Smash hit

When asked in 1997 whether he was in the Hitler Youth he said he was registered but “stayed free of it”, by which he meant he never attended meetings. He was enlisted in the Wehrmacht in 1943, at the age of 16, serving in an anti-aircraft battery and in the infantry in his home town. He never fired a shot.

He returned to the seminary after the war and plunged into academic life. His curriculum vitae reads like a tour of Germany’s top theological faculties. By 1962, when he met Küng at Vatican II, his special expertise was on the basic dogmas of the church.

Both Küng and Ratzinger made names for themselves in Rome and knew each other well. Pope Paul VI told an aide that the young professors should be drawn into the service of the papacy. Küng was summoned to meet Paul in private audience; he asserts that Ratzinger was accorded the same privilege.

Küng claims Paul flattered him, then became severe, criticising his progressive views. Turning on the charm again, he suggested Küng should put his brilliant mind at the service of the papacy. Küng bluntly refused. Paul VI said: “You must trust me.” Küng responded: “I do trust you, Holy Father, but not all those around you.” Küng was out. In a devastating indictment, he today asserts that Ratzinger was similarly invited to serve the papacy. He wonders whether Ratzinger fully comprehended the conformity that would be demanded of him should he accept.

“That’s the condition: conform, adapt,” said Küng. “It was possibly clearer to me than to Ratzinger, who evidently subsequently took the way offered to him directly or indirectly in some form by the Pope — and with no little success.” The comment is clear: Ratzinger traded his progressive stance for ecclesiastical preferment.

The transition from progressive to conservative can be precisely dated. In 1968 he wrote in progressive vein: “Above the pope as an expression of the binding claim of church authority stands one’s own conscience, which has to be obeyed first of all, if need be, against the demands of church authority.” But a profound alteration took place in 1969 when student demonstrators in the theology department of Tübingen University accused the Catholic church and traditional theology of propping up capitalism.

“I knew what was at stake,” remembers Ratzinger. “Anyone who wanted to remain a progressive in this context had to give up his integrity.”

That year he became a member of the influential international theological commission, with leave to travel extensively and to meet the bishops and cardinals of the world.

The conservative convert made such a mark with Paul VI through the 1970s that he was appointed Archbishop of Munich in 1977: a stunning promotion for a 50-year-old priest with no pastoral experience. The following year Paul VI died and Ratzinger, now a cardinal, met Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland for the first time.

They got to know and like each other at the conclave that chose John Paul I, the so-called “smiling pope” who reigned for only 33 days.

When Wojtyla was elected John Paul II that October he lost no time in settling Küng’s hash. In December his licence to teach theology as a Catholic was withdrawn. The reason: he had challenged the official version of papal infallibility.

The Polish Pope brought Ratzinger to Rome as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981. From John Paul II’s point of view the liberals were using Vatican II as an excuse to create chaos in the church. He was determined to put a bit of stick about and Ratzinger was to be his instrument of discipline. Few were prepared for the intellectual limitations he would set for the practice of theology and the harshness of his methods of control.