Getting To Know Him

It is Day 97. At noon sharp, the light rain that has been falling on the village of Les Combes, high in the Italian Alps, gives way to golden sunshine. Equally punctually, the white-shocked man with an increasingly comfortable smile walks across a small meadow to greet about 8,000 believers. Pope Benedict XVI, officially on a summer "retreat," waves his two-handed wave, sits graciously through a local bishop's introduction and speaks. With three months' practice at this, he no longer steps on applause lines, such as references to his predecessor and a much anticipated trip to Germany. His initial remarks are energetic, though his expression while reciting the Ave Maria prayer remains more stoic than rapturous. He implores God to stay the hand of terrorists and convert their hearts, and he intones the Angelus honoring the Incarnation. And then, after precisely 20 minutes, Benedict works the crowd a bit and heads back indoors to ... what? A first, tone-setting encyclical? The book whose existence is established but whose topic is not? The reorganization of the papal bureaucracy? People wonder.

Much as they have wondered for the past three months. A papacy is not a presidency, with every day's progress tallied obsessively on the march through a limited term. Yet scholars had hoped by now for a sense of how Benedict's new station would affect his theology and whether his avid pursuit of heretics as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith meant that heads would roll. Would there be more like Thomas Reese, the open-minded editor of the Jesuit magazine America, whose departure was apparently sealed with Benedict's election? When would the new Pope tear into the ecclesiastic "filth" inside his church and the "dictatorship of relativism" outside it that he had diagnosed preconclave? Benedict's first 100 days have offered no definitive answers, but occasional modest indicators--plus a frank give-and-take with some of his alpine hosts on Day 98--showed a progress of the man into the office and suggested that those who predicted a "caretaker" papacy may have spoken too soon. An inside look at seven telling days of the new Pope's stewardship:

DAY 5 TAILORING HIMSELF TO THE NEW JOB

In a gesture probably intended to mollify a press that had been portraying him as an unrelenting hard-liner, the newly chosen Benedict invited journalists as guests to his first public appearance in the Vatican's Paolo VI auditorium on April 23. But he was ill at ease, and the ever vigilant Italian scribes noted that the hemline of his robes was cut far too high, offering an unusually revealing look at his ruby papal slippers. It was the kind of gaffe his predecessor, as a former actor, would have been unlikely to commit.

A day later the hem had fallen. And over time Benedict found his office's public aspect an increasingly comfortable fit. His smile offset the famous dark circles beneath his eyes. Eventually he was tolerating such photo ops as a public cell-phone conversation with an ailing nun and the donning of a fire fighter's hat. "He'll never be a celebrity," says a Vatican official who has worked closely with Ratzinger. "But he seems more joyful and sure of himself." Ratzinger's brother was once worried that the job might harm his health. On the contrary, asserts Walter Cardinal Kaspar, a fellow German, "he is reinvigorated" by it.