for the next few years. The last Pope Benedict, who led the church during World War I, was a peacemaker who advocated harmony and reconciliation. Church observers think perhaps Ratzinger selected a personal role model when he selected a name.

And there is precedent for philosophical and even theological transformations. Pope John XXIII in the late 1950s entered the Vatican as a conservative, but turned more progressive as the years passed.

As much as Catholics may want to preserve church tradition, the simple truth is that the world is changing, especially in Third World regions where the competition over faith is intense.

The time is coming for the church to give women a greater presence, and to consider more seriously the changing role of men in the priesthood. It has yet to be determined what part Pope Benedict XVI will play in this natural evolution.

April 21, 2005