Rite and Reason: Pope Benedict will be Supreme Pontiff a year on Wednesday. Patsy McGarry looks back on what has happened since.
It was with deepest trepidation then that many witnessed the speedy election of Benedict last year. He arrived trailing diktats, after 24 years as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In St Peter's Square, within seconds of his being presented to the crowd as Pope, two text messages from Ireland registered on my mobile. One read simply "Holy Jesus!" The other, more graphically, "the church is finished", though a different f-word was used. All around, jubilant seminarians were going crazy while some older Catholics stood stunned, illustrating a church divided.
And if ever a single figure could be said to bear responsibility for that division there he was - waving to the crowds from the balcony of St Peter's Basilica. Since then many called on the great virtue hope to sustain them through scepticism when they heard senior church figures say: "He is not like that at all. In private he is a humble, courteous man. A shy, gentle scholar."
Those senior figures might well ask, one year on, "what say ye now of Benedict?" Well, clearly they are right about his demeanour. He is a reserved man, uneasy with adulation while yet warming to the crowds. To date it is this style which has marked out his papacy by contrast with his more gregarious predecessor.
Substantially though, nothing has changed. He has remained, as expected, consistent. So there will be no change in mandatory clerical celibacy - as he reiterated at the Synod of Bishops in Rome last October. There has been no discussion on women priests. There is no tolerance of "dissident" theologians, though a welcome development took place last September when Benedict met his old adversary Hans Küng for four hours.
On ecumenism, Benedict told a gathering of Christian leaders at World Youth Day celebrations last August that Christian "unity subsists, we are convinced, in the Catholic Church, without the possibility of ever being lost". Hardly encouraging. He began that meeting with a greeting to "the representatives of the other churches and ecclesial communities". The "other churches" were the Orthodox. The "ecclesial communities" were the Protestants present.
This was in line with his "not proper churches" description of all Reformed Churches in his Dominus Iesus (2000) document. The description deeply offends Protestants, whose "ecclesial communities" Pope Paul VI described as "sister churches".
Benedict was consistent too last November when he published an instruction banning homosexuals from becoming priests, while seminarians with temporary homosexual tendencies must be free of those for three years before ordination.
In 1986 he described homosexuality as "objectively disordered" and said the orientation tended towards the "intrinsically evil". Undoubtedly it was such views that prompted his intervention in the recent Italian general election campaign to condemn same-sex marriage.
Of course there was his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, published in December, with its unexpectedly discursive style and candid insights into (hetero)sexuality in specific ("man") gender language. Its exploration of eros and agape was refreshing, as was his addressing of Nietzsche's assertion that Christianity had poisoned eros. "Christianity of the past is often criticised as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed," he wrote.
It is ironic that the first philosopher Benedict quotes is Nietzsche, the man who coined the "God is dead" phrase in 1882. One can imagine him metaphorically spinning in his grave at being referred to at all in a papal encyclical.
Benedict described the first part of the encyclical, which it is believed he himself wrote, as "more speculative". Of significance too were his comments in it on the role of the pastor. He quotes Pope Gregory the Great who "tells us that the good pastor must be rooted in contemplation", and Benedict is contemplative by nature.
It now looks likely that his will be a quiet papacy, for which mercy let us be grateful (discreetly). He has, it seems, said all he has to say on issues of doctrine and now seems more interested in structure/reorganising the Curia, which is under way.
Patsy McGarry is Religious Affairs Correspondent at The Irish Times.