Magister on what Benedict has been teaching these past 10 months:

He begins with a survey of the new cardinals:

Many of those predicted to be made cardinals were passed by.

In all of Latin America, the only new red hat will go to a cardinal of Venezuela, a country where the Church is being sorely tested by the authoritarian government of Hugo Chávez.

In Asia, it is another bishop on the front lines who will be made a cardinal, the very energetic bishop of Hong Kong, who is most definitely feared by the Chinese authorities.

Only four have been selected within the Roman curia, and one of them is over 80 years old. So those remaining without the purple are Stanislaw Rylko of Poland, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity; Paul Josef Cordes of Germany, president of “Cor Unum”; and Angelo Comastri of Italy, archpriest of the basilica of Saint Peter and vicar general of Vatican City.

It can be gathered from this that being the head of a Vatican office does not automatically clear the way to becoming a cardinal. It seems likely that with Benedict XVI, the purple will be associated, in the curia, with a few important dicasteries. And that some offices will be scaled down, or even suppressed.

Another of the candidates for the purple predicted by the media, Michael Fitzgerald, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, not only was not designated a cardinal, but was removed from his office and sent to Egypt as a nuncio.

And then goes on to the "truth," – the focus of another talk he gave in the US. He very systematically goes through Benedict’s actions and major statements from the past ten months, and traces the thread of the theme of "truth" through them all. Then he goes back to his drumbeat, sounded a few times recently, of the resistance Benedict is, according to Magister, facing:

It is known that there are those who actively oppose this pope, both within and outside of the Vatican. One indication of this opposition comes from the rumors that have been spread about the unfolding of the conclave. These rumors are intended to show that the election of Ratzinger was not at all equitable, that it was in doubt until the very end, that it was unduly favored by the fact that he was the dean of the college of cardinals, that he is in the pocket of Opus Dei, that the time is ripe for a new pope, preferably a Latin American, and that, in short, Benedict XVI should submit himself to these inherent limitations.

But there is another reason for pope Benedict’s solitude. It is the slight stature of many of the Church’s leaders, inside the curia and outside of it: this is a group which, because of its intrinsic limitations, is incapable of being equal to this pope’s demanding program and his great vision.