“He represented the West par excellence,” he said. “The Constantinian era, the European era of the church, ends with him.” With Francis, and the opening to the Americas, he said, “the rules are different.”
“Benedict brought back the fundamentals,” Mr. Badde said.
While Benedict preferred ornate clothing from the church’s past, and eased the return of the old Latin liturgies, his most ardent supporters rejected the traditionalist, and even conservative, labels as so limiting as to be incorrect.
“Traditionalist by clothing maybe, theologically no way,” said Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a German aristocrat who said she saw her good friend Benedict in November, when she knelt to kiss his ring and held his hand, but found his voice so soft as to be unintelligible.
For decades, though, admiring Catholic conservatives, and the liberals he shot down, heard Benedict loud and clear.
As the powerful keeper of church orthodoxy from 1981 to 2005 during the papacy of his predecessor and mentor, John Paul II, Benedict — who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany — served as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal official. “God’s Rottweiler,” his critics called him.
He acted as an enforcer, conservative compass and culture warrior, veering the church away from what he ultimately came to consider the liberal overreach of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. He sought to suppress the social activism in the church that he suspected of Marxism. He crushed dissent among more liberal theologians and drew a hard line against gays. He helped promote clerics in his and John Paul II’s mold in the Roman curia, the bureaucracy that runs the church, as well as in dioceses and orders around the world.
