And the thumbscrews and rack have remained locked in the basement of the office Ratzinger once headed, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which (as the world media never cease to remind us) "was once known as the Inquisition".

Yet for all these impressive accomplishments, the fifth year of his pontificate is opening under storm clouds of crisis. The Pope's January effort to extend a hand of reconciliation to the ultra-traditionalist followers of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre ignited a worldwide uproar. One of the four Lefebvrist bishops whose excommunications were lifted, an ex-Anglican named Richard Williamson, turned out to be a Holocaust denier - a point of which the Pope and his senior advisers were evidently unaware, although bloggers and other internet literates from the Antipodes to Zimbabwe had the full, nasty story. The Lefebvrist fiasco and the chaos it caused in Catholic-Jewish relations were just settling down when Austria erupted. The issue in this case was the appointment of a new auxiliary bishop of Linz, who turned out to have interesting ideas about the relationship between divine providence and meteorology: Hurricane Katrina's ravaging of New Orleans, the nominee once claimed, was God's punishment for decades of debauchery in the Big Easy. The bishop-elect eventually asked the Pope to withdraw his nomination, and Benedict agreed. Some wondered whether a new round of Josephinism - the Enlightenment-era Austrian resistance to papal authority in the nomination of bishops - was at hand. As this Alpine ecclesiastical earthquake rumbled across Europe, the Roman Curia proved itself incapable of frankly and expeditiously handling another disaster - the revelations that Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the priestly order of the Legion of Christ and the lay movement Regnum Christi, had led a life of sexual dissolution and financial irregularity, even as the order and the lay movement provided some of the most vibrant young priests and lay activists in the Church. While that slow-motion train-wreck headed towards the abyss, the best of the Vaticanisti, Sandro Magister of the weekly L'espresso, reported that the Vatican Secretariat of State may have badly misread the character and qualifications of Joseph Li Shan, the new bishop of Beijing, who has, Magister argued, been far too cosy with the Chinese communist regime and the regime-supported Patriotic Catholic Association.

Benedict XVI did take advantage of a February meeting demanded by the pro-abortion Catholic Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, to deliver a firm reminder of one of those moral truths that can be known by reason - that innocent human life deserves the protection of the laws in any just society. Speaker Pelosi was also denied the photo-op she obviously craved, a sign that the Vatican had not completely lost its capacity to control its own agenda and the Pope's role in advancing that agenda. Yet, for Benedict's supporters, the Pelosi reprimand was a brief moment of sun through the darkening clouds. Had Ratzinger been right in April 2005? Was he really not a man of governo? And what did that portend for the future of his papacy which, despite his age, could stretch well into the next decade?