John Allen's "The Real Ratzinger Revealed" is free on the Tablet's Web site. Were you expecting a "fundamentalist" pope? If so, how are you coping with having the expectation confounded?

If the danger of the John XXIII and Paul VI era was throwing the babyout with the bathwater, the chief risk in today's politics of identitycuts in the opposite direction, towards rigidity and exaggerateddefensiveness - a sort of "Taliban Catholicism" that knows only how toexcoriate and condemn. To be sure, one can see the stirrings of such aspirit in today's Church. Potentially, Benedict XVI's legacy may lie inpointing a way around these shoals. Given all that he represents,Benedict is in a unique position to illustrate that one can embraceCatholic fundamentals without becoming a fundamentalist, that reasonand faith are not opposed but inextricably linked. That, in fact, wasthe argument he was trying to make in Regensburg, although the uproarover the quotation occluded his effort.