What Turned Pope Benedict Conservative?

An interesting inquiry of the sort the MSM never undertakes, incurious as they are:

What happened at Tubingen?

It took me a month to answer that question. According to the media, Tubingen is the German university where, in 1968, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -- the future Pope Benedict XVI -- became a conservative. He did so, according to media accounts, because of left-wing student protests in 1968, when Ratzinger was a professor.

Is that true? That a brilliant and deeply reflective theologian and priest simply freaked out over some student protests and became orthodox? Perhaps, but if so the more compelling question the media ignored is, if the protests changed Ratzinger, what exactly about them did it? The New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, TV pundits and Newsweek were all vague: there were student protests. The kids were influenced by Marxism and even invaded Ratzinger's classroom to perform sit-ins. This instantly formed and remains the media template for judging the new pope's life.

But to me it all seemed more than a little bogus. Sure, Pope Benedict seems a gentle soul -- but this drove him from the campus and made him a conservative? When an anonymous source who may or may not even be real asserts that American troops fighting the war on terror flushed a Koran down the toilet, it runs in Newsweek and causes pandemonium around the world. Yet the same magazine can't be bothered to investigate the simple question of what formed the pope's worldview. It's hard to believe, but it seems the liberal bias in the media is still, after all these years, causing more than a few reporters to cover for communists. In its coverage, Time magazine (and remember these people are journalists paid handsomely to get the story) offered a tantalizing tidbit: at one point student protestors had referred to the Cross of Christ as "a sadomasochistic object." Well, at least here was something genuinely scandalous and offensive. So who said it? Time doesn't answer. What else was said? Silence. In his book Why I Am a Catholic, Garry Wills only refers to Ratzinger's irrational fear of the "noisy students" in 1968. Noisy students -- how bad could that be? Did Ratzinger just flip out?