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As it turns out, Christianity Today first weighed in on the new pope eight years ago. CT executive editor Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School, wrote a 1997 article about "The Gift of Salvation," a statement from the Evangelicals and Catholics Together talks. "For all our differences," George wrote, "Bible-believing evangelicals stand much closer to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger than to [Anglican] Bishop John Spong!"

Over the years, Ratzinger has been mentioned in our publications many times, for his comments on Judaism, rock music in church, Catholic politicians in the U.S., morality and human liberty, even gluten-free Communion wafers.

So Pope Benedict XVI, né Joseph Ratzinger, is "a known quantity," Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told Religion News Service after the Vatican announced "Habemus papam."

Well, at least people think they know everything there is to know about the new pope. "Is the pope Catholic?" used to be a response to obvious questions, meaning "Of course, yes!" But with Ratzinger's election to the papacy, some seem quite upset that the new pope is Catholic—that is, that he supports the teachings of Roman Catholicism.

Much has been made of Ratzinger's work as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's office for overseeing orthodox teachings. Since he was responsible for promoting and enforcing doctrine, he is seen as "the enforcer." That is, in fact, the subtitle of his biography: "The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith." Other nicknames are less kind; Panzerkardinal and God's rottweiler are among the nicer ones.

But don't be so quick to confuse the office with the man. In 1998's Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium, Ratzinger lamented that his job enforcing doctrine wasn't what he wanted:

The cost was that I couldn't do full time what I hand envisaged for myself, namely really contributing my thinking and speaking to the great intellectual conversation of our time, by developing an opus of my own. I had to descend to the little and various things pertaining to factual conflicts and events. I had to leave aside a great part of what would interest me and simply serve and to accept that as my task.

Still, in such a role he contributed a great deal toward the conversations of our time, and so became one of the most well-known cardinals to ever enter the papacy, if not to leave it.

"If you had asked people in 1965, Who is the pope? they wouldn't know and probably wouldn't care," George said in an interview earlier this month. That changed with the celebrity status of Benedict XVI's predecessor: "John Paul II has become a world figure and certainly within the Christian world in a way that evangelicals know him, appreciate his stand on many, many issues, resonate with his piety and spirituality, and know he's a man of prayer and deep faith—even though we can't follow him all the way into his Marian devotion."

And evangelicals know that Ratzinger helped to shape John Paul II's papacy, especially his stand on those issues. "Cardinal Ratzinger is a person of enormous influence within the Vatican," George said. "As a non-Catholic, on balance I want to say, God bless him [for clamping down on theological dissidents within Catholicism]. ... It's good for Catholics to be real true Catholics and be true to their faith. The last thing we evangelical Protestants need is for the Catholic Church to become a weakened version of Protestant liberalism. And I think that's the trajectory of some of these progressives."

That essentially was the view of a 2000 CT editorial focusing on one of Ratzinger's most notable documents, Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church. News stories misrepresented much of the document, CT said. One might have expected CT to take great umbrage at Dominus Iesus's assertion that almost all Protestant bodies "are not churches in the proper sense" and that "they suffer from defects." And indeed, CT did disagree with that first statement. But the magazine also noted that it has long been the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.

As to the second assertion, CT said, "In a certain sense, we do suffer from defects. But so does the Church of Rome."

As George told CT back then, "From an evangelical perspective, we must say to the Church of Rome the same thing that [Dominus Iesus] says to non-Catholic Christians: Serious defects remain in Catholic teaching and piety, and we call the Church of Rome, as we call our own churches, to further reformation on the basis of the Word of God."

In the evangelical Protestant view of the Roman Catholic Church, defects in teaching are largely focused on the office Benedict XVI has taken; evangelicals and Catholics agree on social teachings, but ecclesiology remains the dominant area of disagreement, as George spelled out in "What I'd Like to Tell the Pope About the Church."

Actually, the pope's attitudes on ecclesiology and social teachings are directly tied together, Richard John Neuhaus wrote in a 1998 CT review of Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium:

He refers ... to "the canon of criticism"—women's ordination, contraception, celibacy, and the remarriage of divorced persons. On these issues, liberal reformers insist, the Catholic Church must change if it is to reach the people of our time effectively. Here the cardinal becomes the skeptic. He notes an obvious factor that is often overlooked: "On these points Protestantism has taken the other path, and it is quite plain that it hasn't thereby solved the problem of being a Christian in today's world and that the problem of Christianity, the effort of being a Christian, remains just as dramatic as before."

Ratzinger is unlikely to change much of his views on any of these points. A Re:Generation Quarterly article quotes Ratzinger asking rhetorically in an interview, "Is truth determined by a majority vote, only for a new 'truth' to be 'discovered' by a new majority tomorrow?"

Even the pope can't change Church teachings on such matters, Ratzinger has taught. Nor can he change its teachings on the papacy, though he has written that the papacy will change "when hitherto separated communities [e.g. Protestants] enter into unity with the pope."

Sound like the rigid dogma of the Church's "Grand Inquisitor," eager to stamp out those who disagree? Don't be too sure. In fact, Ratzinger made one of the Catholic Church's most ecumenical moves in history, suggesting that the doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son rather than the Father alone—something that has separated East and West churches for nearly a millennium—is not "a fundamental content of the profession of the Christian faith." When he quoted the Nicene Creed in Dominus Iesus, he used the Eastern version, not the Western (and Roman Catholic) one.

Perhaps Ratzinger is not as much the "known quantity" we're reading about in the papers after all.