Many people were disappointed that the cardinals did not choose a pope from the Third World to highlight the desperate plight of its impoverished peoples. Cardinal Ratzinger had not previously attended extensively to global social problems as he was engaged with more theological writing and teaching.
However, he had been involved in some social controversies, notably on the war in Iraq, and during the liberation theology debates on problems of hunger and poverty. He presumably played a key role when his Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reviewed the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, drafted by the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace and released late in 2004.
With Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger strongly opposed the US invasion of Iraq as morally unjustified. He was also disconcerted by leading US neoconservatives, especially George Weigel and Michael Novak, interpreting the Catholic Catechism to mean that only governments, not the Church, could make the final decision about the justice of recourse to war. As one of the most influential neoconservatives in the Bush camp, Novak adopted a politically partisan role in disputing the Pope’s views. To prevent such blatant misreading of the text, Ratzinger considered that these sections of the Catechism might need to be rewritten.
In a clear reference to the Iraq war, the Compendium of Social Doctrine states that ‘engaging in a preventive war without clear proof that an attack is imminent cannot fail to raise serious moral and juridical questions ... International legitimacy for the use of armed force … can only be given by a competent body’.
Further, with obvious implications for the sanctions against Iraq which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, the Compendium declared: ‘Sanctions must never be used as a means for the direct punishment of an entire population.’
It appears that Benedict will continue John Paul II’s opposition to the unilateralist foreign policies of the US neoconservatives and the Bush Administration.
Perhaps Cardinal Ratzinger is most controversially known for his interventions against versions of liberation theology. The point that was at times overlooked in the ensuing controversy and anti-communist media frenzy was that his documents were also highly critical of injustice and oppression in Latin America.
Cardinal Ratzinger was no friend of the often rapacious and cruel practices of capitalism as it existed in many Third World countries. His Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation in