by Luigi Sandri

A puff of white smoke and loud bell ringing from the Vatican's Sistine Chapel announced that German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was on April 19 (Tuesday) chosen to be Pope Benedict XVI to lead the 1-billion member Roman Catholic Church.

"Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope, John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me, a simple and humble worker in the Lord's vineyard," the new Pope said when he emerged on the Vatican balcony an hour after the white smoke started to billow from the recently installed chimney to announce his election.

His address was punctuated frequently by applause from the tens of thousands of people who had thronged St. Peter's Square to catch a glimpse of the man who would follow John Paul II who died on April 2.

Those assembled and television watchers throughout the world heard that the 115 red-hatted cardinals eligible had elected the new pope. He was the man Pope John Paul had selected in 1981, the then Archbishop of Munich, as his second-in-command and he would now be his successor as the 265th pope.

The German cardinal was born in Marktl am Inn, a village of 2700 people on the Austrian border east of Munich on April 16, 1927. He has been seen as a guardian of Vatican orthodoxy in his post as the Vatican's Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Ratzinger had before the conclave door shut on Monday urged his fellow cardinals from around the world to reject the "dictatorship of relativism" which "does not recognise anything as absolute and leaves as the ultimate measure only the measure of each one and his desires". He urged that people remain faithful to the teachings of Jesus.

Still, a representative of the International Movement We are Church, set up to campaign for reform in the Catholic Church, had before the cardinals began their conclave described as "reactionary" the legacy of John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger.

"What the church needs now is a genuine return to tradition, a pope who can recover legitimate approaches to church authority, which have been obscured by extreme interpretations of the definition of papal infallibility and primacy," said Paul Collins, an Australian church historian who resigned from the priesthood over the Vatican's investigation of his book, "Papal Power".

In Geneva, the Lutheran World Federation, representing 66 million Lutherans throughout the world said it hoped for "significantly new approaches" from Pope Benedict XVI to promote the unity of the church.

"As Lutherans we expect especially that ecumenical progress can be made on the basis of the substantial theological agreements that have been achieved," said LWF President Mark S. Hanson and General Secretary Ishmael Noko in a joint statement.

In 1999, the LWF and the Roman Catholic Church signed a "joint declaration on the doctrine of justification". The LWF was the Protestant denomination that had come the closest to clinching agreement on matters of doctrine with the Catholic Church.

In the declaration the two denominations expressed agreement in basic truths pertaining to a doctrine that was a central area of contention between the papacy and Martin Luther at the time of the Reformation.

Ratzinger was ordained as a priest in 1951, in a joint ceremony with his brother Georg. He became a theology professor in Freising, near Munich, when he was only 31.

(C) 2005 Ecumenical News International (ENI)