Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, died on December 31st, aged 95

Pattering in the forceful, tumultuous wake of John Paul II, Benedict XVI had a hard act to follow. In 2005 there were few expectations. Or rather, there were expectations of the wrong kind: that the man who from 1981 had been prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (cdf) would rule the Roman Catholic church like an elderly headmaster, waspish and intolerant, with the fires of a new Inquisition gleaming in those pale blue eyes.

Where John Paul’s Polishness was refreshing, Joseph Ratzinger’s Germanness worried people. As a boy in deeply Catholic Bavaria he had been conscripted into the Hitlerjugend and briefly trained for the disintegrating Wehrmacht; after that his life had been the seminary, the professoriat, the faculty of theology at Regensburg, the College of Cardinals. He was surely so academic that he would not warm to the pastoral, crowd-pleasing side of the pontificate; he was surely so schooled in youth to heel-clicking obedience that any stirrings of liberalism in the church would be crushed beneath his elegant fist.

But just as his predecessor had possessed, behind the warm gregariousness, a carapace of cold steel, so “Rottweiler” Benedict in the holiest office showed a surprisingly soft, even timid, side. He was dotty about cats, caressing the strays of Rome and chatting to them in German. He adored playing Mozart on the piano, and on warm summer evenings at the papal retreat of Castel Gandolfo would serenade locals out of the open windows. His Bavarian roots survived in a liking for potato dumplings and sausage. Fashion-conscious almost to foppishness, he ordered gold-woven robes in the style last worn by Paul V, the Borghese pope, and liked to sport red Gucci slippers under his pure white robes.

The now-required papal globetrotting tired out this man, who had prayed to hide away in the Vatican Library before the white mantle fell on him; and his radical, solitary decision to retire in February 2013, the first by a pope for 600 years, proved how tough he found the job. But there was a certain simple sweetness in his manner which made young people like him, and put Queen Elizabeth, head of the Church of England, almost at ease with papistry when he stayed with her in 2010 at Holyroodhouse. He taught that the essence of Christianity was pure joy, the joy that God’s love is unfailing, like the song of the lark he heard singing from the altar at the moment he was ordained, in June 1951. His first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, was all about that love, the eros and agape of man for God and God for man; and he once remarked to journalists that maybe humans, like angels, could fly a bit, if they didn’t take themselves too seriously.

Apologies he found harder. The world seemed to expect them of him, though: an apology to the Jews for the Vatican’s apparent indifference to the Holocaust, and another to the thousands of victims of paedophile priests in Europe and North America. He said sorry in his own way, in institutional words. A general prayer for peace in the Middle East was pushed between the blocks of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. In Malta he wept for abused children the sincere tears of an old man who felt that the activities of errant priests had “left a stain” and “filth” on the church. But in his prime at the cdf, where he had energetically persuaded John Paul II to let him deal with such cases, he had written letters recommending that offenders should be moved to other parishes, and any internal investigations kept quiet.

His probing intelligence, which shone through in his encyclicals, sometimes got him into trouble. In a lecture at Regensburg in 2006, calling for dialogue between faith and reason, he remarked that Muhammad had brought into the world only “things evil and inhuman”; the press chose not to notice that this was a quotation from 14th-century Byzantium. Hunched in his study, he often seemed wilfully bereft of media advisers and in contact only with austere, pure, complex minds like his own.

Those minds were conservative. He had followed the reformers within the church for a time, and knew Hans Küng, the most famous liberal theologian, at Tübingen; but the tumult of the 1960s traumatised him. His post at the cdf required him to squash heresy and reassert doctrine, and he did so. A whirl of excitement erupted in 2010 when he let slip, in the course of a six-hour interview with Peter Seewald, a German journalist, that the use of condoms against aids might be “a step on the way to another, more humane sexuality”. It was a solitary blip in an unswerving message, that condoms made aids worse. This, after all, was the pope who two years earlier had issued a letter allowing a more general use of the old Tridentine rite (complete with anti-Semitism), in which priests turned their backs on the congregation and the faithful knew their place. Catholics had been wrong, he wrote, to assume that the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 had authorised creativity, in liturgy or in anything else.

Just up the hill

During the pontificate of his passionately reformist successor, Francis, he kept largely out of sight in the convent where he lived, just up the hill. He seemed to adjust happily to his unprecedented emeritus role, though he would rather have been plain “Father Benedict”; he liked Francis’s company and never openly contradicted him, telling rare interviewers that they were in perfect agreement on everything. The same was not true of the courtiers around him, a “Regensburg network” of conservatives and traditionalists, in close touch with right-wing American media, who saw him as the touchstone of their plotting and resistance. In Benedict, and in his past pronouncements, they saw a means to save the church from novelty and heresy.

He was by then far too old and frail for such a role, even if he had wanted it. He almost certainly did not. But there was no doubt that this was a man for whom relativism was the greatest evil in the modern world, and doctrinal rectitude the surest guard against it. And no one should have been surprised at that.