So whatever happened to Joseph Ratzinger, "God's Rottweiler"?

The truth is that the cartoon image of Joseph Ratzinger, the dour, cold enforcer of Catholic doctrine, continues to impede a serious wrestling with the ideas and proposals of the man who became Pope Benedict XVI. From the beginning of his ecclesiastical career, Ratzinger was a reformer. As a seminary student and in his graduate studies, Ratzinger resisted the petrified official theology of the mid 20th century and sought fresh theological approaches through the study of the Bible, the early Church Fathers and history. He was deeply marked, spiritually and intellectually, by the mid-­century liturgical movement, and in the beauty of Catholic worship found another fresh avenue to theological insight. Yes, he was offended, even appalled, by the radicalism of "1968" and its attempts to turn everything, including the truths of Christian faith, into political weaponry. But in that same explosive year Ratzinger offered a course at the University of Tübingen that turned into one of his best-­selling books, Introduction to Christianity, a sympathetic treatment of the modern crisis of religious faith and a thoroughly modern exposition of the core elements of Christian belief.

Indeed, Ratzinger's entire career can be understood as a sustained effort to make Christianity interesting again. How, he asks, did this astonishing proposal about God's passionate love for the world become boring? How can the Gospel become fresh and exciting again? Over half a century of what even his fiercest critics concede is theological work of the highest calibre, Ratzinger has tried to make it possible for his students and readers to experience the joy of faith afresh. The old/new atheism of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens may produce bestsellers; Benedict XVI knows that the real challenge to Catholicism today is not hard-edged atheism but indifference - the kind of indifference towards the mystery of life and being that the American philosopher Alan Bloom once dubbed "debonair nihilism".