Tests for an Unbending Pope...

That headline writer must think E. J. Dionne was hoping to see "a reed shaken by the wind." In yesterday's column Dionne was quoting Cardinal Ratzinger.

He once said that "the 1968 revolution" turned into "a radical attack on human freedom and dignity, a deep threat to all that is human."

Today he's quoting Hans Kung.

"Joseph Ratzinger is afraid," the liberal Catholic theologian Hans Kung declared in 1985. "And just like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, he fears nothing more than freedom."

Maybe it depends on how one thinks about freedom.

... the model from which creation must be understood is not the craftsman but the creative mind, creative thinking. At the same time it becomes evident that the idea of freedom is the characteristic mark of the Christian belief in God as opposed to any kind of monism. At the beginning of all being it puts not just some kind of consciousness but a creative freedom which creates further freedoms. To this extent one could very well describe Christianity as a philosophy of freedom. For Christianity, the explanation of a reality as a whole is not an all-embracing consciousness or one single materiality; on the contrary, at the summit stands a freedom that thinks and, thinking, creates freedoms, thus making freedom the structural form of all being.

--Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (1968), translated by J. R. Foster (1970), p. 110

Update: Michael Novak regarding, inter alia, Ratzinger on liberty.