Often divisive

During his 24-year-long work as the Vatican's chief theologian, and now as the spiritual leader of the world's 1 billion plus Catholics, Ratzinger has often divided people.

While Catholic liberals have complained that he has blocked reforms, his back-to-basics emphasis on following Jesus Christ has caught the focus of many mainstream Catholics in his German homeland.

And while critics in Italy accuse him of interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state by lambasting government attempts to grant some rights to homosexual couples, intellectuals across Europe appreciate his efforts to bring back values to an increasingly secular society.

 As Sandro Magister, a papal expert who writes for Italian weekly L'Espresso, put it: "Benedict is extremely concerned about the destiny of mankind, particularly of a mankind that lives in a modern society that appears to have lost the ability to distinguish between good and bad, right from wrong."

Benedict has often been depicted as a hard-line conservative obsessed by what he once called "the dictatorship of relativism" - the idea that no objective truth exists. Yet supporters prefer to point at his willingness to dialogue with critics, followers of other faiths and non-believers alike.

"Ratzinger has a strange and most admirable strength: he prefers to be surprised rather than surprise," wrote former Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls in an April 12 article for Italian daily La Repubblica.

Warning about danger

During his packed general audiences in Rome's St Peter's Square, Benedict often warns about the dangers of reason without faith and of faith without reason.

This, rather than the perceived link between Islam and violence that angered Muslims so much, was the central theme of his September 12, 2006 speech at the University of Regensburg.

A reason "which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures", the pope said in his now famous lecture "on faith and reason", "is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures".

 At the same time, as he also noted in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love), the Greek term "logos", which is found in the opening verse of one of the Gospels - "In the beginning was the Logos" - is often translated as "word" but can also mean "thought", "logic" or "reason".

Building bridges

In this respect, experts note, Benedict has been attempting to build a bridge not only between followers of different faiths, but also between believers and non-believers.

Born on April 16, 1927 - a Holy Saturday - in Marktl-am-Inn, a small town in Bavaria, Ratzinger was forced as a schoolboy to enlist in the Hitler Youth, despite coming from a strongly anti-Nazi family.

More unhappy times came between 1966 and 1969, while teaching dogmatic theology at Germany's University of Tuebingen.

There, revolting students criticized him as a reactionary, prompting him to part ways with another famous Catholic thinker at the university, Swiss-born Hans Kueng. Many believe this experience cemented Ratzinger's conservative views.

And yet, since the conclave's decision to elect one of the oldest cardinals as pope, on April 19, 2005, Ratzinger has met Kueng and a new generation of Tuebingen academics with open arms.

Dialogue and discovery, rather than old-age resentment, is what 80-year-old Benedict appears to be striving for.