Theology professors on Jesuit campuses across the world jumped for joy Tuesday when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected to become Pope Benedict XVI. The Catholic Church made a fateful decision in prioritizing doctrinal discipline in its Western members over the well-being of its much more faithful and much more needful members from the developing world.

Cardinal Ratzinger was a doctrinaire conservative from Northern Europe. None of these are particularly bad — Benedict is a great authority on Catholic doctrine. However, his record as John Paul II's confrontational head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith indicates that he may not prioritize the true crises in the Catholic Church right now: AIDS in Africa, political repression in Latin America and religious persecution in Asia, and desitution in all three of these expanding areas.

Instead, the Vatican has chosen a leader who, from all indications, will focus on the faithful in the Western world.

The problem isn't so much Benedict XVI's conservative stances, but it's the fact that there is no indication that he is going to improve on one of John Paul II's greatest legacies: the expansion of the Catholic Church in the developing world. Conservative Cardinals like the Rev. Francis Arinze of Nigeria or the Rev. Claudio Hummes of Brazil would have kept the Church on a similar doctrinal path. However, they could have transcended such conflicts by instantaneously creating a religious revival in the church's true base.

Instead, the Cardinals went with the "safe" choice, which may dash 26 years of progress by showing Africans, Latinos and Asians that the church values its European identity over its global future. Benedict XVI would have to forge a massive change in his personal priorities in order to demonstrate otherwise.

Perhaps we are rushing to judgment. However, Cardinal Ratzinger's comments Monday indicated his vision for the future church is an all-out culture war machine in Europe and North America that is the rough equivalent of Don Quixote attacking a windmill.

Catholics have been turning away in droves in large part because of a clergy abuse scandal that Ratzinger himself has trivialized. In a Western marketplace of ideas, intellectually intricate doctrinaire Catholicism cannot compete with the instantaneous self-gratification of secular humanism. This calls for a change in emphasis that the church just refused to take.

Twenty-six years ago, the church took a pro-active stance in confronting Communism by electing the Polish Karol Wojtyla. The major conflict of this era is the humane expansion of globalization — especially in developing nations. Benedict XVI's past has done very little to demonstrate that he understands this.

We sincerely hope he proves us wrong.

This editorial appeared in The Marquette Tribune on April 21 2005.