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The issue of gays in the priesthood connects with the paedophile crisis. The hardline view, endorsed by the late pope, is that paedophilia finds its origin in homosexuality. Yet Benedict has so far not pursued the implications by endorsing a witch-hunt of gay clergy. It has been claimed by some sociologists that 50% of American seminarians are gay.

Instead there has been more focus on personnel changes in Rome. Eclipsed is the once supremely powerful Cardinal Angelo Sodano, secretary of state in the Vatican, a kind of ecclesiastical prime minister and foreign secretary rolled into one. Benedict’s close “kitchen cabinet” is composed of three trusty, moderately conservative cardinals.

Two of them — Angelo Scola, the Italian patriarch of Venice and the American Levada — are former pupils of Benedict’s; the third, the Austrian Christoph Schonborn, was the new pope’s chief supporter at the conclave which elected him. All three enjoy expansive girths; like Caesar, Benedict does not favour “lean and hungry” prelates about him.

If Catholic conservatives are disappointed, the liberals are wary. During his time as orthodoxy watchdog Ratzinger was responsible for excommunicating the mild Indian theologian Tissa Balasuriya for suggesting that the virgin birth was a kind of symbol rather than a hard fact, and for withdrawing the teaching licence of the French Jesuit Father Jacques Dupuis, who dared to hazard that all religions, including Christianity, fell short of absolute truth. Ratzinger had also intimated in his notorious 1999 document Dominus Iesus that non-Catholic churches were not “real” churches, implying, to the fury of the former primate George Carey, that the Archbishop of Canterbury is a non-ordained layperson.

A year on, most liberal Catholics remain moderately optimistic. Both sides of the liberal-conservative divide, moreover, were surprised when in January Benedict delivered his first encyclical. Titled God Is Love, it is a low-key academic sermon on Christian selfless love, known as agape, and how it progresses, ideally, from sexual love, eros. Thus love between a man and woman can become an epitome of human and divine love. The second half of the letter advocates Christian aid to the poor. This is in tune with the aspirations of young Catholics focused on making poverty history.

To profess charity, however, is not necessarily to practise it. Despite Benedict’s almsgiving rhetoric he has gone silent on the issue. At his first consistory of cardinals late last month (a meeting at which new cardinals are given their red hats), there was only one new cardinal for Africa, and he was 87 and in a wheelchair.

Benedict is set to be tough on Islam, unlike John Paul, who favoured an occasional visit to a mosque or toting a copy of the Koran for the cameras. “We’ll be nice to you,” he is saying, “if you stop burning down our churches and killing our missionaries.” In Cologne last summer he declared that “any country which claims not to respect other religions is not worthy of the name civilisation”.

But can he heal the absence of respect between the liberals and the conservatives which still threatens a centrifugal break-up of the church? The expectation, a year ago, was that Benedict would favour the traditionalist interpretation of Catholic belief and practice, a path that could have led to internal conflict such as the church has not seen since the reformation.

It seems, though, that he is attempting to bring his divided flock together, stressing the basics of what should unite rather than divide them. By concentrating on unconditional love in his first encyclical, he appears to be invoking an image of the church as a big tent with room for all perspectives.