Benedict I (575-79)

Virtually nothing, including his birthdate, is known about the 62nd pope and the first to bear the name Benedict. A Roman and the son of Boniface, he was called Bonosus by the Greeks. He is said to have helped the country cope with a famine following the Lombard invasion. He was buried in the vestibule of the sacristy of the old Basilica of St. Peter.

(St.) Benedict II (684-85)

The 81st pope was a Roman. He was a student at the schola cantorum, where he excelled as a Bible scholar and singer. He secured an imperial decree that ended the imperial confirmation of popes. He is known to have adopted Emperor Constantine's two sons. He fought Monothelism, restored many of the churches of Rome, and endowed funds to minister to the poor. He was buried in St. Peter's.

Benedict III (855-58)

The 105th pontiff took office in tumultuous times. A Roman by birth, Benedict, son of Peter, was elected pope on the death of Pope Leo IV, but church intrigue resulted in his imprisonment for several months before he was released and consecrated.

Benedict IV (900-03)

The birthdate of the 118th pope, a Roman, is unknown. He was the first of six popes named Benedict (Benedict IV through IX) who reigned during the Dark Ages. Each reigned for a very brief time and virtually nothing—even the precise dates of their reigns—is historically verifiable. The historian Frodoard, a contemporary, praised him for his generosity and concern for the common weal and dubbed him "Great." He crowned Louis the Blind as emperor. He was buried in front of St. Peter's near the gate of Guido.

Benedict V (964)

The 133th pope was elected after the death of Pope John XII. In a matter of months, Emperor Otto I, who opposed his election, marched on Rome, took Benedict V prisoner, and ended his pontificate. The emperor then placed his own candidate, who adopted the name Leo VIII, in office, and took Benedict with him to Germany, where he remained against his will under the care of the Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, until his death.

Benedict VI (973-74)

Very little is known of the life and reign of the 135th pope, Benedict, Cardinal-Deacon of St. Theodore, a Roman and the son of Hildebrand. His pontificate came to a grisly end, when a group of nobles and clergy took him captive and imprisoned him at the Castle of Sant' Angelo. He was strangled there when his captors learned that an imperial envoy had been sent to Rome by Emperor Otto II to release him.

Benedict VII (974-83)

The 136th pope, born in Rome, was bishop of Sutri. After his election, the antipope, Boniface Franco, and his followers challenged his authority. Emperor Otto II supported him and ensured his papacy. As pope, Benedict VII attempted to suppress simony (the buying and selling of spiritual benefits), supported monasticism, and appointed the first archbishop of Carthage.
The 133th pope was elected after the death of Pope John XII. In a matter of months, Emperor Otto I, who opposed his election, marched on Rome, took Benedict V prisoner, and ended his pontificate. The emperor then placed his own candidate, who adopted the name Leo VIII, in office, and took Benedict with him to Germany, where he remained against his will under the care of the Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, until his death.

Benedict VI (973-74)

Very little is known of the life and reign of the 135th pope, Benedict, Cardinal-Deacon of St. Theodore, a Roman and the son of Hildebrand. His pontificate came to a grisly end, when a group of nobles and clergy took him captive and imprisoned him at the Castle of Sant' Angelo. He was strangled there when his captors learned that an imperial envoy had been sent to Rome by Emperor Otto II to release him.

Benedict VII (974-83)

The 136th pope, born in Rome, was bishop of Sutri. After his election, the antipope, Boniface Franco, and his followers challenged his authority. Emperor Otto II supported him and ensured his papacy. As pope, Benedict VII attempted to suppress simony (the buying and selling of spiritual benefits), supported monasticism, and appointed the first archbishop of Carthage.

Benedict VIII (1012-24) The 144th pope, Benedict VIII, son of Gregory, Count of Tusculum, was a layman who became the first of the Tusculan popes. He crowned the German king, Henry II, emperor in 1014. He helped pacify Italy by defeating the Saracens and forging an alliance with the Normans. Benedict IX (1032-45) The 146th pope was the Count of Tusculum and a nephew of the two preceding popes. He was placed on the throne by his father, Alberic, at the age of 20. In 1044, he was driven from office as unfit to rule. He managed to reinstate himself, but later resigned, only to try once again to take the papal throne. Emperor Henry III intervened and Clement II was made pope. After Clement's death, Benedict again seized the throne, but was forced out by Clement's successor, Damasus II. Benedict X, antipope (1058) Born John Minicus, he later became Cardinal Bishop of Velletri before being elected pope in 1058 by arrangement of the Count of Tusculum. He was ousted by cardinals backed by Hildebrand (later Pope Gregory VII), who succeeded in installing his candidate, Gerhard of Burgundy, Bishop of Florence, as Pope Nicholas II. Nicholas II excommunicated Benedict X and forced him to flee to the castle of Gerard of Galeria. After securing Rome, Nicholas II battled and defeated Benedict X and his supporters. Benedict X was imprisoned and died in the hospice of St. Agnese. In the aftermath of the controversy over Benedict X, the church implemented new rules governing papal elections. (Blessed) Benedict XI (1303-04) Nicholas, Boccasini, Benedict XI, a Dominican, was the 198th pope. He entered the Dominican order at 14. Known as a scholar and a conciliator in internecine church battles, he was beatified in 1773. Benedict XII (1335-1342) Born Jacques Fournier, in the province of Toulouse, he was the 197th pontiff and the third of the Avignon popes, who reigned in France. A Cistercian monk in the monastery of Boulbonne, and then in Fontfroide, he studied at the University of Paris, where he received a doctorate in theology. He hoped to re-establish the papacy in Rome, but the cardinals convinced him to remain in France because of Italy's political instability. Benedict XIII (1724-30) Born Pietro Francesco Orsini, the 246th pope was the son of Ferdinando Orsini and Giovanna Frangipani of Tolpha. He belonged to the princely family of Orsini-Gravina. At 16, he entered the Dominican novitiate against his family's will. In 1672, he was made a cardinal by Pope Clement X, a relative. Despite his privileged roots, he was considered a extremely pious leader and a strict enforcer of church doctrine. In honor of Benedict XI, a member of the Dominican Order, he took the name Benedict XIV (he avoided choosing the number 13, considered unlucky). However, he soon changed his name to Benedict XIII, because Peter de Luna of Aragon (1394-1423), an antipope, had previously taken the name Benedict XIV. Benedict XIV (1740-58) Born Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini, the 248th pope was the son of Marcello Lambertini and Lucretia Bulgarini, of Bologna. Benedict XIV is best known as a scholar. Benedict XV (1914-22) Giacomo della Chiesa, who became the 259th pope, was born in Pegli, Italy, in 1854, and died in Rome in 1922. He had served as nuncio to Spain, privy chamberlain, Archbishop of Bologna, and cardinal. Elected pope immediately after the outbreak of World War I, he remained neutral throughout the war, which coincided with his pontificate. He was considered a stark contrast to his predecessor, Pius X, who was staunchly opposed to theological "modernism." Life Story of  New Pope

That fear has stayed with Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI. Only Monday, at services opening the conclave that chose him as John Paul II's successor, he warned of "a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything as certain."

Yet his former students of theology say they know a different Ratzinger from the one who became the Vatican's unbending doctrine chief.

They describe a collegial professor who encouraged wide-ranging seminar discussions and was reticent about pushing his own views on students, whose group included a student from Africa interested in the relationship between Roman Catholicism and voodoo, and another researching the novelist Franz Kafka - whose works paint the barrenness of established orders.

"The negative image arises from something I think goes against the grain for him, and that is having to say no all the time," said the Rev. Vincent Twomey, who studied under Ratzinger at the University of Regensburg and now teaches at Pontifical University in Maynooth, Ireland.

The Rev. Stephan Otto Horn, another former student from Regensburg, recalled that one of the seminar participants once objected strenuously to remarks Horn had made about Christians in Germany during the Nazi period. Ratzinger stepped in immediately to defend his right to speak.

"In my circle," Horn remembered Ratzinger saying, "one must be able to say what one thinks."

Two major threads in Ratzinger's makeup - wide-ranging intellectual activity and a highly traditional Roman Catholic piety - became part of him early on.

He was born on April 16, 1927, on the Saturday before Easter - to parents named Josef and Mary - and was baptized the same day in the small Bavarian town of Marktl Am Inn. The baptismal font is now displayed proudly by the town's small museum.

The future pope did not see his birth date as coincidence. "That my life from the beginning was in this way immersed in the Easter mystery has always filled me with gratitude," he said in his German autobiography, "Aus Meinem Leben," published in English as "Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977."

The family moved often due to his father's work as a policeman, and eventually settled in Traunstein, a town in Germany about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Austrian cultural center of Salzburg.

The church was a constant in small-town Bavarian life, and even as a small boy, Ratzinger was deeply impressed by the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church - candlelight services during Advent in the early morning dark, the Easter service where the Resurrection was announced by suddenly dropping curtains and letting in the light.

The family lived in an 18th century farmhouse surrounded by an oak forest. Ratzinger considers the town his real home, and locals view him as one of their own. He returns regularly, says the head of St. Michael's seminary where he studied, the Rev. Thomas Frauenlob.

"I like the cardinal very much, I admire him, and it looks like he's coming under attack as very conservative,'" Frauenlob said. "But he is really dedicated, and he wants to preserve the church."

Ratzinger's studies were interrupted at age 14 in 1943 when he was drafted by the Nazis to assist flak batteries and dig anti-tank ditches. After release from a POW camp in June 1945, he attended another seminary in the town of Freising, a place where the students were driven by pent-up hunger for reading and learning after the disruption of the war

He read widely - not just Catholic thinkers such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, but novelists such Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Paul Claudel, and Jewish thinker Martin Buber. The priest in charge, Michael Hoeck, had just survived five years in the Dachau concentration camp.

Ordained in 1951, on the same day as his brother Georg, Ratzinger took a doctorate in theology from the University of Munich. But not before a devastating rejection of his doctoral dissertation, on the medieval theologian St. Bonaventure.

Ironically for a man known today as a theological purist, Ratzinger was deemed to have propounded a dangerous relativism by suggesting that "revelation," or God's revealed message to humanity, depended on individuals' perception of it. To this day, he says he was misunderstood.

Shaken, Ratzinger survived only by dropping the offending chapters and spending months on revisions. He said it made him resolve to take the side of the underdog from then on in such disputes.

Accordingly, as he taught theology in the universities of Bonn, Muenster, Tuebingen and Regensburg, he built a reputation for welcoming far-ranging discussion, even with members of other faiths such as Eastern Orthodoxy or Protestantism. He was named bishop of Munich in 1977, and served there until being summoned to the Vatican by John Paul II as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1981.

Ratzinger's career is closely entwined with that of Hans Küng - an outspoken theologian who is today perhaps the foremost critic of the Church's swing toward conservatism under John Paul II. In the early days, Küng considered Professor Ratzinger a liberal and pushed hard for his hiring at Tuebingen, a renowned center of progressive theology.

Küng remembers Ratzinger as friendly but not overly welcoming - even "timid" - when they first met, in a cafe on the Via della Conciliazione in Rome, where both were serving as advisers at the start of the Second Vatican Council.

"All in all, he was a quite sympathetic contemporary, with whom one could argue over any question that came up on an equal footing," Küng wrote in his memoirs.

Later, however, Ratzinger would attack Küng's writings, and in 1979 - before Ratzinger made his way to the Vatican - the church authorities deprived Küng of the right to officially teach Catholic theology, though he has gone on teaching and writing at Tuebingen.

Later, Küng would wonder at what he considered Ratzinger's transformation: "It's often wondered at, how such a gifted, friendly, and open theologian could make such a transformation, from advanced Tuebingen theologian to Roman Grand Inquisitor."

Ratzinger increasingly became dismayed by the atmosphere at Tuebingen during the turbulent 1960s. Küng and Ratzinger both had lectures interrupted by student radicals who heckled them and occupied their lecture halls, Küng recalls.

Ratzinger left in 1969 for Regensburg, but he said his time at Tuebingen wasn't wasted. Küng gave him the time and freedom from lecturing to write "An Introduction to Christianity," which has been translated into 17 languages and became one of his most popular books.

Ratzinger has continued to meet once a year with former students from his days as a teacher. There's no word on whether the meetings will continue now that he is pope.

"There was, as there always is when we get together, a kind of a freedom to express your opinion," Twomey said of the most recent gathering.