German pope cuts little ice with most of the Germans (Feature)

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin Apr 14, 2010, 6:01 GMT

Berlin - He's a German theology professor, but Pope Benedict XVI has never had much of a following in his homeland, where Catholics are in a minority and a sex-abuse scandal has plunged his church into crisis.

Benedict's election as pope five years ago caught most Germans by surprise. One German popular newspaper, Bild, played on the 'We are the champions' theme to trumpet: 'We are the pope.' But there was no jubilation on the streets.

Unlike Poles, who viewed their pope, John Paul II, as both a religious revivalist and national liberator, Germans did not expect any practical benefits from having a fellow countryman as pope.

Nor is there any broad yearning for a rebirth of faith.

The church only has about 26 million adherents out of a population of 80 million, and only 15 per cent of the German Catholics are at mass on any Sunday, according to Bishops' Conference statistics. Catholicism only dominates a few enclaves.

The former Joseph Ratzinger has paid two papal visits to Germany, each time speaking in staunchly Catholic venues. At a Catholic youth rally in 2006, followers chanted 'Be-ne-de-tto' wherever he went. In 2006, pious rural Bavarians blessed themselves wherever he passed.

A public survey in March by Forsa, a polling company, found only 31 per cent of Germans rated Benedict's performance in the papacy as 'good' or 'very good.' Three years earlier, 70 per cent of Germans had given him good ratings.

Many German Lutherans were hostile to Benedict from the start and German agnostics regarded him as an irrelevance.

Even liberal Catholics in Germany, who demand the priesthood for women and reform at the Vatican, view him as a failure.

Ulrich Ruh, editor of the theology journal Herder Korrespondenz, said in an interview that history would never see Benedict's papacy as more than an interim, 'meaning a time without any major reforms, where something finished beats its last.'

Ruh said, 'Many expectations about him were unrealistic from the start,' adding that the papacy in its present form was out of date.

'It's an impossible task,' he said, saying the current form of papacy arose after the Bishop of Rome lost his territories and the the First Vatican Council in 1869-70 hailed a pope as infallible in pronouncements on doctrine.

'The office of pope is treated by the church almost as if it were a holy sacrament. It has to be disarmed,' said Ruh, who argued that neither Pope John Paul II nor Benedict were up to the challenge.

John Paul had tried to reshape it with public appearances and travel and Benedict had written theology books, which was not a pope's real job, Ruh said.

The scandal over clerical sex abuse, which brought disgrace on the church in the United States in the 1990s and in Ireland from 2001 onwards after an internal inquiry began, only burst on the German church in February this year.

Hundreds of people have come forward to describe undergoing vicious corporal punishment, groping by priests and in some cases rape while they were children between the 1950s and 1990s.

A few blame the church for the abuse itself. Many criticize the church for re-assigning guilty priests instead of suspending them and for failing to report the floggers and the gropers to the police.

German newspaper editorials have demanded that the pope apologize, although German Catholics have tended to side with Benedict on this issue at least, with many pointing out that it was Cardinal Ratzinger who began purging the church of paedophile priests in 2001.

Ratzinger was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which drafted new rules and cracked down hard.

Even Christian Weisner, a gadfly German Catholic layman who has little good to say about Rome, said the tragedy was that Ratzinger's zero-tolerance policy was obstructed by other church officials.