For the past 25 years, a meeting took place each week that defied the history of the 20th century. A Pole and a German met in peace to discuss the will of God. Every Friday, Pope John Paul II, the Pole, sat with Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, alone. Now the Pole is dead, and the German is pope.

In some ways, it is even more extraordinary to have a German pope than it was to have a Polish one. Much of Polish society retained its Catholic integrity under Communist persecution. Most of German society succumbed to Hitler, compromising itself.

To choose a man brought up at that time and in that place is to state that the most corrupted human society can be redeemed. If the world accepts the new pope, Germany’s atonement will be recognized and its honor among the nations will be restored.

In Pope Benedict XVI, as Ratzinger has now become, the German experience inspired a particular respect for the Jews. At school, though not at home, he was taught by Nazis that Christ had been an Aryan, but in his religious instruction, it was insisted that Jesus was indeed a Jew. Jews and Christians, Ratzinger believes, say “a common yes to the living God.” He does not believe that you cannot speak of God after Auschwitz. “I would say,” he has declared, “that the cross recapitulates in advance the horror of Auschwitz.”

Why has this learned man, the theologian who debated with Pope John Paul II, the philosopher, chosen the name Benedict? In part, maybe, out of respect for the last pope of that name, who was mocked by both sides for trying to bring peace in World War I. But I would suggest a historically more distant inspiration as well. Cardinal Ratzinger of St. Benedict, the man who had given birth to monasticism in the twilight of the Roman Empire. His “rule” – his instructions to monks – laid the foundations, Ratzinger believes, for the methods of democracy. His spiritual spark kept the light of Christianity alive through centuries of darkness.

“Think of late antiquity,” the new pope once told an interviewer. “Where St. Benedict probably wasn’t noted at all. He was also a dropout who came from noble Roman society and did something bizarre, something that later turned out to be the ‘ark on which the West survived.'”

This, I suspect, is Benedict’s model. He strongly supports the documents of the Second Vatican Council, but his experience of the subsequent turmoil in the church has taught him that Western culture is profoundly hostile to the message of Christianity. He is fascinated by Hermann Hesse’s novel “Steppenwolf,” with its portrait of the self-isolating man. Because today egotism is exalted rather than the love of God,” this destruction of the capacity to live gives birth to deadly boredom. It is the poisoning of man. If it carried the day, man, and with him also the world, would be destroyed. “That destruction will be avoided, Benedict XVI believes, not by the church trying to recover worldly power, but by renewing, as Benedict did, its intellectual and moral reverence for the truth.

In his cast of mind, the new pope is rather more somber than his predecessor. He is more disturbed by false argument, less optimistic about the immediate prospects for mankind. He believes, as he told the Conclave this week, that the “dictatorship of relativism” is tyrannizing the modern world.

And so his favored images are of survival, preservation of treasure, and the regrowth of the church from a tiny grain of mustard seed. He admires Englishmen such as Thomas More and Cardinal Newman – “a man who listens to his conscience and for whom the truth that he has recognized … is above approval and acceptance, is really an ideal and a model for me.”

The answer to the question of our time, the new pope believes, may be to challenge the spirit of that time: “The church can be contemporary by being anti-contemporary.” He is stern, yes; obscurantist, no.

On the only occasion that I met Cardinal Ratzinger, I was struck by three things. The first was his embarrassing courtesy. I handed him an article I had written about becoming a Catholic, assuming he would put it “on file.” Instead, he read the whole thing right through as I sat before him.

The second was his intellectual curiosity. The third surprising characteristic, was his openness: friendly, relaxed, almost chatty, always trying to answer any question put.

The cardinal struck me as a man happy in himself, though sorrowful about the state of the world. He was hopeful, however. He takes inspiration from the chance that he was born on Easter Eve: “I find that a very good day, which … hints at my conception of history and my own situation; on the threshold of Easter but not yet through the door.”