Les deux papes

At eighty-one, and after a lifetime of prayer and study inside his theological ivory tower, he was completely unprepared for the fact that the decisions he made as pope had real consequences for real people. His failure to grasp the severity of this and previous crises made it clear just how detached from the world the pope really was

When reviewing Ratzinger's record at the CDF, Gibson believes that he "too easily ignored the fact that he was dealing with fellow human beings, with other Christians, and not just with ideas.

There is an undeniable parallel between Benedict's attempts to reduce the cognitive dissonance of his own experiences under Hitler's rule by painting an idyllic picture of a childhood almost entirely uninterrupted by the savageries of the Second World War and his apparent unwillingness to confront the horrific reality of widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic Church during his time as pope.

When, eventualy, the stalemate was broken and the lightning German invasion of Holland, Belgium, and France, known as the Blitz krieg, came on May 10, 1940, Ratzinger acknowledges the surprising surge of patriotic emotions, even from those opposed to nationalism, when the powers that punished Germany after the First World War were "brought to their knees in a short time" at the beginning of the Second.