AT LEAST eight East German communist agents were ordered to report on the private life and political views of the future Pope Benedict XVI during the Cold War years, according to his secret police files published in Berlin yesterday.

The release of the Stasi documents came at a particularly poignant moment for the Pope as he opens in Rome his first Bishops’ Synod since his elevation to the papacy last April. One of the themes of the synod is the boundary between Church and State.

The Pope denounced yesterday the double standards of secular societies that define belief as a private matter while keeping Christian views out of the public domain.

“A tolerance that allows God as a private opinion but which excludes Him from public life, from the reality of the world and our lives, is not tolerance but hypocrisy,” he said. In a comment that could just as well have been directed at the East German spymasters who pried into his life, he said: “When man makes himself the only master of the world, and master himself, justice cannot exist.”

It was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s deep anti-communism and his profound suspicion of atheist states that made him a target of the East German Stasi. Their suspicions seem to be confirmed by his long friendship with Karol Wojtyla, the Polish cardinal and future Pope John Paul II.

In a dense dossier of reports which spanned two decades, Stasi agents noted that Cardinal Ratzinger had been emotionally shocked by the left-wing student rebels who disrupted his theology lectures at the University of Tübingen in the 1960s. The experience had turned him from a church reformer into “the leading conservative theologian”, one Stasi analysis said, noting his opposition to left-leaning priests in Central America.

Cardinal Ratzinger was regarded in the Vatican as one of the strongest opponents of communism, one Stasi report said, giving a warning that he could take a more public stance against communism than Pope John Paul.

The Pope commissioned him in 1980 with the organisation of church help in West Germany for the counter-revolutionary developments in Poland. The reference was to Solidarity, the independent trade union that was challenging the communist authorities and sending ripples of panic through the regimes of eastern Europe.

The Stasi were plainly anxious to gather compromising information on Cardinal Ratzinger that could be passed on to Moscow. Despite a trawl through old Nazi archives, Stasi researchers found nothing linking Joseph Ratzinger to Third Reich activities. “No documents exist on Ratzinger’s activities for the time before 8.5.1945,” the report said. Nor did they unearth much about his personality. “Although he appears to be initially shy in conversation, he does possess a winning charm,” one secret police informant said.

The identity of most of the spies is still unknown. They are entered in the files with codenames such as Aurora, Lorac, Erich Neu, Gemse, Louwe. One of the agents, Lichtblick (which means Bright Spot) was unmasked as Eugen Brammertz, a Benedictine father, who died in 1987. Archivists now in charge of the secret police files estimate that the Stasi used 223 people within the Catholic and Protestant churches to supply a regular flow of information.

The elevation of a Polish Pope and the rise of Solidarity spurred on the search for intelligence that could be used against senior clerics. An East German Interior Ministry memo from 1982 said: “It is imperative to lay bare the hostile activities of the Vatican and above all to compromise the standing of the Pope.” Since Cardinal Ratzinger was very close to the Pope, he was made a priority target.

Extracts from the Stasi files were published exclusively yesterday by the tabloid Bild Am Sonntag, which said that Pope Benedict had personally authorised the release of the documents to journalists.

SECRETS AND LIES

The Stasi had files on about six million people and it had about 174,000 informers. Stasi officials tried to shred files as the regime collapsed in 1989

Times Recommends

• Air crash: ‘Everything is burnt. It is the closest thing to Hell’
• The true story of a passionate Korean 'spy'
• I shot Lennon in the back, Chapman tells parole board