COURAGEOUS PASTOR POPE LOVES FLOCK MORE THAN POPULARITY.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

BACK when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI penned some words that seem poignant now at this time in his young, but much-criticized pontificate: ``There can be no love without suffering, because (love) always demands an element of self-sacrifice.''

Now more than ever, he ought to know.

True love entails suffering because it requires, in ways large and small, putting another's needs ahead of one's own. Love is the hungry mother who gives her own small ration of food to her growing children. It's the husband who faithfully labors for years to care for his ailing wife. And it's the pope who cares more about the world's salvation than its approval.

Pope Benedict XVI loves his flock - not in some fleeting or emotional sense, but in a deeper, enduring and self-sacrificial way. Throughout his ministerial life, he has taken to heart what Scripture and 2,000 years of tradition have revealed, refusing to sugarcoat sin or allow false teachers to pass off sophistry as the authentic faith.

Now that this man who describes himself as a ``simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord'' has ascended to the church's highest post, he surely experiences some suffering in the form of the rhetorical attacks from his many detractors. They have wasted no time in deriding his background, his intentions, his character.

Archconservative, they call him, intolerant and unyielding. He is a reactionary, they say, a radical. Authoritarian, even fascistic.

All this because Pope Benedict XVI is faithful to the same Christian orthodoxy as all 264 popes before him, starting with St. Peter. The church's critics can't seem to come to terms with the reality that the pope is - surprise! - Catholic.

Yet such barbs are precisely the sort of self-sacrifice he is willing to endure. In the Mass he celebrated just before the conclave that elected him, he invoked the very words of Christ in Gethsemane: ``Not my will, but Your will be done.''

Pope Benedict XVI understands that just as in this world love cannot be divorced from suffering, it also cannot exist separate from truth.

In his first Mass as pope, he invoked what may become a major theme of his pontificate, ``the unifying force of Truth and Love.'' Days earlier, before the conclave, he elaborated on this idea: ``In Christ, truth and love coincide. ... Love without truth would be blind, truth without love would be like a resounding gong or symbol'' (1 Corinthians 13:1).

It isn't love to discard truths that the faith holds are crucial to one's eternal salvation.

A friend called me the other night to discuss the pope's election, and over the course of our conversation, he announced some personal news: After years of smoking, he had resolved to give up the habit. Why now? His parents had given him a stern talking-to, pleaded with him not to continue the behavior that had claimed his own grandfather's life.

His parents were loving him with truth. They challenged him, respectfully and gently, but unambiguously calling him to change his ways. They didn't pretend that his smoking was harmless, even if he might have initially preferred that they would. They didn't feign indifference to his well-being. Nor would they have given up on him, or loved him any less, had he rejected their advice.

Through the ``unifying force of Truth and Love,'' they may have added decades to their son's life.

So it is with the Holy Father, who, if you believe the critics, is simply a curmudgeonly scold out to make sure no one has a good time. Through the force of love and truth, he seeks to add eternity to his children's lives - even if that means telling us things we don't necessarily care to hear. He reminds us that God is just, but also endlessly merciful.

What the critics denounce as this pope's ``inflexibility'' is really an expression of his love, grounded in his understanding that it must be rooted in truth.

The forces of relativism long for a pope who will abandon any Church teaching we find difficult or uncomfortable, any belief that clashes with our own desires and egos. But having promised to be ``a courageous and faithful pastor of His flock,'' Benedict XVI wouldn't dream of it.

Love and truth go hand in hand.

And, usually, so does suffering.

It must come as little surprise to the new pope that over the last week he has been made relativism's whipping boy. And no doubt he understands that whatever suffering such abuse might cause him, it serves a higher purpose.

Pope Benedict XVI can take consolation in the final Beatitude: ``Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.''

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2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, appears at the window of St. Peter's Basilica's balcony after being named leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Patrick Hertzog/AFP/Getty Images

(2) Pope Benedict XVI greets children and the crowd gathered in front of his former private home in Rome this week. The pontiff left Vatican City on Wednesday for a quick visit.

Associated Press Osservatore Romano, ho