Getting To Know Him

By By David Van Biema, Jeff Israely

It is Day 97. At noon sharp, the light rain that has been falling on the village of Les Combes, high in the Italian Alps, gives way to golden sunshine. Equally punctually, the white-shocked man with an increasingly comfortable smile walks across a small meadow to greet about 8,000 believers. Pope Benedict XVI, officially on a summer "retreat," waves his two-handed wave, sits graciously through a local bishop's introduction and speaks. With three months' practice at this, he no longer steps on applause lines, such as references to his predecessor and a much anticipated trip to Germany. His initial remarks are energetic, though his expression while reciting the Ave Maria prayer remains more stoic than rapturous. He implores God to stay the hand of terrorists and convert their hearts, and he intones the Angelus honoring the Incarnation. And then, after precisely 20 minutes, Benedict works the crowd a bit and heads back indoors to ... what? A first, tone-setting encyclical? The book whose existence is established but whose topic is not? The reorganization of the papal bureaucracy? People wonder.

Much as they have wondered for the past three months. A papacy is not a presidency, with every day's progress tallied obsessively on the march through a limited term. Yet scholars had hoped by now for a sense of how Benedict's new station would affect his theology and whether his avid pursuit of heretics as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith meant that heads would roll. Would there be more like Thomas Reese, the open-minded editor of the Jesuit magazine America, whose departure was apparently sealed with Benedict's election? When would the new Pope tear into the ecclesiastic "filth" inside his church and the "dictatorship of relativism" outside it that he had diagnosed preconclave? Benedict's first 100 days have offered no definitive answers, but occasional modest indicators--plus a frank give-and-take with some of his alpine hosts on Day 98--showed a progress of the man into the office and suggested that those who predicted a "caretaker" papacy may have spoken too soon. An inside look at seven telling days of the new Pope's stewardship:

DAY 5 TAILORING HIMSELF TO THE NEW JOB

In a gesture probably intended to mollify a press that had been portraying him as an unrelenting hard-liner, the newly chosen Benedict invited journalists as guests to his first public appearance in the Vatican's Paolo VI auditorium on April 23. But he was ill at ease, and the ever vigilant Italian scribes noted that the hemline of his robes was cut far too high, offering an unusually revealing look at his ruby papal slippers. It was the kind of gaffe his predecessor, as a former actor, would have been unlikely to commit.

A day later the hem had fallen. And over time Benedict found his office's public aspect an increasingly comfortable fit. His smile offset the famous dark circles beneath his eyes. Eventually he was tolerating such photo ops as a public cell-phone conversation with an ailing nun and the donning of a fire fighter's hat. "He'll never be a celebrity," says a Vatican official who has worked closely with Ratzinger. "But he seems more joyful and sure of himself." Ratzinger's brother was once worried that the job might harm his health. On the contrary, asserts Walter Cardinal Kaspar, a fellow German, "he is reinvigorated" by it.

DAY 25 CHARTING HIS COURSE WHILE HONORING THE PAST

In a bravura balancing act, on May 13 Benedict simultaneously fast-tracked John Paul II for sainthood and appointed San Francisco Archbishop William Levada as his own replacement to head the Vatican office on doctrine. The first announcement may run counter to Benedict's natural inclinations: he appears to frown on mass-market saintmaking (he has said he will not attend beatifications, which are a step before canonization). However, he clearly regards John Paul as a special case for sainthood and not just because of his own admiration. In the days before his election, the then Cardinal not only heard the cries of "Santo Giovanni Paolo" ringing over St. Peter's Square but also reportedly saw a petition by a substantial number of his peers asking that John Paul's "cause" proceed without the usual five-year wait. Thus Vatican watchers regard the exemption--which Benedict announced personally, in Latin, to roars of approval from a group of seminarians--as not simply a bow to overwhelming lay sentiment but also a kind of political nod to the Cardinals in the name of their collective mentor.

That nicely offset the independence Benedict signaled by choosing Levada. "Everybody," says a powerful Rome-based Cardinal, "was expecting a European" for the key slot. Rome was certainly not anticipating a relatively obscure Archbishop from the scandal-plagued U.S. church. By tapping Levada, a personal acquaintance with a reputation as a practical if unspectacular thinker, Benedict may or may not have been arranging to act as the de facto head of his old shop. But he certainly showed a willingness to go his own way.

DAY 41 DEFLATING AN IMAGE

In his first extra-Roman excursion, to the Adriatic port of Bari on May 29, Benedict seemed uncomfortable with the chants of "Be-ne-det-to!" by young Catholics eager to pick up the old "Gio-van-ni Paolo!" tradition. (In subsequent weeks, he even shushed them.) "John Paul built a rapport based on [such] enthusiasm," says a Rome-based Cardinal. "This Holy Father tends to diminish the importance of enthusiasm." While preaching, Karol Wojtyla would wave, gesticulate and repeatedly make the sign of the Cross. Benedict's pulpit style is austere by contrast, which more and more seems a philosophical choice rather than a personal reticence. During his Bari homily, which lauded observation of the Sabbath as an antidote to modern life's "unbridled consumerism" and "secularism closed to transcendence," Benedict allowed himself only a small circling gesture of his cupped hands. He displayed the Host with a simple up-and-down movement rather than the slow-motion drama that is a current Eucharistic vogue.

His former colleague calls this part of Benedict's attempt to "simplify the papacy" and "deflate" the Pope's image in favor of his ideas. He expresses those ideas simply so that the author's style does not obscure the primacy of Christ. Observes Cardinal Kaspar: "John Paul would make longer, maybe more poetic discourses. Benedict is more precise. He is a theologian." An explainer of symbols, not the symbol itself.

DAY 56 BATTLEFIELD EUROPE

Much has been made of how "gentle" the new Pope is. And his comportment and rhetoric have been relatively mild, especially in contrast to his 24 years as a heresy hunter. (While discussing AIDS prevention with African bishops, for instance, rather than restating John Paul's opposition to condoms, he simply called abstinence the only "fail-safe" way to prevent HIV.) But those who missed the "Panzer Kardinal" were rewarded in the weeks before an unusual political triumph on June 13. It was clear that Benedict regarded Europe as the epicenter of the secular relativism he scorned, but it was less so what he might do about it. When an Italian referendum threatened to end restrictions on in-vitro fertilization, the Pope joined the fray, telling Italian bishops fighting it, "I am close to you with my words and my prayers." When the initiative failed, Italian television called the church the winner. Three weeks later, Spain legalized gay marriage over Catholic objections and Benedict's (indirect) criticism. But the Italian vote galvanized prelates who had suffered decades of defeat on divorce and abortion and suggested that if Benedict picks his political fights wisely, he may be rewarded.

DAY 80 A PLAYER ON ISLAM?

The deadly July 7 bombings in London exposed the Pope's desire to be heard on the topic of Islam. Within hours of the carnage, the Italian newswire ANSA reported that he intended to call the attack "anti-Christian." It seemed a harsh and narrow attribution, and indeed his actual statement replaced the term with "barbaric." Yet Vatican Secretary of State Angelo Sodano subsequently muddied the waters by saying that "anti-Christian" had been intended to suggest that the attacks were inconsistent with Christian values rather than aimed at Christian targets. That in turn led to a careful clarification by Benedict that the bombings represented "not a clash of civilizations, but only a small group of fanatics." Asked whether Islam is a religion of peace, he mused, "I wouldn't want to label it with big general words. Certainly there are also elements that can favor peace and other elements. We must try to find the best elements to help." The response's nuance may not endear him to the Muslim group he intends to visit in Germany, but his notion of the Catholic Church "helping" moderate Islam was a telling excursion beyond typical interfaith vocabulary into the language of realpolitik. What sort of help Benedict might offer remains to be seen.

DAY 98 SPEAKING OUT AT LAST

July 27 may be remembered as the day the Pope finally opened up. Officially, reporters were barred from the 12th century cathedral in Introd, just down the hill from Les Combes, while he had a few words with local priests as his vacation ended. But a day later, he passed the proceedings to L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, and they were riveting. In a rat-a-tat-tat strafe of global Christianity, he asserted that traditional Protestantism is in "profound crisis," that evangelicalism owes its popularity to a "certainty" that he said derives from its willingness to settle for a "minimum of faith," and that although Catholicism "isn't in such bad shape," the West is "a world that is tired of its own culture ... that has arrived at a time in which there's no more evidence of the need for God, much less Christ, and in which it seems that man alone can make himself."

He acknowledged that a Pope is not an "oracle" and "is infallible only in rare situations--"a truism, but fresh, given what critics called the papal triumphalism of his predecessor. Benedict also challenged a phenomenon in which John Paul often reveled--the explosion of priestly vocations in the developing world, which the new Pope said sometimes owes less to faith than to seminarians' quest for material gain and "social promotion" in their villages. If the global south is the church's future, he apparently plans to vet it.

Most concretely, he dashed the hopes of those who begged him to let Catholics who have divorced and remarried without managing to get an annulment take Communion. Yet he did so with some delicacy, acknowledging their suffering and saying they should feel they still belong to the church.

Did his talk break new ground? Perhaps not doctrinally, but it demonstrated qualities that the Vatican has missed at least since the latter years of John Paul's illness: a questing, nuanced intelligence; a willingness to understand issues in their complexity even when he does not change his mind; a certain humility and a spirit of practical engagement that, rather than retreat behind rank or theological niceties, seem eager to take on the world of the church and the church in the world.

A few days earlier, when the Pope seemed to be playing his cards close to his chest, his spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls assured reporters who had made the pilgrimage to Les Combes not to worry. "We'll have a lot of work to do," he said. "There will be a lot to analyze." Indeed, well before the next 100 days are up.