White smoke today signaled the election of a new pope at 5:50 p.m. (shortly before noon EDT), Vatican time. German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 78, will now be known as Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger won with a two-thirds majority vote, backed by 77 of 115 voting cardinals. The International Herald Tribune reports Ratzinger is the “first Germanic pope in roughly 1,000 years.”

Lucetta Scaraffia, a professor of history at Rome’s University of La Sapienza, remarked on Ratzinger’s consistency in his espousal to pro-Orthodoxy values. “His speech was rather unusually straightforward. Usually, just before a conclave, cardinals try to present themselves as a mediator. That’s not Ratzinger. You might say it was courageous.”

An article today in the International Herald Tribune notes that some of the issues faced by Pope Benedict XVI will be “the need for dialogue with Islam, the divisions between the wealthy north and the poor south [of Italy], as well as problems with his own church,” which, in addition to recent sex scandals, include “a chronic shortage of priests and nuns in the West” and the fact that the church is losing a significant number of people who feel its teachings are no longer “relevant.”

In his article for the International Herald Tribune from April 12, Ian Fisher reported that Ratzinger views the relationship between Catholicism and Islam from a competitive standpoint, rather than from a view of tolerance and dialogue. While many cardinals share Pope John Paul’s “embrace of dialogue” between disparate religious faiths, Ratzinger, regarded as “one of the most conservative voices in the church,” does not.

Ratzinger’s public statement opposing the inclusion of Turkey in the European Union in Le Figaro was opposed by Venice Archibishop and Cardinal Angelo Scola: