As everyone who reads Douthat’s column and blog in the Times knows, he is a conservative Catholic who believes that Benedict was unjustly maligned in the press and views Francis with a large degree of suspicion. I obviously have never met either individual (I doubt Douthat has, either), but my take on the two is as follows:
Benedict strikes me as being sort of a cross between Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and Dick Cheney–a man who went through the motions of claiming to love God and mankind, but whose real love was the rules, which he enforced with great enthusiasm (he is German, after all). He then felt sorry for himself when he was criticized for it. Can you imagine him, in a different time, burning heretics? You bet you can. You can practically smell the burning flesh on him.
Francis doesn’t come across that way at all. His love of God and mankind are conspicuously genuine. He has doubts about his own wisdom. He enforces the rules because it is his job, not because he gets a special kick out of it. Instead of drawing lines in the sand to keep unworthy people out, he erases as many as he can to bring people in.
Oh, and one additional note for Ross–it is clear that you are a Catholic because you are a conservative, and not the other way around. If you ever have a chance to read this, you might want to ponder the implications of that point.