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Article: The Vatican's Enforcer.(Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger)
- Article from:
- National Catholic Reporter
- Article date:
- April 16, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 National Catholic Reporter. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Batzinger's 18 years of chasing dissent leave behind a bruised, divided church
Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger was born in rural Bavaria on April 16, exactly 72 years ago. Perhaps it is fate that the day was Holy Saturday and his parents were Joseph and Mary -- eerie foreshadowing for a child who would grow up to become a stark sign of contradiction in the world's largest Christian church.
Like so much else about Ratzinger, how far to press that biblical parallel is contested. Some say his 18 years as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church's guardian of orthodoxy, have been the intellectual salvation of Roman Catholicism ...