Three Ways of Looking at a Pope

Africa Breaks With Negative Coverage in Europe and Latin America

The conservatism of Pope Benedict XVI is playing very differently around the world.

In traditionalist Africa, the new pontiff's doctrinal opposition to sexual permissiveness makes the Church "a stabilising moral force in a world on the brink of moral collapse," according to Dorothy Kweyu, a columnist for The Nation in Kenya.

In Europe what the BBC calls the "fearsome reputation" of the former Joseph Ratzinger has provoked anxious hand wringing and irreverent headlines. "From Hitler Youth to Papa Ratzi," proclaimed a profile in The Sun, in Britain.

And in impoverished Latin America, Benedict is being portrayed as the rigid "Pankercardinal," whose papacy, in the words of Argentina's Pagina12 (in Spanish), promises "more of the same."

These reactions are partly the result of now-dashed "Hopes for a Third World Pope," that I wrote about on April 4 and partly the result of Ratzinger's 25 years as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The disappointment is most keen in Latin America, where online commentators had touted Cardinals Oscar Rodriguez Madariaga of Honduras, Claudio Hummes of Brazil, and Francisco Javier Errázuriz of Chile as papal contenders.

"The Naming of Benedict XVI left a bittersweet taste in Latin America," says El Espectador (in Spanish) in Colombia.

Columnist Martin Granovsky of Pagina12 dubbed Benedict "The Persecutor" for his role in denouncing Liberation Theology which focused on the struggles of the poor in the 1960s and 1970s.

The editors of El Heraldo in Honduras said the advocates of "renovation" of the Church can only bide their time.

Judging by Benedict's "inflexibility," they say, "a kind of continuity with the Wojtyla era is the best that can be hoped for by those who want a renovation of the Church to make it more compatible with the social, economic, political and scientific reality of the world."

European reaction was hardly more favorable. In a nine-nation media survey, the Paris daily Liberation (in French) reported that commentators from London to Moscow to Athens don't much like the man they call the "German shepherd." (The biggest exception is Italy where coverage is reported to be generally positive.)

The reaction in Benedict's native Germany was "mixed," according to Deutsche Welle, the Web site of the country's public broadcasting network. A spokesman for the liberal Catholic group "Kirche von Unten" (Church from Below), said Ratzinger's election was "a catastrophe. . . . I think that even more people will turn their backs on the church."

But Matthias Matussek, writing in the newsweekly Spiegel Online scoffed at such critics.

"In Germany, the people who are most vocal in discussing faith in public are those who have long since turned their backs on religion," he writes. "German talk show hosts would just love to see this old-fashioned bastion of prayer, culture and tradition -- which they, after all, have left -- trivialized and modernized as much as possible, perhaps in a desperate attempt to dispel the underlying sense of melancholy they feel because they're no longer part of it all."