c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As soon as the smoke cleared, a crowd gathered under three television sets in the newsroom.

We stared at the red velvet curtains, the threshold of hope. When the drapes moved, someone let out a yelp. False alarm. Maybe the maid was dusting.

Would the new pope be Italian? Latino? African?

Would he be a liberal, a conservative or a moderate?

We studied the drapes, waiting for an opening. Waiting for a chance for women to be heard, for priests to marry, for remarried divorcees to receive Eucharist, for a Third Vatican Council

For days, people around the world had placed bets, creating an NCAA bracket of cardinals. The Irish made it a horse race, with bettors pulling for South America over Africa.

Then the curtain opened and a man in red announced, “We have a pope.”

And the new pope is … rats.

Make that Ratzinger.

Joseph Ratzinger. The German cardinal just turned 78. Nothing like a predictable papacy. What do you expect? The previous pope stacked the deck with like minds.

I was disappointed but not surprised. We didn’t get a new pope. We got the old one, minus the charisma. Ratzinger was John Paul II’s Dick Cheney.

“He really represents continuity,” a TV newscaster said. In other words, same old same old.

What does Ratzinger stand for? Dogmatic purity. He has been called a hard-liner. A moral policeman. A Vatican bureaucrat. The dismisser of dissent. The most feared of the cardinals.

Is that really what we want in a pope?

Couldn’t we have picked the most compassionate of the cardinals? Someone who would attract people to Catholicism, not threaten them with rigid interpretations of theology?

Forgive me for saying what many Catholics are thinking: At least he’s old.

I wondered what my friend Kevin Conroy thought. A priest, Kevin’s life mission is to serve the poor. He was pulling for the cardinal from Honduras.

“What’s God thinking?” Kevin asked.

We both laughed. Then he put it in perspective.

“Do you really listen to the pope day in and day out?”

Of course not.

“I never met this guy,” Kevin said. “I never met the last guy. My vocation isn’t to the pope, it’s to Jesus and to the poor.”

Good thing to remember.

The new pope already promised “simply and humbly to labor in the vineyard of the Lord.” I just hope he doesn’t crush all the grapes.

Being a traditionalist isn’t a bad thing if the new pope is willing to go all the way back to the original tradition of being a servant, one who washes the feet of others.

Being a fundamentalist isn’t a bad thing either, if he focuses on the most fundamental fundamentals: love and service.

We need a pope who will see the human side of the church, not just enforce rigid rules. The doctrine is already protected.

“I hope he protects the spirit,” Kevin said.

This church needs a shepherd.

“Someone who will make the poorest, most forgotten person on the earth feel like a human being,” Kevin said.

His friend Gary Malin, a priest at St. Gabriel in Concord Township, Ohio, isn’t a big Ratzinger fan, either. All along, he kept praying, “The cardinals are open, and I am, too.”

“Right now I don’t feel that way,” he confessed. “I hope I can stay open.”

Me, too.

(Regina Brett writes for The Cleveland Plain Dealer.)

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