Pope Benedict XVI has taken positions similar to his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, and has been a staunch defender of Catholic Doctrine. He has made it clear that he intends to maintain traditions, and not give in to modern pressures to change policy on such issues as birth control, abortion, and same-sex marriage. Benedict XVI maintains the Church's opposition to moral relativism.
- The church must renounce worldly principles and standards in order to accept the truth, and the way it must go will always lead to some form of martyrdom. It is important for us to realize that we cannot bring about unity by diplomatic maneuvers. The result would be a diplomatic structure based on human principles. Instead, we must open ourselves more and more to God. The unity that he brings about is the only true unity. Anything else is a political construction, and it will be as transitory as all such constructions are. This is the more difficult way, for in political maneuvering, people themselves are active and believe they can achieve something. But we must wait on God, and we must go to meet him by cleansing our hearts. From Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now known as Benedict XVI, during a 1995 interview in Rome.
Benedict's theology places much emphasis on the role of the institutions of the Catholic Church as the instrument by which God's message manifests itself on Earth. As such, he does not view the search for moral truth as a dialectic and incremental process, and this view of the role of the Church is one that tends to resist external social trends rather than submitting to them.
In a pre-conclave Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, he warned, "We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires."
Benedict is a theologian in a modern orthodox vein. His theology aims at a synthesis of Thomism, philosophical personalism (with such proponents as Martin Buber, John Paul II--tempered by phenomenology, and more recently Leon Kass), and the 'nouvelle théologie' of Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthazar. This is a sharp contrast with the school of thought, until recently ascendent in much of American and European academic theology, represented by Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, and Edward Schillebeeckx.
Before becoming Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger was a well-known and quite controversial figure in the Catholic Church, for a number of outspoken pronouncements.
Regarding the scandal of sexual abuse by priests in the United States, he was seen by critics as indifferent to the abuse. In 2002 he told Catholic News Service that "less than 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type." Opponents saw this as ignoring the crimes committed by those who did abuse; others saw it as merely pointing out that this should not taint other priests who live respectable lives. His Good Friday reflections in 2005 were interpreted as strongly condemning and regretting the abuse scandals, which largely put to rest the speculation of indifference.
Other controversial statements included a 1987 statement that Jewish history and scripture reach fulfillment only in Christ – a position critics denounced as "theological anti-Semitism." Other religious groups took offense to a 2000 document in which he argued that, "Only in the Catholic church is there eternal salvation." However, groups such as the World Jewish Congress commended his election as Pope as "welcome" and extolled his "great sensitivity".
Gay rights advocates widely criticized his 1986 letter to the Bishops of the church, On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, in which he stated that homosexuality is a “strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.” In an earlier letter dated September 30, 1985, Ratzinger reprimanded Seattle Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen for his liberal views on women, gays, and doctrinal issues, stating, "The Archdiocese should withdraw all support from any group, which does not unequivocally accept the teaching of the Magisterium concerning the intrinsic evil of homosexual activity." Archbishop Hunthausen was temporarily relieved of his authority.
In the United States, during the 2004 presidential campaign, then Cardinal Ratzinger expressed the view that voters would be "cooperating in evil" if they backed a political candidate supporting legalized abortion or euthanasia precisely because they supported these policies..
