My Life and Times

Bob Herbert

April 25, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Agony of War
By BOB HERBERT

Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good." ? Simone Weil

"There's no doubt in my mind that the good Lord has his hands full right now." ? The Rev. Ted Oswald at the funeral Mass for Marla Ruzicka

In a horrifying incident that occurred in the spring of 2003, an Iraqi woman threw two of her children, an infant and a toddler, out the window of a car that had been hit accidentally in an American rocket attack. The woman and the rest of her family perished in the black smoke and flames of the wreckage. The toddler, whose name was Zahraa, was severely burned. She died two weeks later.

The infant, named Harah, was not badly hurt. She was photographed recently on the lap of Marla Ruzicka, a young humanitarian-aid worker from California who was herself killed a little over a week ago in the flaming wreckage of a car that was destroyed in a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad.

The vast amount of suffering and death endured by civilians as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has, for the most part, been carefully kept out of the consciousness of the average American. I can't think of anything the Bush administration would like to talk about less. You can't put a positive spin on dead children.

As for the press, it has better things to cover than the suffering of civilians in war. The aversion to this topic is at the opposite extreme from the ecstatic journalistic embrace of the death of one pope and the election of another, and the media's manic obsession with the comings and goings of Martha, Jacko, et al.

There's been hardly any media interest in the unrelieved agony of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq. It's an ugly subject, and the idea has taken hold that Americans need to be protected from stories or images of the war that might be disturbing. As a nation we can wage war, but we don't want the public to be too upset by it.

So the public doesn't even hear about the American bombs that fall mistakenly on the homes of innocent civilians, wiping out entire families. We hear very little about the frequent instances of jittery soldiers opening fire indiscriminately, killing and wounding men, women and children who were never a threat in the first place. We don't hear much about the many children who, for one reason or another, are shot, burned or blown to eternity by our forces in the name of peace and freedom.

Out of sight, out of mind.

This stunning lack of interest in the toll the war has taken on civilians is one of the reasons Ms. Ruzicka, who was just 28 when she died, felt compelled to try to personally document as much of the suffering as she could. At times she would go from door to door in the most dangerous areas, taking down information about civilians who had been killed or wounded. She believed fiercely that Americans needed to know about the terrible pain the war was inflicting, and that we had an obligation to do everything possible to mitigate it.

Her ultimate goal, which Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont is pursuing, was to establish a U.S. government office, perhaps in the State Department, to document the civilian casualties of American military operations. That information would then be publicly reported. Compensation would be provided for victims and their families, and the data would be studied in an effort to minimize civilian casualties in future operations.

War is always about sorrow and the deepest suffering. Nitwits try to dress it up in the finery of half-baked rationalizations, but the reality is always wanton bloodshed, rotting flesh and the lifelong trauma of those who are physically or psychically maimed.

More than 600 people attended Ms. Ruzicka's funeral on Saturday in her hometown of Lakeport, Calif. Among them was Bobby Muller, chairman of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. A former Marine lieutenant, he knows something about the agony of war. His spinal cord was severed when he was shot in the back in Vietnam.

He told the mourners: "Marla demonstrated that an individual can make a profound difference in this world. Her life was dedicated to innocent victims of conflict, exactly what she ended up being."

E-mail:bobherb@nytimes.com

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Pool photo by Eric Neitzel

Debbie Rowe, right, leaves court in Santa Maria, Calif., on Wednesday. She was married to Michael Jackson for three years.

Jackson's Ex-Wife Says She Praised Him as Part of Deal
By JOHN M. BRODER

SANTA MARIA, Calif., April 27 - Michael Jackson's ex-wife, the mother of two of his three children, testified at his molesting trial on Wednesday that she had made a videotape praising Mr. Jackson to help repair his image after the broadcast of a documentary in which he admitted sharing his bed with young boys.

Debbie Rowe, who was married to Mr. Jackson for three years before they divorced in 1999, said she sat for a nine-hour videotaped interview in February 2003 after being told that by doing so she would be allowed to see Mr. Jackson and their two children, Prince Michael, now 8, and Paris, now 7. Ms. Rowe, a prosecution witness, said that she had not seen any of them in several years and that the promised reunion never occurred.

Ms. Rowe said Mr. Jackson had asked her in a telephone conversation to make the videotape because the documentary was "full of lies" about his relations with children. She said the phone call had been arranged by several associates of Mr. Jackson who are named as unindicted co-conspirators in the 10-count indictment of Mr. Jackson.

Her testimony was the first to link Mr. Jackson directly to the men who, prosecutors contend, conspired to kidnap the family of the boy, now 15, who has accused Mr. Jackson of molesting him and to force them to make a videotape attesting to his character.

Mr. Jackson is charged with four counts of child molesting, one count of attempted child molesting and four counts of giving alcohol to a minor to aid in sexual abuse, in addition to the conspiracy count.

Ms. Rowe said that though she was married to Mr. Jackson and bore two children by him, she never lived with them. She received limited visits with the children after the divorce and later gave up all parental rights. She is currently fighting in court to have her visiting rights restored.

Ms. Rowe had been an assistant to Mr. Jackson's dermatologist and said she had known Mr. Jackson for more than 20 years. She smiled at the defendant several times during her 40 minutes on the stand on Wednesday. Her testimony is expected to continue on Thursday.

Ms. Rowe said she had been happy to participate in the videotaped interview because she had been led to believe it would bring her back in contact with her children. She insisted that the interview, conducted by Mr. Jackson's associates, had not been scripted and that she had not seen any of the questions in advance.

"I was excited to see Michael and the children," she said, her voice cracking with emotion, "to be reintroduced to them and to be reacquainted with their dad."

She added, "He's my friend."

Near the end of the day's testimony, Ms. Rowe said she had given some untruthful answers during the taped interview. Mr. Jackson's lead lawyer, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., repeatedly objected when Ronald J. Zonen, the assistant district attorney handling the questioning of Ms. Rowe, tried to establish which of her answers were false. But just before the day's testimony ended, she said she gave untruthful answers to questions about her opinion of Mr. Jackson's fitness as a parent.

Prosecutors are expected to pursue this line of questioning on Thursday and to show excerpts from the videotaped interview.

Earlier on Wednesday, Judge Rodney S. Melville of Santa Barbara County Superior Court denied a request by the defense to declare a mistrial on the basis of what one of Mr. Jackson's lawyers called prosecutorial misconduct. Out of the presence of the jury, the lawyer, Robert M. Sanger, said in his motion that Gordon Auchincloss, a senior deputy district attorney, had raised issues in his questioning of Mr. Jackson's personal filmmaker, Hamid Moslehi, that the judge had earlier ruled out of bounds.

Mr. Auchincloss had questioned Mr. Moslehi about his filming of a Jackson interview conducted by Martin Bashir, a British journalist, and had used the words "sleeping with boys" in a reference to Mr. Jackson's activities.

Though the judge agreed that the wording should not have been used, he denied the request for a mistrial.


Nick Madigan contributed reporting for this article.

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Frank Rich

April 24, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time
By FRANK RICH

Whatever your religious denomination, or lack of same, it was hard not to be swept up in last week's televised pageantry from Rome: the grandeur of St. Peter's Square, the panoply of the cardinals, the continuity of history embodied by the joyous emergence of the 265th pope. As a show of faith, it's a tough act to follow. But that has not stopped some ingenious American hucksters from trying.

Tonight is the much-awaited "Justice Sunday," the judge-bashing rally being disseminated nationwide by cable, satellite and Internet from a megachurch in Louisville. It may not boast a plume of smoke emerging from above the Sistine Chapel, but it will feature its share of smoke and mirrors as well as traditions that, while not dating back a couple of millenniums, do at least recall the 1920's immortalized in "Elmer Gantry." These traditions have less to do with the earnest practice of religion by an actual church, as we witnessed from Rome, than with the exploitation of religion by political operatives and other cynics with worldly ends. While Sinclair Lewis wrote that Gantry, his hypocritical evangelical preacher, "was born to be a senator," we now have senators who are born to be Gantrys. One of them, the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, hatched plans to be beamed into tonight's festivities by videotape, a stunt that in itself imbues "Justice Sunday" with a touch of all-American spectacle worthy of "The Wizard of Oz."

Like the wizard himself, "Justice Sunday" is a humbug, albeit one with real potential consequences. It brings mass-media firepower to a campaign against so-called activist judges whose virulence increasingly echoes the rhetoric of George Wallace and other segregationists in the 1960's. Back then, Wallace called for the impeachment of Frank M. Johnson Jr., the federal judge in Alabama whose activism extended to upholding the Montgomery bus boycott and voting rights march. Despite stepped-up security, a cross was burned on Johnson's lawn and his mother's house was bombed.

The fraudulence of "Justice Sunday" begins but does not end with its sham claims to solidarity with the civil rights movement of that era. "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias," says the flier for tonight's show, "and now it is being used against people of faith." In truth, Bush judicial nominees have been approved in exactly the same numbers as were Clinton second-term nominees. Of the 13 federal appeals courts, 10 already have a majority of Republican appointees. So does the Supreme Court. It's a lie to argue, as Tom DeLay did last week, that such a judiciary is the "left's last legislative body," and that Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, is the poster child for "outrageous" judicial overreach. Our courts are as highly populated by Republicans as the other two branches of government.

The "Justice Sunday" mob is also lying when it claims to despise activist judges as a matter of principle. Only weeks ago it was desperately seeking activist judges who might intervene in the Terri Schiavo case as boldly as Scalia & Co. had in Bush v. Gore. The real "Justice Sunday" agenda lies elsewhere. As Bill Maher summed it up for Jay Leno on the "Tonight" show last week: " 'Activist judges' is a code word for gay." The judges being verbally tarred and feathered are those who have decriminalized gay sex (in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Kennedy) as they once did abortion and who countenance marriage rights for same-sex couples. This is the animus that dares not speak its name tonight. To paraphrase the "Justice Sunday" flier, now it's the anti-filibuster campaign that is being abused to protect bias, this time against gay people.

Anyone who doesn't get with this program, starting with all Democrats, is damned as a bigoted enemy of "people of faith." But "people of faith," as used by the event's organizers, is another duplicitous locution; it's a code word for only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity. The trade organization representing tonight's presenters, National Religious Broadcasters, requires its members to "sign a distinctly evangelical statement of faith that would probably exclude most Catholics and certainly all Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist programmers," according to the magazine Broadcasting & Cable. The only major religious leader involved with "Justice Sunday," R. Albert Mohler Jr. of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has not only called the papacy a "false and unbiblical office" but also told Terry Gross on NPR two years ago that "any belief system" leading "away from the cross of Christ and toward another way of ultimate meaning, is, indeed, wicked and evil."

Tonight's megachurch setting and pseudoreligious accouterments notwithstanding, the actual organizer of "Justice Sunday" isn't a clergyman at all but a former state legislator and candidate for insurance commissioner in Louisiana, Tony Perkins. He now runs the Family Research Council, a Washington propaganda machine devoted to debunking "myths" like "People are born gay" and "Homosexuals are no more likely to molest children than heterosexuals are." It will give you an idea of the level of Mr. Perkins's hysteria that, as reported by The American Prospect, he told a gathering in Washington this month that the judiciary poses "a greater threat to representative government" than "terrorist groups." And we all know the punishment for terrorists. Accordingly, Newsweek reports that both Justices Kennedy and Clarence Thomas have "asked Congress for money to add 11 police officers" to the Supreme Court, "including one new officer just to assess threats against the justices." The Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body for the federal judiciary, has requested $12 million for home-security systems for another 800 judges.

Mr. Perkins's fellow producer tonight is James Dobson, the child psychologist who created Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs media behemoth most famous of late for condemning SpongeBob SquarePants for joining other cartoon characters in a gay-friendly public-service "We Are Family" video for children. Dr. Dobson sees same-sex marriage as the path to "marriage between a man and his donkey" and, in yet another perversion of civil rights history, has likened the robed justices of the Supreme Court to the robed thugs of the Ku Klux Klan. He has promised "a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea" if he doesn't get the judges he wants.

Once upon a time you might have wondered what Senator Frist is doing lighting matches in this tinderbox. As he never ceases to remind us, he is a doctor - an M.D., not some mere Ph.D. like Dr. Dobson - with an admirable history of combating AIDS in Africa. But this guy signed his pact with the devil even before he decided to grandstand in the Schiavo case by besmirching the diagnoses of neurologists who, unlike him, had actually examined the patient.

It was three months earlier, on the Dec. 5, 2004, edition of ABC News's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," that Dr. Frist enlisted in the Perkins-Dobson cavalry. That week Bush administration abstinence-only sex education programs had been caught spreading bogus information, including the canard that tears and sweat can transmit H.I.V. and AIDS - a fiction that does nothing to further public health but is very effective at provoking the demonization of gay men and any other high-risk group for the disease. Asked if he believed this junk science was true, the Princeton-and-Harvard-educated Dr. Frist said, "I don't know." After Mr. Stephanopoulos pressed him three more times, this fine doctor theorized that it "would be very hard" for tears and sweat to spread AIDS (still a sleazy answer, since there have been no such cases).

Senator Frist had hoped to deflect criticism of his cameo on "Justice Sunday" by confining his appearance to video. Though he belittled the disease-prevention value of condoms in that same "This Week" interview, he apparently now believes that videotape is just the prophylactic to shield him from the charge that he is breaching the wall separating church and state. His other defense: John Kerry spoke at churches during the presidential campaign. Well, every politician speaks at churches. Not every political leader speaks at nationally televised political rallies that invoke God to declare war on courts of law.

Perhaps the closest historical antecedent of tonight's crusade was that staged in the 1950's and 60's by a George Wallace ally, the televangelist Billy James Hargis. At its peak, his so-called Christian Crusade was carried by 500 radio stations and more than 200 television stations. In the "Impeach Earl Warren" era, Hargis would preach of the "collapse of moral values" engineered by a "powerfully entrenched, anti-God Liberal Establishment." He also decried any sex education that talked about homosexuality or even sexual intercourse. Or so he did until his career was ended by accusations that he had had sex with female students at the Christian college he founded as well as with boys in the school's All-American Kids choir.

Hargis died in obscurity the week before Dr. Frist's "This Week" appearance. But no less effectively than the cardinals in Rome, he has passed the torch.

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David Okrent

April 24, 2005
THE PUBLIC EDITOR
The Hottest Button: How The Times Covers Israel and Palestine
By DANIEL OKRENT

Let me offer two statements about this paper's coverage of the conflict in the Middle East. First: I find the correspondents at The Times to be honest and committed journalists. Second: The Times today is the gold standard as far as setting out in precise language the perspectives of the parties, the contents of resolutions, the terms of international conventions.

Neither of these comments is my own. The first is a direct quotation from Michael F. Brown, executive director of Partners for Peace, an organization that seeks, it says, "to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories." The second comes from Andrea Levin, president and executive director of the Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America, the muscular pro-Zionist media monitor. With partisans on each side offering respectful appraisal in place of vituperation and threat, you would think that we had reached a milestone moment in The Times's coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

You would be wrong. Less temperate groups on each side find The Times guilty of felonies ranging from outright dishonesty to complicity in the deaths of civilians. A group called the Orthodox Caucus has led boycotts of The Times for "simply not telling the truth." I have met with representatives of If Americans Knew, an organization that says The Times conscientiously reports on the deaths of Israeli children but ignores the deaths of Palestinian children - children, they say, usually "shot in the head or chest" by the Israeli soldiers.

On the edges, rage and accusation prevail; nearer the middle, more reasoned critics still find much to criticize. Michael Brown and Andrea Levin can cite chapter, verse, sentence and punctuation mark. They watch this paper with a truly awesome vigilance.

It's this simple: An article about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot appear in The Times without eliciting instant and intense response. A photograph of a grieving mother is considered a provocation, an interview with a radical on either side is deemed willful propaganda. Detailed studies of column inches devoted to one or another subject arrive weekly. One reader, Leo Rennert of Bethesda, Md., has written to me 164 times (as of Friday) over the past 17 months to comment on the Middle East coverage. His messages are seldom love letters.

On this issue, love letters are as common as compromise, and The Times's exoneration from charges of bias is as likely as an imminent peace.

After reading thousands of criticisms (as well as insults, accusations and threats) of The Times's Middle East coverage, I'm still waiting for one reader to say the paper has ever been unfair in a way that was damaging to both sides. Given the frequency of articles on the subject, it would be hard to imagine that such a piece has not been published. In fact, I've seen a few myself. But to see them, I have had to suppress my own feelings about what is happening in Israel and Palestine.

I can't say I'm very good at it. How could I be - how could anyone be - when considering a conflict so deep, so unabating, so riddled with pain? Who can be dispassionate about an endless tragedy?

This doesn't exonerate The Times, nor does the fact that criticism comes from each side suggest that the paper's doing something right. But no one who tries to walk down the middle of a road during a firefight could possibly emerge unscathed.

Critics will say The Times attempts nothing of the sort, that it has thrown in its lot with one side in the conflict. But let's keep motive out of this discussion. Neither you nor I know what the motives of the editors might be. Nor should their motives even matter. We can judge them only on what they do.

Some things The Times does and does not do (apart from having extremely opinionated opinion pages, which color the way the rest of the paper is read but are not the issue under discussion today):

It does not provide history lessons. A report on an assassination attempt on a Hamas leader in Gaza that kills nearby innocents will most likely mention the immediate provocation - perhaps a Palestinian attack on an Israeli settlement. But, says the angered reader, what about the murderous assault that provoked the settlement attack? And, says his aggrieved counterpart on the other side, what about the ambush that preceded the assault? And so on back to the first intifada, and then to 1973 and 1967 and 1956 and 1948 - an endless chain of regression and recrimination and pain that cannot be represented in a year, much less in a single dispatch in a single day.

It eschews passion. If your cause needs good publicity - as both the Palestinians and the Israelis definitely do - conventional news story tropes can only be infuriating: bland recitations of presumed facts followed by challenges to those facts, assertions by spokesmen instantly countered by opposing spokesmen. The paper's seeming reluctance, for instance, to report evidence of incitement to racial or religious hatred derives in part, I believe, from a subconscious effort to stick to the noninflammatory middle and to keep things civil, even when civility leaked out of the conflict long ago.

But partisans desire heat. Detachment itself becomes suspect. If you are not with us, you are therefore against us.

It makes selections. For people on either side who see the conflict as a life-and-death issue - as it certainly is - the Middle East is the only story that matters. Each day's reports in The Times are tiny fragments of a tragic epic. Yes, there were demonstrations against settler relocation this morning, but how can you ignore the afternoon's additional construction on the West Bank barrier? Or, I know you gave my version of events yesterday, but why are you presenting only the other side's version today?

This dilemma is aggravated by the way certain events force themselves into the newspaper. Violence trumps virtually everything else. If you are covering a debate and a terror bomb detonates two blocks away, you race to the bombing site. Terrorists have a horrifying way of influencing news coverage, but it works.

It does not cede definitive authority to other organizations and sources. Last Tuesday, "Israel, on Its Own, Is Shaping the Borders of the West Bank," by Steven Erlanger, angered Michael Brown for its unelaborated statement that Palestinians "argue that all Israeli settlements beyond the green line are illegal." The Times, Brown believes, is obligated to note that "it's not just the Palestinians who say it's illegal, but U.N. Security Council resolutions."

Ethan Bronner, the paper's deputy foreign editor, counters:"We view ourselves as neutral and unbound by such judgments. We cite them, but we do not live by them." He adds, "In 1975, when the U.N. General Assembly labeled Zionism as racism, would it have been logical for The Times to repeat that description as fact from then on? Obviously not. We take note of official views, but we don't adopt them as our own."

Nor does the paper accept as authoritative the reporting of others. A common criticism I receive is built around "proof" of something The Times has not itself reported. Frequently such evidence is drawn from openly partisan sources, and when I cite to critics contrary evidence provided by Times reporters, that evidence is in turn dismissed as partisan. The representatives of If Americans Knew earnestly believe that the information they presented to me about the killing of Palestinian children to be "simple objective criteria." But I don't think any of us can be objective about our own claimed objectivity.

It is limited by geography. The Times, like virtually every American news organization, maintains its bureau in West Jerusalem. Its reporters and their families shop in the same markets, walk the same streets and sit in the same cafes that have long been at risk of terrorist attack. Some advocates of the Palestinian cause call this "structural geographic bias."

If the reporters lived in Gaza or Ramallah, this argument goes, they would feel exposed to the daily struggles and dangers of life behind Palestinian lines and would presumably become more empathetic toward the Palestinians.

I don't know about empathy, but I do know that the angle of vision determines what you see. A reporter based in secular, Europeanized Tel Aviv would experience an Israel vastly different from one living in Jerusalem; a reporter with a home in Ramallah would most likely find an entirely different world. The Times ought to give it a try.

It's only a newspaper. It eventually comes to this: Journalism itself is inadequate to tell this story. Like recorded music, which is only a facsimile of music, journalism is a substitute, a stand-in. It's what we call on when we can't know something firsthand. It's not reality, but a version of reality, and both daily deadlines and limited space make even the best journalism a reductionist version of reality.

In preparing to write this article, my conversations with Michael Brown and Andrea Levin, with various other parties of interest and with The Times's editors consumed hours. My e-mail encounters with readers have consumed months. To all who would assert that squeezing what I've drawn from this research into these few paragraphs has stripped the many arguments of their nuance or robbed them of their power, I have no rebuttal. The more important and complicated an issue, or the closer it is to the edge of life and death and the future of nations, the less likely its essences can be distilled by that wholly inadequate but absolutely necessary servant, daily journalism.


?

A postscript:

During my research, representatives of If Americans Knew expressed the belief that unless the paper assigned equal numbers of Muslim and Jewish reporters to cover the conflict, Jewish reporters should be kept off the beat.

I find this profoundly offensive, but not nearly as repellent as a calumny that has popped up in my e-mail with lamentable frequency - the charge that The Times is anti-Semitic. Even if you stipulate that The Times's reporters and editors favor the Palestinian cause (something I am not remotely prepared to do), this is an astonishing debasement. If reporting that is sympathetic to Palestinians, or antipathetic to Israelis, is anti-Semitism, what is real anti-Semitism? What word do you have left for conscious discrimination, or open hatred, or acts of intentional, ethnically motivated violence?

The Times may be - is - imperfect. It is not anti-Semitic. Calling it that defames the accuser far more than it does the accused.


The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

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Peter Buchanan-Smith

April 24, 2005
Crossing Cardinal Nein
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

POPE BENEDICT XVI takes over the throne of St. Peter with a remarkably long and telling record. The one consistent theme in the more than 100 cases that he adjudicated as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faithful was his fierce, overarching defense of absolutism against relativism in doctrinal matters - of any kind.

He snuffed out Marxist-tinged liberation theology in Latin America and reproved the Rev. Charles E. Curran and other university theologians who sought to loosen church rules on contraception and homosexuality.

Cardinal Ratzinger also reined in religious dissidents on the right, most notably Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected even the most basic reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

And he arguably should have been a little tougher on Emmanuel Milingo, a Zambian archbishop who wed a 43-year-old Korean acupuncturist in a group ceremony performed by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the eccentric leader of the Unification Church. (Rev. Milingo renounced his bride and the Unification Church after a visit with John Paul II and was welcomed back to the fold.)

Pope Benedict spent a quarter of a century fighting what he calls the "dictatorship of relativism," and weeding out challenges to strict Catholic teaching. It was his training as a theologian, it was his day job in the Roman curia, but it also reflected his sensibility as a German Catholic.

He and John Paul II had no dispute on doctrinal matters, but they came from different worlds and those distinctions were clearest at the end of John Paul's papacy. They are likely to be just as visible at the start of Benedict XVI's.

John Paul II was born in a Poland that was almost 100 percent Catholic - when he became a bishop the chief threat to his faith was Communism. The new pope was born into a conservative Catholic enclave in a country with deep Protestant roots. He came of age in Nazi Germany, but by the time he became a bishop, his preoccupation was the secularization of Europe as a whole, and particularly in Germany, a hotbed of Catholic dissent.

After Communism collapsed, the Slavic pope fixated on mending the 1,000-year rift with the Eastern Orthodox Church, sometimes pushing the Vatican's ecumenical envelope in an effort to mollify Eastern European patriarchs. He had some notable successes, including a joint service with Patriarch Teoctist of Romania in 1999, but he never realized his dream of visiting Moscow.

Cardinal Ratzinger never displayed the same degree of interest in reconciling East and West in what John Paul II loved to describe as the "two lungs of Christianity." Mostly he was busy stamping out wisps of religious pluralism, most famously in 2000, when he published "Dominus Iesus" ("The Lord Jesus") , which condemned "relativistic theories" of religious pluralism and described other faiths as "gravely deficient."

The document was mostly aimed at reining in straying Catholic theologians like the Rev. Jacques Dupuis, a Belgian theologian who after teaching in India argued that other religions could also lead to salvation, but it offended religious leaders of almost every stripe. Jewish religious leaders in Rome boycotted several interfaith meetings in protest. Even some cardinals publicly questioned its tone and timing.

And yet one of his less known decisions was a 1998 joint declaration by the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation affirming that the two churches had found common ground on the issue of "justification," the means by which a human being is made worthy of salvation; that dispute drove Martin Luther to set off the Protestant Reformation more than 500 years ago.

At the time, many of Cardinal Ratzinger's critics suspected that he would sabotage the declaration. Instead, the Cardinal, a longtime admirer of Martin Luther, was instrumental in rescuing an agreement when it was on the verge of collapse, according to John L. Allen Jr., a journalist for The National Catholic Reporter who wrote a 2001 biography of Cardinal Ratzinger. The signing took place on Oct. 31, 1999, the anniversary of the day Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

As was his wont, the future Pope Benedict did not go soft on what he deemed critical issues of doctrine. Disagreement between the two churches on issues like papal infallibility and the ordination of women still remain. Accordingly, Cardinal Ratzinger blocked German Catholics from sharing communion with their Lutheran brethren at a 2003 joint gathering.

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