Despite his pre-Papal reputation as an enforcer for rigid orthodoxy, at the time he was made Pope, I remember Paul Collins saying that he was a more conciliatory figure between the liberals and conservatives in the Church than people realised.
The article above from Slate really confirms this: pointing out that nearly all of Ratzinger's time in the Church during and since Vatican II has been concerned with this unresolved issue of how the Church responds to "modernity", and has been about trying to find a middle way.
It is well worth reading.
I found Pope Benedict a much more likeable Pope than I expected. Sure, he's stuck on views on reproduction, contraception and sexuality which have rapidly changed in the laity he leads, but there were signs even there that he saw nuance, with his recent comment regarding condom use. He specifically supported international action on environmental issues including, of course, the key one of greenhouse gases. I think he made statements consistent with the Church's general concern about unfettered free markets hurting people. (Which probably fell on deaf ears with the American Catholic Republican dills who think Ayn Rand had something useful to tell them.) He even made a sort of semi approving statement regarding Teilhard de Chardin, who I think will prove to be an important figure in a re-framing of Catholic thought and theology as response to evolution. (At its heart, I think the Catholic issue with "modernity" does come down to the unresolved issue of how the revolution in the scientific understanding of the universe and biology affects the doctrine of Original Sin, with knock on effects for the New Testament and subsequent Church understanding of the role of Jesus.)
So there was quite a lot to like, really.
The task of the new Pope will be extraordinarily hard. The truth is, if you do allow all liberal and progressive elements to have their way under the umbrella of the Church, they can end up talking themselves into nonsense positions, such as saying it doesn't even matter whether Jesus really existed. (See my old posts on what happened with St Mary's Church at South Brisbane.) Weaving a way between giving conscience and woolly spirituality full sway on the one hand, while having a belief community that shares common values and understandings of why they join together on the other, is not an easy job....
Update: further support for the "Pope Benedict was more liberal than you thought" position is to be found in this article at Salon. I'll quote their section on economics in particular:
In countless speeches and letters, Benedict expressed an economic ethic that Fox News would label socialistic. In just that one address to the diplomatic corps, for instance, Benedict stressed the importance of universal education; the need for “new rules” stressing ethics over balance sheets to govern the global financial system; and the importance of fighting climate change in tandem with global poverty.
Sure, he phrased these views in terms of general principles rather than specific policy demands, and they happen to be very much in keeping with the long history of Catholic social teaching. But they were, all the same, not exactly a consensus view for an international Catholic audience that includes millions of people living in countries that do not educate girls. And they are certainly not a consensus view in places, like the U.S., where religious traditionalism has made common cause with laissez-faire economics to a much greater degree than it has in Benedict’s Germany.
John Paul II won the love of American conservatives through his Cold War alliance with Ronald Reagan; Benedict, coming to the papacy during the Bush years, played a rather different tune on issues dear to the right, from preventive war to unrestrained markets. “In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine,” he wrote just before his papacy, “and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”
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