...it was the protests of student radicals at Tübingen University - in which he saw an echo of the Nazi totalitarianism he loathed - that seem to have pushed him definitively toward deep conservatism and insistence on unquestioned obedience to the authority of Rome. <snip>
...But so important to him was protecting the church as a fortress of moral authority that he said theologians must adhere to church teaching even if it is not infallible. In his "Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian" of 1990, he ruled that dissenters must not try to sway public opinion because open criticism hurts the church.
But he was also concerned for the society outside the church. For instance, during a speech to an anti-abortion convention in 1986, he said legalized abortion implied that "It is force that establishes right and thus, inadvertently for the many, the very bases of any authentic democracy are threatened."
In a book-length interview published in 1985 titled "The Ratzinger Report," he used a rigorously argued line of reasoning to support a doctrinal position that reverberates outside the church. He condemned abortion, contraception, homosexual relations, sex without marriage, "radical feminism" and transsexuality. The wrongness of those ideas all arise from the separation of sexuality from motherhood and marriage, he said. That leads to procreation without sexuality and "biological manipulation" of births that "uncouples man from nature," he said. People then become just another product in the world.
... The pope told me that it is my biggest religious obligation not to have my own opinions.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/international/worldspecial2/24ratzinger.html?pagewanted=1&incamp=article_popular_4It seems like an odd leap to equate "student radicals" with "Nazi totalitarianism" so as to justify a belief in the complete unquestioning authority of the church. One would have to be convinced of the complete goodness/infallibility of the church to give it that much control following the Nazi experience - and it seems the "student radicals" were working toward exactly the opposite of "totalitarianism".
I would think most of us believe in people having their own opinions as to whether a leader or group is working in the best interests of others and in the
obligation to making informed opinions - not giving up that right and obligation - not surrendering that obligation to any authority figure.
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