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Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, died on December 31st, aged 95   Source:Economist 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 ...