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The reign of Pope Benedict XVI was little more than two weeks old when Father Thomas J. Reese announced that on June 1, 2005, he would step down as editor of America, a New York-based Catholic weekly. The priest's resignation ends a five-year struggle with the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the former Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition (more concisely just "the Inquisition"), over the Jesuit magazine's coverage of matters ranging from religious pluralism to gay rights.

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Acting as the mailed fist of Catholic orthodoxy, the CDF is the oldest and most powerful branch of the Roman Curia, the Church's administrative bureaucracy. An order telling Rev. Reese, a respected political scientist and broadcast commentator, to resign or submit each issue of his publication to a board of censors had been handed down by the CDF in March. The prefect of the doctrinal enforcement body at that time was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who on April 19 would take the name Benedict XVI upon succeeding the late John Paul II as pope. Ratzinger's papal name honors Benedict of Narsia, patron saint of Europe, and Pope Benedict XV, who in 1917 expanded papal power through his publication of the Code of Canon Law.

Reese's dismissal was designed to halt discussion of urgent issues confronting American Catholics. During the editor's seven-year tenure, America had examined the Church's relations with Islam and other faiths; published articles on both sides of the issue of withholding Communion from politicians who support abortion rights; considered the Church's exclusion of women from the priesthood; and spotlighted same-sex marriage, gay priests, and the status of gay men and lesbians within the Church.

At a glance, America's editorial openness under Reese seems consistent with Pope Benedict's first public statement to the faithful on April 20, 2005. "I address everyone with simplicity and affection," said the new pontiff, "to assure them that the Church wants to continue to build an open and sincere dialogue with them, in a search for the true good of mankind and of society."

But "open and sincere dialogue" suggests an improbably drastic change of pace for a man who has built a career on obstructing inquiry and stifling debate. Many observers versed in Vatican politics expect Benedict XVI to shut down dialogue, crush dissent, and define the "the true good of mankind and of society" as Catholic supremacy. Dedicated to preserving the Christian character of increasingly secular Europe with its burgeoning population of Muslims and non-believers, Benedict is expected to reaffirm the idea that those who do not embrace the Church at least informally, through a "baptism of desire," will be shut out of Heaven.

The new pope can be counted upon to demand strict adherence to Catholic doctrine on sex and reproduction, and to harden his intolerance of homosexuality. In 1986, when the Vatican issued an 18-point "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," a draconian document superseding an earlier, more flexible pronouncement on gay issues, the letter bore Ratzinger's signature.

Cardinal Ratzinger was hand-picked by John Paul II to head the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith when the relatively moderate prefect Franjo Cardinal Seper retired in 1981. As chief doctrinal overseer and advisor, the 78-year-old German cleric held formidable power by the time of John Paul's death. Nevertheless, it was widely assumed that Ratzinger was too old to be pope, and had alienated too many members of the papal electoral body, the College of Cardinals.

Not the first black pope

His election as the 265th pope of the billion-member Roman Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination in the world, was obtained through shrewd machinations and ardent lobbying. Pope John Paul II, whose saintly avuncular image masked a fiercely reactionary temperament, might have approved. But Ratzinger's victory disappointed many. It punctured the hopes of Italians who thought that the passing of John Paul, a Pole, might return the papacy to one of their countrymen. It frustrated those who, convinced that the Third World holds the key to the Church's future, hoped for an African, Asian, or Latin American pope. It demoralized Catholics seeking saner Church policies on reproductive rights. For women and sexual minorities within the Church, it was a bitter setback.

Born in 1927, Joseph Ratzinger grew up in the authoritarian Catholic culture of rural Bavaria. When Hitler came to power, the future pope and his family seem not to have been Nazi sympathizers; Ratzinger's policeman father was reportedly anti-Nazi. Nevertheless, young Ratzinger joined Hitler Youth, as required, when he turned 14. Drafted into the German army two years later, he served in an anti-aircraft artillery unit. In April 1945, he joined the mass desertions that occurred as the Third Reich went down in flames. Later that year, he enrolled in a seminary. In 1951, he entered the priesthood.

Pursuing theological studies at the University of Munich, Ratzinger was drawn to the Church Fathers, the earliest formulators of Catholic dogma. His chief influence was St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (in present-day Algeria). Father Ratzinger's doctoral dissertation, completed in 1953, was entitled, "The People and the House of God in Augustinian Doctrine of the Church."

A gay life spurned

St. Augustine (354-430 CE) shaped and defined the Church's attitude toward sex. In his teens and 20s, Augustine kept mistresses, had bouts of recreational promiscuity, pursued at least one passionate relationship with another man, and indulged in such secular pastimes as attending bawdy plays. Upon his conversion to Christianity (circa 373), his attitude toward sex was, as he famously stated it later in his Confessions, "Lord, give me chastity, but not now."

When Augustine did at last resign himself to chastity, his new-found, militant purity sought to make up for lost time. He invented the concept of original sin, explaining that primal, lapsarian stain in sexual terms. He had no doubt that the fruit illicitly obtained from Eden's Tree of Knowledge was awareness of sex.

Augustine taught that sex was permissible only when it served procreation. He viewed even procreative sex as tainted by original sin, which flowed from one generation to the next through the contaminant called semen. He considered erections symbolic of the Fall of Man, surmising that before the Fall, Adam could control his penis "the way one commands his feet when he walks." An involuntary predisposition toward "diabolical excitement of the genitals" (or "disobedience in the member") was, he thought, the curse brought down on all men by the sin of Adam, just as pain in childbirth was the penalty exacted from all women by the sin of Eve.

In Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven (1988), Uta Ranke-Heineman describes Augustine as "the man who fused Christianity together with hatred of sex and pleasure into a systematic unity." More than any other Christian thinker of the fourth and fifth centuries-- an epoch of religious visionaries-- St. Augustine left an imprint, not simply on the Catholic Church and clerics such as Joseph Ratzinger, but on Western culture.

In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas structured the Church Fathers' repressive moral theology around Aristotle's teachings on natural law. As Augustine's chief intellectual heir, Aquinas ensured the Church's continued hostility toward non-procreative sex. He deemed any deviation from missionary-position heterosexual intercourse a serious transgression. (Vaginal intercourse in any other position was thought to impede conception.)

Room for improvement

In 1962, seven centuries after Aquinas, Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, a vast ecumenical session concerned with modernizing liturgy and doctrine. Among the humanitarian pope's objectives was to temper old-guard Augustinian severity with "the medicine of mercy." Cultivating reconciliation and renewal, "Vatican II" imparted a more upbeat message than Pius IX's First Vatican Council (1869-'70), mainly remembered for its affirmation of papal infallibility.

At Vatican II, the birth-control question loomed large. When John XXIII set up a commission of scientists and theologians to examine the Church's position on contraception, many thought it was just a matter of time before the Vatican eased its interdictions on abortion, contraception, divorce, priestly celibacy, and female ordination.

At the start of the 1962-'65 ecumenical council, Church policy on birth control was only 32 years old. Pope Pius XI had proscribed contraception in 1930; until then, the hierarchy was divided on the issue. Before the Church's ban on abortion became absolute in 1869, a fetus could be terminated in the first trimester. (Male fetuses supposedly became "ensouled" 40 days after conception and females at the 80-day mark; since the sex of a fetus could not be determined, an 80-day limit was set on abortion.) By the 1960s, Catholics wishing to limit the size of their families were allowed one loophole, the "rhythm method" (also known as "Vatican roulette") approved by Pope Pius XII in 1951.

Vatican II produced two conflicting visions of ritual and moral governance. Aggiornimento-- "bringing up to date"-- was aimed at lifting Catholicism into the modern world; a parallel movement, ressourcement, encouraged a "return to sources" such as Scripture and the teachings of Augustine. Rev. Joseph Ratzinger, who attended Vatican II as advisor to Joseph Cardinal Frings of Cologne, was a strong proponent of ressourcement.

Aggiornimento, seen as the agenda of John XXIII, briefly had the upper hand. But Pope John died in 1963 while Vatican II was still in progress. His tight-lipped successor, Pope Paul VI, soon chilled the spirit of reform. Rumored to be gay-- and outed by, among others, French writer Roger Peyrefitte-- Pope Paul perhaps had personal reasons to cultivate moral rigidity. It was, at any rate, in keeping with Paul's conservative vision to elevate Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II, to cardinal in 1967, and, ten years later, to promote Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger to cardinal as well.

When Vatican II's commission on contraception voted 64-4 to end the Church's ban on birth control, Pope Paul cast their findings aside. Many Catholics repaid him by continuing to practice contraception despite Humanae Vitae (1968), his subsequent reaffirmation of traditional morality. The encyclical was based on an awareness that sexual control was essential to the Vatican's worldwide hold on its flock. It dashed the hopes of everyone waiting for the Church to relax its positions on human sexuality.

Grassroots pressure

Some took action. The American theologian Rev. Charles Curran organized a protest against Humanae Vitae shortly after its release. In 1969, Rev. Patrick Nidorf, an Augustinian priest, began the Catholic gay support group Dignity in San Diego. By 1973-- the year a group of women founded Catholics for a Free Choice-- Dignity grew into a national nonprofit entity working toward affirmation of GLBT persons "through the integration of their spirituality with their sexuality, and... [participation] in all aspects of life within the Church and society."

Acknowledging gay Catholics' growing visibility, especially in the US, the pre-Ratzinger Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a "Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics" in 1975. The declaration emphasized that while homosexual acts were "intrinsically disordered" and forbidden, there was a distinction to be drawn between homosexual acts and homosexual persons. Simple sexual orientation, not acted upon, could be morally neutral. Homosexually oriented individuals merited understanding and compassionate treatment.

But Cardinal Ratzinger proved less willing to love the sinner and hate the sin. His 1986 revision of Church policy toward gay men and lesbians claimed that "an overly benign interpretation was given to the homosexual condition" in the 1975 document. "Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin," stressed Ratzinger's letter to Catholic bishops, "it is a more or less strong tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder."

Denouncing homosexual activity as "contrary to the creative wisdom of God," Ratzinger advised the bishops to address homosexual desire through "appropriate catechetical programmes" created to quash it. (One such program is the Catholic ex-gay organization Courage.) In the aftermath of the Ratzinger-CDF letter, many gay Catholics sought solace in other religions. Matt Foreman, Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said in a recent interview that Ratzinger's pronouncement inspired him to leave the Church entirely.

In the 1980s, the CDF moved ruthlessly against gay Catholics. Oblivious to the stresses of being Catholic and gay, Ratzinger attributed American Catholics' perceived moral failings to cultural hedonism and "feminist thought." Dignity was expelled from Church property. Seattle's Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen was divested of authority to speak on moral issues for, among other infractions, allowing Dignity members to use church facilities. Father Curran, who had denounced Humanae Vitae 18 years before, was removed from his teaching post at Catholic University in Washington, DC. His sins included voicing the notion that homosexuality could be morally valid in "a loving relationship striving for permanency."

Taking out the paddle

Disciplining American Catholics through the '80s and '90s, Ratzinger ranged beyond gay issues. Aware that Father Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Congressman, had voted for abortion rights, the CDF forbade priests and nuns to hold electoral office. In 1984, Catholics for a Free Choice bought ad space in the New York Times to call for dialogue on abortion; Ratzinger demanded public retractions by all 28 signatories to the statement (24 nuns refused). In 1985, Father Terrance Sweeney, a Jesuit, conducted a study on such topics as celibacy, finding that a quarter of all priests believed they should be able to marry. Ratzinger ordered the study destroyed. The Vatican also sought to force Catholic educators worldwide to adhere unquestioningly to traditional Church doctrine.

"Ratzinger has drawn lines in the sand and wielded the tools of his office on many who cross those lines," wrote Joseph Allen, Jr. in a 1999 National Catholic Reporter essay. "Whether necessary prophylaxis or a naked power play, his efforts to curb dissent have left the Church more bruised, more divided, than at any point since the close of Vatican II."

With Ratzinger at his side, Pope John Paul II clung to the dictates of Humanae Vitae in the face of overpopulation, famine, abject poverty, and AIDS. Packing the College of Cardinals with conservatives, John Paul reduced diocesan autonomy and centralized Catholic power in Vatican City. Ratzinger, meanwhile, broadened John Paul's power by stretching the limits of infallibility.

The 2002 canonization of Spaniard Josemaria Escriv, founder of the right-wing Catholic movement Opus Dei, fulfilled a joint goal of Pope John Paul and his Grand Inquisitor. Ratzinger had longtime ties to Escriv's 75-year-old organization, which helped sustain fascist rule in Franco's Spain and eventually Pinochet's Chile. Devoted to Cold War anti-communist activism, Opus Dei incited the Church's sometimes literal demonization of the left.

Cardinal Ratzinger is believed to have been the driving force behind Pope John Paul's opposition to left-wing "liberation theology." John Paul acknowledged the evils of capitalism during his 1998 visit to communist Cuba, but such sentiments come less easily to Benedict XVI, whose lack of sympathy toward Marx-tinged populist movements knows no bounds.

"The Church hierarchs are afraid of people," says Father John Sheehan (not his real name), a US-born priest who works in Latin America. He notes that there is no way to improve the lot of the poor without changes that put the Church in closer touch with the humanity it seeks to shepherd. "The Vatican is always going to be worried about liberation theology because it challenges the status quo," he adds, "and the Church is very much wedded to the status quo."

For Benedict XVI, of course, being wedded precludes divorce.

One recently troublesome aspect of the status quo has been Pope John Paul's-- and now Pope Benedict's-- handling of the sex-abuse scandal in the American Church. Ratzinger rightly observed that sex-crime allegations against priests were blown out of proportion by the media, but went too far in attributing media overkill to a premeditated anti-Catholic campaign. His worst tactical response was to shroud CDF sex-abuse investigations in secrecy, allowing accusers to spin conspiracy theories of their own.

Both Ratzinger and Pope John Paul dismissively blamed the crisis on gay clergy, throwing priests perceived as gay, such as dubiously accused Paul Shanley, to the wolves. The Vatican is now planning an "apostolic visitation" to seminaries around the world. The process could spark an anti-gay witch hunt, though forthcoming orders banning gay seminarians may be ignored.

"American bishops know," says one gay priest, "that if gay men are excluded from the priesthood, there won't be any priests. But it's already worse than the Army [in the era of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.']"

The Catholic left endures despite bullying and threatened excommunication. Forbidden in 1999 to continue ministering to gay people, Rev. Robert Nugent and Sister Jeannine Gramick, along with members of Dignity, continue to speak out on gay issues. Catholics for a Free Choice, which promotes the utterly orthodox doctrine of obedience to one's conscience, has recently set up a website, www.pope-watch.org, aimed at keeping tabs on Benedict XVI. Dissident organizations such as the UK's Catholics for a Changing Church exist throughout Europe. In Central and South America, liberation theology is, according to Father Sheehan, "very much alive, at least on the intellectual and devotional level."

Leery of public squabbles, Pope Benedict has begun his pontificate on a cosmetically conciliatory note. On June 9, for example, he pledged to "pursue the path" of improved relations with Jews. The statement seems an expedient gesture coming from the German head of a Church that during World War II ignored the systematic extermination of Europe's Jews by armed forces in which he then served.

Having reminded the world that his namesake, Pope Benedict XV, worked for peace during World War I, this Benedict will follow John Paul's lead in opposing the US-perpetrated war in Iraq. But he has yet to unsettle the right-wing American Presidential administration in any significant way. Few Democrats, on the other hand, have forgotten Ratzinger's unprecedented effort to affect the 2004 US Presidential election by telling priests to deny communion to any politician, such as John Kerry, who declared himself pro-choice.

Because the former CDF prefect now stresses "dialogue," some Catholics imagine a thaw in his attitudes toward gay and female members of the Church. In an open letter to the new pope, the pseudonymous gay priest Gerard Thomas reminded Benedict that even his anti-gay letter of 1986 recommended compassion, and that "the earthly ministry of Jesus of Nazareth was one of inclusion, not exclusion."

But for as long as Pope Benedict XVI occupies the Chair of Peter, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church will almost certainly grow less inclusive, less universal, and less catholic.

Old Testament passages most frequently cited to justify condemning homosexuality are-- given its standard homophobic spin-- the story of Sodom in the Book of Genesis, and the man-on-man prohibition of Leviticus 20:13. The closest Christ ever came to a pronouncement on sexual morality was his intervention on behalf of a woman about to be stoned for adultery. ("`He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her'"-- John 8:7.) Nowhere in the Gospels does Christ acknowledge the existence of homosexuality. In the New Testament, only the misogynistic homophobe St. Paul supplies a few notes of stern disapproval.

But the Catholic Church bases its prohibition of non-procreative sex on theological rationales, not Scriptural passages. "In church, Catholics hardly read the Bible," observes one Jesuit. "A lot of the Church hierarchs themselves don't even know what's in the Bible."

Pope Benedict XVI's attitude toward homosexuality is steeped in the teachings of the Church Fathers, especially his hero, St. Augustine, who was endlessly concerned about "the lustful excitement of the organs of generation." Troubled by the impudent spontaneity of one erect penis, Augustine panicked at the thought of two or more penises befriending one another. "Sins against nature," he wrote, "...like the sin of Sodom, are abominable and deserve punishment whenever and wherever they are committed... for our Maker did not prescribe that we should use each other in this way."

Augustine did not invent Roman Catholic antipathy toward homosexuality. Christianity absorbed a homophobic bias through its Jewish roots. The first Church ruling on homosexual acts appears to have been the fourth-century Council of Elvira's decree barring stupratores puerorum-- corrupters of boys-- from communion. In the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea introduced elaborate penalties for any monk caught having gay sex. "Let him be whipped in public," wrote Basil, "and shorn of his tonsure, and let his face be covered with spittle... [let him be] bound in iron chains, condemned to six months in prison, reduced to eating rye bread once a day...."

Discovering demons

The medieval Church was inconsistent in its condemnations, however-- until, as John Boswell notes in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980), "a more violent hostility" toward gay sexuality, along with a rise in intolerance toward minorities all over Europe, materialized during the 12th century.

In 1120, gay sex became a capital crime in Christian Jerusalem. The Third Lateran Council of the Church (1179) addressed homosexuality with penances less severe but still potent. 13th century scholar Thomas Aquinas wrote that homosexual acts deprived sex of its one legitimate, natural object, reproduction. Aquinas considered gay sex worse than adultery, sex with one's mother, or rape. 14th century mystic Catherine of Siena went further, saying homosexual acts made even demons shrink away in horror.

Throughout Church history, however, an unstoppable gay impulse has been entwined with homophobic vilification. St. John Chrysostom may have railed against same-sex lust in his role as Archbishop of Constantinople, but his vision of the Eucharist shimmers with homoerotic fire. "Wherefore this also Christ hath done," Chrysostom wrote, "to lead us to a closer friendship and to show his love for us; he hath given to those who desire him not only to see him, but even to touch and eat him, and fix their teeth in his flesh, and to embrace him, and satisfy all their love."

Traditions of moral austerity notwithstanding, the Catholic Church has always been a sensual religion enamored of pomp, theatricality, "smells and bells." The real or imagined sexual adventures of officially celibate Catholic clergy, from Renaissance womanizers to contemporary boy-lovers, have long fueled anti-Catholic prurient interest. Many Christian sects once viewed the Church-- with fascination-- as the apocalyptic Whore of Babylon, the work of the Devil.

American Protestants and Catholics found common ground, however, in the anti-communist fervor of the 1940s and '50s. US Catholics were eagerly predisposed to spearhead purity crusades and root out subversives. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R.-Wisconsin), Witchfinder General of the United States after World War II, was an Irish Catholic who conflated communists with queers and both with the minions of hell.

During and after the McCarthy era, Catholics dominated sections of political turf now held by evangelicals. Some right-wing Catholic power brokers, such as New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman, were gay. Terry Dolan, founding chairman of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), was, until his death from AIDS-related illness in 1986, the closeted, gay Catholic leader of a horde of born-again Christians.

Prominent figures of the American Right include Catholics involved in reactionary movements usually identified as secular or evangelical: the Equal Rights Amendment's arch-foe Phyllis Schlafly; former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan; direct-mail fundraising wizard Richard Viguerie; and hard-right strategist Paul Weyrich. The Free Congress Foundation, a Weyrich creation, published The Homosexual Network (1982), an influential anti-gay screed by Enrique Rueda, a Cuban Catholic priest.

Right-wing Catholics' fervor and commitment have inspired their born-again colleagues. Randall Terry, Protestant founder of the "pro-life" army Operation Rescue, based his strategies on Catholic activism. Most anti-abortion groups have heavy Catholic representation. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition accommodates Catholics, and in 1995 produced a spinoff, the Catholic Alliance.

Catholics-- the new Protestants?

America's 65.2 million Catholics, a potential voting bloc four times the size of the Southern Baptist Convention, have been voting Republican in growing numbers. The age of Bush has given rise to a new breed of right-wing Catholic politician, best exemplified by Senator Rick Santorum (R.-Pennsylvania), a 47-year-old father of six who once compared legalizing gay sex to legalizing "man on dog."

Santorum's Catholicism was no impediment to his being listed recently by Time magazine as one of "America's 25 Most Influential Evangelicals." He is an outspoken critic of Catholic President John F. Kennedy's insistence upon separation of church and state. An admirer of Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriv, Santorum eagerly welcomed Cardinal Ratzinger's pontificate, describing Benedict XVI as "a holy and humble man who is a great thinker, leader, and faithful servant of the Catholic Church."