You might be forgiven for assuming that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, upon becoming pope, took the name of "Hard-line" rather than "Benedict XVI.".

You might be forgiven for assuming that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, upon becoming pope, took the name of "Hard-line" rather than "Benedict XVI." It is probably best to ignore the media orthodoxy forming around him rather than to refute it. Ratzinger is, like John Paul II, an intellectual, and like John Paul he was involved in the reforms of Vatican II. He is reputed to be more interested in the administrative tasks of the papacy than his predecessor. But he is no grasper of power: He asked John Paul repeatedly to be allowed to leave the Vatican to resume the life of a scholar. Benedict is now to shepherd a Church that faces unprecedented challenges-such as the vast sway that relativism has over the human mind in the continent of his birth, a sway that he has said threatens to become a "dictatorship." It will be harder to overcome that metaphorical dictatorship than it was to overcome the visible dictatorship that his predecessor had a hand in dismantling. But faith may yet move mountains.